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Originally Posted by The Reaper
I think that most of the pros there voted with their feet, won't take the jobs with the risk involved for the money offered, and the company had no choice other than to recruit, train, and place people who were not experienced professionals and who did not understand the risk-benefit ratio on the payroll.
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I think that this was actually an industry-wide phenomenon. The USG government felt that it needed contractors to take care of the deployed force, and the deployed force was stretched thin. The US Army unit in charge of
security at BIAP when I was there, for example, was an ADA unit. Obviously, there was no air threat in Iraq. The unit had borrowed Bradleys on the perimeter checkpoints.
Likewise, government contractors. My first firm won its contracts by attesting that it could get boots on the ground within two weeks, and it also bid well below other, more established firms with credible track records.
In order to make money, and to keep the contract alive and under budget, something had to give. My first firm offered low salaries. Since guys with legitimate resumes and verifiable employment histories were garnering much higher pay at that time, the posers came out of the woodwork, and with no requirement to verify credentials, they were employed by my first firm in droves.
I personally worked with guys who were "snipers in Central America," and guys who were "Force Recon." The funny thing was, when a couple genuine FR guys came aboard, they had never heard of the charlatans. The company did not care. It was hiring guys to stand post at a perimeter checkpoint in high temperatures, and charlatans were perfect for the job, because they could wear their knives upside down and strut around carrying guns and get paid more than they were making in the US as mall
security.
We have all seen guys who were fired from legit jobs given a new lease on life in the sandbox. We have all seen guys who never heard a shot fired in anger while on active duty running the roads in Iraq, protecting "dignitaries." And yes, there were mistakes made, and atrocities occured, and were never investigated, and no one was ever prosecuted, because there was no law in Iraq at that time, no one had jurisdiction, and all that mattered was that boots were on the ground, people were playing their roles, so that the contract would be paid.
And so it went.
Here we are, years later, and some of these charlatans are still active. Some of them have risen in the ranks, and I personally just detected one who worked on an SOF MTT out of the Embassy in Hungary under fraudulent pretenses, and who is working now in Iraq writing INTSUMs for general officers, who had applied to be a program manager for another firm. Well, we caught him. He is supposed to be leaving Iraq soon, allegedly to go get a certified copy of his DD214. He is not expected to return. But the money is too good. He will try again, elsewhere.
Without sanctions against employers who hire and pimp fraudulent contractors to the US government, the problem will not go away. In the same way that firms that hire illegal aliens in the USA need to be prosecuted into extinction, so do firms that hire fakes to support the US government in the war on terror.
And those firms that cut too many corners in a bid to "get paid," betting with the lives of their contractors, have to be held accountable when they lose their bets, and their contractors die needlessly.
And that is the case, as I see it, with
Blackwater.
They bet, they lost, good men died, now
Blackwater has to pay.
It is high time that genuine government oversight is implemented over the entire industry.
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