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.

Obama’s Reactionary Doctrine For American Exceptionalism

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In his recent State of the Union, Obama made many bold statements which people have said were “progressive” and hopeful. These include: his support for paid sick leave for American workers, a pathetic increase of the minimum wage to $10.10, meant to hurt the ‘Fight for $15’ movement; a promise to veto legislation that overturns deficient Wall Street “reform;” support for “affordable” quality childcare; minimal raises in taxes for the wealthy, which isn’t nearly enough; sorta free community college [1]; supposedly protecting “a free and open Internet,” and so on.

Obama also made a number of ‘firsts’ by mentioning transgender and lesbian people in his State of the Union, claiming that the United States government protects them (oh really), which seems great but ignores the fact that not only is Obama “a born again” evangelical Christian, but he has, during his presidency, allowed federal money to fund groups that supported the anti-gay bill in Uganda and “conservative faith-based groups affiliated with the Family Research Council, anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers and an entire network of evangelical abstinence-only educators,” according to an exhaustive investigation in The Nation.

It is important to focus on other parts of the speech, often missed by other analysis, which emphasize American exceptionalism [3], including a section where he hypocritically criticizes Russia for actions that the US has done in the past:

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:

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