There are dangers, of course: as contractors, a private entity, they nonetheless represent us but without the UCMJ to control them. Whatever they do, they do in our name and the US, not the private leadership will get the blame if they screw up.
Training and proficiency are a wild card too - how much say will our government have over inept or irresponsible units?
The bigger issue is that we have gone from a "Citizen Army" filled out by a draft to include all sectors of our society, to a volunteer force which is made up of fewer than 1% of the eligible men and now includes young ladies, deviants, and even people who can't figure out what bathroom to use...now they are being supplanted by civilian hired guns and I would guess, machines, eventually.
What does that portend for our country? How much contact or involvement will the most of us have with the wars that protect us and our allies? What will happen to that thin base of experience that we have even now to know how to handles, fights, emergencies?
Anybody pay attention to that massacre in Las Vegas? If we'd had any semblance of military experience, the crowds wouldn't have packed together on the ground in a fat target - they would have sought cover, killed those spotlights that were illuminating them, found the site that pervert was shooting from and maybe a few would have gotten a weapon and engaged him.
Like the Romans before us, we are becoming comfortable cattle.
This guy is awesome, total Patriot.
The amount of misery the US government has forced him to put up with is astonishing.
his contracts were far beyond the size of a d ring binder and covered even such niggling details as the type of sunglasses The Operators would wear.
State Department employees would never go stealthy by riding in battered local Vehicles, instead they always insisted on high-profile spotless shiny vehicles that said “Attack me!”
often they also insisted on departing via the same route that they arrived, tactically very unsound.
he had to put up a garbage like that all the time.
In return for perfect performance the US government constantly sued him harassed him and constantly tried to prosecute his guys.
Read his book and you will find that every time the US government is mentioned you’ll feel like you have a massive migraine headache coming on.
Is this the guy who said he was going to run for Congress? WY, ID, somewhere out west?
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of "letters of marque and reprisal" was in an English statute in 1354 during the reign of Edward III. The phrase referred to "a licen[c]e granted by a sovereign to a subject, authorizing him to make reprisals on the subjects of a hostile state for injuries alleged to have been done to him by the enemy's army."
One has to worry about war crimes, I suppose, but I do support the notion of mercenaries for focused action rather than "boots on the ground" leading to long-term "nation-building". I say get in, get out -- and break things and kill people as cheaply as possibly.
There would need to be some very strict ground rules about such a force.
1) It would *have* to be offshore, with likely its own Caribbean island, and possibly one in an African enclave leased for the purpose. By being offshore, non-Americans could serve in it, under US NCOs and Officers.
2) It would be limited to just light infantry, with some light wheeled armored vehicles like Humvees and Strykers. Their transport, logistics, communications and emergency support would be provided by the US military.
3) Their main purpose would involve *low* intensity missions, like humanitarian aid, guard duties, minimal peacekeeping, establishing local infrastructure protection in support of military engineer units, etc. The idea being that they cost just a fraction of military personnel for these often protracted missions.
4) They would operate under contract, which they could turn down, with the US military, as uniformed personnel under US Operational Control (and Geneva protections). This means that a POTUS (or a particularly bad POTUS) could not order them to carry out missions they did not voluntarily contract to do. And if they were detained for potentially criminal offenses, while the detention could be done by the military, they would have to be turned over to a civilian court for indictment and trial.
5) They could only operate in countries, like the US military, that had bilateral agreements with the US against the ICC.
6) Any captured militants, or refugees, under their control would be turned over to the US military as soon as possibles.
In the final analysis, the purpose of this is to save a lot of money, and not having the US military to be degraded while carrying out such low intensity, protracted missions.
Issue ‘Letters of Marque’ and let’em go to town. If they step out of line or go beyond their scope then rescind the letter. Letters could be by geographic region or by bad-guy organization. Same goes for the pirates in the Red Sea/Indian O off the Horn of Africa. Hell of a lot more cost effective.