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… 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. (h/t Wonkette)
Oh good, a huge mercenary army allied to American right wing christianists is building its air force.
Eric Prince is … currently in his late 30s, but at the time of founding Blackwater in 1996 he was believed to be the wealthiest person that had ever enlisted in the U.S. Navy SEALs… Eric Prince came from a very conservative evangelical Christian family in the state of Michigan. His father was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps businessman who started a very successful auto parts manufacturing business called Prince Manufacturing. And what the company was best known for was inventing the now ubiquitous lighted sun visor. Any time you’re in your car and you pull down that visor and it lights up, that’s Eric Prince’s family that invented that.
28 August, 2007 at 11:30 pm
I don’t know about you, but the thought of these jocks, who are not culpable under much of international law, running around with high-tech military hardware, scares the shit out of me. Where will this all end?? A mercenary, corporate army on the streets of Liverpool crushing the gang warfare?? Mark my words, a corporate army enforcing the law within the UK is not far away. Personally, I give it 5 years.
28 August, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Nothing really new, at least as far as mercenaries are concerned. For years mercenaries in Africa and Yugoslavia have fielded everything from assault rifles to artillery pieces and attack helicopters, mostly of Russian design (they are the cheapest and therefore more available).
29 August, 2007 at 1:12 am
Blackwater has been used in New Orleans, it’s their closeness to the fundie right power elite that makes them something new. The dogs of war are becoming ‘respectable’ corporate players, in the open. And using them to wage a war also serves the purpose of redistributing public money upwards to private corps, very much part of free market privatisation ideology. Which really means democratic control/oversight becomes a thing of the past.
29 August, 2007 at 10:04 am
Corporations running around with attack aircraft. That’s just what the world needs.
29 August, 2007 at 10:45 am
Mercenaries don’t care for the ideologies of their employers, only that they get payed on time. Of course, the idea of rent-a- cops running around in APCs and Hueys armed with minguns is not one I would consider appealing.
29 August, 2007 at 10:50 am
Oh and lead by a guy that believes he is reliving a his own version of Red Dawn/Left Behind. Not a pretty picture. I hope he and that nutjob from the BNP never meet in a dark alley.
29 August, 2007 at 3:22 pm
If they did it would be to make sweet fascist lurve!
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