- Joined
- Apr 1, 2025
He didn't say in America, he said on earth which is undeniably true.
Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and SOCOM general - The most "Special" groups in the U.S. Military
- Thread starter Justtocheck
- Start date
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2024
TRIPLING DOWN!
Also, I have to post this gem response by SEAL Ian Fitzgerald. r/navyseal has no creepy feet pics. Only straight fire
.
Also, I have to post this gem response by SEAL Ian Fitzgerald. r/navyseal has no creepy feet pics. Only straight fire
.
This video is from Trey Lindsey whose IG is @gallowglass3g. He's a former ST6 Blue Squadron Operator who participated in the rescue of Jessica Buchanan in Somalia. I love how he's nearly 50 years old, hasn't been operational a decade, and still discriminates and engages photographic targets twice as fast as the active D Squadron operators shoot plain USPSAs in their leaked CQB video.
Also in the HR training video Matt Pranka posted a few years ago that went viral, he actually missed his first round *in the house. If it had been live it would have gone straight through that drywall and into the room where the hostage was being held. Gotta love how the non-resistant OPFOR stands there and lets himself be shot after Pranka trips and falls. Though TBF the overall level of performance is light years ahead of that team from D Squadron.
Aussie Special Forces Recruitment Ad. What's with the fake HUD?
Canadian JTF-2 Operator with a very Canadian and respectful assessment of Delta
Also in the HR training video Matt Pranka posted a few years ago that went viral, he actually missed his first round *in the house. If it had been live it would have gone straight through that drywall and into the room where the hostage was being held. Gotta love how the non-resistant OPFOR stands there and lets himself be shot after Pranka trips and falls. Though TBF the overall level of performance is light years ahead of that team from D Squadron.
Aussie Special Forces Recruitment Ad. What's with the fake HUD?
Canadian JTF-2 Operator with a very Canadian and respectful assessment of Delta
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- Joined
- Nov 22, 2024
To be fair, you need to have a fairly high IQ to understand Delta's training objectives, and the Canadian operator didn't have the capacity of mind for a true paradigm shift.
Hear me out. An elite warfighter oper8tor is a finely tuned machine. A pro. A master. The most correct comparison would be an F1 pilot.
Most F1 pilots will eventually crash their super expensive cars in races. It's a normal part of the job. In the same vein, if you oper8te hard enough, you WILL be plugging a terrified pregnant woman in the chest several times as her other children shriek in horror. It WILL happen. Otherwise it's fair to say you are a pussy and not going on enough missions.
But what you do then? You can't have pearl-clutching-commiefaggot-Rolling-Stone readers thinking you are "monster" or a "war criminal" or much worse, "incompetent", whatever that means. It's just bad for the brand.
So you cover it up, from top to bottom. You never mention it again. You will retire with a full pension, your name will be redacted from all media, and your deeds will only be known by terminally online Brazilians after one of your teammates shares classified photos for IG clout. It's a win-win-win. And Fort Bragg will provide you with enough chemical amenities to soothe your demons if you were unlucky enough to join Delta Force with some morals. Worst case scenario, you get a Remington haircut and get a cool piece of land to get buried in Arlington. I'd say that's a pretty fair deal.
It's sad the JTF-2 bro failed to see the lesson there for him because of his Canadian predispositions.
Pine Gap Island bros breaking into your house to get your 7 TB hard drives of Vtuber streams
Cool fake HUD and all in the video, but they don't show a costume party or drinking out of a prosthetic leg from a killed civilian. 2/10. No fun allowed. Would not destroy my knees and back to join.
You joke but... 1:11:26
Switch a VB for a prosthetic leg, and this is how I imagine the Aussie SAS
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2024
Matt Larsen saying "nobody told us in my 6 years us there would be non-combatants in the battlefield".
What in God's name is this organization? Do they not train and think about where they fight?And then he goes "Get ready. There's going to be fratricide, there's going to be shooting at unarmed civilians. Bet on it. And you are going to be the one shooting that person!"
Matt Landfair looking like he can equip an entire city PD with small arms. We get it bro, you like pistols.
You know, the thing that gets me about Delta is that they pretend to be so much better. Like with the Aussie SAS.
Every normal officer would look at those clowns and think "Okay, these are our designated low IQ shitbulls, and I will set my expectations accordingly."
But with Delta, they are "The Unit." So good, that everyone in the world looks up to them and they are extremely professional. Everyone in the Army should know how much better they are. Then you look a bit deeper, and it's just like group of dudes, with dangerous egos, substance abuse issues, horrendous performance slips, and a severe lack of introspective minds.
But they still want to be "The Unit™ Best of the best of the best."
Todd Michael Fulkerson, the Neanderthal SF drug trafficker, was a SF medical Sargent (18D) during the surge in Afghanistan. And he's from Ohio. A reminder, he got arrested and charged for trafficking kilograms of fent and coke and faces up to 20 years. He was recruited because of his military background allegedly.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2023
Sergeant Flintstone, what is your major malfunction??
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
I thought I would spread the word of something wholesome.
Related - this is a good article on how fucked up the entire concept of being a drone pilot is. Paywalled with no archive, but you can find the copy-pasted text below the spoiler.
REDWOOD VALLEY, Calif. — After hiding all night in the mountains, Air Force Capt. Kevin Larson crouched behind a boulder and watched the forest through his breath, waiting for the police he knew would come. It was Jan. 19, 2020. He was clinging to an assault rifle with 30 rounds and a conviction that, after all he had been through, there was no way he was going to prison.
Captain Larson was a drone pilot — one of the best. He flew the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, and in 650 combat missions between 2013 and 2018, he had launched at least 188 airstrikes, earned 20 medals for achievement and killed a top man on the United States’ most-wanted-terrorist list.
The 32-year-old pilot kept a handwritten thank-you note on his refrigerator from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was proud of it but would not say what for, because like nearly everything he did in the drone program, it was a secret. He had to keep the details locked behind the high-security doors at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nev.
There were also things he was not proud of locked behind those doors — things his family believes eventually left him cornered in the mountains, gripping a rifle.
In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called “the customer.” The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. It did not matter. The customer got what the customer wanted.
And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Crews had to watch it all in color and high definition.
Captain Larson tried to bury his doubts. At home in Las Vegas, he exuded a carefree confidence. He loved to go out dancing and was so strikingly handsome that he did side work as a model. He drove an electric-blue Corvette convertible and a tricked-out blue Jeep and had a beautiful new wife.
But tendrils of distress would occasionally poke up, in a comment before bed or a grim joke at the bar. Once, in 2017, his father pressed him about his work, and Captain Larson described a mission in which the customer told him to track and kill a suspected Al Qaeda member. Then, he said, the customer told him to use the Reaper’s high-definition camera to follow the man’s body to the cemetery and kill everyone who attended the funeral.
“He never really talked about what he did — he couldn’t,” said his father, Darold Larson. “But he would say things like that, and it made you know it was bothering him. He said he was being forced to do things that went against his moral compass.”
Drones were billed as a better way to wage war — a tool that could kill with precision from thousands of miles away, keep American service members safe and often get them home in time for dinner. The drone program started in 2001 as a small, tightly controlled operation hunting high-level terrorist targets. But during the past decade, as the battle against the Islamic State intensified and the Afghanistan war dragged on, the fleet grew larger, the targets more numerous and more commonplace. Over time, the rules meant to protect civilians broke down, recent investigations by The New York Times have shown, and the number of innocent people killed in America’s air wars grew to be far larger than the Pentagon would publicly admit.
Captain Larson’s story, woven together with those of other drone crew members, reveals an unseen toll on the other end of those remote-controlled strikes.
Drone crews have launched more missiles and killed more people than nearly anyone else in the military in the past decade, but the military did not count them as combat troops. Because they were not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental-health screenings as other fighters. Instead they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war.
Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to recognize the full impact. Despite hundreds of missions, Captain Larson’s personnel file, under the heading “COMBAT SERVICE,” offers only a single word: “none.”
Drone crew members said in interviews that, while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars.
“In many ways it’s more intense,” said Neal Scheuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. “A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think that this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them, there is no reset button.”
In the wake of The Times’s investigations, the Pentagon has vowed to strengthen controls on airstrikes and improve how it investigates claims of civilian deaths. The Air Force is also providing more mental-health services for drone crews to address the lapses of the past, said the commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech, Col. Eric Schmidt.
“We are not physically in harm’s way, and yet at the same time we are observing a battlefield, and we are seeing some scenes or being part of them. We have seen the effects that can have on people,” Colonel Schmidt said. In the past, he said, remote warfare was not seen as real combat, and there was a stigma against seeking help. “I’m proud to say, we have come a long way,” he added. “It’s sad that we had to.”
Captain Larson tried to cope with the trauma by using psychedelic drugs. That became another secret he had to keep. Eventually the Air Force found out. He was charged with using and distributing illegal drugs and stripped of his flight status. His marriage fell apart, and he was put on trial, facing a possible prison term of more than 20 years.
Because he was not a conventional combat veteran, there was no required psychological evaluation to see what influence his war-fighting experience might have had on his misconduct. At his trial, no one mentioned the 188 classified missile strikes or the funeral he had targeted. In January 2020, he was quickly convicted.
Desperate to avoid prison, reeling from what he saw as a betrayal by the military he had dedicated his life to, Captain Larson ran.
The Air Force had other plans. By the time he was commissioned in 2012, the Pentagon had developed seemingly insatiable appetite for drones, and the Air Force was struggling to keep up. That year it turned out more drone pilots than traditional fighter pilots and still could not meet the demand.
“He was sobbing when he got the news. So disappointed. He wanted to fly,” his mother, Laura Larson, said in an interview. “But once he started, he enjoyed it. He really felt like he was doing something important.”
Captain Larson was assigned to the 867th Attack Squadron at Creech — a unit that pilots say worked largely with the C.I.A. and Joint Special Operations Command. The drone crews operated out of a cluster of shipping containers in a remote patch of desert. Each crew had three members: a sensor operator to guide the surveillance camera and targeting laser, an intelligence analyst to interpret and document the video feeds, and a pilot to fly the Reaper and push the red button that launched its Hellfire missiles.
The specifics of Captain Larson’s missions are largely a mystery. He kept the classified details hidden from his parents and former wife. His closest friends in the attack squadron and dozens of other current and former crew members did not respond to requests for interviews; secrecy laws and nondisclosure agreements make it a crime to discuss classified details.
But several pilots, sensor operators and intelligence analysts who did the same type of work in other squadrons spoke with The Times about unclassified details and described their struggles with the same punishing workload and vexing moral landscape.
More than 2,300 service members are currently assigned to drone crews. Early in the program, they said, missions seemed well run. Officials carefully chose their targets and took steps to minimize civilian deaths.
“We would watch a high-value target for months, gathering intelligence and waiting for the exact right time to strike,” said James Klein, a former Air Force captain who flew Reapers at Creech from 2014 to 2018. “It was the right way to use the weapon.”
But in December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules amid the escalating fight against the Islamic State, pushing the authority to approve airstrikes deep down into the ranks. The next year, the Trump administration secretly loosened them further. Decisions on high-value targets that once had been reserved for generals or even the president were effectively handed off to enlisted Special Operations soldiers. The customer increasingly turned drones on low-level combatants. Strikes once carried out only after rigorous intelligence-gathering and approval processes were often ordered up on the fly, hitting schools, markets and large groups of women and children.
Before the rules changed, Mr. Klein said, his squadron launched about 16 airstrikes in two years. Afterward, it conducted them almost daily.
Once, Mr. Klein said, the customer pressed him to fire on two men walking by a river in Syria, saying they were carrying weapons over their shoulders. The weapons turned out to be fishing poles, Mr. Klein said, and though the customer argued that the men could still be a threat, he persuaded the customer not to strike.
In another instance, he said, a fellow pilot was ordered to attack a suspected Islamic State fighter who was pushing another man in a wheelchair on a busy city street. The strike killed one of the men; it also killed three passers-by.
“There was no reason to take that shot,” Mr. Klein said. “I talked to the pilot after, and she was in tears. She didn’t fly again for a long time and ended up leaving for good.”
Squadrons did little to address bad strikes if there was no pilot error. It was seen as the customer’s problem. Crews filed civilian casualty reports, but the investigative process was so faulty that they rarely saw any impact; often they would not even get a response.
Over time, Mr. Klein grew angry and depressed. His marriage began to crumble.
“I started to dread going in to work,” he said. “Everyone kind of expects you to do that stuff and just be fine, but it ate away at us.”
Eventually, he refused to fire any more missiles. The Air Force moved him to a noncombat role, and a few years later, in 2020, he retired, one of many disillusioned drone operators who quietly dropped out, he said.
“We were so isolated, that I’m not sure anyone saw it,’ he said. “The biggest tell is that very few people stayed in the field. They just couldn’t take it.”
“At one point I pulled him aside and told him, ‘If things start bothering you, you and your friends need to talk about it,’” Ms. Larson said. “He just smiled and said he was fine. But I think he was struggling more than he ever let on.”
The Air Force has no requirement to give drone crews the mental health evaluations mandated for deployed troops, but it has surveyed the drone force for more than a decade and consistently found high levels of stress, cynicism and emotional exhaustion. In one study, 20 percent of crew members reported clinical levels of emotional distress — twice the rate among noncombat Air Force personnel. The proportion of crew members reporting post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide was higher than in traditional aircrews.
Several factors contribute — workload, constantly changing shifts, leadership issues and combat exposure. But the most damaging, according to Wayne Chappelle, the Air Force psychologist leading the studies, is civilian deaths.
Seeing just one strike that causes unexpected civilian deaths can increase the risk of PTSD six to eight times, he said. A survey published in 2020, several years after the strike rules changed, found that 40 percent of drone crew members reported witnessing between one and five civilian killings. Seven percent had witnessed six or more.
“After something like that, people can have unresolved, disruptive emotional reactions,” Dr. Chappelle said. “We would assume that’s unhealthy — having intrusive thoughts, intrusive memories. I call that healthy and normal. What do you call someone who is OK with it?”
Having time off to process the trauma is vital, he said. But during the years when America was simultaneously fighting the Taliban, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, that was nearly impossible.
Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding what it called human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear, coping strategies and healthy practices to optimize performance.
“It’s a holistic team approach: mind, body and spirit,” said Capt. James Taylor, a chaplain at Creech. “I try to address the soul fatigue, the existential questions many people have to wrestle with in this work.”
But crews said the teams were only modestly effective. The stigma of seeking help keeps many crew members away, and there is a perception that the teams are too focused on keeping crews flying to address the root causes of trauma. Indeed, a 2018 survey found that only 8 percent of drone operators used the teams, and two-thirds of those experiencing emotional distress did not.
Instead, crew members said, they tend to work quietly, hoping to avoid a breakdown.
Bennett Miller was an intelligence analyst, trained to study the Reaper’s video feed. Working Special Operations missions in Syria and Afghanistan in 2019 and 2020 from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, the former technical sergeant saw civilian casualties “almost monthly.”
“At first it didn’t bother me that much,” he said. “I thought it was part of going after the bad guys.”
Then, in late 2019, he said, his team tracked a man in Afghanistan who the customer said was a high-level Taliban financier. For a week, the crew watched the man feed his animals, eat with family in his courtyard and walk to a nearby village. Then the customer ordered the crew to kill him, and the pilot fired a missile as the man walked down the path from his house. Watching the video feed afterward, Mr. Miller saw the family gather the pieces of the man and bury them.
A week later, the Taliban financier’s name appeared again on the target list.
“We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts. Then I had gone home and hugged my own kids.”
The same pattern occurred twice more, he said, yet the squadron leadership did nothing to address what was seen as the customer’s mistakes. Two years later, Mr. Miller was near tears when he described the strikes in an interview at his home. “What we had done was murder, and no one seemed to notice,” he said. “We just were told to move on.”
Mr. Miller grew sleepless and angry. “I couldn’t deal with the guilt or the anxiety of knowing that it was going to probably happen again,” he said. “I was caught in this trap where if I care about what is happening, it’s devastating. And if I don’t care, I lose who I am as a person.”
At Shaw, he said, his squadron did not have a human performance team. “We just had a squadron bar.”
In February 2020, he got home from a 15-hour night shift, locked himself in his bedroom, put a cocked revolver to his head and through the door told his wife that he could not take it anymore. He was hospitalized, diagnosed with PTSD and medically retired.
Beyond their modest standard pensions, veterans with combat-related injuries, even injuries suffered in training, get special compensation worth about $1,000 per month. Mr. Miller does not qualify, because the Department of Veterans Affairs does not consider drone missions combat.
“It’s like they are saying all the people we killed somehow don’t really count,” he said. “And neither do we.”
When she and Captain Larson had met in 2016, she said, he was already taking mushrooms once every few months, often with other pilots. He also took MDMA — known as ecstasy or molly — a few times a year. The drugs might have been illegal, but, he told her, they offered relief.
“He would just say he had a very stressful job and he needed it,” Ms. Larson said. “And you could tell. For weeks after, he was more relaxed, more focused, more loving. It seemed therapeutic.”
A growing number of combat veterans use the psychedelic drugs illicitly, amid mounting evidence that they are potent treatments for the psychological wounds of war. Both MDMA and psilocybin are expected to soon be approved for limited medical use by the Food and Drug Administration.
“It gave me a clarity and an honesty that allowed me to rewrite the narrative of my life,” according to a former Air Force officer who said he suffered from depression and moral injury after hundreds of Reaper missions; he asked not to be named in order to discuss the use of illegal drugs. “It led to some self-forgiveness. That was a huge first step.”
In Las Vegas, the civilian authorities were willing to forgive Captain Larson, but the Air Force charged him with a litany of crimes — drug possession and distribution, making false statements to Air Force investigators and a charge unique to the armed forces: conduct unbecoming of an officer. His squadron grounded him, forbade him to wear a flight suit and told him not to talk to fellow pilots. No one screened him for PTSD or other psychological injuries from his service, Ms. Larson said, adding, “I don’t think anyone realized it might be connected.”
As the prosecution plodded forward over two years, Captain Larson worked at the base gym and organized volunteer groups to do community service. His marriage was annulled. Struggling with his mental health, seeking productive ways to cope with the trauma, he read book after book on positive thinking and set up a special meditation room in his house, according to his girlfriend at the time, Becca Triano.
“I don’t know what he saw, what he dealt with,” she said. “What I did see toward the end was him really working hard to try to stay sane.”
The trial finally came in January, 2020. His former wife and a pilot friend testified about his drug use. The police produced the evidence. That was all.
After deliberating for a few hours on the morning of Jan. 17, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on nearly every count.
He loaded his Jeep with food and clothes and sped away, convinced that he was facing a long prison sentence, Ms. Triano said. Within hours, the Air Force had a warrant out for his arrest.
Captain Larson headed southwest to Los Angeles and stayed the night with a friend, then started heading north. By the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 18, he was driving by vineyards and redwood groves on U.S. Route 101 in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, when the California Highway Patrol spotted his Jeep and pulled him over.
Captain Larson stopped and waited calmly for the officer to walk up to his window. Then he gunned it — down the highway and onto a narrow dirt logging road that snaked up into the mountains. After several miles, he pulled off into the trees and hid. The police could not find him, but they knew something he did not: All the roads in the canyon were dead ends, and officers were blocking the only way out.
Night fell. Nothing to do but wait.
In the morning, during a briefing at the bottom of the canyon, records show, Air Force agents explained to the Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies that the wanted man was a deserter who had fled a drug conviction, was probably armed and possibly suicidal.
The officers drove up the canyon and spotted tire tracks on a narrow turnoff. Agents crept up on foot until they spotted the blue Jeep in the trees, but did not risk going farther. The deputies had a better option, something that could get a view of the Jeep without any danger. A small drone soon launched into the sky.
Captain Larson was hiding behind a mossy boulder. There was no phone service deep in the canyon, no way to call for whatever hope or solace he might have conjured. He could only record a video message for his family members. One by one, he told them that he loved them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t go to prison, so I’m going to end this. This was always the plan.”
There was a lot he did not explain — things that have kept his family and friends wondering in the years since. He did not talk about the hundreds of secret missions or their impact. He did not say what it had felt like to have his commanders stand by quietly as civilian deaths became routine, then stay just as quiet when a decorated pilot was prosecuted for drug possession. He did not talk about the other pilots who had done the same drugs and then avoided him like a virus after he got caught.
Perhaps he was planning to say more, but as he spoke into the phone camera, he was interrupted by an angry buzzing, like a swarm of bees.
“I can hear the drones,” he said. “They’re looking for me.”
Had they found him alive, his pursuers would have been able to tell him this: In the end, the Air Force had decided not to sentence him to prison, only to dismissal.
But now, just as Captain Larson had done countless times, the officers could only study the drone footage and parse the evidence — slumped behind the boulder, shot with his own assault rifle — of another unintended death.
Captain Larson was a drone pilot — one of the best. He flew the heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper, and in 650 combat missions between 2013 and 2018, he had launched at least 188 airstrikes, earned 20 medals for achievement and killed a top man on the United States’ most-wanted-terrorist list.
The 32-year-old pilot kept a handwritten thank-you note on his refrigerator from the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He was proud of it but would not say what for, because like nearly everything he did in the drone program, it was a secret. He had to keep the details locked behind the high-security doors at Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nev.
There were also things he was not proud of locked behind those doors — things his family believes eventually left him cornered in the mountains, gripping a rifle.
In the Air Force, drone pilots did not pick the targets. That was the job of someone pilots called “the customer.” The customer might be a conventional ground force commander, the C.I.A. or a classified Special Operations strike cell. It did not matter. The customer got what the customer wanted.
And sometimes what the customer wanted did not seem right. There were missile strikes so hasty that they hit women and children, attacks built on such flimsy intelligence that they made targets of ordinary villagers, and classified rules of engagement that allowed the customer to knowingly kill up to 20 civilians when taking out an enemy. Crews had to watch it all in color and high definition.
Captain Larson tried to bury his doubts. At home in Las Vegas, he exuded a carefree confidence. He loved to go out dancing and was so strikingly handsome that he did side work as a model. He drove an electric-blue Corvette convertible and a tricked-out blue Jeep and had a beautiful new wife.
But tendrils of distress would occasionally poke up, in a comment before bed or a grim joke at the bar. Once, in 2017, his father pressed him about his work, and Captain Larson described a mission in which the customer told him to track and kill a suspected Al Qaeda member. Then, he said, the customer told him to use the Reaper’s high-definition camera to follow the man’s body to the cemetery and kill everyone who attended the funeral.
“He never really talked about what he did — he couldn’t,” said his father, Darold Larson. “But he would say things like that, and it made you know it was bothering him. He said he was being forced to do things that went against his moral compass.”
Drones were billed as a better way to wage war — a tool that could kill with precision from thousands of miles away, keep American service members safe and often get them home in time for dinner. The drone program started in 2001 as a small, tightly controlled operation hunting high-level terrorist targets. But during the past decade, as the battle against the Islamic State intensified and the Afghanistan war dragged on, the fleet grew larger, the targets more numerous and more commonplace. Over time, the rules meant to protect civilians broke down, recent investigations by The New York Times have shown, and the number of innocent people killed in America’s air wars grew to be far larger than the Pentagon would publicly admit.
Captain Larson’s story, woven together with those of other drone crew members, reveals an unseen toll on the other end of those remote-controlled strikes.
Drone crews have launched more missiles and killed more people than nearly anyone else in the military in the past decade, but the military did not count them as combat troops. Because they were not deployed, they seldom got the same recovery periods or mental-health screenings as other fighters. Instead they were treated as office workers, expected to show up for endless shifts in a forever war.
Under unrelenting stress, several former crew members said, people broke down. Drinking and divorce became common. Some left the operations floor in tears. Others attempted suicide. And the military failed to recognize the full impact. Despite hundreds of missions, Captain Larson’s personnel file, under the heading “COMBAT SERVICE,” offers only a single word: “none.”
Drone crew members said in interviews that, while killing remotely is different from killing on the ground, it still carves deep scars.
“In many ways it’s more intense,” said Neal Scheuneman, a drone sensor operator who retired as a master sergeant from the Air Force in 2019. “A fighter jet might see a target for 20 minutes. We had to watch a target for days, weeks and even months. We saw him play with his kids. We saw him interact with his family. We watched his whole life unfold. You are remote but also very much connected. Then one day, when all parameters are met, you kill him. Then you watch the death. You see the remorse and the burial. People often think that this job is going to be like a video game, and I have to warn them, there is no reset button.”
In the wake of The Times’s investigations, the Pentagon has vowed to strengthen controls on airstrikes and improve how it investigates claims of civilian deaths. The Air Force is also providing more mental-health services for drone crews to address the lapses of the past, said the commander of the 432nd Wing at Creech, Col. Eric Schmidt.
“We are not physically in harm’s way, and yet at the same time we are observing a battlefield, and we are seeing some scenes or being part of them. We have seen the effects that can have on people,” Colonel Schmidt said. In the past, he said, remote warfare was not seen as real combat, and there was a stigma against seeking help. “I’m proud to say, we have come a long way,” he added. “It’s sad that we had to.”
Captain Larson tried to cope with the trauma by using psychedelic drugs. That became another secret he had to keep. Eventually the Air Force found out. He was charged with using and distributing illegal drugs and stripped of his flight status. His marriage fell apart, and he was put on trial, facing a possible prison term of more than 20 years.
Because he was not a conventional combat veteran, there was no required psychological evaluation to see what influence his war-fighting experience might have had on his misconduct. At his trial, no one mentioned the 188 classified missile strikes or the funeral he had targeted. In January 2020, he was quickly convicted.
Desperate to avoid prison, reeling from what he saw as a betrayal by the military he had dedicated his life to, Captain Larson ran.
A Vexing Moral Landscape
Captain Larson grew up in Yakima, Wash., the son of police officers. He was a straight-and-narrow Eagle Scout who went to church nearly every Sunday and once admonished a longtime friend to stay away from marijuana. At the University of Washington, where he was an honors student, he joined R.O.T.C. and the Civil Air Patrol, set on becoming a fighter pilot.The Air Force had other plans. By the time he was commissioned in 2012, the Pentagon had developed seemingly insatiable appetite for drones, and the Air Force was struggling to keep up. That year it turned out more drone pilots than traditional fighter pilots and still could not meet the demand.
“He was sobbing when he got the news. So disappointed. He wanted to fly,” his mother, Laura Larson, said in an interview. “But once he started, he enjoyed it. He really felt like he was doing something important.”
Captain Larson was assigned to the 867th Attack Squadron at Creech — a unit that pilots say worked largely with the C.I.A. and Joint Special Operations Command. The drone crews operated out of a cluster of shipping containers in a remote patch of desert. Each crew had three members: a sensor operator to guide the surveillance camera and targeting laser, an intelligence analyst to interpret and document the video feeds, and a pilot to fly the Reaper and push the red button that launched its Hellfire missiles.
The specifics of Captain Larson’s missions are largely a mystery. He kept the classified details hidden from his parents and former wife. His closest friends in the attack squadron and dozens of other current and former crew members did not respond to requests for interviews; secrecy laws and nondisclosure agreements make it a crime to discuss classified details.
But several pilots, sensor operators and intelligence analysts who did the same type of work in other squadrons spoke with The Times about unclassified details and described their struggles with the same punishing workload and vexing moral landscape.
More than 2,300 service members are currently assigned to drone crews. Early in the program, they said, missions seemed well run. Officials carefully chose their targets and took steps to minimize civilian deaths.
“We would watch a high-value target for months, gathering intelligence and waiting for the exact right time to strike,” said James Klein, a former Air Force captain who flew Reapers at Creech from 2014 to 2018. “It was the right way to use the weapon.”
But in December 2016, the Obama administration loosened the rules amid the escalating fight against the Islamic State, pushing the authority to approve airstrikes deep down into the ranks. The next year, the Trump administration secretly loosened them further. Decisions on high-value targets that once had been reserved for generals or even the president were effectively handed off to enlisted Special Operations soldiers. The customer increasingly turned drones on low-level combatants. Strikes once carried out only after rigorous intelligence-gathering and approval processes were often ordered up on the fly, hitting schools, markets and large groups of women and children.
Before the rules changed, Mr. Klein said, his squadron launched about 16 airstrikes in two years. Afterward, it conducted them almost daily.
Once, Mr. Klein said, the customer pressed him to fire on two men walking by a river in Syria, saying they were carrying weapons over their shoulders. The weapons turned out to be fishing poles, Mr. Klein said, and though the customer argued that the men could still be a threat, he persuaded the customer not to strike.
In another instance, he said, a fellow pilot was ordered to attack a suspected Islamic State fighter who was pushing another man in a wheelchair on a busy city street. The strike killed one of the men; it also killed three passers-by.
“There was no reason to take that shot,” Mr. Klein said. “I talked to the pilot after, and she was in tears. She didn’t fly again for a long time and ended up leaving for good.”
Squadrons did little to address bad strikes if there was no pilot error. It was seen as the customer’s problem. Crews filed civilian casualty reports, but the investigative process was so faulty that they rarely saw any impact; often they would not even get a response.
Over time, Mr. Klein grew angry and depressed. His marriage began to crumble.
“I started to dread going in to work,” he said. “Everyone kind of expects you to do that stuff and just be fine, but it ate away at us.”
Eventually, he refused to fire any more missiles. The Air Force moved him to a noncombat role, and a few years later, in 2020, he retired, one of many disillusioned drone operators who quietly dropped out, he said.
“We were so isolated, that I’m not sure anyone saw it,’ he said. “The biggest tell is that very few people stayed in the field. They just couldn’t take it.”
‘Soul Fatigue’
In her job as a police officer, Captain Larson’s mother conducted stress debriefings after traumatic events. When officers in her department shot someone, they were required to take time off and meet with a psychologist. As part of the healing process, everyone present at the scene was required to sit down and talk through what had happened. She was not aware of any of that happening with her son.“At one point I pulled him aside and told him, ‘If things start bothering you, you and your friends need to talk about it,’” Ms. Larson said. “He just smiled and said he was fine. But I think he was struggling more than he ever let on.”
The Air Force has no requirement to give drone crews the mental health evaluations mandated for deployed troops, but it has surveyed the drone force for more than a decade and consistently found high levels of stress, cynicism and emotional exhaustion. In one study, 20 percent of crew members reported clinical levels of emotional distress — twice the rate among noncombat Air Force personnel. The proportion of crew members reporting post-traumatic stress disorder and thoughts of suicide was higher than in traditional aircrews.
Several factors contribute — workload, constantly changing shifts, leadership issues and combat exposure. But the most damaging, according to Wayne Chappelle, the Air Force psychologist leading the studies, is civilian deaths.
Seeing just one strike that causes unexpected civilian deaths can increase the risk of PTSD six to eight times, he said. A survey published in 2020, several years after the strike rules changed, found that 40 percent of drone crew members reported witnessing between one and five civilian killings. Seven percent had witnessed six or more.
“After something like that, people can have unresolved, disruptive emotional reactions,” Dr. Chappelle said. “We would assume that’s unhealthy — having intrusive thoughts, intrusive memories. I call that healthy and normal. What do you call someone who is OK with it?”
Having time off to process the trauma is vital, he said. But during the years when America was simultaneously fighting the Taliban, the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, that was nearly impossible.
Starting in 2015, the Air Force began embedding what it called human performance teams in some squadrons, staffed with chaplains, psychologists and operational physiologists offering a sympathetic ear, coping strategies and healthy practices to optimize performance.
“It’s a holistic team approach: mind, body and spirit,” said Capt. James Taylor, a chaplain at Creech. “I try to address the soul fatigue, the existential questions many people have to wrestle with in this work.”
But crews said the teams were only modestly effective. The stigma of seeking help keeps many crew members away, and there is a perception that the teams are too focused on keeping crews flying to address the root causes of trauma. Indeed, a 2018 survey found that only 8 percent of drone operators used the teams, and two-thirds of those experiencing emotional distress did not.
Instead, crew members said, they tend to work quietly, hoping to avoid a breakdown.
Bennett Miller was an intelligence analyst, trained to study the Reaper’s video feed. Working Special Operations missions in Syria and Afghanistan in 2019 and 2020 from Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, the former technical sergeant saw civilian casualties “almost monthly.”
“At first it didn’t bother me that much,” he said. “I thought it was part of going after the bad guys.”
Then, in late 2019, he said, his team tracked a man in Afghanistan who the customer said was a high-level Taliban financier. For a week, the crew watched the man feed his animals, eat with family in his courtyard and walk to a nearby village. Then the customer ordered the crew to kill him, and the pilot fired a missile as the man walked down the path from his house. Watching the video feed afterward, Mr. Miller saw the family gather the pieces of the man and bury them.
A week later, the Taliban financier’s name appeared again on the target list.
“We got the wrong guy. I had just killed someone’s dad,” Mr. Miller said. “I had watched his kids pick up the body parts. Then I had gone home and hugged my own kids.”
The same pattern occurred twice more, he said, yet the squadron leadership did nothing to address what was seen as the customer’s mistakes. Two years later, Mr. Miller was near tears when he described the strikes in an interview at his home. “What we had done was murder, and no one seemed to notice,” he said. “We just were told to move on.”
Mr. Miller grew sleepless and angry. “I couldn’t deal with the guilt or the anxiety of knowing that it was going to probably happen again,” he said. “I was caught in this trap where if I care about what is happening, it’s devastating. And if I don’t care, I lose who I am as a person.”
At Shaw, he said, his squadron did not have a human performance team. “We just had a squadron bar.”
In February 2020, he got home from a 15-hour night shift, locked himself in his bedroom, put a cocked revolver to his head and through the door told his wife that he could not take it anymore. He was hospitalized, diagnosed with PTSD and medically retired.
Beyond their modest standard pensions, veterans with combat-related injuries, even injuries suffered in training, get special compensation worth about $1,000 per month. Mr. Miller does not qualify, because the Department of Veterans Affairs does not consider drone missions combat.
“It’s like they are saying all the people we killed somehow don’t really count,” he said. “And neither do we.”
A Question of Forgiveness
In February 2018, Captain Larson and his wife, Bree Larson, got into an argument. She was angry at him for staying out all night and smashed his phone, she recalled in an interview. He dragged her out of the house and locked her out, barely clothed. The Las Vegas police came, and when they asked if there were any drugs or weapons in the house, Ms. Larson told them about the bag of psilocybin mushrooms her husband kept in the garage.When she and Captain Larson had met in 2016, she said, he was already taking mushrooms once every few months, often with other pilots. He also took MDMA — known as ecstasy or molly — a few times a year. The drugs might have been illegal, but, he told her, they offered relief.
“He would just say he had a very stressful job and he needed it,” Ms. Larson said. “And you could tell. For weeks after, he was more relaxed, more focused, more loving. It seemed therapeutic.”
A growing number of combat veterans use the psychedelic drugs illicitly, amid mounting evidence that they are potent treatments for the psychological wounds of war. Both MDMA and psilocybin are expected to soon be approved for limited medical use by the Food and Drug Administration.
“It gave me a clarity and an honesty that allowed me to rewrite the narrative of my life,” according to a former Air Force officer who said he suffered from depression and moral injury after hundreds of Reaper missions; he asked not to be named in order to discuss the use of illegal drugs. “It led to some self-forgiveness. That was a huge first step.”
In Las Vegas, the civilian authorities were willing to forgive Captain Larson, but the Air Force charged him with a litany of crimes — drug possession and distribution, making false statements to Air Force investigators and a charge unique to the armed forces: conduct unbecoming of an officer. His squadron grounded him, forbade him to wear a flight suit and told him not to talk to fellow pilots. No one screened him for PTSD or other psychological injuries from his service, Ms. Larson said, adding, “I don’t think anyone realized it might be connected.”
As the prosecution plodded forward over two years, Captain Larson worked at the base gym and organized volunteer groups to do community service. His marriage was annulled. Struggling with his mental health, seeking productive ways to cope with the trauma, he read book after book on positive thinking and set up a special meditation room in his house, according to his girlfriend at the time, Becca Triano.
“I don’t know what he saw, what he dealt with,” she said. “What I did see toward the end was him really working hard to try to stay sane.”
The trial finally came in January, 2020. His former wife and a pilot friend testified about his drug use. The police produced the evidence. That was all.
After deliberating for a few hours on the morning of Jan. 17, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on nearly every count.
On the Run
The pilot would be sentenced after a break for lunch. His lawyer told him to be back in an hour. Instead he took off.He loaded his Jeep with food and clothes and sped away, convinced that he was facing a long prison sentence, Ms. Triano said. Within hours, the Air Force had a warrant out for his arrest.
Captain Larson headed southwest to Los Angeles and stayed the night with a friend, then started heading north. By the afternoon of Saturday, Jan. 18, he was driving by vineyards and redwood groves on U.S. Route 101 in Mendocino County, north of San Francisco, when the California Highway Patrol spotted his Jeep and pulled him over.
Captain Larson stopped and waited calmly for the officer to walk up to his window. Then he gunned it — down the highway and onto a narrow dirt logging road that snaked up into the mountains. After several miles, he pulled off into the trees and hid. The police could not find him, but they knew something he did not: All the roads in the canyon were dead ends, and officers were blocking the only way out.
Night fell. Nothing to do but wait.
In the morning, during a briefing at the bottom of the canyon, records show, Air Force agents explained to the Mendocino County sheriff’s deputies that the wanted man was a deserter who had fled a drug conviction, was probably armed and possibly suicidal.
The officers drove up the canyon and spotted tire tracks on a narrow turnoff. Agents crept up on foot until they spotted the blue Jeep in the trees, but did not risk going farther. The deputies had a better option, something that could get a view of the Jeep without any danger. A small drone soon launched into the sky.
Captain Larson was hiding behind a mossy boulder. There was no phone service deep in the canyon, no way to call for whatever hope or solace he might have conjured. He could only record a video message for his family members. One by one, he told them that he loved them. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I won’t go to prison, so I’m going to end this. This was always the plan.”
There was a lot he did not explain — things that have kept his family and friends wondering in the years since. He did not talk about the hundreds of secret missions or their impact. He did not say what it had felt like to have his commanders stand by quietly as civilian deaths became routine, then stay just as quiet when a decorated pilot was prosecuted for drug possession. He did not talk about the other pilots who had done the same drugs and then avoided him like a virus after he got caught.
Perhaps he was planning to say more, but as he spoke into the phone camera, he was interrupted by an angry buzzing, like a swarm of bees.
“I can hear the drones,” he said. “They’re looking for me.”
Had they found him alive, his pursuers would have been able to tell him this: In the end, the Air Force had decided not to sentence him to prison, only to dismissal.
But now, just as Captain Larson had done countless times, the officers could only study the drone footage and parse the evidence — slumped behind the boulder, shot with his own assault rifle — of another unintended death.
As I sit here and copy-paste this in, I realise this is very MATI. Will probably quit Blackwater posting unless it's actually of interest to anyone. That being said: this post is less horrifying content, more incompetence and astounding levels of not giving a fuck. I will tag the general theme of each section so you can filter through for the parts that interest you.
Najaf - April 4 2004 - incompetence
Thanks to de-Baathification, the streets were teeming with tens of thousands of Iraqi ex-servicemen and public servants. Add on the humanitarian hell-state, and the fact that PMCs were totally immune to prosecution (so consequence-free), it was a glorious loyalty vacuum where anyone offering meaningful assistance would be positively regarded.
Enter Muqtada al-Sadr, who established an impressive network across his areas of influence, occupying police stations, firing RPGs at American troops, and distributing food, water and medicine. ''The occupation is over!'' many yelled. ''We are now controlled by Sadr!'' Sadr formed a militia, the Mahdi Army, said to have at least ten thousand members, and established a base in Najaf, the main Shiite holy city. Naturally, the U.S. saw Sadr as an outlaw who needed to be stopped - "There was a conclusion early on that this guy was trouble and needed to be contained…But there was not a clear plan on how to go about it”. Bremer opposed the suggestion of negotiating with Sadr, “saying that [Sadr] faces three possibilities: He can surrender, he can be arrested by US troops, or he can be killed resisting that arrest”.
Iraqis, backed by the U.S. military, arrested Sadr’s lieutenants, seized his mosques, and shut down his newspaper, al-Hawza, because it violated a U.S.-imposed law “which prohibits newspapers from creating instability through inciting violence against the coalition forces,” as well as “inciting violence”. One of the articles said to incite violence carried the headline “Bremer follows in the steps of Saddam,” and provided examples of how the occupation was impinging on Iraqi rights.
CPA spokesman Al Elsadr told the Washington Post: “The false information in that paper was hurting stability. It was stirring up a lot of hate. It was making people think we were out to get them. If people actually believed that coalition forces were slaughtering civilians it could be real dangerous. That’s incitement.”
Al-Hawza was named for a Shiite seminary that historically encouraged revolt against occupation, particularly the 1920s British occupation, and its closing sparked massive protests and renewed support for Sadr, who had been losing popularity over time. Chants like "Just say the word, Moqtada…and we'll resume the 1920 revolution!" were a pretty good indicator of the success of Bremer’s call. Mahdi forces began taking over buildings in the area before moving towards the occupation HQ at Najaf that was being guarded by Blackwater.
Enter Muqtada al-Sadr, who established an impressive network across his areas of influence, occupying police stations, firing RPGs at American troops, and distributing food, water and medicine. ''The occupation is over!'' many yelled. ''We are now controlled by Sadr!'' Sadr formed a militia, the Mahdi Army, said to have at least ten thousand members, and established a base in Najaf, the main Shiite holy city. Naturally, the U.S. saw Sadr as an outlaw who needed to be stopped - "There was a conclusion early on that this guy was trouble and needed to be contained…But there was not a clear plan on how to go about it”. Bremer opposed the suggestion of negotiating with Sadr, “saying that [Sadr] faces three possibilities: He can surrender, he can be arrested by US troops, or he can be killed resisting that arrest”.
Iraqis, backed by the U.S. military, arrested Sadr’s lieutenants, seized his mosques, and shut down his newspaper, al-Hawza, because it violated a U.S.-imposed law “which prohibits newspapers from creating instability through inciting violence against the coalition forces,” as well as “inciting violence”. One of the articles said to incite violence carried the headline “Bremer follows in the steps of Saddam,” and provided examples of how the occupation was impinging on Iraqi rights.
CPA spokesman Al Elsadr told the Washington Post: “The false information in that paper was hurting stability. It was stirring up a lot of hate. It was making people think we were out to get them. If people actually believed that coalition forces were slaughtering civilians it could be real dangerous. That’s incitement.”
Al-Hawza was named for a Shiite seminary that historically encouraged revolt against occupation, particularly the 1920s British occupation, and its closing sparked massive protests and renewed support for Sadr, who had been losing popularity over time. Chants like "Just say the word, Moqtada…and we'll resume the 1920 revolution!" were a pretty good indicator of the success of Bremer’s call. Mahdi forces began taking over buildings in the area before moving towards the occupation HQ at Najaf that was being guarded by Blackwater.
Blackwater in action - real cowboy shit
On April 4, Najaf was protected by 8 Blackwater contractors, 3 Salvadorian soldiers, and 4 Marines. Since Blackwater were coordinating the defence, there is no official military report of how the battle went, and Blackwater’s VP Patrick Toohey (a former SEAL) didn’t do much to clarify, stating they had “fought and engaged every combatant with precise fire," before correcting himself to say that they were "conducting a security operation…the line is getting blurred”.
Sidebar on Patrick Toohey
Patrick claims 45 years of special ops experience after retiring from the Navy as a Captain. He served 8 years as a SEAL after graduating BUD/S in 1970, serving as an enlisted operator until he was commissioned in 1978. He reports assignments in UDT-21, UDT-22, SEAL Team Four, JSOC, U.S. Sixth Fleet, SEAL Team Six, as well as leading and serving in combat operations in Grenada, Beirut, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, and the Middle East. Imagine having all of that experience and still playing second fiddle to Erik Prince. Bananas.
Since Blackwater, he’s moved on to be the VP of Operations of Range 19, a multi-national security firm with a foundation in combating terrorism around the world. He’s also listed as “business development” for Fortem Genus, who work with the most innovative defense manufacturers to implement complete security solutions for governments, companies, and individuals worldwide. He also served as Corporate Director of Advanced Technology Special Operations Programs for Northrop Grumman, and served as a staff member on GWB’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. For unknown reasons, a FOIA request was made due to a “need to inform the public of his background experience”, but it was declined after a year’s wait since it relates to someone’s personal records.
Back to business
Corporal Lonnie Young was taking a nap after installing an antenna on the roof when the sounds of guards returning fire woke him. He proceeded to the roof alongside Blackwater contractors and, once he had a target in his sights, Young asked for permission to engage. With no CO on site, a Blackwater contractor allegedly gave permission. Young and Blackwater assert that the Iraqis fired first, though there is a contention that forces guarding the HQ fired percussion rounds into the crowd and pissed everybody off.
From there, they engaged in a gun battle against “hundreds” of Mahdi militia, with Young stating that he had to stop shooting every fifteen minutes to cool his gun, firing 700-800 rounds before needing to pause. After an Army captain was shot, Young provided first aid and retrieved additional ammo, then tended to a Blackwater contractor who was shot in the jaw with blood spurting 5-6 feet, Young pinching his carotid closed. Another Marine stated that “all of the Blackwater guys told me that if it hadn’t been for [Young], they may indeed have been overrun.” In the Najaf video included in my first Blackwater post, Blackwater contractors are seen directing the soldiers and giving instructions on weapons use. After thousands of rounds fired, ''they were down to single digits of ammo, less than 10 rounds a man.'' After allegedly attempting to contact military commanders, Blackwater made contact with Bremer’s staff to pull his three Blackwater helicopters to drop ammo and retrieve a now-wounded Young (and seemingly leaving the guy shot in the face behind, since I can only find sources saying one evac). Eventually, the U.S. dropped a JDAM, and Blackwater supplied additional contractors. The generally accepted kill count was 20-30, with about 200 wounded, though Young said it was hundreds.
Interestingly, Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt in the CPA briefing did not acknowledge Blackwater’s presence, labelling them as coalition soldiers:
Side note - Ben Thomas, who was filmed in the Najaf video, went on an epic rant on Get Off The X in 2006 as “Mookie Spicoli”, chimping out over people critiquing Blackwater’s performance. While I don’t have a capture of that, I do have this:
All of this to say: Blackwater were running the show at Najaf. Blackwater were giving orders to Marines. As Blackwater’s VP put it, “this is a whole new issue in military affairs. Think about it. You’re actually contracting civilians to do military-like duties.”
Post-Fallujah - DGAF
So, your guys have literally been ripped apart in Fallujah. Another clump narrowly avoided death by mob thanks to the hard work of an antenna installer. What’s your next move?
A series of Congressional meetings with at least four members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as Tom DeLay (House majority leader), Porter Goss (chair of the House Intelligence Committee and future CIA director), Duncan Hunter (chair of the House Armed Services Committee), and Bill Young (chair of the House Appropriations Committee). Why? Likely related to reports that “Blackwater was leading a lobbying effort by private security firms and other contractors to try and block congressional or Pentagon efforts to bring their companies and employees under the same justice code” as active duty personnel. Ultimately, efforts failed, with the 2007 defence-spending authorisation including language allowing contractors to be court-martialled, but the effort was there. Still, Blackwater landed a massive contract to protect US diplomats and facilities. Bremner granted immunity for whatever happened (and will happen with Blackwater) in Iraq, and county officials decided to push through permissions for the construction of a 64,000-square-foot building, set to be Blackwater’s international headquarters, that had been blocked for six years. Great venue for them to host the SWAT Olympics/World SWAT Challenge. Despite it being televised on ESPN, I cannot find any surviving video footage. Unclear who won, but encouraging that the local guys had such success:
Contractor Quality - DGAF + horrifying
Fun and games aside, “some military leaders [were] openly grumbling that the lure of $500 to $1,500 a day is siphoning away some of their most experienced Special Operations people at the very time their services are most in demand.” As competitors emerged, the quality became even more variable, and people started to get antsy about who was hired - like former apartheid security forces: “my reaction was one of horror that that sort of person is employed in a situation where what should be encouraged is the introduction of democracy”...“these firms are hiring anyone they can get. Sure, some of them are special forces, but some of them are good, and some are not.” PMCs "[weren’t] required to have an intelligence collection or analytical capability in house. It's always assumed that the government is going to provide intelligence about threats…they are flying blind, often guessing about places that they shouldn't go."
Sidebar: contractors from Titan Corporation and CACI were implicated in Abu Ghraib, having provided interrogators and translators who “were either directly or indirectly responsible for the abuses at Abu Ghraib”. More than a third of CACI’s interrogators had no formal military training. A class action followed, alleging that Titan and CACI worked with US officials to “humiliate, torture, and abuse persons” to win more contracts for interrogation services.
A sample of the matters raised (in addition to physical and mental abuse of detainees, destruction of evidence, prevention of reporting to the Red Cross and general skulduggery):
In 2024, CACI was ordered to pay three Iraqi plaintiffs $3M each in compensatory damages and $11M each in punitive damages. This came after CACI attempted to have the case dismissed more than 20 times. No criminal charges have been filed.
International recruiting - horrifying
Naturally, with operations expanding, Blackwater needed more guys. While using foreign reinforcements isn’t unusual, their decisions on who to employ were unconventional, to say the least.
School of Americas Context
Founded in 1946 as the U.S. Army School of the Americas (now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), SOA was established to train armed forces from Latin American countries on U.S. military doctrine. More than 60,000 personnel have attended SOA. In saying that, between 1970 and 1979, cadets from dictatorships (Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, Peru, Honduras) made up 63% of SOA’s students. In the 1980s, Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia made up 72% of cadets. By 1984, when the Panama Canal Treaty expelled SOA (they relocated to Fort Benning), criticisms about human rights concerns were out there. SOA added content on human rights in 1989, which constituted 4-40 hours of training for cadets, and 16 hours for instructors preparing to teach.
In 1993, a list of 60,000 graduates was released, though I can’t seem to find a complete upload. Still, notable SOA alum include:
ARGENTINA
- Emilio Massera - Navy CIC and Junta leader who installed an interrogation and torture centre that held up to 30,000 enemies of the state. Detainees were tortured, killed, and taken on “death flights” where they would be dropped from the plane into a river. Prior to his death, he had an international arrest warrant, but Argentina would not extradite him.
- Jorge Rafael Videla Rodondo - Army commander and Junta leader who participated in the above, as well as other terrible war crimes. He was given a life sentence for crimes against humanity, though he was pardoned, but then was taken back into military custody.
- Hugo Banzer Suarez (who was included in SOA’s Wall of Fame) - general and dictator who led a regime that arrested at least 3,000 political opponents, drove thousands to seek asylum, and tortured and disappeared around 2,000 political prisoners in “the horror chambers”.
Sidebar on Chile: for the unfamiliar, General Pinochet came to power through a military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the first Marxist to be elected president of an American country, who the CIA had bet against. The Nixon administration aggressively stoked unrest leading up to the assassination - Ambassador Korrey reportedly told Chilean authorities, “not a nut or a bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean to utmost deprivation and poverty”. Allende allegedly died by suicide, and Pinochet assumed power - “the [U.S. government] wishes to make clear its desire to cooperate with the military Junta and to assist in any appropriate way…We welcome General Pinchoet’s expression of Junta desire for strengthening ties between Chile and U.S.” The CIA estimated between 2,000 to 10,000 deaths resulted from the coup and subsequent clean-up.
- Augusto Pinochet - while not a SOA attendee, his influence is evident - the Commandant displayed a ceremonial sword and a note from Pinochet until at least 1991.
- SOA graduates constitute 1 of every 7 members of DINA, the intelligence agency responsible for the worst of the human rights abuses in Pinochet’s years.
- Pablmo Belmar - Colonel and 1987 guest instructor, directly implicated in the 1976 torture and murder of UN official Carmelo Soria, whose neck was broken after arrest and torture by Dina. As a SOA guest instructor, Belmar delivered the human rights component to cadets.
- Miguel Krassnoff - first lieutenant cited for crimes of genocide, terrorism, torture, and illegal arrest; implicated in the death by torture of Carmelo Soria (see above).
- Armando Fernandez Larios - 2IC to the General who was charged with assassinating General Carlos Prats via carbombing, and indicted in 1979 by an American grand jury for participating in assassinating Orlando Letelier, also via a car bomb.
- Alvaro Quijano, who was an SOA instructor of peacekeeping operations and democratic sustainment courses in 2003/4, who went on to provide security for Diego Montoya, cartel leader and druglord on the FBI’s most wanted list.
- Luis Bernando Urbina Sanchez - rap sheet too long to detail. Active in paramilitary death squads (or as he put it, self-defence groups), assassinations, torture, and disappearances.
At this point, my fingers are falling off, so if you are interested, you can view an extensive write-up here.
Blackwater
Chilean forces
The biggest contingent of Blackwater’s foreign personnel came from Chile, former commandos having trained or served under Pinochet’s regime.
Erik Prince contracted Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle (aka Mike), a staunch Pinochet defender who had worked as a translator for the Chilean and U.S. militaries in the ‘90s before becoming a liaison coordinating deals between Latin American countries and U.S. weapons manufacturers. Pizarro contends that Pinchoet’s army was “exactly the same war on terror” as Bush’s, and that the long list of human rights grievances “is a flat-out lie” (interview between Pizarro & Jeremy Scahill, 2006). He agrees that there were human rights abuses “by Chilean standards”, but “by Colombian standards, we were having, I don’t know, a picnic” (ibid). After resigning as a Marine in 1999, he took up weapons sales and marketing through his company Red Tactica before stepping back in 2003 to be a war commentator on Spanish CNN. Pizarro met Erik in 2003 and was so thrilled by their adult playground - sorry, HQ - that he sold his expertise to strike a deal in arranging and shipping over Latin American ex-special ops.
It worked, since Erik had served as a SEAL in Chile and “had a high regard for Chilean forces”. Pizarro himself said that salaries were as high as $3,000 a month, much higher than the Chilean military’s $400, and he received over a thousand applications. News spread, with accusations that Pizarro was poaching current servicemen, and there were calls from parliamentarians to investigate him, since legally, only the Chilean Defence Ministry can call on active military to work abroad. Regardless, Pizarro prepared a showcase of 300 men for Blackwater personnel to evaluate, and was then invited to bring 100 men to the U.S. for further evaluation. Somehow, only 78 made it to North Carolina (let’s not look too closely there) and spent ten days at the HQ. 77 passed. One was sent home for having an attitude problem.
Ten days later, the first 78 Chileans were sent by Blackwater to Baghdad. The group had an average age of 43 and were “highly seasoned commandos” who did not require further training. As Pizarro put it, “We have been successful. We’re not profiting from death. We’re not killing people.” Even so, newspapers reported in June 2004 (4 months in) that approximately 37 Chileans working for Blackwater were Pinochet veterans, who were allowed amnesty in Chile only if they remained retired from the military. Blackwater continued, and in just over two years, Pizarro had provided 756 Chilean soldiers. As Blackwater President Gary Jackson put it, “We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals - the Chilean commandos are very, very professional and they fit within the Blackwater system…We didn't just come down and say, 'You and you and you, come work for us.' They were all vetted in Chile and all of them have military backgrounds. This is not the Boy Scouts.” Naturally, Pizarro registered his company in Uruguay to avoid Chilean legal hold-ups about illegal activities and mercenaries…as well as public discontent, since Chile had gone as far as to publicly oppose the Iraq war in its rotating spot on the UNSC.
Pizarro started a new company in 2004, Global Guards, which sought to recruit helicopter pilots ($12,000/mo.) and mechanics ($4,000/mo.) to run air taxis in and out of Iraq. Very lucrative, except for the fact that Pizarro began working with Blackwater’s competitor, Triple Canopy, and was promptly dropped. Pizarro said that he had been giving his “tier one” guys to Blackwater, and giving the lower quality personnel to Triple Canopy, but there was no reconciliation. Blackwater began independently negotiating contracts with Pizarro’s men. From 2005, Blackwater looked to source cheaper men who reportedly signed for a third of the Chilean price - personnel from El Salvador, Peru, Nigeria, Jordan, Fiji.
As for Pizarro - my best interpretation of translated court documents - for violating laws about security guards, he was sentenced to 61 days imprisonment, a ban on any activities relating to security guard work (?), and a monetary fine. Red Tactica was charged with criminal association as it constituted a group whose purpose was to commit crimes.
Other forces: Coalition of the Billing
Allegedly (since I cannot find a copy of “Atrapados en Bagdad," Semana 1/268 (August 2006)) to verify, Blackwater massively underpaid Colombian men - $34/day after responding to advertisements for $6,000-$7,000/mo. made by Blackwater’s firm, ID Systems. After telling Blackwater staff they would not work for so little, Blackwater allegedly took their return plane tickets and threatened to kick them off base. Their spokesperson DGAF about solving it - “one contract expired, another task order was bid upon, and so the numbers are different.”
With Chile out of the way, Blackwater looked to the Hondurans secretly training at the army base in Lepaterique…the same base the CIA used to train the Nigerian Contras, and the HQ of Battalion 316, the unit responsible for assassinations and torture of political opponents in the 1980s. No need to get into Ambassador Negroponte’s impressive level of DGAF for human rights abuses while he was assigned to Honduras (81-85), just to note that he has done business with Blackwater - while ambassador to Iraq in 2004 (replacing Bremner as the highest ranking U.S. civilian in Iraq), as Director of National Intelligence from 2005-2007, and as Deputy Secretary of State from 2007-2009, in arranging and using Blackwater’s services to guard diplomats.
Hondaruan instructors “explained to [personnel] that where we were going everyone would be our enemy, and we’d have to look at them that way, because they would want to kill us, and the gringos too…so we’d have to be heartless when it was up to us to kill someone, even it was a child.” When Honduran authorities got wind of the training, and that Chileans were seemingly in charge, the training company was kicked out of the country. Over 100 Hondurans ended up with Blackwater in Iraq, but the exact number isn’t clear.
tl;dr bremner was actually not the worst character in the saga
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2024
Your posts are great and I read them very closely. You even posted the Epic Ben Thooms pasta. Takes a bit of time to read everything and reply since it's full of references. Anyone who says it's not of interest will be canoed by yours truly after I grow an appropriately large oper8tor beard.
Seth posted Bragg Casualty reports. 51 soldiers died at Bragg in 2023. Much more than any base. The circumstances of the deaths are redacted. There's speculation some may have been sent to Ukraine and died there. 22 of the deaths are classified as "Self-inflicted" which is a lot. But there's speculation of murder as well in those cases.
The photographic choice of putting all the files of the casualty reports together was a nice touch to show how many people actually died, taking the abstraction out of the number 51.
Seth thinks they are in Ukraine because Jim Reese told him that. From earlier ITT for those who don't remember, Jim Reese is a former Delta officer who revealed specific left/right turns at Delta selection on a podcast, and led a PMC company that tried to infiltrate a hippie environmentalist protest and immediately got made. He likes to lie about shit to make himself seem more important, and get media spots. He told Seth he commanded Billy Lavigne at Delta. Problem being that Lavigne hadn't even gone to selection by the time Reese retired.
>be American (Delta Force Operator)
>get shot
This is perhaps the one target in Mexico they could hit without taking casualties.
In order of likelihood here's what's killing The Fort Bragg soldiers IMO:
- Drug overdoses
- Suicides
- Study sessions with young scholars
Last edited:
- Joined
- Nov 22, 2024
Speaking of Israel, Bob is seeing things - Noticing Patterns let's say...
Even a random Mossad twitter immediately replied, lol.
Maybe the best Shawn Ryan show yet. Jay is incredibly articulate for someone who's been through as much as he has.
Hey Jesse, if you're going to call people out for bad shooting and LE training, gotta call out this too. Massive steel and soooo sloooow......
Hey Jesse, if you're going to call people out for bad shooting and LE training, gotta call out this too. Massive steel and soooo sloooow......
Poki Moki
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Did Seth Harp have some bad experience when he was in the Army? His comment weeks ago about 2/7 marines being jodied and then when he was basically joking around about the dead Delta guy getting cheated on make me think he has a personal hatred of the whole thing.
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2025
"There is a Blackwater shiftleader in country right now who has a permanent lisp cause of me"
"I'm fucking your wife up the ass this year"
These guys always crack me up when they sperg out online with the middle school insults. I'M A BIG TOUGH MAN! I'VE HURT PEOPLE! FUCK YOUR WIFE!
They seem to think just because they hatcheted a few corpses one time in 2008 — at least one of which might have been a fighting-age male if we're generous — that people walk around in fear of them. They think their "violent presence" (nurtured in the all-male Team Houses of their hormonally charged 20s) comes across over the Internet.
Sorry guys, it does not. Anyone can post hard words online. In fact most people can do it better than these CTE-addled football-tier brainiacs.
Try me in real life, Thomas, get your skull fractured like a spider's web. Get your broken teeth extracted from my fist before I shove it up your wife's cunt.
See how hard that is to write? I must be a big tough alpha male writing words like that on the Internet. I might be former tier one myself...
I was wondering similar. That episode was around the time he was on a strange road trip to build a log cabin with a male journalist friend of his, he may have just been tweeting in a loose mood with sex on the mind.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2019
Posting these as former US Special Operators are named as being involved.
The alleged company behind the security services is a company called "UG Solutions," based out of North Carolina.
I was honestly surprised to find that Blackwater / Academi is not the main contractor for this.
AP article pasted below, two sources included. Imagine going through all that grueling training only to use it to slaughter unarmed civilians. What a fucking clown show.
AP Link (Archive)
Haaretz Link (Archive)
The alleged company behind the security services is a company called "UG Solutions," based out of North Carolina.
I was honestly surprised to find that Blackwater / Academi is not the main contractor for this.
AP article pasted below, two sources included. Imagine going through all that grueling training only to use it to slaughter unarmed civilians. What a fucking clown show.
BEERSHEBA, Israel (AP) — American contractors guarding aid distribution sites in Gaza are using live ammunition and stun grenades as hungry Palestinians scramble for food, according to accounts and videos obtained by The Associated Press.
Two U.S. contractors, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were revealing their employers’ internal operations, said they were coming forward because they were disturbed by what they considered dangerous and irresponsible practices. They said the security staff hired were often unqualified, unvetted, heavily armed and seemed to have an open license to do whatever they wished.
They said their colleagues regularly lobbed stun grenades and pepper spray in the direction of the Palestinians. One contractor said bullets were fired in all directions — in the air, into the ground and at times toward the Palestinians, recalling at least one instance where he thought someone had been hit.
“There are innocent people being hurt. Badly. Needlessly,” the contractor said.
He said American staff on the sites monitor those coming to seek food and document anyone considered “suspicious.” He said they share such information with the Israeli military.
Videos provided by one of the contractors and taken at the sites show hundreds of Palestinians crowded between metal gates, jostling for aid amid the sound of bullets, stun grenades and the sting of pepper spray. Other videos include conversation between English-speaking men discussing how to disperse crowds and encouraging each other after bursts of gunfire.
The testimonies from the contractors — combined with the videos, internal reports and text messages obtained by the AP — offer a rare glimpse inside the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the newly created, secretive American organization backed by Israel to feed the Gaza Strip’s population. Last month, the U.S. government pledged $30 million for the group to continue operations — the first known U.S. donation to the group, whose other funding sources remain opaque.
Journalists have been unable to access the GHF sites, located in Israeli military-controlled zones. The AP cannot independently verify the contractors’ stories.
A spokesperson for Safe Reach Solutions, the logistics company subcontracted by GHF, told the AP that there have been no serious injuries at any of their sites to date. In scattered incidents, security professionals fired live rounds into the ground and away from civilians to get their attention. That happened in the early days at the “the height of desperation where crowd control measures were necessary for the safety and security of civilians,” the spokesperson said.
Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians are living through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, setting off the 21-month war, Israel has bombarded and laid siege to the strip, leaving many teetering on the edge of famine, according to food security experts.
For 2 1/2 months before GHF’s opening in May, Israel blocked all food, water and medicine from entering Gaza, claiming Hamas was stealing the aid being transported under a preexisting system coordinated by the United Nations. It now wants GHF to replace that U.N. system. The U.N. says its Gaza aid operations do not involve armed guards.
Over 57,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the war erupted, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants.
GHF is an American organization, registered in Delaware and established in February to distribute humanitarian aid during the ongoing Gaza humanitarian crisis. Since the GHF sites began operating more than a month ago, Palestinians say Israeli troops open fire almost every day toward crowds on roads heading to the distribution points, through Israeli military zones. Several hundred people have been killed and hundreds more wounded, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and witnesses.
In response, Israel’s military says it fires only warning shots and is investigating reports of civilian harm. It denies deliberately shooting at any innocent civilians and says it’s examining how to reduce “friction with the population” in the areas surrounding the distribution centers.
AP’s reporting for this article focuses on what is happening at the sites themselves. Palestinians arriving at the sites say they are caught between Israeli and American fire, said the contractor who shared videos with the AP.
“We have come here to get food for our families. We have nothing,” he recounted Palestinians telling him. “Why does the (Israeli) army shoot at us? Why do you shoot at us?”
A spokesperson for the GHF said there are people with a “vested interest” in seeing it fail and are willing to do or say almost anything to make that happen. The spokesperson said the team is composed of seasoned humanitarian, logistics and security professionals with deep experience on the ground. The group says it has distributed the equivalent of more than 50 million meals in Gaza in its food boxes of staples.
GHF says that it has consistently shown compassionate engagement with the people of Gaza.
Throughout the war, aid distribution has been marred by chaos. Gangs have looted trucks of aid traveling to distribution centers and mobs of desperate people have also offloaded trucks before they’ve reached their destination. Earlier this month, at least 51 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 wounded while waiting for the U.N. and commercial trucks to enter the territory, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and a local hospital. Israel’s military acknowledged several casualties as soldiers opened fire on the approaching crowd and said authorities would investigate.
AP spoke to the two contractors for UG Solutions, an American outfit subcontracted to hire security personnel for the distribution sites. They said bullets, stun grenades and pepper spray were used at nearly every distribution, even if there was no threat.
Videos of aid being dispensed at the sites seen by the AP appear to back up the frenetic scenes the contractors described. The footage was taken within the first two weeks of its distributions — about halfway into the operations.
In one video, what appear to be heavily armed American security contractors at one of the sites in Gaza discuss how to disperse Palestinians nearby. One is heard saying he has arranged for a “show of force” by Israeli tanks.
“I don’t want this to be too aggressive,” he adds, “because this is calming down.”
At that moment, bursts of gunfire erupt close by, at least 15 shots. “Whoo! Whoo!” one contractor yelps.
“I think you hit one,” one says.
Then comes a shout: “Hell, yeah, boy!”
The camera’s view is obscured by a large dirt mound.
The contractor who took the video told AP that he saw other contractors shooting in the direction of Palestinians who had just collected their food and were departing. The men shot both from a tower above the site and from atop the mound, he said. The shooting began because contractors wanted to disperse the crowd, he said, but it was unclear why they continued shooting as people were walking away.
The camera does not show who was shooting or what was being shot at. But the contractor who filmed it said he watched another contractor fire at the Palestinians and then saw a man about 60 yards (meters) away — in the same direction where the bullets were fired — drop to the ground.
This happened at the same time the men were heard talking — effectively egging each other on, he said.
In other videos furnished by the contractor, men in grey uniforms — colleagues, he said — can be seen trying to clear Palestinians who are squeezed into a narrow, fenced-in passage leading to one of the centers. The men fire pepper spray and throw stun grenades that detonate amid the crowd. The sound of gunfire can be heard. The contractor who took the video said the security personnel usually fire at the ground near the crowds or from nearby towers over their heads.
During a single distribution in June, contractors used 37 stun grenades, 27 rubber-and-smoke “scat shell” projectiles and 60 cans of pepper spray, according to internal text communications shared with the AP.
That count does not include live ammunition, the contractor who provided the videos said.
One photo shared by that contractor shows a woman lying in a donkey cart after he said she was hit in the head with part of a stun grenade.
An internal report by Safe Reach Solutions, the logistics company subcontracted by GHF to run the sites, found that aid seekers were injured during 31% of the distributions that took place in a two-week period in June. The report did not specify the number of injuries or the cause. SRS told the AP the report refers to non-serious injuries.
More videos show frenzied scenes of Palestinians running to collect leftover food boxes at one site. Hundreds of young men crowd near low metal barriers, transferring food from boxes to bags while contractors on the other side of the barriers tell them to stay back.
Some Palestinians wince and cough from pepper spray. “You tasting that pepper spray? Yuck,” one man close to the camera can be heard saying in English.
SRS acknowledged that it’s dealing with large, hungry populations, but said the environment is secure, controlled, and ensures people can get the aid they need safely.
To confirm the footage is from the sites, AP geolocated the videos using aerial imagery. The AP also had the videos analyzed by two audio forensic experts who said they could identify live ammunition — including machine-gun fire — coming from the sites, in most cases within 50 to 60 meters of the camera’s microphone.
In the video where the men are heard egging each other on, the echo and acoustics of the shots indicate they’re fired from a position close to the microphone, said Rob Maher, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Montana State University and an author and research expert in audio forensic analysis. Maher and the other analyst, Steven Beck, owner of Beck Audio Forensics, said there was no indication that the videos’ audio had been tampered with.
The analysts said that the bursts of gunfire and the pop sequences in some of the videos indicated that guns were panning in different directions and were not repeatedly aimed at a single target. They could not pinpoint exactly where the shots were coming from nor who was shooting.
GHF says the Israeli military is not deployed at the aid distribution sites. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an army spokesman, said the army is not stationed at the sites or within their immediate proximity, especially during operating hours. He said they’re run by an American company and have their own security.
One of the contractors who had been on the sites said he’d never felt a real or perceived threat by Hamas there.
SRS says that Hamas has openly threatened its aid workers and civilians receiving aid. It did not specify where people were threatened.
According to the contractor who took the videos, the Israeli army is leveraging the distribution system to access information.
Both contractors said that cameras monitor distributions at each site and that American analysts and Israeli soldiers sit in a control room where the footage is screened in real time. The control room, they said, is housed in a shipping container on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The contractor who took the videos said some cameras are equipped with facial recognition software. In live shots of the sites seen by the AP, some videos streams are labeled “analytics” — those were the ones that had the facial recognition software, said the contractor.
If a person of interest is seen on camera — and their information is already in the system — their name and age pops up on the computer screen, said the contractor. Israeli soldiers watching the screens take notes and cross-check the analysts’ information with their own drone footage from the sites, he said.
The contractor said he did not know the source of the data in the facial recognition system. The AP could not independently verify his information.
An internal SRS report from June seen by the AP said that its intel team would circulate to staff a “POI Mugs Card,” that showed photos of Palestinians taken at the sites who were deemed persons of interest.
The contractor said he and other staff were told by SRS to photograph anyone who looked “out of place.” But the criteria were not specified, he said. The contractor said the photos were also added to the facial recognition database. He did not know what was done with the information.
SRS said accusations that it gathers intelligence are false and that it has never used biometrics. It said it coordinates movements with Israeli authorities, a requirement for any aid group in Gaza.
An Israeli security official who was not named in line with the army’s protocol, said there are no security screening systems developed or operated by the army within the aid sites.
The several hundred contractors hired by UG Solutions landed in Israel in mid-May, not long before the first GHF site opened on May 26.
The rollout was jumbled and lacked leadership, the two contractors told the AP. Some of the men had been recruited only days prior via email asking if they wanted to work in Gaza. Many had no combat experience and were not properly trained in offensive weapons, they said.
SRS did not provide the staff with draft rules of engagement until three days after distributions started, they said. The draft rules, seen by the AP, say deadly force may be used only under extreme necessity and non-lethal weapons may be used in an extreme situation on unarmed individuals who are physically violent.
The Palestinians seen in the videos don’t appear to be physically aggressive. SRS says there have been occasional altercations at the sites between aid seekers, but none have involved its staff.
Each contractor was equipped with a pistol, stun grenades, tear gas and an Israeli-made automatic rifle capable of firing dozens of rounds within seconds, said the contractor who took the videos.
In an email from May shared with the AP by a third party, one high-ranking contractor wrote to the head of UG Solutions and called the operation “amateur hour.” He wrote that the sites did not have enough staff or resources making them “not sustainable” and “not safe,” according to the email, seen by the AP.
The two contractors said none of the men in Israel working for UG Solutions were tested to see if they could handle a gun safely. One said the rushed rollout also meant not everyone could “zero” their weapon — adjust it to one’s personal specifications to ensure proper aim. Military experts say not zeroing a weapon poses a significant risk.
A spokesperson for UG Solutions, Drew O’Brien, said UG has an extensive recruiting and training process, including “a detailed application process, screening by experts, reference checks, background checks and weapons proficiency.” The group said it prides itself on repeated quality control checks once missions are underway.
O’Brien said the group was unaware of video showing gunfire from someone believed to be a UG Solutions contractor. He said he couldn’t comment on the allegations without seeing the videos.
The two contractors warned that if the organization continues as is, more lives will be at risk. “If operations continue in this manner, innocent aid seekers will continue to be needlessly injured,” said the contractor who took the videos. “And possibly killed.”
Two U.S. contractors, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were revealing their employers’ internal operations, said they were coming forward because they were disturbed by what they considered dangerous and irresponsible practices. They said the security staff hired were often unqualified, unvetted, heavily armed and seemed to have an open license to do whatever they wished.
They said their colleagues regularly lobbed stun grenades and pepper spray in the direction of the Palestinians. One contractor said bullets were fired in all directions — in the air, into the ground and at times toward the Palestinians, recalling at least one instance where he thought someone had been hit.
“There are innocent people being hurt. Badly. Needlessly,” the contractor said.
He said American staff on the sites monitor those coming to seek food and document anyone considered “suspicious.” He said they share such information with the Israeli military.
Videos provided by one of the contractors and taken at the sites show hundreds of Palestinians crowded between metal gates, jostling for aid amid the sound of bullets, stun grenades and the sting of pepper spray. Other videos include conversation between English-speaking men discussing how to disperse crowds and encouraging each other after bursts of gunfire.
The testimonies from the contractors — combined with the videos, internal reports and text messages obtained by the AP — offer a rare glimpse inside the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the newly created, secretive American organization backed by Israel to feed the Gaza Strip’s population. Last month, the U.S. government pledged $30 million for the group to continue operations — the first known U.S. donation to the group, whose other funding sources remain opaque.
Journalists have been unable to access the GHF sites, located in Israeli military-controlled zones. The AP cannot independently verify the contractors’ stories.
A spokesperson for Safe Reach Solutions, the logistics company subcontracted by GHF, told the AP that there have been no serious injuries at any of their sites to date. In scattered incidents, security professionals fired live rounds into the ground and away from civilians to get their attention. That happened in the early days at the “the height of desperation where crowd control measures were necessary for the safety and security of civilians,” the spokesperson said.
Aid operation is controversial
Gaza’s more than 2 million Palestinians are living through a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, setting off the 21-month war, Israel has bombarded and laid siege to the strip, leaving many teetering on the edge of famine, according to food security experts.
For 2 1/2 months before GHF’s opening in May, Israel blocked all food, water and medicine from entering Gaza, claiming Hamas was stealing the aid being transported under a preexisting system coordinated by the United Nations. It now wants GHF to replace that U.N. system. The U.N. says its Gaza aid operations do not involve armed guards.
Over 57,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the war erupted, according to the territory’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and militants.
GHF is an American organization, registered in Delaware and established in February to distribute humanitarian aid during the ongoing Gaza humanitarian crisis. Since the GHF sites began operating more than a month ago, Palestinians say Israeli troops open fire almost every day toward crowds on roads heading to the distribution points, through Israeli military zones. Several hundred people have been killed and hundreds more wounded, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and witnesses.
In response, Israel’s military says it fires only warning shots and is investigating reports of civilian harm. It denies deliberately shooting at any innocent civilians and says it’s examining how to reduce “friction with the population” in the areas surrounding the distribution centers.
AP’s reporting for this article focuses on what is happening at the sites themselves. Palestinians arriving at the sites say they are caught between Israeli and American fire, said the contractor who shared videos with the AP.
“We have come here to get food for our families. We have nothing,” he recounted Palestinians telling him. “Why does the (Israeli) army shoot at us? Why do you shoot at us?”
A spokesperson for the GHF said there are people with a “vested interest” in seeing it fail and are willing to do or say almost anything to make that happen. The spokesperson said the team is composed of seasoned humanitarian, logistics and security professionals with deep experience on the ground. The group says it has distributed the equivalent of more than 50 million meals in Gaza in its food boxes of staples.
GHF says that it has consistently shown compassionate engagement with the people of Gaza.
Throughout the war, aid distribution has been marred by chaos. Gangs have looted trucks of aid traveling to distribution centers and mobs of desperate people have also offloaded trucks before they’ve reached their destination. Earlier this month, at least 51 Palestinians were killed and more than 200 wounded while waiting for the U.N. and commercial trucks to enter the territory, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry and a local hospital. Israel’s military acknowledged several casualties as soldiers opened fire on the approaching crowd and said authorities would investigate.
Videos, texts, internal reports document havoc at food sites
AP spoke to the two contractors for UG Solutions, an American outfit subcontracted to hire security personnel for the distribution sites. They said bullets, stun grenades and pepper spray were used at nearly every distribution, even if there was no threat.
Videos of aid being dispensed at the sites seen by the AP appear to back up the frenetic scenes the contractors described. The footage was taken within the first two weeks of its distributions — about halfway into the operations.
In one video, what appear to be heavily armed American security contractors at one of the sites in Gaza discuss how to disperse Palestinians nearby. One is heard saying he has arranged for a “show of force” by Israeli tanks.
“I don’t want this to be too aggressive,” he adds, “because this is calming down.”
At that moment, bursts of gunfire erupt close by, at least 15 shots. “Whoo! Whoo!” one contractor yelps.
“I think you hit one,” one says.
Then comes a shout: “Hell, yeah, boy!”
The camera’s view is obscured by a large dirt mound.
The contractor who took the video told AP that he saw other contractors shooting in the direction of Palestinians who had just collected their food and were departing. The men shot both from a tower above the site and from atop the mound, he said. The shooting began because contractors wanted to disperse the crowd, he said, but it was unclear why they continued shooting as people were walking away.
The camera does not show who was shooting or what was being shot at. But the contractor who filmed it said he watched another contractor fire at the Palestinians and then saw a man about 60 yards (meters) away — in the same direction where the bullets were fired — drop to the ground.
This happened at the same time the men were heard talking — effectively egging each other on, he said.
In other videos furnished by the contractor, men in grey uniforms — colleagues, he said — can be seen trying to clear Palestinians who are squeezed into a narrow, fenced-in passage leading to one of the centers. The men fire pepper spray and throw stun grenades that detonate amid the crowd. The sound of gunfire can be heard. The contractor who took the video said the security personnel usually fire at the ground near the crowds or from nearby towers over their heads.
During a single distribution in June, contractors used 37 stun grenades, 27 rubber-and-smoke “scat shell” projectiles and 60 cans of pepper spray, according to internal text communications shared with the AP.
That count does not include live ammunition, the contractor who provided the videos said.
One photo shared by that contractor shows a woman lying in a donkey cart after he said she was hit in the head with part of a stun grenade.
An internal report by Safe Reach Solutions, the logistics company subcontracted by GHF to run the sites, found that aid seekers were injured during 31% of the distributions that took place in a two-week period in June. The report did not specify the number of injuries or the cause. SRS told the AP the report refers to non-serious injuries.
More videos show frenzied scenes of Palestinians running to collect leftover food boxes at one site. Hundreds of young men crowd near low metal barriers, transferring food from boxes to bags while contractors on the other side of the barriers tell them to stay back.
Some Palestinians wince and cough from pepper spray. “You tasting that pepper spray? Yuck,” one man close to the camera can be heard saying in English.
SRS acknowledged that it’s dealing with large, hungry populations, but said the environment is secure, controlled, and ensures people can get the aid they need safely.
Verifying the videos with audio analysis
To confirm the footage is from the sites, AP geolocated the videos using aerial imagery. The AP also had the videos analyzed by two audio forensic experts who said they could identify live ammunition — including machine-gun fire — coming from the sites, in most cases within 50 to 60 meters of the camera’s microphone.
In the video where the men are heard egging each other on, the echo and acoustics of the shots indicate they’re fired from a position close to the microphone, said Rob Maher, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Montana State University and an author and research expert in audio forensic analysis. Maher and the other analyst, Steven Beck, owner of Beck Audio Forensics, said there was no indication that the videos’ audio had been tampered with.
The analysts said that the bursts of gunfire and the pop sequences in some of the videos indicated that guns were panning in different directions and were not repeatedly aimed at a single target. They could not pinpoint exactly where the shots were coming from nor who was shooting.
GHF says the Israeli military is not deployed at the aid distribution sites. Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an army spokesman, said the army is not stationed at the sites or within their immediate proximity, especially during operating hours. He said they’re run by an American company and have their own security.
One of the contractors who had been on the sites said he’d never felt a real or perceived threat by Hamas there.
SRS says that Hamas has openly threatened its aid workers and civilians receiving aid. It did not specify where people were threatened.
American analysts and Israeli soldiers work side by side, contractors say
According to the contractor who took the videos, the Israeli army is leveraging the distribution system to access information.
Both contractors said that cameras monitor distributions at each site and that American analysts and Israeli soldiers sit in a control room where the footage is screened in real time. The control room, they said, is housed in a shipping container on the Israeli side of the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza.
The contractor who took the videos said some cameras are equipped with facial recognition software. In live shots of the sites seen by the AP, some videos streams are labeled “analytics” — those were the ones that had the facial recognition software, said the contractor.
If a person of interest is seen on camera — and their information is already in the system — their name and age pops up on the computer screen, said the contractor. Israeli soldiers watching the screens take notes and cross-check the analysts’ information with their own drone footage from the sites, he said.
The contractor said he did not know the source of the data in the facial recognition system. The AP could not independently verify his information.
An internal SRS report from June seen by the AP said that its intel team would circulate to staff a “POI Mugs Card,” that showed photos of Palestinians taken at the sites who were deemed persons of interest.
The contractor said he and other staff were told by SRS to photograph anyone who looked “out of place.” But the criteria were not specified, he said. The contractor said the photos were also added to the facial recognition database. He did not know what was done with the information.
SRS said accusations that it gathers intelligence are false and that it has never used biometrics. It said it coordinates movements with Israeli authorities, a requirement for any aid group in Gaza.
An Israeli security official who was not named in line with the army’s protocol, said there are no security screening systems developed or operated by the army within the aid sites.
It was a rushed rollout, the contractors say
The several hundred contractors hired by UG Solutions landed in Israel in mid-May, not long before the first GHF site opened on May 26.
The rollout was jumbled and lacked leadership, the two contractors told the AP. Some of the men had been recruited only days prior via email asking if they wanted to work in Gaza. Many had no combat experience and were not properly trained in offensive weapons, they said.
SRS did not provide the staff with draft rules of engagement until three days after distributions started, they said. The draft rules, seen by the AP, say deadly force may be used only under extreme necessity and non-lethal weapons may be used in an extreme situation on unarmed individuals who are physically violent.
The Palestinians seen in the videos don’t appear to be physically aggressive. SRS says there have been occasional altercations at the sites between aid seekers, but none have involved its staff.
Each contractor was equipped with a pistol, stun grenades, tear gas and an Israeli-made automatic rifle capable of firing dozens of rounds within seconds, said the contractor who took the videos.
In an email from May shared with the AP by a third party, one high-ranking contractor wrote to the head of UG Solutions and called the operation “amateur hour.” He wrote that the sites did not have enough staff or resources making them “not sustainable” and “not safe,” according to the email, seen by the AP.
The two contractors said none of the men in Israel working for UG Solutions were tested to see if they could handle a gun safely. One said the rushed rollout also meant not everyone could “zero” their weapon — adjust it to one’s personal specifications to ensure proper aim. Military experts say not zeroing a weapon poses a significant risk.
A spokesperson for UG Solutions, Drew O’Brien, said UG has an extensive recruiting and training process, including “a detailed application process, screening by experts, reference checks, background checks and weapons proficiency.” The group said it prides itself on repeated quality control checks once missions are underway.
O’Brien said the group was unaware of video showing gunfire from someone believed to be a UG Solutions contractor. He said he couldn’t comment on the allegations without seeing the videos.
The two contractors warned that if the organization continues as is, more lives will be at risk. “If operations continue in this manner, innocent aid seekers will continue to be needlessly injured,” said the contractor who took the videos. “And possibly killed.”
Haaretz Link (Archive)
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- Joined
- Nov 22, 2024
Happy 4th of July! Thank you all for your service! 
No refunds, suckers / archive
From his first Rolling Stone article "Abandoned in Iraq" we can infer plenty of things. He was almost surely part of the 277th Engineer company, based in San Antonio, Texas. He may have been part of the "Hell train" incident in Al Amarah, or not, but he surely knew Redus and Torres personally, and they told him their story. (The article is worth the read, those are the two soldiers that were abandoned after an ambush and had to make their way back alone)
That event surely disgruntled him. He had to wait 10 years to publish the story because it made the Army look very bad. Seth then and spent time in Iraq during the Kurdish liberation of Raqqa from ISIS and his views became more left leaning, in the "anti-American imperialism" vein. He published in 2020 "In Harm's way" about mysterious horrifying homicides of women near Mexico City, and how that connected itself with Cartel Violence.
The Fort Bragg cartel appears to be a thematic melting pot of Seth's experiences. Disgruntlement with the Army and their cover-ups, PTSD, drug violence, and a bitterness and cynicism at the system and their most idealized figures, that are the Special Forces in Bragg.
Right now, Seth is going for a sort of "Latin American lefty intellectual" vibe on X which is fine, but imo one cannot escape one's roots.
He was born in rural Texas, without much money, fought in Iraq for the oportunity to got to college and become a lawyer, then journalist. No mattter how much he reads or what other influences he has, one cannot truly escape the past. The whiplash in his style in X happens when a 2005 angry Texan grunt meets the modern "Intellectual, journalistic and socially concious left leaning" Seth.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk. If Seth fedposts and ruins the launch of his book, I will cry about it in the Oh No my Oshi!! thread.
No refunds, suckers / archiveWoah, they got USASOC veterans on security staff.
To be fair you don't need to zero your rifle to shoot at an unarmed mass of starving civilians. It's a bit of an overkill.
I read this in Ralph's voice.
Seth never talked much about his military service. He was a truck driver reservist in 2005, when the Iraq war was starting to heat up badly. He described his job as just driving a truck as he was getting shot. Though that M16 he's carrying is not a prop gun.
From his first Rolling Stone article "Abandoned in Iraq" we can infer plenty of things. He was almost surely part of the 277th Engineer company, based in San Antonio, Texas. He may have been part of the "Hell train" incident in Al Amarah, or not, but he surely knew Redus and Torres personally, and they told him their story. (The article is worth the read, those are the two soldiers that were abandoned after an ambush and had to make their way back alone)
That event surely disgruntled him. He had to wait 10 years to publish the story because it made the Army look very bad. Seth then and spent time in Iraq during the Kurdish liberation of Raqqa from ISIS and his views became more left leaning, in the "anti-American imperialism" vein. He published in 2020 "In Harm's way" about mysterious horrifying homicides of women near Mexico City, and how that connected itself with Cartel Violence.
The Fort Bragg cartel appears to be a thematic melting pot of Seth's experiences. Disgruntlement with the Army and their cover-ups, PTSD, drug violence, and a bitterness and cynicism at the system and their most idealized figures, that are the Special Forces in Bragg.
Right now, Seth is going for a sort of "Latin American lefty intellectual" vibe on X which is fine, but imo one cannot escape one's roots.
He was born in rural Texas, without much money, fought in Iraq for the oportunity to got to college and become a lawyer, then journalist. No mattter how much he reads or what other influences he has, one cannot truly escape the past. The whiplash in his style in X happens when a 2005 angry Texan grunt meets the modern "Intellectual, journalistic and socially concious left leaning" Seth.
Thank you for listening to my TED talk. If Seth fedposts and ruins the launch of his book, I will cry about it in the Oh No my Oshi!! thread.
It seems like history rhymes, and the Government is outsourcing it's work in Gaza to a Blackwater copycat with low standards, an eagerness to kill and a lack of oversight.
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2018
The worst thing for me isn't just how impersonal it is, but how much glee if not sexual fervor that people on social media get from it. In the order days, when I'd see people on LiveLeak or Rotten(dot)com, there'd be an almost sense of "Oh fuck, that looks bad" or almost regret for the shit they willingly clicked on and watched. But because we need to side up for this conflict that is half the world away and in a country most people can't point to on a map... these people fucking seem to enjoy it way too much.
Tin Foil Hatter
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2025
Sounds like plausible deniability. I don't know if the incompetency is a smoke screen or if we truly are incompetent. The pre-boomer generation had to solve their own problems. They did a vast majority of their own work, so they knew how to solve problems. When they died off and were replaced by the boomers, who "just paid people for that" we saw this catastrophic shift in the west. Weak men truly bring about hard times.
Tin Foil Hatter
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2025
Oh sweet summer child, that's not where most of the PTSD is coming from.
"ABSTRACT: Based on interviews with United Kingdom veterans, this special commentary offers a new interpretation of war trauma. Few studies investigate the emotions soldiers experience when witnessing child sexual assault. During the Afghan campaign, personnel witnessed acts of rape by allies in the Afghan security services on boys—usually excused as the local practice of bacha bazi—and were directed not to intervene. This special commentary examines the effects of these actions on soldiers and the mission, highlighting how soldiers were impacted by what they witnessed but could not stop."
The GWOT guys and the Vietnam guys get along great. We are bound together with the knowledge that we wasted our youth in a bullshit war for a bullshit cause by politicians that were fucking retarded. A lot of Afghan vets are fucking pissed that we brought those fuckers state side, they should have been left to the taliban. It's NOT the translators that the taliban is after. The taliban has a fatawa against pedos and faggots.
"The Taliban publicly condemned the practice. In 1994, the founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, famously rescued a young boy who was about to be raped by two military commanders. Opposition to bacha bazi facilitated his popularity throughout the 1990s. When the Taliban came to power in 1996, they made bacha bazi illegal as a violation of Islamic law. After the Taliban seized Kandahar, Mullah Omar issued a fatwa that made sodomy (which included consensual relationships and the rape of children) a capital offense."
My hunch is that they are dialing back the woke, because the Taliban is gaining popularity in the Islamic world. Their liberal fake and gay isis did not win the hearts and minds like the chad taliban did, and now that they have a TRILLION dollars in US military hardware, the smart people are starting to realize that this is going to become a bigger problem in the future, and are not sure how or IF they can contain it.