what do we have against the common insurgency?

an old mad magazine back page fold-in advertisement mocked the old cold medicine, contact, stating "what do we have against the common cold?"; folding it in the answer was "nothing. actually we quite like them; they give us all our business."

a quick check of halliburton jobs around the world, for the week of 13 May 2006, turns up:

• Afghanistan (155)
• Australia (41)
• Canada (2)
• Djibouti (23)
• Dubai (5)
• Iraq (413)
• Jordan (1)
• Korea (1)
• Kuwait (35)
• Macedonia (1)
• United Kingdom (19)
• United States (246)

in other words, the wars in afghanistan and iraq are big business for our quasi-private companies that feed off the no-bid contracts and outsourcing of security and intelligence. now many of these jobs are not security jobs (for some reason it is hard to get a crane operator to go to iraq these days), but many are. according to a 2004 report,

• In Iraq, private military contractors supply more trainers and security forces than all remaining members of the “coalition of the willing” except the US. According to the April 10, 2004 Economist, approximately 15,000 civilian security guards are currently stationed there, at least 6000 of them armed....
• More than $20 billion — a third of the Army’s budget for Iraq and Afghanistan – currently goes to contractors...
• “The global trade in hired military services is booming, and we’re only just now catching up,” notes Peter Singer, who works with the Brookings Institution. “It runs the gamut from cooks whose services have been privatized through to the maintenance people on fighter jets, to communications technicians, to trainers and recruiters, to generals providing strategic expertise, to fighter pilots and commandos. The entire spectrum of military services has been privatized in some way or another.”....
• Meanwhile, the new Bush administration pushed the privatization of more IT functions.
• According to an August 1, 2001 Washington Post report, such moves represented “a clear acknowledgement by NSA officials that the agency has fallen behind the technological curve.”... A month before 9/11, NSA director Michael Hayden tried to put a positive spin on the situation. Turning over IT systems to a private company would allow the NSA “to refocus assets on the agency’s core mission of providing foreign signals intelligence and protecting US national security-related information systems,” he said.
• But that rationale doesn’t fully explain...the decision to “refocus assets” address the long-term impact of this wholesale outsourcing – the export of skilled jobs. After eliminating 4000 US “consulting” positions in 2001, then scoring a record $16.8 billion in contracts by March 2004, CSC [csc owned dyncorp for a while, so unsure to whom this applies] announced that it plans to triple its staff in India to 5000 within two years, turning CSC India Pvt. Ltd. into a “strategic hub.” Not coincidentally, the Indian operation was launched in 2001, precisely to tap that country’s pool of low-cost engineering and IT talent. (Outsourcing Defense 6/04, Written by Greg Guma, The Quiet Rise of National Security, Inc.)

any problems with hayden's gut belief in the beauty of outsourcing intelligence besides the fact that the no-bid quasi-private companies closely linked with the administration make out like bandits from your tax dollars? well let's go to the message boards and see who is hoping to be our buddies in military intelligence (not to mention working with shia militias and somali warlords in our admin's belief that the real enemy is a mythic, unified spectre-like terror group):

• I'm a 28 former romanian millitary intelligence officer. Does anybody can tell me if and how i can get a job with dyn corp (in iraq, afghanistan, africa)...
• Hi..., send me an address email and your resume, I shall send you the phone number (us/uk) of the international dyncorp recruiter. (PostPosted: Sun Feb 05, 2006)

does anyone recall the romanian revolution? is this who we want on our side?