Blackwater gets an even bigger makeover

[one-eyed fat man]

25. Because Congress won't fund them

Congress sets the active duty end strength figures it will fund. DoD has shifted more and more support functions to contractors, saving the uniformed slots for troops closer to combat. The State Department, AID, and other agencies that might have had military security details allotted them fifty years ago won't get them. Their in-house "protective services" might be fine patrolling a parking garage in DC, but woefully inadequate in Yemen, Islamabad or Kandahar.

If you were a thirty-something NCO with an 18 series MOS and recent combat experience, Making six times a month over what the DoD paid for the same risks might be tempting.

Not unlike the American Volunteer Group that went to China with Chennault. Except that was really a black op, that they were volunteers was a convenient fiction for Roosevelt.

http://www.flyingtigersvideo.com/about.html

For years after the Flying Tigers disbanded in 1942, they had been known as a mercenary air force in the service of the Chinese government. Finally on July 4, 1991, in a ceremony honoring the Flying Tigers, the United States Government belatedly admitted the truth - the Flying Tigers had been created by secret order of President Franklin Roosevelt. Months before Pearl Harbor, the Flying Tigers were created to help the Chinese defend their cities from relentless bombing by the Japanese, who had invaded China in 1937.

Three hundred men and women were recruited from within the ranks of the U.S. Armed Services. Pilots, aircraft mechanics, propeller specialists, doctors, nurses, clerks and even a chaplain joined what was called the American Volunteer Group. They signed a one-year contract to protect the only supply route open for the United States to deliver war materiel to China - the Burma Road. They boarded ships from the West Coast in the spring and summer of 1941, traveling as missionaries, planters, and circus performers. Their disguises were meant to mask their true mission and protect FDR's secret effort to keep China from falling to the Japanese without provoking a war with Japan.