In the Gap theyíre ìmercenaries,î but in the Core itís called ìprivate securityî

Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 25 April

Reference: ìíOutsourcedí or ëMercenary,í Heís No Soldier,î by James Dao, New York Times, 25 April, p. WK3.

Story about role of private security firms in Iraq: is this new phenom? No, say experts. We can show you long history of such entities in international affairs.

Reality is: whenever youíre talking about stable security rule sets, like we have inside the Core today, these entities are basically rent-a-cops. But move inside the Gap, where the security rule-sets are weak or absent, and these entities add bulk to the point of becoming private armies. So long as we have the Gap, weíll have these mercs, but theyíre not a way to shrink the Gap. You will find these guys where things are really bad, and they are nothing but stop-gap measures for private companies trying hard to do business in security-less situations. In short, the firms are the equivalent of sending a boy to do a manís job.

My vision of the Sys Admin force that the U.S. military fields, along with other states, would keep these guys largely at the margins in the Gap, filling up the corners instead of tackling central jobs like Iraq. Trying to shrink the Gap on the cheap involves a lot of mercenaries, but itís not a recipe for success. The Coreís corporations will come and go in the Gap, entering and leaving according to business decisions regarding profit and loss. We wonít be integrating Iraq into the wider world on the basis of business decisions alone. War isnít out-sourced in such an easy fashion.

So yes, wage war within the context of everything else, but donít pretend you can just push it off on somebody else. There are simply some jobs that belong with governments, and waging war in one of them.