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Comment by DavidPeiffer | Hacker News Reader

I had an industrial engineering professor who did a full career in the military, focused on energy efficiently.

Paraphrasing, "The great thing about the US Government is it's so big, if the optimal solution would save 30%, but you find a suboptimal solution that only saves 29%, nobody will notice because you're still saving tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of savings."

One of his big projects was on energy efficiently in remote military camps. The cost of fuel per gallon was around $100 delivered to parts of Afghanistan. They had tons of portable generators running at ~20-40% of capacity. If memory serves, ~70% is most efficient. By some combination of building a small or connecting a few tents to a single generator, they were able to very significantly reduce the fuel required and improve the quality of service.

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> The cost of fuel per gallon was around $100 delivered to parts of Afghanistan

This was one of the most deeply insane parts of the whole twenty-year war. Of course, wars have unlimited budgets, so trucking gasoline thousands of miles through hostile territory with occasional losses and then using it to aircondition tents was going to happen. While back inside the US teachers were having to buy school supplies with their own money, because only wars have unlimited budgets.

Also using Blackwater mercenaries so they could just brush any of their deaths under the rug as they typically didn't use Americans for dangerous and unprotected jobs.

How much did Blackwater do? Did they actually fight or just guard?

AFAIK Blackwater was mostly for guard duty, but I'm sure in practice it wasn't just for that. There's also a lot of smaller orgs out there that do "guard duty", not just american (for example britain is also active).

Also there was a point when Blackwater boasted that they could deploy a light brigade (~3k troops) anywhere in the world, people in the Pentagon figured it out and very quickly killed that org. Compare with Prigozhin and his adventures, just for reference he had more than 10k soldiers under his command, on heavy equipment (arty, tanks, ifvs), permission to illegally recruit from prisons, he even had air defence like Pantsirs, the motherfuckers even tried to get nuclear backpacks (man-portable nuclear bombs) from a storage site near Voronezh.

I think those entities are being tolerated and even welcome, as long as they don't exceed some potentially threatening size.

> Also there was a point when Blackwater boasted that they could deploy a brigade (~3k troops) anywhere in the world, people in the Pentagon figured it out and very quickly killed that org.

That... didn't happen.

Blackwater went through several reorgs, rebranding, and acquisitions, initially starting with at least superficially deemphasizing security in favor of other functions because of “business risk” just after the Nisour Massacre, but (as Constellis Holdings) is still doing the things it did before, notably as part of the Saudi intervention in Yemen.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080615215345/http://hamptonroa...

But largely you're right, the story is more complicated. I originally heard it in a non-English interview with some Colonel (OF-5, the rank just below General of brigade).

Personally I am very much against the idea of a democratic nation allowing a private company have a combat strength of an infantry brigade. Definitely too much. (And of course such structures, if they exist, must be penetrated by intelligence, though this is not something you can legislate or even admit).

Right, I wasn't disagreeing that they said that they can supply forces (and that article is a year before Blackwater forces were involved in the Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq), just that the Pentagon didn't shut them down in response to them saying it, though the relationship wuth the government was complicated by what troops they supplied did not long after that.

Yup, mostly guarding important people and locations. Though they had itchy trigger fingers and shot up a lot of civilians and cars, and a massacre or two. Eric Prince also wanted them to be a mercenary army for hire. He fooled some Swiss engineers to adapt a small airplane so it could be armed with missiles and tried to sell that as a service (believe it was confiscated on the way somewhere in Africa to be used against insurgents or something).

Also pitched a plan to the pentagon about privatizing their presence in Afghanistan and extracting their natural resources to pay for it. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/09/05/... (didn't vet this source)

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