Blackwater Founder Makes Secret Army in UAE

[Shroom Man 777]

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Late one night last November, a plane carrying dozens of Colombian men touched down in this glittering seaside capital. Whisked through customs by an Emirati intelligence officer, the group boarded an unmarked bus and drove roughly 20 miles to a windswept military complex in the desert sand.

The Colombians had entered the United Arab Emirates posing as construction workers. In fact, they were soldiers for a secret American-led mercenary army being built by Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of Blackwater Worldwide, with $529 million from the oil-soaked sheikdom.

Mr. Prince, who resettled here last year after his security business faced mounting legal problems in the United States, was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi to put together an 800-member battalion of foreign troops for the U.A.E., according to former employees on the project, American officials and corporate documents obtained by The New York Times.

The force is intended to conduct special operations missions inside and outside the country, defend oil pipelines and skyscrapers from terrorist attacks and put down internal revolts, the documents show. Such troops could be deployed if the Emirates faced unrest in their crowded labor camps or were challenged by pro-democracy protests like those sweeping the Arab world this year.

The U.A.E.’s rulers, viewing their own military as inadequate, also hope that the troops could blunt the regional aggression of Iran, the country’s biggest foe, the former employees said. The training camp, located on a sprawling Emirati base called Zayed Military City, is hidden behind concrete walls laced with barbed wire. Photographs show rows of identical yellow temporary buildings, used for barracks and mess halls, and a motor pool, which houses Humvees and fuel trucks. The Colombians, along with South African and other foreign troops, are trained by retired American soldiers and veterans of the German and British special operations units and the French Foreign Legion, according to the former employees and American officials.

In outsourcing critical parts of their defense to mercenaries — the soldiers of choice for medieval kings, Italian Renaissance dukes and African dictators — the Emiratis have begun a new era in the boom in wartime contracting that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. And by relying on a force largely created by Americans, they have introduced a volatile element in an already combustible region where the United States is widely viewed with suspicion.

The United Arab Emirates — an autocracy with the sheen of a progressive, modern state — are closely allied with the United States, and American officials indicated that the battalion program had some support in Washington.

“The gulf countries, and the U.A.E. in particular, don’t have a lot of military experience. It would make sense if they looked outside their borders for help,” said one Obama administration official who knew of the operation. “They might want to show that they are not to be messed with.”

Still, it is not clear whether the project has the United States’ official blessing. Legal experts and government officials said some of those involved with the battalion might be breaking federal laws that prohibit American citizens from training foreign troops if they did not secure a license from the State Department.

Mark C. Toner, a spokesman for the department, would not confirm whether Mr. Prince’s company had obtained such a license, but he said the department was investigating to see if the training effort was in violation of American laws. Mr. Toner pointed out that Blackwater (which renamed itself Xe Services ) paid $42 million in fines last year for training foreign troops in Jordan and other countries over the years.

The U.A.E.’s ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba, declined to comment for this article. A spokesman for Mr. Prince also did not comment.

For Mr. Prince, the foreign battalion is a bold attempt at reinvention. He is hoping to build an empire in the desert, far from the trial lawyers, Congressional investigators and Justice Department officials he is convinced worked in league to portray Blackwater as reckless. He sold the company last year, but in April, a federal appeals court reopened the case against four Blackwater guards accused of killing 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007.

More at the webpage.

This is just fantastic. Under all the sheen and shine, is the UAE no different from all the other shitty nations that have gone under in the last few months? Egypt looked oh-so-nice, a US-backed tourist destination, yet the peoples there chafed under the regime of a Friend of America and decided to get him the fuck out. So, outside the lens of American media filters that portray the UAE as such a nice place, economically prosperous and all that shit, what is it like out there and why would they fear the people rising up if they were such good guys?

The invisible hand of the free market is slitting the third world's throat with a bayonet of "freedom".

[Lonestar]

Arab States(well, oil-rich ones) contract out a lot of their defense work anyway. This is just more shooty and notable since it involves Eric Prince and Executive Outcomes vets.

[Shroom Man 777]

Like you said, their own indigenous troops are shit? And we've seen Libya do pretty much the same thing.

Why is it so hard for them to get their own troops up to spec? Also, just how different are the military compositions or whatever of say, Saudi/Emirati Arab monarchy armies and the armies of Iran/Iraq which weren't monarchies? Iran and Iraq are both battle hardened. Whereas those other states aren't, and just get a lot of backing from the US of A.

[Pelranius]

Additionally, they (the UAE government and Mr. Prince) could want to use Dubai as a base to their little army for hire when it's not being rented to the despot of the month in Africa, Asia or the Middle East (in addition to using the battalion to threaten dissidents and migrant workers).

[Marcus Aurelius]

Like you said, their own indigenous troops are shit? And we've seen Libya do pretty much the same thing.

Why is it so hard for them to get their own troops up to spec? Also, just how different are the military compositions or whatever of say, Saudi/Emirati Arab monarchy armies and the armies of Iran/Iraq which weren't monarchies? Iran and Iraq are both battle hardened. Whereas those other states aren't, and just get a lot of backing from the US of A.

I suppose Sea Skimmer can probably elaborate more, but the traditional view by now is that the Arab socio-psychological mind set is pretty badly suited for modern military training and doctrines. Arabs seem to do much better in irregular formations. Of course it is all too easy to trip into the fallacy of cultural explanation, but nobody has been able to provide a better explanation yet.

As for differences of Middle-East monarchies and republics: it is mostly the monarchies that use hired troops. Iraq never had any, and to my knowledge Iran didn't either. Egypt also does not use them. A notable exception to the rule is the Jordanian Kingdom (Jordan), which traditionally has one of the best trained armies in the Arab countries, but on the other hand Jordan is a poor country. Syria likewise is too poor to use hired troops even if they wanted. They are most popular among the Gulf monarchies which have a lot of oil money but not much in the way of modern military tradition. I suppose the rich monarchs see them as a easy way to get a fairly credible military instead of trying to improve their domestic troops (which has proven hard for the cultural or whatever reasons mentioned above). It's also possible that the monarchs consider them more reliable than a well-trained army of indigenous troops would be. Especially in case of the KSA that probably is true.

[[R_H]]

Like you said, their own indigenous troops are shit? And we've seen Libya do pretty much the same thing.

Why is it so hard for them to get their own troops up to spec? Also, just how different are the military compositions or whatever of say, Saudi/Emirati Arab monarchy armies and the armies of Iran/Iraq which weren't monarchies? Iran and Iraq are both battle hardened. Whereas those other states aren't, and just get a lot of backing from the US of A.

There's quite a lengthy article online (don't have the link) about why Arab militaries aren't that great.

One reason, as Sea Skimmer mentioned in the Libya thread is that regimes like Libya, which as we know are common in the Middle East, greatly prefer loyalty over competence. Officers are shitty quality and treat the enlisted like shit, NCOs are shit as well, morale is low etc. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these problems are due to the fact that many of these regimes were Soviet client states.

[K. A. Pital]

I wouldn't be surprised if some of these problems are due to the fact that many of these regimes were Soviet client states.

More like Soviet arms-buyers. If they were a PROPER Soviet satellite (see: Warsaw Pact) we would teach their armies to fight more or less the same as we'd teach our own one. However, that would require them being proper satellite states, fully loyal to our orders. We tried to teach some of the Arabs how to... well, how to work with equipment, how to use it properly, some basics of mechanized operations. Can't tell you much, this stuff's still classified here (a relative of mine and an acquaintance from Moscow told me a few tales how they tried to do exactly that, but I can't pass those around). It just didn't work...

We didn't care much, too - after all, PROPER Soviet satellites would be facing either Americans, NATO nations or armies trained by them (like, ARVN), whereas Africans and Middle East nations at the time were likely to face inferior armies of their neighbors more than those of any advanced country.

[Lonestar]

Like you said, their own indigenous troops are shit? And we've seen Libya do pretty much the same thing.

Why is it so hard for them to get their own troops up to spec? Also, just how different are the military compositions or whatever of say, Saudi/Emirati Arab monarchy armies and the armies of Iran/Iraq which weren't monarchies? Iran and Iraq are both battle hardened. Whereas those other states aren't, and just get a lot of backing from the US of A.

The Gulf States are a bunch of jerkoffs that have immense difficulty performing basic maintenance on their own equipment. If you freakin' contract out rifle cleaning to foreigners how squared away do you think the actual shooters are going to be? There are a couple of stories I could tell about the Bahraini Navy, but I won't(well, not on the internets).

Mind, Iraq was always somewhat better at the less glamorous stuff than the other Gulf States. They would be the outlier.

More like Soviet arms-buyers. If they were a PROPER Soviet satellite (see: Warsaw Pact) we would teach their armies to fight more or less the same as we'd teach our own one. However, that would require them being proper satellite states, fully loyal to our orders. We tried to teach some of the Arabs how to... well, how to work with equipment, how to use it properly, some basics of mechanized operations. Can't tell you much, this stuff's still classified here (a relative of mine and an acquaintance from Moscow told me a few tales how they tried to do exactly that, but I can't pass those around). It just didn't work...

We didn't care much, too - after all, PROPER Soviet satellites would be facing either Americans, NATO nations or armies trained by them (like, ARVN), whereas Africans and Middle East nations at the time were likely to face inferior armies of their neighbors more than those of any advanced country.

You guys tried your damndest to teach themselves really basic stuff, and they still screwed up. I recall in Arabs at War when the Israelis bombed Egyptian airfields the Soviet advisors at the airfields told the pilots "You need to get the surviving aircraft in the air and move them further West if you don't plan to fight with them", and the Egyptians were so bereft of initiative that they sat around waiting for explicit orders to move the aircraft from the General Staff, only to see the soviet-supplied aircraft 'sploded on the ground when the second wave of Isareli aircraft showed up.

[Simon_Jester]

Like you said, their own indigenous troops are shit? And we've seen Libya do pretty much the same thing.

Why is it so hard for them to get their own troops up to spec? Also, just how different are the military compositions or whatever of say, Saudi/Emirati Arab monarchy armies and the armies of Iran/Iraq which weren't monarchies? Iran and Iraq are both battle hardened. Whereas those other states aren't, and just get a lot of backing from the US of A.

There's quite a lengthy article online (don't have the link) about why Arab militaries aren't that great.

One such article here:

http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars

To sum up, bearing in mind that none of the following conclusions are 100% ironclad, but a number of them are possible factors in the difficulty Arab nations have assembling strong, effective armies. Still, take them with a grain of salt:

1) Information as Power
The tendency to hoard specialist knowledge as a way of maintaining one's prestige and importance in a unit hurts the unit. This can inhibit an Arab military from passing out training manuals and making sure troops are cross-trained on each other's equipment, which weakens the unit: say, the tank gunner is the only guy in the tank who knows how to aim the gun, because everyone in a company of a dozen tanks all has to get their lessons from the company commander. If a tank's gunner is injured, sick, or freezes up in combat, no one else in the tank can do his job because there's no cross-training. It can also work the other way round, with senior officers having little or no technical experience, which makes them less efficient at understanding what their troops are doing.

2) Educational System
A lot of schooling in the Muslim world concentrates on memorization, which can come at the expense of innovation. Likewise, students (and people in general) are discouraged from competing with one another directly, because this is seen as trying to pick fights by showing one another up and creating rivalry- when one person visibly outperforms another, the loser is seen as being humiliated and losing face. The same happens when someone visibly fails a challenge: if I ask you a question you can't answer, I am seen as having humiliated you, rather than as having attempted to test your knowledge the way I might test the strength of a piece of wood.

That too can have adverse effects on the ability of trainee officers to learn lessons in an instructional setting.

Officer Corps
Junior officers are well trained with military hardware (since they're drawn from the educated class of their society, they often have to do a lot of the job of managing the equipment themselves), but not so well trained in the leadership skills that Western armies put a lot of energy into training. Thus, they may be good at maintaining hardware, but not so good at keeping morale up, taking the initiative, or coming up with local innovations to solve specific problems without orders from on high.

At the same time, soldiers are regarded as being low-class, inferior beings compared to officers, which makes morale even worse and often leads officers to neglect the problems of their men until those problems get bad enough to hurt the unit's fighting quality.

[I speculate that this may be in part a holdover from colonial times, when it was common for the military of places like Egypt and Syria to contain large numbers of native troops commanded by white officers who really did think of themselves as a privileged superior race. Then again, it may also come from lots of other things.]

Soldiers are conscripts, and because of the bad treatment conscripts receive, morale is typically low. Moreover, noncommissioned officers in the Middle East have trouble filling the gap- they're just another type of lowly troopers, not a bridge between soldiers and officers like they are in Western militaries. At the same time, the officers (who have so much of the technical knowledge, see above) have trouble teaching soldiers because they don't want to get their hands dirty.

This further contributes to poor training, and causes soldiers to distrust their officers, which tremendously weakens unit cohesion during battle.

Decision-Making Processes
The decision-making structure tends to be very top-down; conformism is a powerful force in the military and there is a strong emphasis on personal and political loyalty and reliability. Innovators and independent thinkers are suspicious characters, while sitting on your hands waiting for orders from above is rarely punished- because no one worries about someone who sits on their hands staging a coup.

Thus, it is difficult for junior officers in Arab militaries to make any decision on their own, which creates crises during battle- when a small unit may be cut off and destroyed before it can receive orders to retreat, for instance- and during peacetime- when decisions that 'should' be made by sergeants, lieutenants, and captains about how to organize simple things are instead being made by colonels and generals, which wastes the senior officers' time on minutiae while having a paralyzing effect on the juniors' ability to act in a crisis.

Reluctance to Admit Mistakes
Pursuant to the above, no one wants to be seen as a complainer any more than they want to be seen as a prima donna. That hurts military performance because it makes it harder for units to say things like "yo, we need the tools to maintain our trucks, you've got them all at the division headquarters and we need them down here at the battalion headquarters." Which means that the battalions in question wind up with a lot of broken trucks. Repeat this across the entire army and you get a military full of inadequately maintained equipment- see Lonestar's point.

Likewise this makes it hard to assign responsibility and figure out what went wrong after the fact- you get generals too busy playing blame games to learn from a mistake.

Mutual Distrust
In a region with a long history of warlords and elites who gain power at each other's expense through trickery, stretching back to ancient clan warfare, divisions within the military along ethnic or unit lines can make it hard to coordinate. To attack a fortified position you may need one platoon to rush the position while the other lays down covering fire... but that won't work if the first platoon doesn't trust the second to provide the covering fire. This makes it hard to motivate the troops to take risks. Likewise, you get breakdowns in coordination between infantry, artillery, armor, air support, and so on- same problem. Coordination between different units, or armies of different nations, is likewise difficult for reasons of trust: in a political environment where everyone always watches their back, no one is dealing with the problem in front of them as effectively as they might.

Class Stratification
This is a problem between officers and men, but it's also a problem between the rulers and the common soldiers of the army. When the regime is willing to write off large numbers of troops for political advantage, it has bad effects on the fighting strength of the army- both because the soldiers know this and are demoralized, and because political leaders will often make bad decisions for temporary advantage, such as keeping information about war plans secret from the men expected to fight the war too long.
_______________

It is also alleged that Soviet trainers made some of these problems worse- because these problems existed to some extent in the Red Army, such as the massive gap of prestige and education between officers and men.

[Sea Skimmer]

I suppose Sea Skimmer can probably elaborate more, but the traditional view by now is that the Arab socio-psychological mind set is pretty badly suited for modern military training and doctrines. Arabs seem to do much better in irregular formations. Of course it is all too easy to trip into the fallacy of cultural explanation, but nobody has been able to provide a better explanation yet.

In the oil states it does start out as being partly cultural, but to a large degree it is the specific governments at work in ways which I think it is hardly fair to say are just 'culture'. As deliberate policy they import foreign workers for all the menial jobs and emphasis that only high level jobs should be for local people; they are now trying to reverse this now that they have more people and less spare money, but it has to a point become part of that culture. Since being an enlisted solider IS in the end a menial job, low and behold no one wants the job, and those who do get it don’t feel like doing a good job about it. Meanwhile anyone who wants to be a decent officer will usually go for a navy or air force job over the army because it’s more glamorous and gives more independence. Also no one wants to command those menial crap soldiers anyway. Then political cronyism and the desire for loyalty and connections over talent will then undermine even this, the Saudi Air Force being the prime example. Knowing that the west will come and help if the shit really hits the fan doesn't help.

All the Arab oil states have had mercenary forces for regime protection, and simply to have someone competent around, for decades; and most of them also have internally divided military forces, with for example the Saudi National Guard being more or less totally independent of the regular Saudi Army and rather more competent by all accounts and actual combat. Most of them are also highly dependent on contractors for logistical and maintenance support, but frankly at this point the western armies are doing the same thing and ever higher tech weapons simply don’t favor training uniformed men to do everything anymore. The smaller the military the more this is an issue.

When the Arabs are forced into a situation in which they have a pressing need to win; like Iraq fighting off Iran in the later stages of the war, they do tend to find a way to be a little more competent or at least adapt tactics that play to the strengths they do have. But most Arab militarily history since 1947 has basically been wars that should have never happened; so not inspiring for moral, and without moral even the best trained men are worthless.

Iraq BTW may have used foreign pilots mainly from Pakistan in the Iran-Iraq war; its fairly damn likely they did so at some points, and rumors exist that this included French pilots to fly the first Exocet armed anti shipping missions after France actually loaned Iraq planes of a type it never otherwise used....

[K. A. Pital]

You guys tried your damndest to teach themselves really basic stuff, and they still screwed up. I recall in Arabs at War when the Israelis bombed Egyptian airfields the Soviet advisors at the airfields told the pilots "You need to get the surviving aircraft in the air and move them further West if you don't plan to fight with them", and the Egyptians were so bereft of initiative that they sat around waiting for explicit orders to move the aircraft from the General Staff, only to see the soviet-supplied aircraft 'sploded on the ground when the second wave of Isareli aircraft showed up.

Yup. Fun tales. In this the Egyptians were hardly much different from Ethiopians. The latter didn't even dig trenches unless there was a Soviet officer standing above them. You could order them to dig a trench from here to there, and in the morning you'd come to check - well, the trench wouldn't be there. The guy just made a 1x1 meter pit for himself... and that was is.

[Sarevok]

Were the Ethiopian soldiers just lazy or did they not understand the survival value of a trench ?

[[R_H]]

Interesting excerpts from the article:

To help fulfill his ambitions, Mr. Prince’s new company, Reflex Responses, obtained another multimillion-dollar contract to protect a string of planned nuclear power plants and to provide cybersecurity. He hopes to earn billions more, the former employees said, by assembling additional battalions of Latin American troops for the Emiratis and opening a giant complex where his company can train troops for other governments.
Knowing that his ventures are magnets for controversy, Mr. Prince has masked his involvement with the mercenary battalion. His name is not included on contracts and most other corporate documents, and company insiders have at times tried to hide his identity by referring to him by the code name “Kingfish.”

The former employees said that in recruiting the Colombians and others from halfway around the world, Mr. Prince’s subordinates were following his strict rule: hire no Muslims. Muslim soldiers, Mr. Prince warned, could not be counted on to kill fellow Muslims.

The company, often called R2, was licensed last March with 51 percent local ownership, a typical arrangement in the Emirates. It received about $21 million in start-up capital from the U.A.E., the former employees said.
Mr. Prince made the deal with Sheik Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. The two men had known each other for several years, and it was the prince’s idea to build a foreign commando force for his country.

“He sees the logic of war dominating the region, and this thinking explains his near-obsessive efforts to build up his armed forces,” said a November 2009 cable from the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi that was obtained by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.

He and Mr. Prince also began looking for soldiers. They lined up Thor Global Enterprises, a company on the Caribbean island of Tortola specializing in “placing foreign servicemen in private security positions overseas,” according to a contract signed last May. The recruits would be paid about $150 a day.
Within months, large tracts of desert were bulldozed and barracks constructed. The Emirates were to provide weapons and equipment for the mercenary force, supplying everything from M-16 rifles to mortars, Leatherman knives to Land Rovers. They agreed to buy parachutes, motorcycles, rucksacks — and 24,000 pairs of socks.
To keep a low profile, Mr. Prince rarely visited the camp or a cluster of luxury villas near the Abu Dhabi airport, where R2 executives and Emirati military officers fine-tune the training schedules and arrange weapons deliveries for the battalion, former employees said. He would show up, they said, in an office suite at the DAS Tower — a skyscraper just steps from Abu Dhabi’s Corniche beach, where sunbathers lounge as cigarette boats and water scooters whiz by. Staff members there manage a number of companies that the former employees say are carrying out secret work for the Emirati government.

Corporate documents describe the battalion’s possible tasks: intelligence gathering, urban combat, the securing of nuclear and radioactive materials, humanitarian missions and special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment.”
One document describes “crowd-control operations” where the crowd “is not armed with firearms but does pose a risk using improvised weapons (clubs and stones).”
People involved in the project and American officials said that the Emiratis were interested in deploying the battalion to respond to terrorist attacks and put down uprisings inside the country’s sprawling labor camps, which house the Pakistanis, Filipinos and other foreigners who make up the bulk of the country’s work force. The foreign military force was planned months before the so-called Arab Spring revolts that many experts believe are unlikely to spread to the U.A.E. Iran was a particular concern.

Although there was no expectation that the mercenary troops would be used for a stealth attack on Iran, Emirati officials talked of using them for a possible maritime and air assault to reclaim a chain of islands, mostly uninhabited, in the Persian Gulf that are the subject of a dispute between Iran and the U.A.E., the former employees said. Iran has sent military forces to at least one of the islands, Abu Musa, and Emirati officials have long been eager to retake the islands and tap their potential oil reserves.
The Emirates have a small military that includes army, air force and naval units as well as a small special operations contingent, which served in Afghanistan, but over all, their forces are considered inexperienced.

The contract includes a one-paragraph legal and ethics policy noting that R2 should institute accountability and disciplinary procedures. “The overall goal,” the contract states, “is to ensure that the team members supporting this effort continuously cast the program in a professional and moral light that will hold up to a level of media scrutiny.”

But former employees said that R2’s leaders never directly grappled with some fundamental questions about the operation. International laws governing private armies and mercenaries are murky, but would the Americans overseeing the training of a foreign army on foreign soil be breaking United States law?
Susan Kovarovics, an international trade lawyer who advises companies about export controls, said that because Reflex Responses was an Emirati company it might not need State Department authorization for its activities.
But she said that any Americans working on the project might run legal risks if they did not get government approval to participate in training the foreign troops.
Basic operational issues, too, were not addressed, the former employees said. What were the battalion’s rules of engagement? What if civilians were killed during an operation? And could a Latin American commando force deployed in the Middle East really be kept a secret?

“We were practically an army for the Emirates,” Mr. Rincón, now back in Bogotá, Colombia, said in an interview. “They wanted people who had a lot of experience in countries with conflicts, like Colombia.”

He soon found himself in the midst of the camp’s daily routines, which mirrored those of American military training. “We would get up at 5 a.m. and we would start physical exercises,” Mr. Rincón said. His assignment included manual labor at the expanding complex, he said. Other former employees said the troops — outfitted in Emirati military uniforms — were split into companies to work on basic infantry maneuvers, learn navigation skills and practice sniper training.
R2 spends roughly $9 million per month maintaining the battalion, which includes expenditures for employee salaries, ammunition and wages for dozens of domestic workers who cook meals, wash clothes and clean the camp, a former employee said. Mr. Rincón said that he and his companions never wanted for anything, and that their American leaders even arranged to have a chef travel from Colombia to make traditional soups.
But the secrecy of the project has sometimes created a prisonlike environment. “We didn’t have permission to even look through the door,” Mr. Rincón said. “We were only allowed outside for our morning jog, and all we could see was sand everywhere.”

The Emirates wanted the troops to be ready to deploy just weeks after stepping off the plane, but it quickly became clear that the Colombians’ military skills fell far below expectations. “Some of these kids couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn,” said a former employee. Other recruits admitted to never having fired a weapon.
As a result, the veteran American and foreign commandos training the battalion have had to rethink their roles. They had planned to act only as “advisers” during missions — meaning they would not fire weapons — but over time, they realized that they would have to fight side by side with their troops, former officials said.
Making matters worse, the recruitment pipeline began drying up. Former employees said that Thor struggled to sign up, and keep, enough men on the ground.

And R2’s own corporate leadership has also been in flux. Mr. Chambers, who helped develop the project, left after several months. A handful of other top executives, some of them former Blackwater employees, have been hired, then fired within weeks.

To bolster the force, R2 recruited a platoon of South African mercenaries, including some veterans of Executive Outcomes, a South African company notorious for staging coup attempts or suppressing rebellions against African strongmen in the 1990s. The platoon was to function as a quick-reaction force, American officials and former employees said, and began training for a practice mission: a terrorist attack on the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, the world’s tallest building. They would secure the situation before quietly handing over control to Emirati troops.
But by last November, the battalion was officially behind schedule. The original goal was for the 800-man force to be ready by March 31; recently, former employees said, the battalion’s size was reduced to about 580 men.
Emirati military officials had promised that if this first battalion was a success, they would pay for an entire brigade of several thousand men. The new contracts would be worth billions, and would help with Mr. Prince’s next big project: a desert training complex for foreign troops patterned after Blackwater’s compound in Moyock, N.C. But before moving ahead, U.A.E. military officials have insisted that the battalion prove itself in a “real world mission.”

[Sarevok]

*Sigh*

I am becoming convinced we live in a technothriller world. A badly written technothriller by a author with no imagination or flair for occasional exciting scenes.

[Chirios]

...

Is this guy really trying to build up a mercenary army in the Middle East? Really? MGS4 was a video game, you aren't supposed to take your business model from Liquid Snake.

[Simon_Jester]

You guys tried your damndest to teach themselves really basic stuff, and they still screwed up. I recall in Arabs at War when the Israelis bombed Egyptian airfields the Soviet advisors at the airfields told the pilots "You need to get the surviving aircraft in the air and move them further West if you don't plan to fight with them", and the Egyptians were so bereft of initiative that they sat around waiting for explicit orders to move the aircraft from the General Staff, only to see the soviet-supplied aircraft 'sploded on the ground when the second wave of Isareli aircraft showed up.

Yup. Fun tales. In this the Egyptians were hardly much different from Ethiopians. The latter didn't even dig trenches unless there was a Soviet officer standing above them. You could order them to dig a trench from here to there, and in the morning you'd come to check - well, the trench wouldn't be there. The guy just made a 1x1 meter pit for himself... and that was is.

Were the Ethiopian soldiers just lazy or did they not understand the survival value of a trench ?

My guess:

Start with the fact that nobody without combat experience really understands the survival value of a trench on the bone-deep level. I know I don't.

What makes soldiers entrench rigorously, instinctively, is long training on the principle of "sweat saves blood." This concept does not seem to have made it into the collective consciousness of most Middle Eastern militaries. And without it, training to dig trenches in peacetime isn't going to work well: soldiers will dig, and dig, and eventually go "screw this, I'm literally digging a hole in the ground for nothing, it's not like somebody's going to drop bombs on my head right now..." and plunks down in the little hole he's dug himself.

Digging the entire trench is hard work, and men don't enjoy doing it. In successful armies they are trained to do it so that they will do it automatically in a combat zone, to the point where every time the sergeant says "dig foxholes," they know what he means and obey. In a military where training exercises are fewer, where those sergeants and lieutenants have less initiative, and where the only remotely prestigious and socially-approved part of a soldier's job is fighting, not digging holes like a bloody mole... it's just not going to happen as often.

[Sidewinder]

Digging the entire trench is hard work, and men don't enjoy doing it. In successful armies they are trained to do it so that they will do it automatically in a combat zone, to the point where every time the sergeant says "dig foxholes," they know what he means and obey. In a military where training exercises are fewer, where those sergeants and lieutenants have less initiative, and where the only remotely prestigious and socially-approved part of a soldier's job is fighting, not digging holes like a bloody mole... it's just not going to happen as often.

Speaking from personal experience, in all four years I spent in the Army, I dug maybe half a trench in a single field exercise, before it was canceled because we dug up a grenade (dummy? dud?), and EOD was called to clear the area.

[Simon_Jester]

Er, does this include foxholes and other small-scale entrenchments?

[Sidewinder]

The invisible hand of the free market is slitting the third world's throat with a bayonet of "freedom".

More like the Third World sees throat-slitting daggers in the free market's hand, and is committing seppuku to avoid the dishonor of losing to the free market. The website Simon_Jester linked to, also has an interesting article on Arab culture.

Sinister West

Perhaps the section of this book most relevant to today's political and social environment is the chapter on the psychology of Westernization. After centuries of certitude that their civilization was superior—a belief evolving from the very poor impression the European crusaders made on the Arabs and fully justified by the reality—the Arab self-image was rudely shattered by the easy French conquest of Egypt in 1798. A declining Middle East had been far surpassed by a revitalized Europe. The initial shock among the Arab elite was followed by a period of limited emulation, at least in the form of Western political and social values.

As the Western political hold on the Arabs receded, Western cultural influence increased, which in many ways was even more irritating to the Arab elite—particularly in terms of the technology invasion that at every level was a daily reminder of the inability of the Middle East to compete. [Author of The Arab Mind] Patai's assessment of the Arab view of technology has been amply supported over the last decades. Clearly enthusiastic users of technology, particularly in war weaponry, the Arabs nevertheless remain a lagging producer of technology. Partially, as Patai demonstrates, this is a reaction to the "jinn" (devil) of Western culture as it appears to the Arab of the twenty-first century. While recognizing the superiority of Western technology, the traditional Arab sees Western culture as destructive to his way of life; hence the ever-present battle between modernity and modernism: Can a society modernize without the secular lifestyle that appears to accompany the process? Adherents of the Islamist ideology, espousing a politicized, radical Islam, see no contradiction between a seventh-century theocracy and twenty-first century technology and would answer yes; however, history does not support such a view in the Middle Eastern context. As a Muslim coworker put it, "We want your TV sets but not your programs, your VCRs but not your movies." This will be the battleground of every Arab nation for the coming generation.

In his section on the "sinister West," Patai gets to the heart of the burning hatred that seems to drive brutal acts of terrorism against Americans. Despite its lack of a colonial past in the Middle East, America, as the most powerful representative of the "West," has inherited primary enemy status, in place of the French and British. Patai points out the Arabs' tendency to blame others for the problems evident in their political systems, quality of life, and economic power. The Arab media and Arab intellectuals, invoking the staple mantras against colonialism, Zionism, and imperialism, provide convenient outside culprits for every corrupt or dysfunctional system or event in the Arab world. Moreover, this is often magnified and supported by a number of the newer generation of Western scholars inculcated with Marxist teaching who, unwittingly perhaps, help Arab intellectuals to avoid ever having to come to grips with the very real domestic issues that must be confronted. The Arab world combines a rejection of Western values with a penchant for carrying around historical baggage of doubtful utility. At the same time, there is a simplistic, if understandable, yearning for return to a more glorious and pristine past that would enable the Arabs once again to confront the West on equal terms. This particular belief has found many Arab adherents in the past decade.

Patai also delves into the extremely sensitive issue of the nature of Islam in a particularly prescient manner. He views the fatalistic element inherit in Islam as an important factor in providing great strength to Muslims in times of stress or tragedy; in normal or better times, however, it acts as an impediment. Given their pervasive belief that God provides and disposes of all human activity, Muslims tend to reject the Western concept of man creating his own environment as an intrusion on God's realm. This includes any attempt to change God's plan for the fate of the individual. Certainly one can point to numerous exceptions. But, having worked for long periods with Arab military units, I can attest to their often cavalier attitude toward safety precautions, perhaps reflecting a Qur'anic saying, heard in various forms, that "death will overtake you even if you be inside a fortress." Just observing how few Arabs use seat belts in their automobiles can be a revelation. This manifestation of Arab fatalism is often misconstrued as a lesser value put on human life.

In the all-important area of Muslim relations with other religions, Patai sums up the differences between Christianity and Islam as being functional, not doctrinal. The proponents of fundamentalist Islam do not fear Christianity. They fear that Westernization will "bring about a reduction of the function of Islam to the modest level on which Christianity plays its role in the Western world." The quarrel is not so much with Christianity—which most Muslims see as a weak religion of diminishing importance—as with the secularism that has replaced it. Frequently in the Arab world one hears references to the [singer] "Madonna" culture and its manifestations of drugs and sexual promiscuity. Today, while Western military power has become much less of a threat, the inroads made by Western cultural values have become more of one.

My special area of interest has been the impact of culture on military structure, strategy, and operations,[10] and in this regard the assessments of Patai, although not aimed at this area, are particularly informative. As he wrote, "despite the adoption of Western weaponry, military methods, and war aims, both the leaders and the people have kept alive old Arab traditions." The observations and studies of military specialists continue to support his conclusion. The Arab military establishment's ineffectiveness in the past century has never been a matter of lack of courage or intelligence. Rather, it has been a consequence of a pervasive cultural and political environment that stifles the development of initiative, independent thinking, and innovation. This has been commented on by a number of Middle East specialists, both Arab and non-Arab, but none explains it as well as Patai, who suggests that Arabs conform not to an individualistic, inner-directed standard but rather to a standard established and maintained rigidly within Arab society. As I noticed among the officers with whom I worked, there was a real reluctance to "get out front." The distrust of the military's loyalty to the regime reinforces a military system in which a young, charismatic officer with innovative ideas will be identified as a future threat to be carefully monitored by the ubiquitous security agencies.

Emphasis mine. In short, the UAE government doesn't trust the troops raised from its own soil, and thinks mercenaries will serve more loyally.

[Sidewinder]

Er, does this include foxholes and other small-scale entrenchments?

I received a classroom lesson on how to dig a foxhole, but not on Great War-style trenches. I wasn't actually asked to dig a foxhole- the drill sergeants understandably didn't want to spend hours supervising us as we dug a hole.

[Decue]

Er, does this include foxholes and other small-scale entrenchments?

I received a classroom lesson on how to dig a foxhole, but not on Great War-style trenches. I wasn't actually asked to dig a foxhole- the drill sergeants understandably didn't want to spend hours supervising us as we dug a hole.

Why not? I did so when I did my military service. It did only take a few hours and there is a few think about (probably the things you learned about in the classroom though). But then I am the kind of a guy that think is fun to dig a hole.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm afraid I'm out of the depth of my knowledge here; I hope the board's veterans will weigh in on this to a greater extent.

I would hope that my take on why Egyptian/Ethiopian soldiers didn't dig trenches except when Soviet instructors were standing over them watching them is accurate, but I don't know as much as I thought I did about the level of training for entrenchment in Western militaries.

[Sidewinder]

The lack of emphasis may be due to the fact I was trained as a helicopter mechanic, NOT as a frontline infantryman. Anyone who served as an infantryman, care to elaborate?

[Simon_Jester]

The lack of emphasis may be due to the fact I was trained as a helicopter mechanic, NOT as a frontline infantryman...

Ah-ha. I was wondering about that- forgot to ask, though.

[Serafina]

My main source of information is a friend in the german airforce. However, because he is not trained as a pilot, he received some training in ground defenses - a remnant of the cold war where the possibility of airbases getting under ground attack was quite real.
Either way, most of his training about digging trenches was theoretical. The digging itself is not that complicted and doesn't need to be trained, the emphasis is apparently placed on "when to do it and how to dig the right trench for the right situation", which was mostly done in the classroom rather than in the field.

Ironically the german army is, according to him, placing more emphasis on digging foxholes rather than trenches, because the latter are mostly outdated in mechanized warfare - which the army is, but the airfield defense troops of the airforce aren't.

But that's second- and third-hand information, so i don't even rely on it myself.