For Monday’s Mash-up, I offer the following for consumption.
From the British media we have:
- ArmorGroup wins a $189 million contract to protect the US Embassy in Kabul. This, in the words of TimesOnline (and probably ArmorGroup itself), “confirms Armor as a leader in diplomat protection.”
- An MP wants to know the Rules of Engagement (RoE) of security contractors in Iraq, as noted in a letter to the editor. Apparently 25% of UK Iraq aid goes to security (why so low? US figures are closer to 33% and up to 50%, are we getting charged too much?, if we give the UK a 5% commission, we’d still save money).
While we’re on the private military industry…
- RYP reports on IraqSlogger that the Iraqi MoI is enjoying some sovereign powers when it comes to issuing weapons permits to contractors, to the likely detriment of PERSEC.
- David Phinney not just opens the kimono on contractor deaths but shines a light inside: they’re now 20% of the total deaths. David is the kimono manager for this sort of thing… 🙂
On the wiki front:
- KurzweilAI.net brings us a BusinessWeek article on transformation of communication through wikis and blogs (it might be knowledge management, but from my experience w/ the ConflictWiki, it is at best knowledge capture and sharing with little real management, but that’s just me).
- CSIS’s PCR Blog also has wiki news, this time on Citizendium. See also Kathryn Cramer’s comments on Wikipedia’s editorial threshold.
On US military readiness and breaking the force (see my posts on Readiness and Recruiting):