Posted on 04/28/2014 3:22:52 PM PDT by tcrlaf
A homemade bomb has exploded in the Donetsk region of Ukraine, killing one soldier and wounding another, the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said Monday.
"When on duty, in the course of daily inspection of reinforcing obstacles, two contract soldiers of the armed forces of Ukraine were injured. According to preliminary information, the cause of injury was the explosion of an unknown improvised explosive device," the statement said.
The wounded soldier, a junior sergeant, is in intensive care and military doctors have said he is expected to live, the ministry said, adding that the injured man was transported by helicopter to a hospital in Kharkiv.
Federalization supporters in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Gorlovka, Slaviansk and Kramatorsk have refused to recognize the legitimacy of the current Ukrainian government and are urging interim authorities to hold referendums similar to the one held in Crimea last month, which led to the republic's reunification with Russia.
Interesting 2006 article with more granularity about military contractors in Iraq:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/04/AR2006120401311.html
rgr. KBR = hash slingers. Very few blackwater folks according to the source.
Comparing the 1991 100 hour war to a ten year occupation is apples and oranges. The military also took cuts of ~ 500,000 between the two events, with, as I recall,almost 300,000 coming out of the force responsible for sustained land combat.
Lucky we had contracting companies able to fill the gap, don’t you think?
There's obviously no way to hire 100,000 military contractors trained to US spec ops or even conventional military standards. However, if they were mostly hash slingers, per the WaPo article, which lists 650 dead as of 2006, they were getting killed at more than double the rate of US troops.
Either that or the coup government in Kiev is totally inept and its actions are making it impossible for them to govern.
yep -If you choose to run around a war zone w/o weapons, armor, supporting fires, CREW, etc bad stuff can happen.
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