Thoughts on Thursday

This Vanity Fair article on Erik Prince is very interesting. Despite being one scary as hell dude, I always thought Erik Prince was interesting because he owned a company of iconic status in history. Who knew that Erik Prince himself was iconic and the real deal Hollywood action hero for the US government? It really is too bad he has become yet another covert American agent exposed, because anytime any American covert agent is exposed in public it does not do any favors to the American people. I imagine his global access and reputation made him very useful to the CIA, but I also think that he was intentionally exposed for reasons that go well beyond party politics.

With a hat tip to Joshua Foust for informing via Twitter, this TPMMuckraker article is informative, but irrelevant and perhaps a bit stupid. The writer of that article is too blinded by politics to make a good point with his useful information, because when Justin Elliott starts complaining that the government is paying $5 billion for 104,100 contractors in Afghanistan, all he does is reveal how he has never undertaken any business venture or enterprise beyond his own opinion in his entire life. Work doesn't get done without people Justin, you should try undertaking a task bigger than the Christmas party at your local newspaper before complaining how work gets done in the real world.

He has done good research though, and has useful information in that article. According to his data, the average cost of a contractor in Afghanistan, according to my math, is somewhere around $48,000 if $5 billion annually is spent on contractors. That is really damn good actually.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 was intended to distribute $787 billion to create and save 1.6 million jobs. Do the math, that is $491,875 per job. If we note the Afghanistan war cost as a government jobs program, the Presidents new troop surge plan is the most successful government funded private sector jobs program of the Obama administration to date.

What I don't understand though is why people are worried about ~105,000 contractors in Afghanistan when the entire strategic purpose of the "new plan" is to raise an Army of over a quarter million soldiers in one of the most dangerous parts of the world. When the strategic point of the Presidents War Policy is to raise and fund a brand new Army of over 1/4 million troops in Asia, worrying about the number of contractors on government payroll to support our own Army seems more than a little trivial.