Perhaps I’m the last one to the party on this, but Penny Arcade of all places clued me into a subculture of flight sim enthusiasts who’ve built their own online air traffic control net to manage a virtual airspace of fight sim pilots.

I hope that the FAA already has people looking at SquawkBox; I doubt they could build a better test environment for candidate airspace modernization ideas, and here is one already sitting out there.

During the 20th Century, cryptographers repeatedly found the precise mathematical tools they needed already perfectly formed (having been developed by number theorists for completely different reasons). It was like the guys building the Saturn V rocket wandering into a hardware store and finding precisely the part they need already sitting on a shelf in the corner. “How’d this thing get here? Why’d somebody build it?” “That? Oh, some guy just made it because he thought it was interesting. Wrote a paper about it, you know.” The 21st Century may witness a similar phenomenon in the realm of hyper-realistic online environments for scenario gaming and analysis of alternatives.

In an op-ed I missed over the weekend, Boot argues that we need to accept that PSCs are a reailty in our geopolitical environment (H/T TPMB). They are already a significant proportion of our force (Boot cites an estimate that between 20,000-50,000 PSCs guard facilities in Iraq that would otherwise require soldiers and Marines), so the sooner we start catching our laws, planning and doctrine up with this fact the better.

The problem is that there is a gray zone in the law when it comes to contractors on foreign battlefields. Congress has passed legislation to make clear that contractors fall within the Uniform Code of Military Justice as well as civilian law (the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act), but neither the Department of Justice nor the Judge Advocate General’s Corps has shown much enthusiasm for enforcing these rules. That needs to change.

Beyond that, we need to do a better job of integrating contractors with military units so as to avoid mix-ups such as the one that occurred in 2004 when four Blackwater employees were killed in Fallouja, triggering a Marine offensive. Malcolm Nance, a veteran intelligence operative who has worked as a contractor in Iraq, makes an intriguing suggestion in the Small Wars Journal: Create a “force protection command” within the U.S. military that would be responsible for overseeing contractor operations. This would help make contractors more useful to military commanders.

Chet Richards was one of the first thinkers I saw out on front of this one, going so far as to propose privitizing the majority of our Leviathan force. What other ideas are out there?