If that is the trend, then you can pretty much kiss the future of the military goodbye.

Believe me, 13th_redneck, I'm on both sides of the fences on it. On one hand, I believe that it's a good thing that they provide services that the military can't/won't undertake; on the other hand, we can't have them running around lawless. I understand that they aren't subject to military justice as individuals, but I believe that there should be contractual restrictions on the Blackwater and similar corporations as a whole when contracted by the U.S. government.

^^^ I'm with Deerslayer, there is certainly a lot more to this than meets the eye, so I find that I must make my judgement based on the best information available at the moment.

It's all anyone can do, unless of course, they have a second agenda.

Well put deerslayer.
Blackwater has been submitting proposals to various states as a viable alternative to the National Guard. In addition - Blackwater was just cleared to have their own fixed wing combat aircraft. If that does not get some of you concerned, this should - they are currently bidding on a proposal to build the replacement vehicle for the Humvee.

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Concerning the accusations of taking up arms against the US - well, I can't speak for other organizations, but never in a blue moon would a Blackwater employee knowingly engage a US counterpart.

If restrictions apply to the military, it should apply to them as well. If it is deemed okay that these guys have some rules that don't apply to them, these rules should be discarded by the military as well.
Who knows... maybe this is what the future is destined to be and the military will now be a stay at home force and those who want to have a go abroad join Blackwater and the like.
It's not like I totally don't feel for a lot of the motivations either.
There's a lot of serious Non combat types (with a capital N) who don't seem to realize the military is a warfighting organization and they get in the way of people who want to get things done.

Originally Posted by senojekips

^^^ I'm with Deerslayer, there is certainly a lot more to this than meets the eye, so I find that I must make my judgement based on the best information available at the moment.

It's all anyone can do, unless of course, they have a second agenda.

Problem is, a second agenda is hard to prove. It's a double-edged sword- on one hand, you can pay a merc to undertake a sensitive, dangerous, or dull task that you can't (read won't) do yourself, and have no repercussions because it's legit, or you can have said mercenary fire on an unidentified target and have the public go bat**** about a topic it doesn't understand well.

That being said, I find it a bit easier than most folks to excuse such civilian casualties, because they are a fact of war that cannot be totally eliminated. Until there is concrete evidence that the shots were fired in malice without provocation, on subjects that Blackwater KNEW were unarmed, I'm going to reserve my judgment of that particular incident.

Here in my hometown, some police officers got caught in a crossfire last year. They'd been on bike patrol, investigating a real rough part of town where the kids were popping fireworks (against regulations). I've talked to one of the guys involved, and he believes that it was a ploy to disguise gunfire. If that sort of ruse is used in the U.S., I don't blame any military or paramilitary force for being extremely cautious of civilians in foreign countries, and quick to react with deadly force under duress.

You have a point but you ignore this crucial bit of information:
No Mercenary has ever been tried for shooting a civilian (at least as of a year or two ago).
The same cannot be said of the military.
They're in the same environment, and the military undertakes the more difficult and sensitive missions. So I don't see why the mercenaries should be given special immunity to any of the laws.
With the kind of ROEs that the mercs play with, heck life might even be easy for the average GI over there.
Maybe if these mercs are made to pay for actual crimes they commit, they won't strut around so much looking down on actual military folks who do the real fighting.
As with Blackwater ringing about the changes in terms of equipment... it's easy if you haven't blown the money on other equipment and it's easy with the type of money they charge for their services.
But again I say, what is this organization going to do after Iraq?
Not to mention, a company like this drains the military of good personnel. Who wouldn't make the switch? You do easier work, you get better deployment terms, you get to wear what you want and you get paid a fortune. And when Iraq is over, you will have a surplus of unemployed people with an array of military skills, many of which who have too much pride to become security guards at the local mall.

that's the other edge of the sword I was talking about.

I have the distinct impression from what I read that this is not a first time occurrence, and that many civilians have been killed in exchanges of fire. However the difference in this case seems to be that on this occasion the Iraqis seem to be convinced that the Blackwater operatives were distinctly careless and used an inappropriate amount of force.

Place yourself in the shoes of the Iraqis for a minute. Your country has been over run by the coalition forces. Now we won't go into the legitimacy of this act at this time and for the moment we will take the view of the Iraqis who welcomed this act whom I firmly believe were in the majority at the time.

Now, the forces have displaced the previous Government and have most of the bad guys locked up or executed. A civil government has been put in place and the forces remain to keep the peace and hopefully prevent a serious attempt by the previous ruling party to re establish themselves, this is accepted by the present regime as being necessary.

However, along with the regular coalition forces there is a group of armed civilians that are not responsible to the Iraqis, they are not under the control of the coalition forces, they are not covered under the Geneva convention and they behave as a law unto themselves, and from time to time they kill innocent members of your population and don't really give a stuff.

If this happened in your country what would you do? What would the American Militia do? I think that they would move into high gear and bother the sh!t out of them.

In a stabler country I'd consider it the problem of Blackwater's, SOS Temps, whoever's personnel- but you bring a valid point to the table.