{"id":2527,"date":"2016-08-18T20:55:26","date_gmt":"2016-08-19T01:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/?p=2527"},"modified":"2016-08-18T20:55:26","modified_gmt":"2016-08-19T01:55:26","slug":"americas-addiction-to-mercenaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/?p=2527","title":{"rendered":"America&#8217;s Addiction to Mercenaries"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Contractors also encourage mission creep, because contractors don&#8217;t count as &#8220;boots on the ground.&#8221; Congress does not consider them to be troops, and therefore contractors do not count again troop-level caps in places like Iraq. The U.S. government does not track contractor numbers in war zones. As a result, the government can put more people on the ground than it reports to the American people, encouraging mission creep and rendering contractors virtually invisible.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theatlantic.com\/international\/archive\/2016\/08\/iraq-afghanistan-contractor-pentagon-obama\/495731\/\">America&#8217;s Addiction to Mercenaries &#8211; The Atlantic<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Contractors also encourage mission creep, because contractors don&#8217;t count as &#8220;boots on the ground.&#8221; Congress does not consider them to be troops, and therefore contractors do not count again troop-level caps in places like Iraq. The U.S. government does not &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/?p=2527\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current_events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2528,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2527\/revisions\/2528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.brandylion.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}