Arming the Bohemian Once More

After a nearly two month hiatus, I've posted something new at Armed Bohemian again: Grey Skills.
Just some rough thoughts really, but, its something. I have no idea if this will be the regular posting pattern for AB or not. I'd like for it not to be, but the natural order may say differently.
This blogging stuff takes a great deal of work - I spend anywhere between two and ten hours on every blog post longer than a couple paragraphs. Sometimes there is just not enough time in the day. Particularly when I am doing this for free, and probably will continue to do so for awhile as I build the necessary frame work and readership to make virtual crowdsurfing work. That is time I could spend blacksmithing, teaching, doing other writing, or training , just as those things are time I could spend blogging. Everything has to balance, and that's always evolving.


Don't forget about Armed Bohemian though. I havent -It's still going and will continue.

Armed Bohemian

I have a new project - Armed Bohemian, a blog on some specific ideas about war, culture, warriors and related thoughts, problems and snarky comments.
This will let me leave Rum & Donuts as the personal forum I've created it to be. The ideas and questions that will be shaping Armed Bohemian are rather constant for me, and I'd rather give them their own playground than dominate this space with them.

Stay tuned - More to come, here, there, and elsewhere!

A Bright Idea from The Atlantic

Not a new idea, but a bright one none the less. In Unleash the Dogs of Peace editor Gibney makes the excellent suggestion of using private military companies (PMCs) instead of UN Peace Keepers in difficult regions. There is great merit to this idea for varying reasons, only one of which is the UN's seeming inability to actually keep, never mind create, peace.
Gibney isn't the first to suggest this. Obviously, PMC's themselves have always suggested this. Still a good idea. Maybe a better idea now than it was when Executive Outcomes was suggesting it for Rwanda (prior to the great machete party) - Today's contenders seem to offer more stability, and despite the media's efforts less mercenary stigma.

From the Atlantic piece:

"There is a different, more robust approach to making peace in nasty places: deploy private military companies like Executive Outcomes, whose small, highly trained force defeated insurgencies in Sierra Leone and Angola during the 1990s. Executive Outcomes is now out of business. But as researchers like Peter Singer have documented, the private-military-company marketplace now fields scores of firms (including the U.S. giants Xe—formerly Blackwater—and DynCorp) that take in billions in revenue. Put them on retainer, and they’ll go where they’re paid to go—unlike every one of the 19 countries that had pledged troops on a standby basis for UN peacekeeping and then refused, in 1994, to send them to Rwanda."