I Was a Mercenary. Trust Me: Erik Prince’s Plan Is Garbage. By Sean McFate - Politico

For the past year, Erik Prince has been peddling an idea that should alarm anyone who has followed his career: We should replace U.S. troops in Afghanistan with mercenaries, preferably his.

For those who do not know Prince, he was a founder of Blackwater International, the private military contractor that became so toxic, he had to change the company’s name. Under his management, Blackwater committed perhaps the worst war crime of the Iraq war: A squad of armed contractors killed 17 civilians at the Nisour traffic circle in Baghdad. The incident sparked a political uproar in Iraq, vastly complicated the mission of the State Department diplomats the contractors were ostensibly there to protect, and set off multiple probes into Blackwater’s conduct. A FBI inquiry later found that 14 of the 17 deaths were unjustified. For Americans, the “Nisour Incident” was a stain on their country’s moral character. For Iraqis, Blackwater’s reckless behavior and callous disregard for Iraqi lives seemed emblematic of America’s handling of the war as a whole, and helped to hasten our exit.

Now Prince wants to privatize the Afghanistan war. And Afghans thought the worst we could do was bomb them.

The generals laughed at Prince, and thankfully the president went with the non-mercenary option. But Prince refuses to disappear, excoriating the generals in a recent op-ed for The New York Times, and pushing again for mercenaries, suggesting “it is not too late to alter the course.”

As a former military contractor, I cannot imagine a worse outcome for Afghanistan or the U.S. than handing everything over to mercenaries…

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It Takes a Village to Raze an Insurgency by Daniel R. Green - Defense One

Over the last few years, the U.S. military’s special operations community has changed the way it approaches counterinsurgency. Along with direct action — think Navy SEALs helicoptering in to find Osama bin Laden or Army Green Berets clearing buildings of insurgents —Special Operations Forces are now much more prone to work with indigenous security forces, empowering them to fight on their own behalf. Instead of security being something done to local populations, it is increasingly something done with them.

This dramatic shift is largely an outgrowth of a rising view within the U.S. military that however effective unilateral U.S. combat operations may be against terrorist and insurgent groups, these “victories” will only be temporary absent a viable local partner who is motivated to fight. But this approach isn’t focused simply on raising local security forces, it also requires confronting an insurgency’s political strategy as well as participating in modest state-building efforts.

This turnabout in SOF strategy took place for many reasons, but a central factor was lessons learned in fighting the Taliban. After years of combat in Afghanistan, Special Operations Forces began to realize that relentless clearing operations were unsustainable; for security to endure, local communities had to be involved and participate in their own defense. Special Operations Forces also discovered that Afghan villagers were motivated by a variety of reasons to join the Taliban insurgency, many of which had nothing to do with the Islamist movement’s religious ideology. Some villagers joined due to tribal and village frictions, others because they were disappointed by the Karzai government, were intimidated into joining, or were simply seeking a steady paycheck. The Taliban itself continued to exist because the Afghan state was either too weak to defend local communities or too overbearing, preying on its own people and alienating many from their government. What was becoming clear to SOF was that the United States and the Afghan government had to confront the Taliban insurgency holistically, addressing its political, tribal, and economic aspects as well as its military wing while undertaking modest efforts to nurture the Afghan state and ensure that it governed justly. In a sense, the United States had to use the Taliban’s structure and strategy against it…

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Mattis Disputes Reports Of Being At Odds With Trump by Robert Burns - Associated Press

Where some see Defense Secretary Jim Mattis distancing himself from President Donald Trump on North Korea and other big issues, Mattis sees “someone’s rather rich imagination” at work creating a conflict where he insists none exists.

“I’ve seen this now for months,” Mattis said, referring to reports that he is at odds with the commander in chief.

In an impromptu exchange with reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday, Mattis was asked about interpretations of comments he made Wednesday after Trump tweeted that talking to North Korea “is not the answer.” Shortly after the tweet, a reporter asked Mattis whether the U.S. was out of diplomatic solutions. He replied, “No, we’re never out of diplomatic solutions.”

Some viewed this as contradicting, or even defying, Trump.

“It was widely misinterpreted,” Mattis said. He said he agreed with Trump that the U.S. should not be talking to North Korea now, after it fired a ballistic missile over Japanese territory, which Mattis called “a reckless, provocative act.” There remain diplomatic avenues to pursue in the interest of avoiding war, including additional economic sanctions, Mattis said…

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