SSG David Bellavia MOH and Speech

SSG David G. Bellavia earnd his Medal of Honor while serving as a member of Company A, Task Force 2-2, 1st Infantry Division fighting in Fallujah, Iraq under Operation Phantom Fury. Read his MOH citation then watch the 22 minute video which gets really good at the 6 minute mark.

Medal of Honor Citation:

Staff Sergeant David G. Bellavia distinguished himself by acts of gallantry and intrepidity above and beyond the call of duty on November 10, 2004, while serving as squad leader in support of Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah, Iraq.

While clearing a house, a squad from Staff Sergeant Bellavia’s platoon became trapped within a room by intense enemy fire coming from a fortified position under the stairs leading to the second floor. Recognizing the immediate severity of the situation, and with disregard for his own safety, Staff Sergeant Bellavia retrieved an automatic weapon and entered the doorway of the house to engage the insurgents.

With enemy rounds impacting around him, Staff Sergeant Bellavia fired at the enemy position at a cyclic rate, providing covering fire that allowed the squad to break contact and exit the house.

A Bradley Fighting Vehicle was brought forward to suppress the enemy; however, due to high walls surrounding the house, it could not fire directly at the enemy position. Staff Sergeant Bellavia then re-entered the house and again came under intense enemy fire. He observed an enemy insurgent preparing to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at his platoon. Recognizing the grave danger the grenade posed to his fellow soldiers, Staff Sergeant Bellavia assaulted the enemy position, killing one insurgent and wounding another who ran to a different part of the house.

Staff Sergeant Bellavia, realizing he had an un-cleared, darkened room to his back, moved to clear it. As he entered, an insurgent came down the stairs firing at him. Simultaneously, the previously wounded insurgent reemerged and engaged Staff Sergeant Bellavia. Staff Sergeant Bellavia, entering further into the darkened room, returned fire and eliminated both insurgents. Staff Sergeant Bellavia then received enemy fire from another insurgent emerging from a closet in the darkened room.

Exchanging gunfire, Staff Sergeant Bellavia pursued the enemy up the stairs and eliminated him. Now on the second floor, Staff Sergeant Bellavia moved to a door that opened onto the roof. At this point, a fifth insurgent leapt from the third floor roof onto the second floor roof. Staff Sergeant Bellavia engaged the insurgent through a window, wounding him in the back and legs, and caused him to fall off the roof.

Acting on instinct to save the members of his platoon from an imminent threat, Staff Sergeant Bellavia ultimately cleared an entire enemy-filled house, destroyed four insurgents, and badly wounded a fifth. Staff Sergeant Bellavia's bravery, complete disregard for his own safety, and unselfish and courageous actions are in keeping with the finest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the United States Army.

After the Service:

Bellavia was Vice Chairman and co-founder of Vets for Freedom and is currently the President of EMPact America, an American energy resiliency organization based in Elma, New York. He published a memoir, House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, co-written with John R. Bruning., recognized as one of the top five best Iraq War memoirs. Bellavia has signed an agreement with a film producer to make his memoir into a major motion picture.

He has unsuccessfully run for Congressional office several times in highly liberal New York but contnues to be highly sought after appearances at veterans events and for speeches.

Watch the video below to see one of the most amazing speeches you will ever hear:

The Pentagon Ups the Ante in Syria Fight

Hundreds of U.S. Special Forces troops are heading overseas to train Syrian rebels to battle the Islamic State, but White House dithering and bureaucratic confusion could make it hard for them to pull it off. This article was writen by Seán D. Naylor, an intelligence and counterterrorism senior staff writer for Foreign Policy. He previously spent 23 years at Army Times, where his principal beat was special operations forces. He is the author of 'Not A Good Day To Die' – The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda and the forthcoming Relentless Strike – The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command.

The Special Forces group that ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan in 2001 is preparing to deploy to Jordan to train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State, but many of the U.S. military’s most elite warriors have a gnawing fear that those efforts may be too little, too late.

Four years after the start of the uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group is getting ready to establish a multinational special operations task force in Jordan to train and equip Syrian rebel forces that the United States deems “moderate” — which means allied with neither the Islamic State nor al Qaeda’s local affiliate, al-Nusra Front.

But daunting challenges lie ahead for 5th Group. They include finding and vetting enough moderate rebels to make a difference on the battlefield; potential friction with the CIA, which has its own rebel training program going on in Jordan; the Obama administration’s refusal to let special operations forces fight alongside the rebel forces they have trained; and a confusing chain of command that none of the relevant American military headquarters seem willing or able to explain.

To complicate matters further, the general in charge of the training mission in Jordan is considered one of the special operations community’s most capable senior officers, but as things stand he is scheduled to rotate out of the country just as the training effort gets underway.

The stakes are enormously high for Washington and its allies. The Obama administration has publicly vowed to keep U.S. forces out of the line of fire in the campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, in part to guard against the prospect of more American fatalities in a conflict the U.S. public had overwhelmingly turned against in recent years. The White House is instead hoping that members of some of the military’s most secretive and elite units can rebuild the shattered Iraqi army and stand up a force of tribal militias willing to fight the Islamic State, while simultaneously helping to train and equip a new rebel force in Syria. Failure in either location is likely to embolden the United States’ enemies in the region — Iran, the Assad regime, the Islamic State, and al-Nusra Front — and seriously damage American prestige.

The ban on Special Forces trainers entering Syria is just one of a number of Obama policy directives hampering the special operations training effort — and, with it, the success of the overall U.S. mission against the Islamic State, according to special operations officers. Another is a more general pressure to minimize the U.S. footprint on the ground in Jordan and Iraq. The military is still waiting for the formal authorization to deploy “large formations” of special operations forces, said a special operations lieutenant colonel. “It all goes back to the national policy, and there’s a lot of frustration with that,” he said.

There is also a real risk that the Special Forces soldiers will find themselves in competition with the CIA for the same dwindling band of moderate rebels. The CIA is already training Syrian rebels in Jordan, but that effort is limited by the relatively small number of operatives that Langley can devote to the effort. Hence the introduction of the 5th Special Forces Group, which can train several times the number of guerrillas as the CIA can. “This is an industrial-size problem,” said a special operations officer who has been tracking the issue from Washington. “You need an industrial-size solution.”

The job of mediating between the CIA and the elite military forces will fall to Maj. Gen. Michael Nagata, a highly regarded Special Forces officer who runs both the U.S. Central Command’s special operations command and an “interagency” task force that will oversee the training efforts in Jordan. “The choice of title for Nagata’s organization is not accidental,” said the special operations officer in Washington, in reference to the word “interagency.” “[His job] is to try and keep the line [between the CIA and the special operations forces] clearly established and try to keep everybody on the proper side of that line.”

On the ground, the training mission itself will be run by Col. John Brennan, 5th Group’s commander, who previously led a squadron in the Army’s famed Delta Force. Brennan will command a combined joint special operations task force in Jordan during the next few months, with the mission of training Syrian rebels. The word “combined” refers to the participation of other countries; the military is keen to involve as many local partners as possible. “If we turn this into Fort Bragg East we’re not doing the [Jordanian] monarch any favors,” said the special operations officer in Washington. “We want an Arab face on this thing.”

Finding and vetting moderate rebels will be the task force’s first major challenge, and one that will likely be left to U.S. allies, in particular the Jordanians and Saudis, said the special operations officer in Washington. However, there are doubts as to whether enough rebels and would-be rebels who meet U.S. criteria remain in Syria. “It’s a commonly held position here that when you say ‘moderate opposition,’ those guys were killed off two years ago,” said the special operations officer in Washington.

Even if enough Syrians can be recruited, it will take years for the training pipeline to produce the numbers required to change the situation on the ground in Syria. “They’re talking like two, three years for this training effort to produce anything, and they were struggling just to get it off the ground,” said a senior special operations officer with close knowledge of U.S. policy deliberations on Iraq and Syria.

Other than the need to keep as much of an Arab face as possible on the training effort, the prospect of an indefinite, but certainly multiyear, mission is another factor driving the size of the American commitment in Jordan down. “This is going to be a long-term effort and we’re going to have to pace ourselves to a degree,” said the special operations lieutenant colonel. In practice, this means that 5th Group will rarely have more than 200 Special Forces soldiers in the country at a time, a force theoretically capable of training roughly 7,000 guerrillas at one time. But the real numbers are likely to be much lower. “If they could put out 5,000 guys every 90 days that would be an extraordinary success,” said the senior special operations officer familiar with policy deliberations on Iraq and Syria. “But I don’t think the numbers will be anything like that.”

The length of time required to turn those guerrillas into an effective fighting force depends on several variables, including their likely mission and whether or not they are being trained to integrate the use of crew-served weapons like mortars and antitank rockets into their maneuvers. “If you’re taking guys off the street and trying to form them into cohesive units, anything less than 90 days, I think you’re putting yourself at risk,” the senior special operations officer said. “They’re not going to withstand first contact [with the enemy].”

The best hope for achieving success through the Special Forces effort would be to follow the model that worked so well for 5th Group in Afghanistan in late 2001, according to special operations officers. This would entail allowing the A-teams to accompany their charges into battle in an offensive campaign supported by U.S. and allied air power and intelligence. The problem is that the Obama administration has ruled out letting Special Forces teams enter Syria — a policy decision that has frustrated many in the special operations community, who say it’s vital for there to be Special Forces advisors on the front lines but doubt the Obama administration would ever authorize it. “If that’s the way it works best, I can almost guarantee you that’s not the way the administration is going to let us proceed,” said the officer tracking things from Washington.

Another problem is a bureaucratic one: The military has a baffling array of special operations and conventional headquarters that are already established or are mooted to soon deploy to the region. Also in Jordan is a U.S.-led multinational effort named Operation Gallant Phoenix, aimed at tracking the foreign fighter flow into Iraq and Syria. Begun as an initiative under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which controls the military’s most elite special operations units, and JSOC’s higher administrative headquarters, U.S. Special Operations Command, it has expanded to include participation by U.S. Central Command and U.S. European Command, said the senior special operations officer. Although sometimes referred to as the “foreign fighter task force,” Gallant Phoenix doesn’t have troops of its own to send out on raids or direct assaults and instead passes on the information it receives to allied countries.

With the Islamic State’s foreign fighter contingent now estimated by the United States to exceed 20,000, it makes more sense to address the problem through allied governments and law enforcement, said a retired special operations officer with intimate knowledge of ongoing operations. “It’s too big a problem to kill with any kind of kinetics,” he said.

Joint Special Operations Command also has a small military contingent headquartered in Iraqi Kurdistan. Called Task Force 27, it is built around Delta Force — which has long enjoyed close relations with Kurdish security and intelligence forces — and is led by the Delta commander, a colonel. Task Force 27’s focus is on targeting the so-called high-value individuals who comprise the Islamic State leadership. Most of the task force’s effort has been devoted to Syria, but it has also paid attention to potential targets in the Mosul area of Iraq. However, other than at least one hostage rescue attempt, Task Force 27 has conducted no direct action missions against Islamic State targets, several special operations sources said. “If the time comes when the president makes a decision, ‘Hey, we’ve got a chance to capture [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-] Baghdadi’ ... they might be poised to do that, but to my knowledge, nobody’s given them a green light to do that,” the senior special operations officer said.

In addition to the Delta elements in Iraqi Kurdistan, there is also a three- to four-man Delta cell at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, that manages intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance flights launched from Incirlik air base, the senior special operations officer said. The United States had been providing that sort of support along the Turkish border to the Turkish government for several years. When the Islamic State kidnapped almost 50 employees of the Turkish Consulate and 30 Turkish truck drivers in Mosul in June 2014, the Turkish government gave the United States permission to send flights south across the border to try to locate the hostages, the senior officer said.

One similarity between the missions in Iraq and in Syria is that in both cases, the United States is late to the game. As the Islamic State expanded its control over northern Iraq and northeastern Syria, the United States did little. Only when the group overran Mosul in June did the U.S. government stir to action, according to the special operations officer in Washington. “If not for the catalyst of our embassy potentially falling, we’d probably be doing nothing,” he said.

The military dispatched a crisis response force in anticipation of having to evacuate the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. That force included 5th Group’s combatant commander’s in-extremis force, a reinforced Special Forces company specially trained for counterterrorism missions, as well as Navy SEALs and Air Force special operations elements, said the special operations officer in Washington. That force remained in Iraq, and transitioning the special ops contingent there to a “less ad hoc” force “has been an effort,” he said. But that new force is slowly gathering, under the command of Brig. Gen. Kurt Crytzer, a Special Forces officer who is Nagata’s deputy in Central Command’s special operations command.

Headquartered at a base beside Baghdad International Airport, Crytzer’s command is known as Joint Special Operations Task Force – Iraq, and will likely include Navy SEALs and Marine special operations elements as well as A-teams from a Special Forces group other than 5th Group, which is expected to be consumed with the mission in Jordan. (With 3rd Group and 7th Group heavily committed to Afghanistan and Latin America, the chances are good that the additional SF teams will come from 1st or 10th Groups, said the special operations lieutenant colonel.) Also included in Crytzer’s task force are several allied special operations contingents.

But although the U.S. special operations forces in Iraq, Jordan, and Iraqi Kurdistan are all focused on the same enemy — the Islamic State — they do not share the same chain of command. “It’s not the model that they have in Afghanistan, where everybody’s under one command,” said the senior special ops officer with close knowledge of U.S. policy deliberations on Iraq and Syria. “It’s still this kind of a bifurcated command,” with different reporting chains for the secretive Joint Special Operations Command elements, sometimes known as “the national mission force,” and other special ops units like 5th Group, known as theater special operations forces.

Crytzer reports directly to Army Lieut. Gen. James Terry, which runs the U.S.-led allied war effort in both Iraq and Syria from a headquarters in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. Nagata, however, reports straight to Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, the head of U.S. Central Command. The Joint Special Operations Command force in Iraqi Kurdistan, Task Force 27, has yet another chain of command, meaning that no single special operations officer in the theater commands all the U.S. special operations forces, a situation that disturbs some in the special ops community.

“The enemy’s got unity of effort and we don’t have that. And they’ve got unity of command too,” said a recently retired colonel with close links to U.S. Special Operations Command. “How many headquarters do you fucking need?”

Muddying the waters further are rumors that Maj. Gen. Darsie Rogers, the head of U.S. Army Special Forces Command, might deploy to the Middle East with yet another new command. Rogers’s spokeswoman declined to comments.

Yet another challenge comes from the fact that Nagata, arguably the most important officer in the effort, will have to move jobs just as the unconventional warfare campaign is getting underway in earnest. By June, Nagata will have been at the helm of Central Command’s special operations component for two years, the standard tenure in that position. Because Nagata’s career has included tours in the CIA, Joint Special Operations Command, and regular Special Forces, as well as multiple jobs in Washington, some view him as uniquely qualified for the role he currently fills. His centrality is sparking talk of the military switching around the command structure so he can stay in the region longer. (The Pentagon set a precedent for this in 2006, when it gave then-JSOC commander Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal a third star and kept him in command, in order not to disrupt his task force as it eviscerated Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq group, the forerunner to the Islamic State.) Despite the challenges, the chance to deploy to the Middle East and conduct a classic Special Forces mission has many in the community licking their lips. “There’s such a lot of anticipation about this right now ... because this is a very good SF mission,” the special operations lieutenant colonel said. However, he noted pointedly, “You’ve got to be careful of wanting a mission too bad.”

US Special Forces Engage ISIS for First Time, Inflict Heavy Casualties

US Special Forces Engage ISIS for First Time, Inflict Heavy Casualties An article by Hunter Roosevelt, published on Controversial Times.com on December 17, 2014

Reports out of Iraq indicate that American Special Forces “advisers” have engaged ISIS in ground combat for the first time.

ISIS forces attacked an Iraqi Army outpost occupied by more than 100 Americans around 1 a.m. local time. The American forces responded “equipped with light and medium weapons, supported by F-18? fighter jets according to sources on the ground.

According to Shafaq News Iraq, US troops have entered with its Iraqi partner, according to Colonel, Salam Nazim in line against ISIS elements and clashed with them for more than two hours, to succeed in removing them from al-Dolab area, and causing losses in their ranks, at a time American fighter jets directed several strikes focused on ISIS gatherings that silenced their heavy sources of fire. He points out that the clashes took place between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m.

A field commander told reporters that the Americans were able to inflict heavy casualties on ISIS while suffering no casualties of their own while forcing the terror group back to their base some 10 kilometers away.

Sheikh Mahmud Nimrawi, a prominent tribal leader in the region, said that “US forces intervened because of ISIS started to come near the base, which they are stationed in so out of self-defense, they responded, welcoming the US intervention, which I hope will not be the last.“

The Sheikh continued, “We have made progress in al-Dolab area, in which ISIS has withdrawn from to the villages beyond, after the battles which involved a private American force , and provided a great impetus firearm, and opened hubs around the region enabled them to storm and surprise ISIS fighters.”

The short version is that ISIS attacked a base where more than 100 Special Forces “advisers” are stationed and took a two hour beating from both the air and the ground while the good guys took no casualties.

General Petraeus on the military today

Thanks to my fellow veterans:

I remember the day I found out I got into West Point. My Mom actually showed up in the hallway of my high school and waited for me to get out of class.

She was bawling her eyes out and apologizing that she had opened up my admission letter. She wasn't crying because it had been her dream for me to go there. She was crying because she knew how hard I'd worked to get in, how much I wanted to attend, and how much I wanted to be an infantry officer.

I was going to get that opportunity. That same day two of my teachers took me aside and essentially told me the following: "David, you're a smart guy. You don't have to join the military. You should go to college, instead."

I could easily write a theme defending West Point and the military as I did that day, explaining that United States Military Academy is an elite institution, that separate from that, it is actually statistically much harder to enlist in the military than it is to get admitted to college, that serving the nation is a challenge that all able-bodied men should at least consider for a host of reasons, but I won't.

What I will say is that when a 16 year-old kid is being told that attending West Point is going to be bad for his future then there is a dangerous disconnect in America, and entirely too many Americans have no idea what kind of burdens our military is bearing.

In World War II, 11.2% of the nation's population served for four (4) years.

During the Vietnam era, 4.3% of the nation's population served in twelve (12) years.

Since 2001, only 0.45% of our population has served in the Global War on Terror.

These are unbelievable statistics. Over time, fewer and fewer people have shouldered more and more of the burden and it is only getting worse.

Our troops were sent to war in Iraq by a Congress consisting of 10% veterans with only one person having a child in the military. Taxes did not increase to pay for the war. War bonds were not sold. Gas was not regulated. In fact, the average citizen was asked to sacrifice nothing, and has sacrificed nothing unless they have chosen to out of the goodness of their hearts.

The only people who have sacrificed are the veterans and their families. The volunteers. The people who swore an oath to defend this nation. You stand there, deployment after deployment and fight on. You've lost relationships, spent years of your lives in extreme conditions, years apart from kids you'll never get back, and beaten your body in a way that even professional athletes don't understand.

Then you come home to a nation that doesn't understand. They don't understand suffering. They don't understand sacrifice. They don't understand why we fight for them. They don't understand that bad people exist. They look at you like you're a machine - like something is Wrong with you. You are the misguided one - not them.

When you get out, you sit in the college classrooms with political science teachers that discount your opinions on Iraq and Afghanistan because YOU WERE THERE and can't understand the macro issues they gathered from books, because of your bias.

You watch TV shows where every vet has PTSD and the violent strain at that. Your Congress is debating your benefits, your retirement, and your pay, while they ask you to do more. But, the amazing thing about you is that you all know this. You know your country will never pay back what you've given up. You know that the populace at large will never truly understand or appreciate what you have done for them.

Hell, you know that in some circles, you will be thought as less than normal for having worn the uniform. But you do it anyway.

You do what the greatest men and women of this country have done since 1775. YOU SERVED. Just that decision alone makes you part of an elite group.

"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." -Winston Churchill- Thank you to the 11.2% and 4.3% who have served and thanks to the 0.45% who continue to serve our Nation.

General David Petraeus, West Point Class 1974

"Some people spend an entire lifetime wondering if they made a difference in the world. But, the members of the U.S. ARMED FORCES don't have that problem."



General David Howell Petraeus - A brief biography
Upon graduation from West Point in 1974, Petraeus was commissioned an infantry officer. After completing Ranger School (Distinguished Honor Graduate), Petraeus was assigned to the 509th Airborne Battalion Combat Team, a light infantry unit in Vicenza, Italy. Ever since then, light infantry has been at the core of his career, punctuated by assignments to mechanized units, unit commands, staff assignments, and educational institutions.

Graduating the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1983, as the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate, he went on to advanced educational assignments, esarning his PhD and teaching at West Point degree from 1985-1987.

Petraeus commanded the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault)'s 3rd Battalion 187th Infantry Regiment, known as the "Iron Rakkasans", from 1991–1993. During this period, he suffered one of the more dramatic incidents in his career - in 1991 he was accidentally shot in the chest with an M-16 assault rifle during a live-fire exercise when a soldier tripped and his rifle discharged. He was taken to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tennessee, where he was operated on by future U.S. Senator Bill Frist. The hospital released him early after he did fifty push-ups without resting, just a few days after the accident.

In 1999, as a brigadier general, Petraeus returned to the 82nd, serving as the assistant division commander for operations and then, briefly, as acting commanding general. During his time with the 82nd, he deployed to Kuwait as part of Operation Desert Spring, the continuous rotation of combat forces through Kuwait during the decade after the Gulf War.

In 2003, Petraeus, then a Major General, saw combat for the first time when he commanded the 101st Airborne Division during V Corps's drive to Baghdad.

In June 2004, less than six months after the 101st returned to the U.S., Petraeus was promoted to lieutenant general and became the first commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq.

In January 2007, as part of his overhauled Iraq strategy, President George W. Bush announced that Petraeus would succeed Gen. George Casey as commanding general of MNF-I to lead all U.S. troops in Iraq.

On October 31, 2008, Petraeus assumed command of the United States Central Command (USCENTCOM) headquartered in Tampa, Florida. Petraeus was responsible for U.S. operations in 20 countries spreading from Egypt to Pakistan—including Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

On June 23, 2010, President Obama announced that he would nominate Petraeus to succeed General Stanley A. McChrystal as the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan.

Petraeus retired from the U.S. Army on August 31, 2011. On April 28, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that he had nominated Petraeus to become the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

On 9 November 2012, citing an extra-martial affair, Petraeus announced his resignation from the CIA. General Petraeus remains a well respected soldier by trops and peers alike.

Civilian Warriors: Blackwater and the War on Terror

‘Civilian Warriors: Blackwater and the War on Terror’ by Erik Prince Article from the Washington Post concerning the history and role of Civilian Contractors in Combat and Combat support roles.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, the U.S. military included 1.4 million active personnel and nearly 1 million more in the reserves — plus hundreds of thousands of civilians at the Pentagon and civilian agencies across the national security complex. It was a smaller force than the one that had fought the Persian Gulf War a decade earlier, but still enough, in pre-9/11 Pentagon war plans, to fight two simultaneous regional battles.

However, for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this force was not enough. And so our government faced choices: raise a larger army, call up more reservists, hire more civilians or rely on contractors. At some point, the government exercised all these options. But for the first time in U.S. history, it chose to rely so heavily on contractors that, at the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, contractor personnel outnumbered troops in each theater of war.

Although it didn’t make the most money in Iraq (that title goes to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR) or directly participate in the immense Iraq and Afghanistan counterinsurgency missions (like DynCorp, which trained Iraqi police, and Parsons, which rebuilt Iraqi infrastructure), Blackwater stands apart from all other contractors because of the amount of publicity it received, including both praise and scorn. By the height of the Iraq war, in October 2007 when chief executive Erik Prince testified before Congress, Blackwater had morphed into a Rorschach test: How one perceived the company often revealed one’s feelings about the nation’s post-9/11 wars.

After years in self-imposed exile overseas because of frustration with Blackwater’s legal woes and other issues, Prince now reenters the fray with “Civilian Warriors,” a book about the life, death and resurrection of Blackwater. Prince’s story begins with his maturation as a Midwestern scion who inherits the family manufacturing business while serving as a Navy SEAL. After growing restless with the family concern, he starts Blackwater with a small, tight-knit group of other former SEALs. The original business plan for Blackwater envisioned the world’s premier shooting facility, where elite military, intelligence and law enforcement personnel could train in ways Prince only dreamed of while wearing the uniform. After Sept. 11, Blackwater’s mission expanded dramatically, with the company diversifying into many fields, most notably private security for the State Department and CIA overseas, among other customers. In 1998, Blackwater had about $400,000 in revenue; in 2006, that figure stood at more than $1 billion.

The book, co-authored with David Coburn, presents a well-written, credible defense of Blackwater and Prince’s role in building it. But it does not answer the important questions surrounding contractors and their performance in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the Iraq war over and the Afghan war entering its twilight, the time has come to evaluate the efficacy, efficiency and strategic wisdom of using contractors in war. Prince provides evidence for both sides in this debate.

“Civilian Warriors” describes instances of superb contractor performance. The most dramatic of these was Blackwater’s epic rescue of the State Department mission in Najaf, Iraq, during a Shiite uprising in April 2004. A close second may be how Blackwater’s muscular security details enabled the State Department and other civilian agencies to operate in the hellish Iraqi environment of 2003 to ’07, when military resources were too far stretched to support civilians working to rebuild the country. Blackwater’s convoys, helicopters and personnel have earned much criticism for their aggressive approach to this role. However, U.S. civilian agencies could not have functioned in Iraq without Blackwater, and Prince rightfully points to the company’s record of never losing a protectee during its work there. Whether its “high-visibility deterrent” tactics were, as Prince writes, “probably the worst approach for the department actually achieving its diplomatic objectives in Iraq” remains an open question. Blackwater “did a superb job doing exactly what we told them to do,” said retired Marine colonel and prominent military scholar T.X. Hammes, quoted partway through Prince’s book. “The problem is what we told them to do hurt the counterinsurgency effort.”

Prince doth protest too much when he describes the extent to which Blackwater was policed by the government — perhaps because of the extensive fines and legal battles he faced as chief executive, which left scars on him and the company. “So from virtually the moment Blackwater’s men arrived in Iraq,” he writes, “they were subject to the American rule of law.” He points to a variety of contractual provisions and powers at the government’s disposal for reining in Blackwater should it choose to do so. Yet, he does not mention that federal criminal law did not effectively extend to Blackwater until 2004, and that very few contractors have faced prosecution since then. He also overplays the extent to which contracting officers policed Blackwater’s misconduct, policing that often was frustrated by the web of companies and subcontracts employed by Blackwater and its customers to perform work in Iraq and Afghanistan. Additionally, Prince exaggerates the extent to which having veterans in the Blackwater workforce aligned the company’s conduct with the nation’s interests abroad. The vast majority of these men and women served with distinction, but their work for Blackwater should not be conflated with service in uniform.

In many ways, Blackwater’s story is a parable for the growth of the national security industry after Sept. 11. Flush with cash from government contracts, Blackwater expanded rapidly, eventually employing thousands, acquiring its own aviation wing and growing big enough to deploy personnel on at least three continents. Along the way, Blackwater’s team also embraced the attitude of its founder, Prince, who stressed getting the job done over compliance with every law or rule. That approach gave the company a quick-response capability the government lacked and envied, but also contributed to Blackwater’s later problems, such as its export control violations, which resulted in a $42 million fine, the largest of its kind in history at the time.

Prince’s book belongs on the shelf next to the memoirs of the other Iraq and Afghanistan war chieftains: Paul Bremer, Ricardo Sanchez, Stanley McChrystal, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. Along with these other war memoirs, we need Prince’s story to help us understand the history of the post-9/11 wars and the myriad roles contractors played in these conflicts. However, reading Prince’s book should be the first step, not the last, in grasping and questioning the wisdom of sending so many private civilian warriors into harm’s way.

7th Special Forces Group - The Movie

I believe this was created by the 7th SFG. Good movie, although I don't think Ike would necessarily like the music.