Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

This has been going on for years, but now it's news? Here's a blurb from some random 2009 blog post on how this works (more about Iraq, but Vinnell has been training Saudi forces for years, and probably is involved with Yemen as well):

> "The Pentagon has awarded a 48-million-dollar contract to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi army to Vinnell Corporation, a US firm which also trains the Saudi National Guard. The Fairfax, VA-based company, a subsidiary of the US aerospace firm Northrup Grumman, said on its website it was hiring former US army and marine officers to train infantry battalions and combat support units for the new Iraqi army. The Vinnell Corp. of Alexandria, Va., owned by politically connected Northrop-Grumman."

More on that:

https://www.corpwatch.org/article/iraq-vinnells-army-defensi...

It's just so painfully obvious that these kind of articles wouldn't be getting published right now if the US government wasn't angry with Saudi Arabia about crude oil production.

> The Pentagon has awarded a 48-million-dollar contract to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi army to Vinnell Corporation, a US firm which also trains the Saudi National Guard.

Were similar contracts in place for training Afghani Army? Maybe we should get a refund?

I found shocking how western media just declared Afghani army as incapable and closed the chapter. Someone was in charge of this program for 20 years. Someone had oversight of billions spend. Were western contractor facilitating corruption? Was this a shocking failure of western management?

The results are worse than Russian army procurement where millions of uniforms just go missing!

Nobody wants to talk about training the Afghans for 20 years and having them decide to be citizens or Taliban the moment we left.

Training went well, but why would they bother once we're gone?

have youread nothing about the fact that government was paying salaries of soldiers that did not actually exist, and in fact their commanders were pocketing it.

This whole 'afghans decided not to fight' is really convenient. Like blaming a plane crash on pilot error - nothing to investigate, no defects to correct, the only one at fault is already dead.

> It's just so painfully obvious that these kind of articles wouldn't be getting published right now if the US government wasn't angry with Saudi Arabia about crude oil production.

It seems to me that the timing is the point and it is more relevant now that the relationship has become more adversarial. No one would've been paying as much attention in 2009 and rightfully so since those relationships wouldn't have as much of a conflict of interest.

And let's not forget that in 2009, MBS had yet to order Jamal Khasoggi to be killed by being cut in half by a bone saw.

Context matters.

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