‘Civilian Warriors: Blackwater and the War on Terror’ by Erik Prince --- At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. military included 1.4 million active personnel and nearly 1 million more in the reserves — plus hundreds of thousands of civilians at the Pentagon and civilian agencies across the national security complex. It was a smaller force than the one that had fought the first Gulf War a decade earlier, but still enough, in pre-9/11 Pentagon war plans, to fight two simultaneous regional wars. -- However, for the eventual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this force was not enough. And so our government faced choiceS: raise a larger army, call up more reservists, hire more civilians or rely on contractors. At some point, the government exercised all these options. But for the first time in U.S. history, it chose to rely so heavily on contractors that, at the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, contractor personnel outnumbered troops in each theater of war. - More, Phillip Carter, Washingtonpost, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/civilian-warriors-the-inside-story-of-blackwater-by-erik-prince/2013/12/27/974a84bc-6655-11e3-a0b9-249bbb34602c_story.html