Indeed. America’s history and private contractors have been tied together for more than 400 years. AMong the more well known:
1607 - John Smith, who landed in Virginia to help found the Jamestown settlement.
1621 - Miles Standish, hired as a security adviser for the Pilgrims who sailed the Mayflower to Plymouth, MA.
1860s - During the American Civil War, the Pinkerton Detective Agency (a private company) provided presidential security details for Lincoln and conducted intelligence gathering missions.
1941-42 - the American Volunteer Group, more famously known as the Flying Tigers, was a group of American civilian pilots and maintenance personnel contracted by the Nationalist Chinese Government to fly against the Japanese.
1944 - Charles Lindbergh, while serving as a civilian consultant in the Pacific Theater, flew numerous missions and saw combat with USMC and USAAF units.
1943-45 - My own grandfather was a contractor in WWII, hired by the USCG as a meteorologist. He saw service with convoys in the north Atlantic and told me stories of torpedoes and mines (his ship was never hit, but there were some close calls).
The Department of Energy has long used contractors to guard nuclear facilities, and many contractors, working directly for the U.S. Government, have served in Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, Central America in the 1980s, Africa and the ME in the 1990s…
I’m not ranting at anyone in this thread, just reiterating what’s been said in more detail. I am a contractor myself (Afghanistan) and it irritates me to no end when libtards declare this a new “problem” that has only existed this decade…
I’ll caveat this by stating that I have not had the chance to verify this myself. For all we know it could just be one of those myths.
From what I understand they put a limit on the number of US Troops that can be deployed at any given time. I believe this occurred during the carter Administration.
PMCs and other contractors do not count towards that number. This allows our military to field more Warfighters because we no longer count the cooks and certain truck drivers in those numbers.
The other reason is the PMCs are contracted under the DoS. Again this frees up US Troops to be able to do their primary tasks as trigger pullers and frees them from having to play babysitter to every politician that decides they want to “visit the troops” in order to make it look like they care. JM2CW.
It’s not so much a limit on how many troops can be deployed, but how many can be on active duty at all. When I was in the USMC in the 90s, our end strength was set by Congress at 174,000. Period.
Security contractors do work for DOS, as well as a great number of other agencies and companies. I’d estimate that the BW guys who worked the DOS WPPS contract in Iraq probably only made up about 1% of the entire number of contractors working for the coalition in Iraq. They just got the vast majority of the publicity.