It’s A Bird? It’s A Plane! No, It’s A Private Drone Contractor!

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If there is one constant in the private military and security contracting industry it is that nobody has a good record in predicting what the industry will be doing in the future. And much of the time the public is relatively clueless about what they are currently doing

In the 1980s, when the U.S. Army came up with the U.S. Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP) program to help provide logistics support to U.S. forces globally nobody foresaw just how massive that support would become in Iraq or Afghanistan, let alone the major presence of gun-toting private security contractors. Until the revelations of Edward Snowden, most of the public was unaware about just how much the intelligence community depended on private contractors.

The only thing one can say with reasonably certainty is that if there is a way to make money off of it private contractors will be there to make a contract bid. So, now that Iraq is mostly a memory for contractors, although the threat of ISIS is bringing up the numbers a bit, and Afghanistan is trending downwards to the inevitable zero it is a good time to ask what other things private contractors are into these days, aside from logistics and security details.

Erik Prince: What Doesn’t He Know And When Didn’t He Know It?

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Robert Young Pelton was one of the first authors to write about Blackwater, having spent a month running Route Irish with the same Blackwater rapid reaction security detail in Baghdad that would ultimately be involved in the Nisour Square shootout.

That was probably why Erik Prince turned to him when seeking help in editing and marketing his memoir. Pelton claims Prince didn’t pay what he is owed and is suing him. Predictably, Prince, who is no stranger to litigation, is countersuing, alleging that Pelton should not have applied money Prince contractually owed Pelton for a subscription to Somalia Report, a website Pelton created to cover all aspects of the Horn of Africa region.

But while all of this is entertaining it is, at least for those who follow the private military and security sector, not breaking news. The reason I mention it, however, was this bit in the Washington Post article:

Private Sadism Companies & The Torture Report

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Although the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study itself is noticeably reticent to call what the CIA did torture, mostly using the word in footnotes, and talking about laws against, and concerns about, torture it does say, in the foreword by Committee chairman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), that, “While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.”

People will be furiously debating the cons and pros — and yes, there are people, besides Dick Cheney and Fox News commentators who think torture is okay — of government sponsored torture.

But to focus just on the government misses the forest for the trees. Let’s give full credit where it is due. This was not just a public sector activity. This was a joint public-private sector initiative, done with the witting, if not altogether competent, participation of the private sector.