Private Guards Repel Attack on U.S. Headquarters (washingtonpost.com):
An attack by hundreds of Iraqi militia members on the U.S. government’s headquarters in Najaf on Sunday was repulsed not by the U.S. military, but by eight commandos from a private security firm, according to sources familiar with the incident.
Before U.S. reinforcements could arrive, the firm, Blackwater Security Consulting, sent in its own helicopters amid an intense firefight to resupply its commandos with ammunition and to ferry out a wounded Marine, the sources said.
This is disconcerting. A US Marine has to be airlifted from a a firefight by a private security detail, while another group of non-military soldiers fends off an attack on a US government installation.
As Belle at Crooked Timber notes
No wounded Marine should ever be ducking under a hail of bullets with anything but supreme confidence in his heart that a bunch of other Marines are about to come save his butt, any second now. These soldiers-for-hire sound very competent, as they should be, since they are all former Navy S.E.A.L.s or whatever, but having to rely on them to rescue wounded troops is proof that things are going very, very badly wrong.
I keep trying to get my mind around this. It’s so not right, it’s not even wrong, as the saying goes. We’re paying these soldiers for hire who by definition are retired, ie, not as ready to fight as our own frontline troops, but yet they’re having to rescue or even replace the troops, because . . . why? We don’t have the money to pay for the right number of troops but we’re paying for private contractors . . . my brain hurts.
These private companies have helicopters and pilots willing to fly into a firefight and they have sufficient firepower and guts to defend the symbol of US occupation in Iraq: something about that makes my tin-foil hat grow a little tighter. I seem to recall some talk of martial law in the event of another 9/11 event: it looks like the enforcers of that declaration might not be hard to find.