Private employees worked on everything from feeding and housing coalition troops to maintaining weapons systems like the B-2 bomber.
The most lucrative business is not "guns on trucks" but logistics and other less glamorous jobs, such as maintaining weapons systems.
Their worry, though, is that Blackwater's troubles will undermine the whole industry in Iraq.The privatisation of military functions, from logistics to maintaining weapons, has reached the point that the Pentagon now regards contractors as an integral part of its "total force".
"These children are receiving military training and participating in combat, or taking up life-threatening roles at the battlefront, including carrying and maintaining weapons, manning checkpoints, and treating and evacuating war wounded," the report said.
Duties might include tracking and analyzing foreign weapons systems and capabilities; coding and maintaining weapon system simulations; C and C++ programming; keeping tabs on foreign threat capabilities against ground, naval, air, and space weapon systems; or maintaining contacts with counterparts elsewhere in the intelligence community and in government and industry.
Maintaining our nuclear stockpile at its current level is expensive, and infrastructure upgrades at our weapons laboratories and storage facilities to maintain these weapons would significantly strain an already bloated defense budget.
Soldiers and scientists wanted to return to their peacetime pursuits, and there was a danger that wartime knowledge would be lost, leaving no one who knew how to handle and maintain nuclear weapons, much less how to improve the weapons and processes.
The Provost, a weapons master, maintained the weapons and arms of the brotherhood, and himself wore a special medallion.
It lacks the funds to maintain the weapons it has, and may itself face similar missile threats from unpredictable states.
