Navy SEAL, Prince founded Blackwater in when he bought up land in North Carolina and built a training site for military and law enforcement officials. Blackwater was hired by the Navy to train U. The public first became aware of Blackwater in , when four of its employees were killed, their bodies burned and hung from a bridge in Fallujah. Then on Christmas Eve in , an off-duty Blackwater employee shot and killed an Iraqi security guard inside the Green Zone, increasing pressure on the Bush administration to hold private security contractors accountable for crimes committed in war zones.
Prince tried to rebrand the company, renaming it Xe Services in The company is still operating under its original name and its website lists offices in Chesapeake, Virginia, and Abu Dhabi. But he said he was mostly busy "running a small fund and investing in Africa.
His small fund is called Frontier Resource Group, a private equity firm based in Abu Dhabi, which has a contract with the South Sudanese government to build an oil refinery.
The project was temporarily put on hold earlier this year, when the security situation in the country grew too dangerous. While Prince pursued projects overseas, the firearms charges over the former Blackwater employees did not go away.
That is, until this February, when most of the charges were dismissed after retired CIA officials testified the weapons had been given to the Jordanian king with the authorization of the CIA.
Stanley McChrystal after he retired in Nixon retired from the Army in ; his final assignment was as the deputy director of operations responsible for force protection for the U.
Central Command. This is inevitable, Pelton said, because the government has a bizarre love-hate relationship with these companies. An earlier version of this story incorrectly called the company International Development Services. Return to reading. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort.
In March, Black represented Blackwater at a conference in Jordan, announcing that the company was seeking to broaden its role in even more conflict zones. Blackwater is rapidly expanding its operations, creating a new surveillance-blimp division, launching new training facilities in California and the Philippines, and increasingly setting its sights on the lucrative world of DHS contracts.
It is clamoring to get into Darfur and has also hired Chilean troops trained under the brutal rule of Augusto Pinochet. It's hard to imagine that the cronyism that has marked the Bush Administration is not at play in Blackwater's success.
Blackwater founder Erik Prince shares Bush's fundamentalist Christian views. According to a report prepared for The Nation by the Center for Responsive Politics, in all of Erik Prince's political funding generosity since , he has never given a penny to a Democrat running for national office. Company president Jackson has also given money to Republican candidates. Like Prince, he comes from a right-wing family; his father, former Congressman John Schmitz, was an ultraconservative John Birch Society director who later ran for President.
Joseph Schmitz was once in charge of investigating private contractors like Blackwater, but he resigned amid allegations of stonewalling investigations conducted by his department. He now represents one of the most successful of those contractors. Schakowsky charges that the Administration has written Blackwater "blank checks," saying that the internal DHS review of the company "leaves us with more questions than answers. In her testimony this past September, Schakowsky said, "Ask any American if they want thugs from a private, for-profit company with no official law-enforcement training roaming the streets of their neighborhoods.
The answer will be a resounding NO. Blackwater's ascent comes in the midst of a major rebranding campaign aimed at shaking its mercenary image. The company is at the forefront of the trade association of mercenary firms, the International Peace Operations Association, which lobbies for even greater privatization of military operations.
Its story teaches us more about the economic and political benefits and pitfalls of outsourcing security than any other company. At the peak of its activity in the late s, Blackwater ran thriving operations in the US, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, offering a wide array of services ranging from close-quarter combat training to personal protection of US Diplomats and airlift support for the Department of Defense.
His name is Erik Prince. The corps had been conceived by President John F. Kennedy in the 60s in response to the changing nature of warfare that called for increasingly unconventional solutions to replace traditional large-army military operations. He started to work on his own company, and in incorporated Blackwater [3].
Prince used his military connections both to staff his new start-up and also to win the government contracts that would become the foundation of the business. The company initially operated a state-of-the art training facility for military and law enforcement.
The September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the ensuing War on Terror, however, soon afforded the growing business much more lucrative opportunities in the field of private security contracting.
And Prince may have had a point. In , Blackwater was called upon to assist with humanitarian and crowd control efforts after Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans. Then came Iraq. In the spring of , the old-fashioned land invasion was over and had given way to a huge and complicated political mission.
The Department of Defense, the CIA and State Department were all in need of security services which landed Blackwater numerous contracts for a variety of services ranging from guarding facilities to escorting diplomat convoys. Whatever the government needed, Blackwater could provide. And quickly. At the same time, once the company had a foot in the door, it was easy to spot 10 other regional offices that needed the same solution. Ambassador John D. In need of man power, they turned to the marketplace.
But the government must also account for the additional costs of paid leave, medical, insurance and pension funding, and the total life time cost of an army operative; even divided by the number of days in active service, these costs far exceed the daily Blackwater rate.
Moreover, external contractors are a variable cost that can be put on hold or terminated on short notice, providing greater flexibility over that of a US officer. The contractor, not the client, would take the heat — and the bullets. With government willing to staff out responsibilities for security that had traditionally been its exclusive domain, the opportunity proved perfect for an individual with the experiences and worldview of someone like Prince.
I tend to think private charities and private organizations are better solutions.
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