Following up on Craig's post earlier this evening, I wanted to point out some of the really good points that Spencer Ackerman over at the Washington Independent and Matt Yglesias over at Think Progress have been making all day about President Obama's recently announced spending freeze. Ackerman asks why in the world defense spending should go unaffected and Yglesias adds that, while there are reasons to treat various kinds of spending and taxes differently, "the security / non-security distinction doesn’t hold up ... at all."

Yesterday, Justin Elliot at Talking Points Memo published an interesting piece on the never-ending saga that is the government's relationship with the company formerly known as Blackwater. Despite the scandals, investigations and indictments that have recently plagued Xe – and the resultant loss of a license to operate in Iraq and the cancellation of several security contracts overseas – the company continues to perform work for the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As pointed out this afternoon by the Project on Government Oversight's (POGO) Scott Amey, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan released a special report yesterday summarizing their review of inadequate contractor business systems. The report follows up on work the commission did over the summer when it held a hearing on contractors' deficient internal control systems. Based on testimony and evidence from the hearing, the special report lays out five recommendations for the Department of Defense (DOD) to improve oversight of and encourage better business systems from contractors.

The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that as part of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal's effort to turn around the fight in Afghanistan, the U.S. military is planning to replace between 6,000 and 14,000 non-combat troops with contractors. This would allow the Army and Marines Corps to bring in more "trigger-pullers" without increasing the overall number of troops in theater, currently a contentious issue with the American public. With the military having experienced so many issues of waste, fraud, and abuse with contractors in both Iraq and Afghanistan, however, some analysts – including this one – are questioning whether increasing their numbers will not produce more problems than solutions, including the prospect of increasingly jeopardizing soldiers' safety.