April 2009

The more I read about David Shearer the more I like him. I think he has a great deal to offer New Zealand espe­cially with regard to our mil­i­tary and Police.

Today at lunch we dis­cussed this at length and thought that per­haps the Police could be opened up to con­testable fund­ing based on results. If Pri­vatis­ing Pro­tec­tion is taken to its log­i­cal con­clu­sion then why couldn’t we lever­age this method to bet­ter fund out­comes in Policing?

If a mur­der is con­ducted, for instance, then com­pet­ing polic­ing organ­i­sa­tions could bid to work on the solv­ing of the crime with a large amount of the fee paid only upon suc­cess. Same for action against anti-social crimes in par­tic­u­lar areas and so on sav­ing us money and get­ting bet­ter results at the same time. Arguably we already have this sys­tem in place with secu­rity com­pa­nies but those are funded by indi­vid­u­als and com­pa­nies directly. I think the con­testable fund­ing model could really have merit.

We also got around to dis­cussing how New Zealand could pos­si­bly replace the Air Force Strike Wing capa­bil­ity and then we realised that the solu­tion was actu­ally star­ing us in the face.

Once of the major rea­sons that Helen Clark gave for get­ting rid of the Strike Wing was the ongo­ing costs of main­tain­ing such advanced tech­nolo­gies and upgrad­ing them. With David Shearer’s bril­liant work on out­sourc­ing of mil­i­tary and secu­rity and his right­ful ques­tion­ing of the abil­ity of sov­er­eign nations to ade­quately defend them­selves the solu­tion surely is to sim­ply out­source our air force.

I won­dered if this was pos­si­ble but a quick Google Search soon proved to me that indeed it could be.

In a cav­ernous air­plane hangar in Quincy, Illi­nois, two hours south of Chicago a pos­si­ble solu­tion exists;

A decade ago, only sov­er­eign nations could afford to buy and main­tain sophis­ti­cated, high-performance fight­ers. But Kirlin’s unmarked hangars con­tain an air force more for­mi­da­ble than that of many coun­tries. He has 30 jets in fly­ing con­di­tion, 10 in line for main­te­nance, and dozens more to be deliv­ered. His MiG-29 Ful­crums, designed in the late 1970s to go head-to-head with the hottest US planes, are the only pri­vately owned Ful­crums in the world. Kir­lin breaks into a big smile when­ever he looks at them.

Right so, yes we can have an air­force and with a strike capa­bil­ity far in excess of any­thing we had before. The idea has much merit, so much so that USAID is con­sid­er­ing build­ing its own pri­vate air­force as well, using paid for con­trac­tors to deliver. I did won­der if we could just hire Black­wa­ter.

Turns out we can and they do have exactly what we need;

August 27, 2007: Secu­rity com­pany Black­wa­ter U.S.A. is buy­ing Super Tucano light com­bat air­craft from the Brazil­ian man­u­fac­turer Embraer. These five ton, sin­gle engine, sin­gle seat air­craft are built for pilot train­ing, but also per­form quite well for counter-insurgency work. Brazil. The Super Tucano is basi­cally a prop dri­ven trainer that is equipped for com­bat mis­sions. The air­craft can carry up to 1.5 tons of weapons, includ­ing 12.7mm machine-guns, bombs and mis­siles. The air­craft cruises at about 500 kilo­me­ters an hour and can stay in the air for about 6.5 hours per sor­tie. One of the options is a FLIR (infrared radar that pro­duces a photo real­is­tic video image in any weather) and a fire con­trol sys­tem for bomb­ing. Colom­bia is using the Super Tucanos for counter-insurgency work (there are over 20,000 armed rebels and drug gang gun­men in the coun­try). The air­craft is also used for bor­der patrol. The U.S. Air Force is watch­ing that quite closely. The Super Tucano costs $9 mil­lion each, and come in one or two seat ver­sions. The bub­ble canopy pro­vides excel­lent vis­i­bil­ity. This, cou­pled with its slow speed (ver­sus jets), makes it an excel­lent ground attack aircraft.

Black­wa­ter already has a force of armed heli­copters in Iraq, and appar­ently wants some­thing a lit­tle faster, and more heav­ily armed, to ful­fill its secu­rity con­tracts over­seas. Ini­tially, Black­wa­ter is get­ting one two-seater, for pilot train­ing in the United States.

Bril­liant! David Shearer really needs to be selected urgently then John Key in the spirit of co-operation in this time of eco­nomic cri­sis needs to take David Shearer into cab­i­net as Defence Min­is­ter. He will eas­ily be able to restore a Strike Wing capa­bil­ity and at a frac­tion of the cost sim­ply by out­sourc­ing to the likes of Blackwater.

Not only that but Black­wa­ter now also has capa­bil­ity in sev­eral areas that could be extremely use­ful if we decided to out­source aspects of the Navy and Army including;

Black­wa­ter K-9 — Train­ing canines to work in patrol capac­i­ties as war dogs, explo­sives and drug detec­tion, and var­i­ous other roles for mil­i­tary and law enforce­ment duties.

Black­wa­ter Air­ships, LLC — Black­wa­ter Air­ships LLC was estab­lished in Jan­u­ary 2006 to build a remotely piloted air­ship vehi­cle (RPAV).

Black­wa­ter Armored Vehi­cle — Black­wa­ter recently intro­duced its own armored per­son­nel car­rier, the Griz­zly APC.

It comes in 4x2, 4x4, and 6x6 ver­sions with three dif­fer­ent Cater­pil­lar diesel engines are available.

Its armor, called the “Black­wa­ter High Threat Armor Pro­tec­tion Sys­tem” is claimed to defeat .50 cal­iber rounds as well as IEDs. It is con­structed of AR500 steel, and incor­po­rates angled walls and a v-hull chas­sis to deflect the blast waves pro­duced by explo­sives. It uses Fiber-Tek armor rein­forced belly and low­ers, with a fully enclosed drive train. ArmorThane tac­ti­cal coat­ing on the inte­rior and exte­rior reduces spall probability.

There are two top-side egress hatches, five gun ports (two on each side and one in rear), and trans­par­ent armored win­dows, capa­ble of NIJ level 3 pro­tec­tion. The Griz­zly makes use of for­ward and rear 400,000+ can­dle power halo­gen search­lights, which can be oper­ated remotely. It also has a ring­mount roof tur­ret, capa­ble of mount­ing a 12.7mm machine gun, which may be oper­ated from a remote weapon sta­tion.

Black­wa­ter Mar­itime Solu­tions — Black­wa­ter Mar­itime Secu­rity Ser­vices offers tac­ti­cal train­ing for mar­itime force pro­tec­tion units. In the past it has trained Greek secu­rity forces for the 2004 Olympics, Azer­bai­jan Naval Sea Com­man­dos, and Afghanistan’s Min­istry of Inte­rior. Blackwater’s facil­i­ties include a man­made lake, with stacked con­tain­ers sim­u­lat­ing the hull and deck of a ship for mar­itime assaults. Black­wa­ter received a con­tract to train United States Navy sailors fol­low­ing the attack on the USS Cole.

It has also recently pur­chased a 183ft ves­sel, the McArthur, which has been out­fit­ted for dis­as­ter response and train­ing. Accord­ing to Black­wa­ter USA, it fea­tures “state of the art nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems, full GMDSS com­mu­ni­ca­tions, SEATEL Broad­band, ded­i­cated com­mand and con­trol bays, heli­copter decks, hos­pi­tal and mul­ti­ple sup­port ves­sel capa­bil­i­ties. The McArthur was built in 1966 by the Nor­folk Ship­build­ing & Dry­dock Co. and served as a research ves­sel for the National Oceanic and Atmos­pheric Admin­is­tra­tion until its decom­mis­sion­ing in 2003. The ship will be home-ported in Nor­folk, Virginia.

See, there are solu­tions for even the replace­ment of the expen­sive and under utilised LAV III’s whereby we only pay for what we use within the out­sourc­ing model. I can cer­tainly see merit espe­cially with the Word Cup com­ing up for use of the K9 units and the Mar­itime forces for bor­der, fish­eries and smug­gling control.

David Shearer must be slected for Mt Albert, fo the sake of the nation.