VanDyke, who rose to fame as a foreign fighter backing Libyan rebels against Moamer Kadhafi, has just finished leading his new military contracting firm through its first assignment -- training Christian volunteers to take on jihadists.
Funded by Christian groups from abroad, mainly from the United States, the Nineveh Plains Protection Unit (NPU) aims to bring a local Christian militia to bear against the Islamic State group that has seized swathes of Iraq and Syria.
Our government wrongly stated that the war on terror is basically over. Despite our enemy's demonstration that the war is on, our leadership seems reluctant to wage war on them. Even though they are willing to drop bombs, it seems motivated more by an effort to avoid pressure to do something more that would be effective.
With a government eager to avoid winning this war, it should be no shock that private warfare against the jihadis has emerged.
Some will no doubt be scams. But enough will be real. Do we really want to match jihadi non-state fanatics with our own religiously motivated rather than fighting them with our trained professional troops?
We entrust our government with the job of national defense. When the federal government doesn't do that core job (in part because it wants to do everything else but that), much as vigilantes arise when government doesn't provide justice and local defense, voluntary organizations will do the job.
You can purchase a collection of essays from this blog on the reappearance of private warfare related to this trend).
