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 of war has dictated that where US troops go, civilian contractors follow. It's a way of doing business that has become ingrained in the Pentagon's culture as end strength has slowly been whittled away while global commitments show no sign of slackening.

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 in which a multitude of freshly founded private military companies are meeting the demand of an exploding global market for conflict.

“Now that the United States has opened the Pandora’s Box of mercenarianism,” McFate writes in The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order, “private warriors of all stripes are coming out of the shadows to engage in for-profit warfare.”

A new American intelligence assessment on the Afghan war predicts that the gains the United States and its allies have made during the past three years are likely to have been significantly eroded by 2017, even if Washington leaves behind a few thousand troops and continues bankrolling the impoverished nation, according to officials familiar with the report.

The National Intelligence Estimate, which includes input from the country’s 16 intelligence agencies, predicts that the Taliban and other power brokers will become increasingly influential as the United States winds down its longest war in history, according to officials who have read the classified report or received briefings on its conclusions.

WASHINGTON — Despite all of the talk in the Pentagon and among the defense intelligentsia in Washington about the "new normal"— the present era of battling Islamic extremists while putting out security and humanitarian brushfires across the globe — there has really never been a "normal" year when it comes to national security.

And 2015 will be no different. The rise of the al-Qaida offshoot in Iraq, the Islamic State, — or Daesh, as US policymakers are increasingly referring to it — has prompted Washington to send 3,100 troops back to Iraq, with other allies offering about 1,500 more troops to help advise and train Iraqi and Kurdish forces.

KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — An Afghan-international security force detained several suspected militants in northern Kandahar province Wednesday while pursuing a senior Taliban commander.

A newly established NATO command was activated in Camp Eggers in Kabul, as the Combined Security Transition Command -Afghanistan merged with the new NATO Training Mission - Afghanistan to create a unified command for the training of the Security Forces in Afghanistan.

KABUL, Afghanistan — The U.S. – Afghanistan Security and Defense Cooperation Agreement, also known as the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA), and the Agreement between NATO and the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan on the Status of NATO Forces and NATO Personnel Conducting Mutually Agreed NATO-led Activities in Afghanistan, also known as the NATO SOFA, are scheduled to enter into force on January 1, 2015.

Few changes will impact US/NATO forces, US/NATO civilian component, and NATO personnel.

MOSCOW — The US private military company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) has confirmed its readiness to start training a Ukrainian battalion for street fighting, a military-diplomatic source told TASS on Tuesday.

“The private military company Academi has confirmed to the Kiev authorities its readiness to start training an experimental battalion of 550 men as of January at the request of Ukraine’s General Staff,” the source said.

So ends a foreign policy experiment that began with two choices in 2011. In that hinge year, President Obama decided to stay out of the Syrian conflict and to passively accept the withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces from Iraq (which he later claimed as a personal achievement during his reelection campaign).

I’m not sure the motivation behind these acts can be termed a strategy. They seemed rooted in a perception of the public’s war-weariness (which Obama fed through his own rhetoric), a firm determination to be the anti-Bush and a vague belief that a U.S. presence in the Middle East creates more problems than it solves. Not coincidentally, according to political scientist Colin Dueck, “elite, trans-Atlantic liberal opinion” viewed Obama’s approach as “the height of sophistication, regardless of its practical failures.”

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration plans to keep hundreds of extra troops in Afghanistan on a temporary basis next year, above the force of 9,800 that President Barack Obama had previously announced for 2015, in another sign of the challenges the United States faces as it extricates itself from a 13-year war.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss military planning, said the Obama administration was continuing its discussions with allied nations about how many troops NATO countries would be able to contribute to a training mission in Afghanistan, set to begin on Jan. 1 when the alliance’s long combat mission ends.

Netherlands legalized the choice of some members of No Surrender, a biker gang, to travel to Syria and Iraq and fight alongside Kurdish forces against the Islamic State. They are no longer the only European biker gang to enter the fray, as German group Median Empire also announces its presence in Kobani, Syria.

An extensive report highlighting the war against the Islamic State from the perspective of European biker gangs in Spanish newspaper ABC notes that Median Empire, a group named after a Mesopotamian civilization, has chosen to showcase those who leave the comfort of Europe to protect minorities in Iraq and Syria from the jihadist scourge.

Before countries possessed the capacity to create and maintain ocean-going navies, privateers dominated the business of protecting maritime commerce from the risks of piracy, sabotage, and other threats. As key maritime countries developed their navies, they phased out privateering in order to ensure a monopoly over armed conflict and, therefore, state power.

The last century continued this trend, bringing with it two parallel maritime developments: legal and technological. At the same time as the codification of the law of the sea and law of armed conflict progressed, technological developments swept across commercial marine and naval sectors. In tandem, these developments changed the face of maritime and specifically of maritime security affairs forever.

A five-year-old State Department effort to upgrade Afghanistan’s largest prison has been halted with only half the contracted work performed, a watchdog found. The Pol-i-Charkhi facility in Kabul Province — designed in the early 1970s for 5,000 prisoners — currently holds 7,400, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

And though overcrowding has forced prisoners out into the halls, it appears to be well maintained, SIGAR determined, despite some “defective workmanship” performed under the $20.2 million contract with the Al-Watan Construction Co.

Absent on Wednesday in a Washington courtroom, where a federal jury entered guilty verdicts of murder and manslaughter against four Blackwater Worldwide guards in the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians, was a man synonymous with the United States’s infatuation with contractors. He is Erik Prince — billionaire, former Navy Seal, ex-CIA spy — the founder of Blackwater.

Prince is a man accustomed to drama. Numerous agencies have interrogated him. Members of Congress and reporters have hurled accusations against his company: murder, wrongful death, prostitution, negligence, weapons smuggling and racial discrimination. He has been called a “war profiteer,” a “mercenary” and a “right-wing crusader.” He sold the company and started a new one under a different name.