NSFW Military Contractors Lose Deal

ArmorGroup’s five-year, $189 million contract to guard the U.S. embassy in Kabul will not be renewed, the State Department has announced. The decision comes in the wake of this fall’s surfacing of pictures of the private contractors having too much fun in Afghanistan—they featured male guards drinking booze poured through each others’ backsides, prancing naked with weapons in a war zone, and urinating in coconut bikinis. The photos (which are above all an excellent unintentional advertisement for sobriety) were not ArmorGroup’s first brush with scandal. Almost as soon as the company took over security at the embassy in 2007, the State Department began fielding serious complaints about its performance, to the extent that “the security of the U.S. embassy in Kabul is in jeopardy.”