I just fin­ished an inter­est­ing Podcast with Jake Allen, for­mer PMC con­trac­tor and Marine offi­cer who’s in the pri­vate secu­rity biz and a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to Defense Tech and The Private Military Herald online e-​​zine.

Jake and I had a con­ver­sa­tion about the sto­ries sur­round­ing the CIA con­tracts with Blackwater to form al Qaeda kill/​capture squads and ser­vice lethal drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While Jake never worked for Blackwater, he’s got many col­leagues who have and he’s well enough con­nected within the indus­try to deliver thought­ful insights into the con­tro­versy and some unique per­spec­tives on how the CIA con­tracts and what their capa­bil­i­ties are.

To Jake, the CIA hit team con­tract shouldn’t have been much of a sur­prise to any­one except that it was with Blackwater — a com­pany whose image per­son­i­fies every­thing that was bad about the Iraq war. And on the Predator ser­vic­ing con­tract, Jake said “if it were Raytheon, Lockheed Martin or any of the other big named aero­space con­trac­tors that could have done this kind of work nobody would have bat­ted an eye…”

Agreed…

But Jake wasn’t nec­es­sar­ily defend­ing Blackwater. He did say the com­pany had ben­e­fit­ted from a lack of gov­ern­ment over­sight and that more should be done to keep an eye on how tax­pay­ers’ dol­lars are being spent by PMCs.

Be sure to lis­ten (or down­load) the entire inter­view and be sure to check back next month when the hear­ings kick off on both con­tro­ver­sial programs.

– Christian

Was he dead? Was he still alive?

Do we trust the AP on stuff like this? Or is Roggio more credible?

That’s pre­cisely the back and forth we’ve had today on the story of the Predator strike on Baitullah Mehsud, the vicious com­man­der of the Taliban insur­gency in Pakistan and a key al Qaeda ally.

First, it was the MSM claim­ing he’d been killed in a Predator strike at his father in law’s house.

Then we had Roggio writ­ing that his sources were telling him the leader had not been killed, but that he might have been injured in the hit.

Who to believe?

Well, why not hear it from the horse’s mouth.

I spoke with Bill this morn­ing about the story and his reac­tion to the two ver­sions. Let’s just say he’s glad he’s bat­ting at least a 900 on his report­ing of these com­man­der killed rumors.

– Christian

Good morn­ing folks. Sorry for the delayed post…playing catch up.

I wanted to let you know that I’ll be par­tic­i­pat­ing as a pan­elist on a Live Web chat with Frontline doc­u­men­taries on a new project they’ve launched called “Digital Nation.”

This doc­u­men­tary looks at how dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy has impacted our daily lives, includ­ing how it has changed the way the mil­i­tary does busi­ness. Today I’ll weigh in on that sub­ject with Lt. Gen. Robert Elder, the com­man­der of 8th Air Force, and Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo, direc­tor of USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and cre­ator of the military’s “vir­tual Iraq” PTSD treat­ment program.

I hope you’ll join us today at 11am EDT for the online chat over at Frontline’s Digital Nation project site.

– Christian

Back by pop­u­lar demand, we’ve sched­uled another episode of “Boots on the Ground” (or in the water, this time) to chat with secu­rity con­sul­tant and for­mer PSC oper­a­tor Jake Allen, and our recent con­trib­u­tor addi­tion Joe Buff, who’s a noted fic­tion writer and naval expert, about the recent pirate stand­off and what it means for mar­itime strat­egy, naval plan­ning and secu­rity on the high seas.

You can tune in to the pod­cast and stream it live — and even ask your own ques­tions — or you can down­load it later here on Defense Tech or on iTunes.

Hope you’ll join us!

– Christian

Military​.com Editor Ward Carroll had a great inter­view last Friday with pres­i­dent of the Center for a New American Security and for­mer Army Lt. Col. John Nagl on coun­terin­sur­gency, Iraq mis­takes and a look ahead at Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy.

Here’s an excerpt of an arti­cle I wrote to accom­pany Ward’s pod­cast.

One of the intel­lec­tual god­fa­thers of President Barack Obama’s new Afghanistan strat­egy and a noted expert on coun­terin­sur­gency strat­egy is warn­ing that the White House is dan­ger­ously short chang­ing efforts to cre­ate a viable Afghan army to help defeat a Taliban insurgency.

Though he attended Obamas unveil­ing of the new strat­egy March 27 and applauds the pres­i­dents new, more aggres­sive Afghan push, retired Army Lt. Col. John Nagl says he is wor­ried that the U.S. com­mit­ment to build­ing local forces to secure the coun­try wasnt given enough emphasis.

The long-​​term answer has to be an expanded Afghan national army, and this is the pol­icy I hoped to hear [at the speech] but did not, Nagl said dur­ing a March 31 sem­i­nar spon­sored by the Foreign Policy Initiative think tank in Washington. The Afghan national army is the most respected insti­tu­tion in that coun­try and must be expanded to 250,000 … to pre­vent Taliban re-​​infiltration of the population.

The cur­rent U.S. plan is to build the Afghan army to 135,000 troops.

During his March 27 White House speech, Obama pledged 17,000 more U.S. com­bat troops for Afghanistan this year and an addi­tional 4,000 troops to act as train­ers for Afghan national army units. The pres­i­dent also claimed his admin­is­tra­tion would empha­size civil­ian men­tor­ing for Afghan gov­er­nance and devel­op­ment, using diplo­mats, agri­cul­tural experts and gov­ern­ment legal offi­cials to help rebuild Afghan civil society.

Nagl, now pres­i­dent of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for a New American Security think tank, is the author of Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife thought among most mil­i­tary strate­gists to be the intel­lec­tual impe­tus for the ser­vices cur­rent shift to coun­terin­sur­gency train­ing and strat­egy. The for­mer pres­i­dent of CNAS, Michelle Flournoy, was appointed by Obama to be the Pentagons top pol­icy official.

Nagl called Obamas troop increase and trainer push a down pay­ment on whats needed to defeat a resur­gent Taliban and keep extrem­ists from tak­ing over Afghanistan once more.

Building Afghan secu­rity forces will be a long-​​term effort that will require American assis­tance and advi­sors for many years, Nagl added. But there is sim­ply no viable alternative. 

– Christian

Pentagon chief Robert Gates is con­duct­ing a news con­fer­ence today on the release of the DoD Budget for fis­cal 2010. As we’ve heard for the last sev­eral months, there’s prob­a­bly going to be a bunch of dra­matic cuts in there and it will be inter­est­ing to see what makes it and what doesn’t.

According to DoD Buzz edi­tor Colin Clark, The Hill will get the bad news around noon.

DoD Buzz’s con­tribut­ing edi­tor Greg Grant is going to be live blog­ging Gates’ press con­fer­ence today while it streams on the Pentagon Channel at 1:30pm. Colin will be at the Pentagon to cover the presser for a story later on.

So be sure to tune in to Buzz’s live blog today at 1:30.

– Christian

In this episode, we talk to DT con­trib­u­tor Kevin Coleman who takes on his crit­ics, talks break­ing news on new cyber war­fare orga­ni­za­tions and dis­closes pre­vi­ously unre­ported vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties in com­puter hard­ware that may be impos­si­ble to secure.

– Christian

Sorry for the delay folks, tech­ni­cal issues…

And be sure to check us out on iTunes!

– Christian

We just had a great inter­view with Morgan Till, a pro­ducer with the PBS News Hour show, who’s report­ing from Afghanistan this month on the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion there.

Morgan said there’s a pal­pa­ble ten­sion in the city and that com­man­ders assess the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion as a “stalemate.”

Be sure to lis­ten to the entire inter­view and please excuse the audio prob­lems due to inter­mit­tent satel­lite phone con­nec­tions.

– Christian

A quick hit live pod­cast with The Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio and DoD Buzz con­trib­u­tor Greg Grant on the upcom­ing Taliban surge and the ter­ror­ist attacks in Lahore.

– Christian