They annually save the taxpayers billions.
That’s a laugh. The military folks I’ve talked to about this look at Blackwater and the other contractors as people who’ve abandoned real military service so they can get triple the pay, doing military-ish jobs, without being constrained by the discipline of proper rules of engagement (thus endangering real military folks who are lumped in, in the minds of Iraqis, with the shoot-first ask-questions-later Blackwater types).
Contractors in Iraq typically cost at least 3x what it would cost to have military personnel do the same job. Of course, we have a shortage of personnel at this point — that could partly be fixed by raising pay, but the root cause of people refusing to re-enlist, or to enlist in the first place, is gross mismanagement from on high; and fixing that will take a while.
