Bomb Kills Soldier in Ukraine’s Donetsk Region ("Contract Soldiers"?)

RIANovosti ^ | 4-28-2014 | RIA

[Zhang Fei]

Interesting 2006 article with more granularity about military contractors in Iraq:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR2006120401311.html

[redlegplanner]

rgr. KBR = hash slingers. Very few blackwater folks according to the source.

Comparing the 1991 100 hour war to a ten year occupation is apples and oranges. The military also took cuts of ~ 500,000 between the two events, with, as I recall,almost 300,000 coming out of the force responsible for sustained land combat.

Lucky we had contracting companies able to fill the gap, don’t you think?

[Zhang Fei]

rgr. KBR = hash slingers. Very few blackwater folks according to the source.

There's obviously no way to hire 100,000 military contractors trained to US spec ops or even conventional military standards. However, if they were mostly hash slingers, per the WaPo article, which lists 650 dead as of 2006, they were getting killed at more than double the rate of US troops.

[grania]

I'm wondering if Kiev doesn't want to have that vote in late May and wants to get other countries to fight against their pro-Russian population. It seems that it's not war with Russia they want, it's keeping power for themselves. And for that they'll risk war with Russia.

Either that or the coup government in Kiev is totally inept and its actions are making it impossible for them to govern.

[redlegplanner]

yep -If you choose to run around a war zone w/o weapons, armor, supporting fires, CREW, etc bad stuff can happen.