 Tell me about your thoughts on the role of private contractors doing government work in military zones. I think it's something we've jumped into without thinking about it. I think it's inherently bad at the strategic level. There's been a great deal of study about fraud, waste, abuse, contract issues, a number of different organizations, including the U.S. Congress, have done detailed studies. What we really haven't looked at is the strategic impact of contractors and conflict zones. In insurgencies, there are three major problems. One, you have no idea who you've hired. Essentially, they're hired from a Rolodex, and unlike the military where you observe them for months, train them, and give them a final tactical test before they go overseas, a contractor just shows up. So you don't know who he is. If you don't have a government employee riding with him, you literally don't know what they're doing, as we saw evidence by Nozure Square and some of the other problems. But you're responsible for everything they do or fail to do. And that's what makes it strategic in an insurgency, because an insurgency is competition for legitimacy of governance. If you have an armed actor who's not accountable to anyone, and you have no control over what he's doing, that strikes at the very legitimacy of the government. Is there also, I guess, an issue of just not knowing exactly what their base level of training is and not having detailed information on their backgrounds, as you would with military personnel? Yeah, you essentially know nothing about them. We were in Iraq, a contractor was, again, the Bush administration really liked contractors, so they hired a contractor since he recruited the Iraqi army. Well, their recruiting station got attacked, so we went out to see about security and they said, under the contract, we will hire the security and, of course, charge the government for it. So they promised them a platoon of Gherkas. What actually showed up was a platoon of Nepalese villagers. These people had never handled firearms in their lives. They had a former Marine at that place who took the job of training these guys so they could at least load the weapons and handle them safely without killing someone, but that was the level of training we had. What are the legal implications? I would leave that better for an international lawyer, but, again, one of the problems is rather than legal, I would focus on the moral and strategic implications, which, again, you hired them, you brought them here, you're responsible in the eyes of people for everything they do. So every time they run a local off the road or they take a job from a local or they hire locals away from government, they're impacting the insurgency and you have no control over that. But the people see it, even if you don't get out and see what they're doing, the people see it. Right. Increasingly, I guess, military are expected to not only address their strategic objectives in a war zone, but also the humanitarian objectives. Is there a role for contractors to assist in the humanitarian side of the objectives? Yeah, in fact, I'm not so sure contractors as humanitarian organizations. And I guess you could say it's a contract because you pay them to do this or assist them to do this. In Somalia, we had to put out dry feed sites. We had to deliver 72 tons of food through 36 sites in quantities of one kilogram or less. You think about that, that sounds incredibly complex to you. When I talked to an NGO about it, they said, oh, that's no problem, we could do that. But we don't know how to do the security. I said, that's no problem, I can do that. So we did the security, they did the grain distribution, and in less than an hour a day, from the time the truck rolled up to each of the sites, until it was gone and all the people had been given, essentially, a one kilogram bag of food, was less than one hour. Those were unique skills we didn't have. So yeah, there's roles for NGOs, not so much for contractors. It's hard for me to understand how humanitarian assistance and profit making fall in the same box. I can make more money if I cut back the quality of the rations a little bit. If I substitute a lower grade grain for a higher grade grain, I let you inspect it, well then there's profit to be made there. The control, the inspection and the control is very difficult in a conflict zone. And the way at least the United States is set up, we do a lot of our contracting over the internet. So actually the person supervising the contract I had for some bases in Iraq was in Kentucky. His counterpart was in Saudi Arabia. So resolving a dispute on what was happening on the ground was essentially impossible. I guess different countries take different positions on the role of contractors. What do you think lies ahead in the coming years? Well, the Secretary of Defense has said that we should assume when we go to war about half of our force will be contract force. So that's for the essentially governmental functions that are part of any conflict. So that's pretty much the position of the United States right now. Def assigned the memo, our military planners are planning on that. Now that means you've got to think about how you want to do this. I would say I have what may be too simplistic a division, but as a default position, if it's in the conflict zone, it shouldn't be contractors. If it's outside of the conflict zone, you should aggressively look for places that contractors can do the job. If it's measurable, repeatable, kind of bureaucratic, same thing all the time, then it can be easily governed by a contract. There can be a contract officer living with them because there's no risk. And so you can get really good quality. For instance, the maintenance of equipment in Q8 outside the conflict zone was done by contractors, did a great job. Don't know if they did it cheaper than the government, there's a huge dispute about that, but they did a great job. So I think there's a legitimate use. Once you move across the zone into conflict, you create as many problems as you solve. From your personal experience in conflict zones, you've had a long military career. What are the things have you taken away from the interaction between military and contractors? It's a mixed bag, like anything else. One of the things that militaries try to do is kind of smooth things out. So everybody's kind of at the same level of training. You've got tears, you know who's who, by what unit they're in. That's not true at all with contractors. You don't know when you walk up to the person. Am I talking to a former gherka with 30 years in the British army or the Indian army? Or am I talking to a Nepalese villager who's farmed rice for 30 years? I was a little confused as to what he's doing here. Some of them didn't seem to be clear that they were actually going inside a rack. They thought they were going to be doing labor in Q8 where nobody was shooting at them. Some of them were a little surprised to find themselves, essentially the front line. They were there to stop the car bombs. So you don't know. And I think that's been part of the most difficult thing. It's a bit like working with allied forces. There's some allies you work with all the time so you know the quality, how they are. Other times you go into one of these operations in its country you've never met before. They come from a very different background. Some of the initial discomfort will be just you don't understand each other. So there's that problem, but it's massively magnified with contractors. TX Hammers, thanks for your time today. Thank you.