Four years ago, President Barack Obama declared the end of the Iraq war. So much of that fight and our current involvement in the Middle East is carried out by a privatized military. Back in 2003 Iraq invasion, there was the predictable commentary about why we went to war and what the consequences were. And there […]
WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense only has about 250 civilian contractors in Iraq supporting the 2,700 US troops deployed there; but a handful of new solicitations and potential contracts may soon add to that number, according to items posted to a federal contracting Web site. For the past two decades, the resource-heavy American way […]
Despite a drawdown of U.S. troops, America’s military presence in the war-torn country is not over. About 18,000 foreign troops — nearly 11,000 of them American — will remain in Afghanistan to advise and assist the country’s security forces and help them counter insurgent attacks, which have increased in recent months. But, how much "stuff" is […]
While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for DynCorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare […]
USAID has spent roughly $17 billion on reconstruction projects across Afghanistan since the U.S. invaded in 2001 to oust the Taliban regime. USAID’s success has been mixed. There have been undeniable gains in areas such as women’s rights, education, and healthcare. Officials with USAID point to the 2014 Afghan presidential election as a step in […]