Blackwater (or any PMC), for all its woes, is largely staffed with people who have earned their stripes, and demonstrated a high level of competence. Were they to don their old uniforms no doubt most of them would list to port with the weight of the decorations and qualification badges that denote one highly trained and skilled in the profession of arms.
Contrast this with “body shops:” firms that will fill their ranks with anything with a clearance and a pulse. Even people, it was recently relayed to me, with no documented qualifications at all. That is of course unless you count the receipt from the check written to cover the cost of their diploma-mill sheepskin (or is that Naugahyde?).
To be sure, there are plenty of paper-experts in the world, and the intelligence business is no exception. Anyone in the tech world knows how common the MCSE designation is; and you also know that you let one of them near your PC at its peril.
It is also true that there are things you can do and experience in this world that are not readily documented on a transcript, and that’s fine, except that week in Paris twelve years ago isn’t worth 3 credit hours. If it was, and you really learned something, you ought to be able to pass an appropriate test given by someone accredited to do so. Anything less is a fraud …
… and we don’t need frauds teaching the next generation of intelligence professionals!
What in the world kind of message are we sending to people new to the job, fresh from real colleges and actual graduate schools (qualifications, I might add, that are a prerequisite for getting in the door), when we prop up in front of them “instructors” who are in fact their academic inferiors? We can’t find real Ph.D.s? We can’t afford them? We don’t care enough to try? We don’t respect them enough not to waste their time or insult them?
My first years on the job I worked for savants: misfits, malcontents and whacks-jobs all, but first class minds who forgot more about this business than I have ever learned. Compared to some of the new crop today, I was the luckiest guy in the world.
