theatlantic.com
>Prince is proposing to send private contractors to Afghanistan instead of U.S. troops, and have the entire operation overseen by a “viceroy.”
>Mattis aint havin it
>fast foward
>Mattis gone, pic related suddenly appears
tl;dr Burger East India Company and Neo-colonialism perhaps soon
Thoughts?
>Blackwater
ISIS didn't know how good they had it dealing with people who are actually held accountable for their bullshit.
What have they done to earn their reputation? Besides shootings unarmed arabs, we're good enough at that ourselves.
It's probably about selling steaks.
Well, this isn't going to do anything to stabilize the region, that's for sure. Whether BlackademiXEwhateverthefucktheyarenow pisses enough people off to cause another 9/11, that's unknown but probable.
Eric Prince needs to be behind bars. Partly for the crime against gunmanity of plastering his tramp stamp logo all over guns and accessories in the early 00s. But mainly for being a cartel leader.
>tl;dr Burger East India Company and Neo-colonialism perhaps soon
Im down for that
Keep their mouth shut about who they're shooting unarmed civilians for
>being a cartel leader
Waaaaaaaaaah! Someone might disrupt the 700 bil a year welfare program! Waaaaaaaaaaaah!
PMCs cost more than the military not less, you dumb fuck.
Citation needed. Spoiler. You're fucking wrong.
You gotta pay extra for the more "flexible" mercenaries
Either way, I'd like to see a cost/benefit analysis on it.
Can you post a source? I'm not who you were talking to but that sounds wrong.
Mattis worship is low tier garbage. Its the Military Man's equivalent of "I Fucking Love Science" and I'm sick of hearing other soldiers that spend their typical day posting stupid fucking facebook memes become instant political experts because muh Mattis. Muh Mattis muthafucka. Without a doubt I agree with many he was an excellent Marine and a commander but something about him is extremely shady and I'm sure he glows in the dark.
"We did a helicopter resupply mission," Prince told me. "We showed up with two helicopters and eight people — the Navy was doing it with 35 people."
Prince's plan for Afghanistan is 2000 SOF personnel supported by 6000ish contact personnel. It doesn't require massive 100mil dollar compounds, deployment of armor forces etc. It's a low intensity conflict against a insurgent force. We don't need to use 50 mil dollar aircraft dropping $250k GPS guided munitions from a 9 bil aircraft carrier.
>Eric Prince
Good idea, but give the contract to someone else. Eric loves Chinese money and opened up a training center in mainland China last year. He cant be trusted.
He's overrated.
>relieves Dowdy for not beating the Army to Baghdad after he bypassed al-Kut instead of charging through and risking another 17 casualties a la Nasiriya
He wanted nothing more than to be Schwarzkopf 2.0 and to prove to his ex that he wasn't a worthless cuck.
>Blackwater
Oh shit, is it warcrimes o' clock already?
washingtonpost.com
>Under the contract, Regency was to pay Blackwater $11,082,326 for one year, with a second year option, to put together a 34-person team
>popularmechanics.com
>The CBO used similar-size Army units to compare with private guards and found that sergeants in combat earn as much as $190 per day while private firms charge a staggering $1200 per day.
Employing and outfitting grunts for an entire enlistment term is way more expensive than paying a PMC handsomely for a short stint in the AO.
Preach brother.
The taxpayer pays for jarheads to fuck around with all that gear. They pay for every bullet. They pay for their medical costs.
Yeah now compare equipment, maintenance, and logistics costs.
you're comparing total cost to individual level salary. the military pays shitty wages to troops and wastes fucktons of money on dumb shit. private contractors pay well but tend to be light on overhead.
Yes, you fucking muppet. The individuals get paid more per day. PER DAY. they don't get publicly funded health care, dependa-franchise enablement fees, disability etc etc all the other perks. Also... 2000 troops + 6000 support personnel. That's less than 15000+ troops and tens of thousands of support personnel, carrier group support. Etc etc. I don't even know why I'm responding to you because you don't seem to understand that the military can find a way to spend $900,000 moving private chucklefuck from Arizona to Afghanistan, while paying private Pyle 60$ a day
>The US military has been held accountable for their actions this century
>He's overrated.
Before Trump decided he didn't like him nobody would have said that.
Hey retard, the same exact people said (and tried) the same exact fucking thing in 2003.
>A lean military force augmented by private contractors will end these conflicts lickety-split
Any guesses as to how that went?
We should probably just admit the Taliban fucking won and ACTUALLY withdraw. This is just gonna continue to suck taxpayer money AND not work.
Maybe if you didn't find this place until the 2016 election cycle. Prior to 2016, the typical reply to my post would've been something along the lines of
>fuck off back to generation kill faggot
now it's
>MUH TRUMP
QUICK, SWITCH TACTICS
i dont think he's overrated as a tactician but putting the CIC on blast like that with your resignation letter was kind of a stunningly un-classy thing to do, especially when your complaints all revolve around facets of foreign policy out of lane with your role as a commander of military forces.
>you fucking muppet.
Do you actually think that's a good insult? I'm not even sure if I disagree with you because my eyes are rolling so hard I can't read the rest of your post. Stop quoting the black bitch from the worst rainbow 6.
You realize both a lean fighting force and a bloated occupation presence were running IN PARALLEL in both theaters at the same fucking time right? And the lean force did all, ALL, the fucking killing? Right POG?
The taliban are the local fucking population no shit they won. The only way for them to lose is a complete genocide.
I've been here since before Obama and I never saw anyone dislike him until the past year or so.
i'm not sure that's what we should do, but i'm not sure that it isn't, either. we're never going to take out the taliban with direct military action that doesn't address their supply lines in pakiland. it's literally just fighting vietnam all over again, they don't care how many we kill, there will always be some new extremified goat fucker to pick up an ak at the promise of 72 virgins. that said, having people in-country who can fuck with them and are accountable to basically nobody is a great way to say "fuck you" to people who want to fuck with us.
>can't read the rest of your post
Maybe you should instead of basing your opinion off of some video game reference I'm not even getting, CODfaggot
I said it. He had a great reputation, and mostly backed it up, but nobody makes it past 1 star without pledging allegiance to the reigning political powers, and presently, that's globohomo neoliberalism.
Mattis kept transexuals in the military. He kept women in the ground forces and expanded them into infantry FFS. He supported the US in Syria - nothing wrong with that, bombing ISIS was cool, but let's not pretend it wasn't also about enabling the gas/oil lines and creating an artificial mission to justify budget and bureaucratic empires.
Whatever Mattis' benefits as a commander, he sided with the 1990-2010 neoliberal strategy for "international order" instead of the old school US strategy of protecting the western hemisphere or the WW2/Cold War strategy of countering major rising powers only when necessary, and usually through nationalist proxies.
It's almost like BOTH were a giant waste of time, money, and human lives.
And doing the one that failed AFTER doing the other one that failed is a dumb, bad idea.
I was fucking there the so called allies we had were child fucking cartels. The taliban were the goat fucking locals. It's a shit show of different tribes placed under a banner for sake of western countries.
>/v/ kiddie didn't like your insult so he ignores rest of post
the state of this board.
You're the one that's referencing video games, not me. You either heard that from the video game or you heard someone quote the game and thought it was cool enough to start using. I'm just telling you it's not.
>CODfaggot
Jesus dude, you need to step up your game.
yeah i dont disagree with that. but the nature of the country as a breeding ground for global terrorism tempts me to think that we would be wise to maintain some kind of low-level presence there capable of fucking up anyone who starts getting overly uppity. i'm 100% in favor of pulling the military out, but PMCs seem like kind of an ideal way to accomplish that.
lets be realistic, COIN is bullshit. we aren't going to get anyone to respect us in 'stan. but we can make them fear us.
>having people in-country who can fuck with them and are accountable to basically nobody is a great way to say "fuck you" to people who want to fuck with us.
1) You understand that the Taliban literally NEVER DID ANYTHING to "fuck with us" until we invaded their country to kill a guy they couldn't turn over, didn't like, and wasn't fucking there. Right?
2) That's actually, demonstrably a great way to create MORE people who "want to fuck with us."
I personally think this eventually results in a bunch of mercenary corpses getting paraded through the streets like it's Mogadishu.
Ahhhh I see. A head in the sand isolationist libertarian. Got it. Some people need to die. It's best to kill them with a small footprint.
Nigger I wasn't referencing a video game you neckbeard. I'm calling you a muppet because (as user above so lovingly illustrated) you have a nice big neocon arm wedge NIIIICE and deep up your gaping rectum making your mouth flap
>is unaware of British insults
>immediately soys out about MUH GIDYA GAMES
Sad!
Since when the fuck do they go by Blackwater?
Something here doesn't make sense
What is the point of an insult if the person you are trying to insult isn't offended? He's the one quoting a videogame, not me. You fool of a Took. See? It's not very offensive.
Jesus you uncultured jackass
Blackwater coming back would be something different than constellis, which is the conglomerate that bought all of blackwater/xi/academi's assets. This would be a Prince organization
>implying you'd actually be able to defeat the taliban
Not gonna happen. Waste of time and money.
That's more like it.
I'm not unaware of them, I just don't take them seriously, same with the people who live there. I wish we could take the internet from you so we wouldn't have listen to your faggot opinions any more.
Why, precisely, do they "need to die?"
I'm all for justified wars. Iraq and Afghanistan were both invaded under bullshit premises and we've been continuously occupying Afghanistan long enough that adult men in that country cannon remember a time when foreign troops weren't occupying their country and bombing their hospitals for "reasons?", and maybe those people killing foreign invaders are doing the right thing?
If you can honestly say that you wouldn't do the same exact thing if your country was invaded then you aren't a fucking man, bootlicker. If you honestly think people who haven't stopped fighting one of the most powerful military apparatuses in the history of the world are gonna be kowtowed because now instead the occupying force is foreign mercenary death squads instead then I think you don't understand how men think and I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.
>He's the one quoting a videogame
Noni wasn't you dumbshit holy fuck. Muppet as an insult existed before whatever faggot game you're referencing. I mean Jesus fucking Christ I can remember Dennis Miller used the term all the time in his show from the fucking 90s. Brits and Aussies use it as often as people call you a moron. Quick, call me a boomer! HURRRDURRRRRRR
>You understand that the Taliban literally NEVER DID ANYTHING to "fuck with us"
yeah thats bullshit. they harbored osama.
>they couldn't turn over
they could have found any number of reasons if they'd wanted to. calling him a "guest" was superficial bullshit tempered to the religious attitudes of the population, it's not like garlic to a vampire or some shit.
>didn't like
also bullshit. they liked osama plenty. they liked him enough to set him up with bases and training camps, keep him armed, keep him protected, keep him with comms, etc.
>wasn't fucking there
he was there until he retreated to Taliban HQ over in Pakistan. Lets be real, ISI are dicks.
>That's actually, demonstrably a great way to create MORE people who "want to fuck with us."
I just don't buy this COIN shit. winning hearts and minds is a political game that we only fuck our military up by training them to play. militaries are there to kill the enemies of the country, not kiss asses of the traitorous, goat fucking locals with all-carrot, no-stick approaches.
I also don't buy that victim-blaming shit that we're the reason the Taliban exists. ISI manipulating afghan power structures for their own ends is the reason the taliban exists. we've handed out more teddy bears and candy than pakistan has, if that strategy worked then we'd have won already. it doesn't work. what does work is killing people who want to fuck with us, and making sure everyone knows that if they associate with those people, they're next. afghani people are medieval, they don't expect human rights, their actions are calculated coldly based on fear and perception of strength.
>I personally think this eventually results in a bunch of mercenary corpses getting paraded through the streets like it's Mogadishu.
That's literally happening to Russia in Ukraine, Syria, and elsewhere. Does it stop them? Do they even care?
Yeah? Well you're bad at sucking dick. I bet you can't even twerk.
No you can't "beat" them. You just keep kicking the shit out of them while pursuing your interests in the region.
We have geopolitical and resource based interests in the region. I'm not going to justify those policies or get in to a long winded debate about whether or the ethics of our national strategy. That said, I agree with you that the Taliban are not mustache twiriling villains and that each individual has a myriad of reasons why they fight us, some justified, some not.
Whose interests exactly?
Ours you fucking DAJOOZ idiot.
I'm an American and own more guns than you. Go be 14 somewhere else.
So am I correct in saying that Constellis sort of dissolved the whole private army when they bought out Blackwater? Hence the rename to Academi?
The Pashto actually take the "guest right" thing really seriously. If you can't protect someone you called a guest under your own roof, then you aren't a man. Their options were either to try and turn him over then go to war with AQ and a new batch of resurgent warlords and lose all the standing they had or tell another empire to fuck off and try them out. A generation later we still haven't won.
They didn't like him, they tolerated him because he gave them a lot of money to have his dumb camp in the mountains. That's like saying America harbors Eric Prince when he kills kids all over the world and we don't put him in jail for it.
>I don't buy this coin shit
>Actually trying to think like the enemy = "win hearts and minds" apparently.
Wars of occupation don't fucking work. They literally only work when you genocide the local population and replace them with colonists who settle permanently. Not only is this a thing that the 1st World has lost its taste for, you need to find sufficient 1st worlders willing to move to the literally asshole of the world to farm fucking poppies and herd goats. We don't actually want anything from Afghanistan anymore, and the Pashto are never gonna stop fighting because all they want is us gone.
It doesn't matter how many kids you give candy to, you're ALWAYS gonna be a foreign invader and occupier there to kill people who don't want you there to """help""" people who also don't want you there.
I'd be shocked if there's literally anybody in the nation of Afghanistan who hasn't lost somebody to the red, white, and blue and candy doesn't change that.
They're never gonna stop fighting. Would you?
>Wars of occupation don't fucking work.
They worked for Rome. They don't work for us. Hence, wars of occupation do work, but wars of occupation conducted the way we conduct them doesn't.
Did the Romans genocide everybody? No, not unless they got sufficiently fucked with. Fear kept everyone in line until admiration for the superior ways of the Romans could be demonstrated and could replace fear as a motivating factor.
>Brits and Aussies
All I'm saying is that you guys talk like fags. It's your voice, not the things you say. When you say things like that I have to read the rest of your post in that accent and it puts a negative twist on whatever point you're trying to make.
Oh wow five hi points and a mosin that's a sick collection bro. Why don't you go be british somewhere else?
Sort of. It's coplez corporate fuckery beyond my understanding but
Blackwater changed name to Xe services after nisour square for PR reasons. There was US training center which was their big facility in NC and then blackwater worldwide which was their "PMC" business. All of this was run by prince. Then there was some corporate reshuffle for a while and they renamed it again to Academi. Then prince left shortly after (I think) then constellis bought US training center and the Academi book of business, along with other PMCs like olive group and triple canopy. Basically "constellis" owns the corpse of blackwater and a few other smaller PMCs and folded everything together. Very corporate.
If BLACKWATER comes back, it'll be prince running the show probably and sort of a reboot of the culture.
I'm not British or an Aussie you illiterate fuck. I suggest (again) you spend less time autistically rolling your eyes during orgasmic releases between rounds of "1337 shootkill realistic 420noscopeblazeit battle veteran of the sand wars simulator" and learn how to read. faggot.
As for the "guest right" thing, yeah I know the fucking pashto peasants take it seriously, no doubt encouraged by ISI. That's why the Taliban leverage it. But you're failing to distinguish between how a bunch of peasants think, and how their iron-fisted rulers think. You really think the Taliban gives a shit about how "weak" some obscure act makes them look to a bunch of peasants? These are fuckers who do weaker shit than that on a daily basis, they just don't care what peasants think because they and the peasants both know they'll just kill them if they step out of line.
Very interesting, thanks for the info. Maybe the age of merc armies will come again
Maybe the Seychelles will finally be Couped
Ha. A Merc country. Anyhow, no idea if it's the right way to do shit, but using big conventional military deployment doesn't seem to be working at a good bang:buck ratio. Prob fucked no matter what we do desu
I don't see how I've benefited from these dumb adventures
Cool high-school-history-level/History Channel understanding of how the Roman Empire worked bro.
The Romans either
>killed everybody then settled their lands
Or
>Sufficiently erased the local culture and replaced it with their own and tortured everybody to death that had a problem with it with their standing occupying army
Understand that scholars of these subjects will explain to you that these are both actually genocide.
Genocide isn't just "the Holocaust," it's erasing a people.
>How their iron-fisted rulers think
Who do you think I'm talking about?
You missed my point. The Taliban had JUST consolidated their rule and killed the last holdout Muj warlords still fighting them when 9/11 happened. Turning over UBL would've meant avoiding the invasion but restarting that civil war.
As it stands they actually lost 0 standing in the Pashto tribal culture. They actually gained a fuckload.
>illiterate fuck
I'm not illiterate, I read what you said. I just don't believe it.
>1337 shootkill realistic 420noscopeblazeit battle veteran of the sand wars simulator
Those are some hot accusations. I don't even play it I'm just aware of it's existence. It's not realistic at all it's like overwatch but in modern times. If I couldn't read then I wouldn't be able to respond to you. I wish I couldn't read because then I wouldn't have to read the retarded shit you post online. I would rather be ignorant than aware of how stupid you are. If you really are in America then you need to leave because you're not going to find much brit dick over here. Maybe there are some fags though who will put on a fake accent and whisper Rule Britannia in your ear while they fuck you. I don't know what they are in to. I'm not the faggot with Piers Morgan podcasts on his iphone gen x.
Well, there hasn't been another 9/11 style mass attack, so that's something
If that's your rationale then we should be invading Saudi Arabia and hanging the Bush and Clinton families for treason. Dumb boomer.
Yeah, that's definitely because we invaded Afghanistan and squandered the wealth of a generation and not changes in the NatSec protocols since then.
Not him but we unironically should be invading Saudi Arabia and hanging the Bush and Clinton families for treason, if we're invading places.
>The Romans either
>>killed everybody then settled their lands
>Or
>>Sufficiently erased the local culture and replaced it with their own and tortured everybody to death that had a problem with it with their standing occupying army
Not really. Gallic Rome still had a local culture, different than Iberia's, different than Germania's, and different than Italy's. Rome overlayed its own on top of existing cultures, sure, but they didn't usually tear down the local temples, forbid local customs, or anything like that. As long as you paid your taxes and didn't fuck with them or cause trouble to their plans, they didn't fuck with you.
Rome made no effort to genocide "civilizations", except maybe Carthaginians. They might have razed cities and done a lot of looting and pillaging, but more often they just bought them off or enticed their leaders to become vassals.
>Who do you think I'm talking about?
I think you're making a mistake by assuming that the way the average pashto peasant thinks in any way resembles the way a Machiavellian Taliban leader thinks. They don't give a shit about local customs, even when they pretend to. They don't even give a shit about Islam. They're just sociopathic assholes who use the tools available to them to manipulate the populace.
>As it stands they actually lost 0 standing in the Pashto tribal culture. They actually gained a fuckload.
So let me get this straight, they gained a bunch of goat-internet points by harboring some dude who killed a bunch of foreigners randomly. But if we drop a bomb that kills a few civvies who were running around with RPG toting baddies, we lose goat-internet points? This is how you lose wars: you start playing by the enemy's rules instead of your own.
You don't bribe or cowtow to people who have no fear of you. This is basic stuff. If you do that a little bit today, you're going to be doing twice as much tomorrow because they are going to fuck you over.
>Well, this isn't going to do anything to stabilize the region
We tried playing nice and doing "nation building" garbage for nearly two decades, on top of all the other stuff the Soviets already tried to do back in the 80's. Nothing is going to stabilize a part of the world where everyone just wants to fuck little kids and blow themselves up. At this stage the only thing left for us to do is just kill as many of these fucktards as possible and try not to lose too many of our people in the process.
Well. The petrodollar is still a thing for one. But as I said I'm not looking to write an expose on what interests are served by controlling a country between multiple resource centers, the middle of the drug trade and directly neighboring multiple nuclear states. Let me just summarize it as holding these regions for as cheap and effective as possible strengthens the American global position and fiscal interests. Whether it can ever be done at a price that doesn't lead to the bleed out of the empire. (Among a million other factors) Well that remains to be seen
I can't wait to kill you and the rest of your millennial/zoomer kin
How does it feel to pretend to be American online? Is it like putting on a letterman jacket when you weren't on the team? Do you guys have varsity athletics? Can you afford jackets?
>we should be invading Saudi Arabia and hanging the Bush and Clinton families for treason
best idea ive heard all week
>American online
Pretty sure there's nothing in Afghanistan that is even remotely related to the petrodollar.
Iraq and oil rich country power politics is part of this conversation.
stop digging. afghanistan is like the most resource-poor nation on the planet. even the shit you hear about rare earths is really grasping at straws. there is nothing of value in afghanistan unless you like wedding singers and/or goats.
Look at a map idiot
Who cares
PMCs can get something done. The army was basically there to protect interests, not actually fight a war.
and then wut
That's sort of an accurate portrayal of what British accents sound like to me.
wdhmbt
>PMCs can get something done.
[citation needed] on Eric Prince being able to win wars.
>Burger East India Company
Fucking no lmfao
Blackwater will never be valued at anywhere near a trillion dollars in today's money, let alone have any of the influence the DEIC had.
Hey the Chinese hired him in Africa. They give 0 shits about mercenaries vs military discussion. They want their business assets protected.
It's almost... Almost... Hmmm. It's like it's in the MIDDLE of something
I'll take what is opium that props up a pharmaceutical industry for 1000 alex
You’re not in high school anymore, princess. Nobody gives a shit about your video game insider reference, nor does anybody give a shaggy rats ass about your rolling eyeballs. Quit blogging about your second-by-second activities, and address the fucking content of the post you reply to. Or just shut the fuck up. Nobody want to hear about your feelings. Go post breakfast pics on instagram or some shit. That’s more your speed.
I swear, the fucking split has killed this board.