Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

BY THE time Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned in late 2006, he had indeed, as President Bush declared, overseen the “most sweeping transformation of America’s global force posture since the end of World War II.”¹ By Rumsfeld’s last day in office, the ratio of active-duty U.S. soldiers to private contractors deployed in Iraq had almost reached one to one,² a statistic unprecedented in modern warfare. Vice President Dick Cheney called Rumsfeld “the finest Secretary of Defense this nation has ever had.”³ The praise was understandable coming from Cheney. The dramatic military privatization scheme launched during Cheney’s time as Secretary of Defense during the 1991 Gulf War had grown beyond his wildest expectations under Rumsfeld and has forever altered the way the United States wages its wars. And yet despite the unprecedented level of private sector involvement on the battlefield, the U.S. military has seldom been stretched more thinly or faced more perilous times. The Bush administration’s occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan taxed U.S. forces to the point where former Secretary of State Colin Powell declared in late 2006 that “the active Army is about broken.”⁴ In the midst of such striking commentary from one of the country’s most celebrated military figures, President Bush announced his intent to increase the size of the American armed forces to “position our military so that it is ready and able to stay engaged in a long war.”⁵ In his 2007 State of the Union address, Bush called for an increase of ninety-two thousand active duty troops within five years and proposed a Civilian Reserve Corps to supplement official U.S. forces.⁶

While the “bleeding” of the U.S. military was without question the result of the administration’s aggressive policies and unpopular occupations, the new Democratic Congressional leadership, which swept to power in November 2006, seemed more than willing to go along with Bush’s aspirations for an even larger military, rather than questioning the insatiable appetite for conquest that made it a necessity. Among the few forces that could take comfort in this situation are those that have benefited the most from the war on terror—the companies of the war industry. Few have gained as much in the Bush years and few stand to benefit more from the projected U.S. course in the future than Blackwater USA. Erik Prince knows this. In fact, he has offered up a remedy of his own for the numbers crisis in the military—the creation of a “contractor brigade.” As for the official Army plan to increase its size by thirty thousand troops, Prince asserted, “We could certainly do it cheaper.”⁷ Those are the words of a man empowered by success and confident in his future. They are the words of a man with his own army, hailed by the neoconservative Weekly Standard as “the alpha and omega of military outsourcing.”⁸

In the years since Blackwater began in 1997 as a firing range and lodge near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, it has grown to become one of the most powerful private military actors on the international scene. Blackwater in 2006 had some twenty-three hundred private soldiers deployed in nine countries around the world and boasted of a database of another twenty-one thousand additional contractors on whom it could call should the need arise. In 2006, one U.S. Congressperson observed that, in terms of military might, the company could single-handedly take down many of the world’s governments. Its seven-thousand-acre facility in Moyock, North Carolina, has now become the most sophisticated private military center on the planet, while the company possesses one of the world’s largest privately held stockpiles of heavy-duty weaponry. It is a major training center for federal and local security and military forces in the United States, as well as foreign forces and private individuals. It sells its own line of target systems and armored vehicles. Blackwater’s state-of-the-art sixty-thousand-square-foot corporate headquarters welcomes visitors with door handles made from the muzzles of automatic weapons. It is developing surveillance blimps and private airstrips for its fleet of aircraft, which include helicopter gunships.⁹

Blackwater opened a facility, called “Blackwater North” in Illinois, but was forced to abandon projects in California and the Philippines after resistance from local communities. The company holds more than a billion dollars in U.S. government contracts, among them “black” contracts kept from public oversight, and has begun marketing aggressively to corporations. It has deep connections to the U.S. intelligence and defense apparatus and has become nothing short of the administration’s Praetorian Guard in the war on terror. While Blackwater executives may have initially set their sights high in aiming to be a wing of the military—like the Marines or the Army—now, reeling from its successes, the company is no longer content to be subordinate to the United States. While it still maintains its pledge of loyalty and patriotism, Blackwater strives to be an independent army, deploying to conflict zones as an alternative to a NATO or UN force.

Darfur Dreams

In late March 2006, Cofer Black flew to Amman, Jordan, where he represented Blackwater at one of the world’s premier war bazaars, the Special Operations Forces Exhibition and Conference (SOFEX). More than 220 companies ranging from weapons manufacturers and arms dealers to military consultants and trainers to full-blown mercenary outfits were on hand to peddle their goods and services to wealthy governments from across the Middle East, North Africa, and the world. The organizers boasted that SOFEX is “the world’s leading special operations forces, homeland security, counter terrorism and security forces exhibition and conference serving the global defense market.”¹⁰ After the Cold War, the Middle East quickly became one of the world’s hungriest markets for military equipment and training services, and the biennial conference was a valued chance for military commanders and planners to examine and purchase the latest wares international war contractors and military merchants had to offer. In attendance were military delegations from forty-two countries and more than seventy-five hundred visitors from across the globe. As the conference’s promotional materials boasted, “In the last decade, the Middle East has emerged as the largest importing region for security and military defence equipment, representing approximately 60% of the global defence expenditure.”¹¹ As though to give the affair an extra air of legitimacy, the managing director of the conference, Amer Tabbah, touted the fact that SOFEX had been “accredited by the US Department of Commerce… showing the global trust and belief held by many.”¹²

The SOFEX conference was sponsored by one of President Bush’s closest Arab allies, King Abdullah of Jordan. Unlike his father, the late King Hussein, who opposed the 1991 Gulf War, the U.S./U.K.-educated Abdullah provided key support to the Bush administration in the build-up and execution of the Iraq invasion. Jordan has also served as a major transit point and staging ground for war-servicing corporations supporting the occupation in neighboring Iraq. Blackwater, like the White House, developed a special relationship with Jordan, opening an office in Amman early on in the Iraq occupation.¹³ Since King Abdullah took over from his deceased father in 1999, he has worked assiduously to modernize and Westernize Jordan’s military capabilities and to bolster its prominence as a force in the region. When King Abdullah—himself a former Special Operations commander¹⁴—decided in 2004 to create a five-hundred-man special operations counter-terrorism aviation unit, Jordan hired Blackwater to conduct the training for the elite force.¹⁵ The contract, however, was held up by the State Department because of export-control regulations governing the sensitive nature of training foreign military forces. In early December 2004, King Abdullah visited Washington and reportedly raised the issue of the stalled Blackwater contract with almost every U.S. official he met.¹⁶ Soon thereafter the contract was given the go-ahead by the Bush administration. The Jordanian unit would receive training in operating various militarized assault helicopters, such as Blackhawks and Hughes MD500s, for use in counterterror operations, quick-air assaults, and forward reconnaissance. Jordan said it would pay for the training with part of its approximately $1 billion in annual U.S. military assistance.¹⁷ “The Jordanians came to us,” said Erik Prince. “They hired us to help build their squadrons, to teach them how to fly at night on goggles, to mount operations out of a helicopter.”¹⁸

As an exclamation point to King Abdullah’s drive to remake the Jordanian military, just ahead of the SOFEX conference, officials of the kingdom confirmed they had completed plans for what they called the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center in Jordan, a $100 million project also funded by the U.S. government.¹⁹ King Abdullah said the training center project was being supervised by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the monarch’s description sounded as though he was constructing a facility modeled after Blackwater’s Moyock training compound. Abdullah said the facility would be used for the “training of both national and regional special operations forces, counter-terrorism forces, security and emergency service units, and to act as the premier live-fire training center for the Middle East.”²⁰ Indeed, members of Jordan’s elite antiterror unit, Battalion 71, had participated in Blackwater’s 2004 SWAT Challenge in Moyock and had seen the company’s vaunted U.S. training facility firsthand.²¹

Blackwater’s special relationship with Jordan and its king made the company a miniphenomenon at the international war bazaar in Amman in March 2006. Blackwater chose the SOFEX conference to unveil its newly formed parachute team, which performed publicly for the first time at the conference opening at King Abdullah I air base.²² But while Blackwater’s parachute team may have wowed spectators on the ground, it was Cofer Black who stole the show on the opening day. Black “astonished” international Special Forces representatives when he declared that Blackwater was prepared to deploy a private brigade-sized force to conflict or crisis zones worldwide.²³ “It’s an intriguing, good idea from a practical standpoint because we’re low-cost and fast,” Black said. “The issue is, who’s going to let us play on their team?”²⁴ As an example, Black suggested that Blackwater could deploy its force in the Darfur region of Sudan, adding that Blackwater had already pitched the idea to unnamed U.S. and NATO officials. “About a year ago, we realized we could do it,” Black said. “There is clear potential to conduct security operations at a fraction of the cost of NATO operations.” Black was mobbed after his remarks by throngs of defense suppliers excited about the prospect of new markets being described by one of the industry’s star players, not to mention one of America’s most legendary spies. Black explained that Blackwater is a self-sustained operation. “We’ve war-gamed this with professionals,” he said. “We can do this.” He was quick to add that the company would not contradict U.S. policy by renting its services to enemies of the government. “We’re an American company,” Black declared. “We would get the approval of the U.S. government for anything we did for our friends overseas.”²⁵

After Black’s remarks in Jordan, Blackwater vice president Chris Taylor expanded on his firm’s vision for a Sudan deployment. “Of course we could provide security at refugee camps, defensive security,” Taylor said. “What we seek to do first is to be the best deterrent that we can possibly be.”²⁶ He boasted that Blackwater could mobilize faster than the UN or NATO. “In the time that it takes to put an internationally recognized body unit on the ground, I can be there in a third of that time and I will be 60 percent cheaper,” Taylor told National Public Radio.²⁷ But independent experts disputed Blackwater’s claims. “It’s comparing real apples with fictional oranges,” said P. W. Singer of the Brookings Institution. “NATO or UN operations represent a full array of political commitment and activities, not simply a small set of guys with guns and a CASA 212. That’s why they are expensive and completely different.”²⁸

Blackwater wasn’t just talking about Darfur. Taylor also broadened the private-army-for-hire theme, floating the idea of the Iraqi government hiring Blackwater’s men to quell attacks by resistance groups. “We clearly couldn’t go into the whole country of Iraq,” Taylor told the Virginian-Pilot. “But we might be able to go into a region or a city.” Cofer Black and other company officials spun their vision for “peacekeeping,” “stabilization,” and “humanitarian” operations as being born of moralistic outrage over human suffering. The international community, they argued, is slow to respond and ineffective, while, as Black said in Jordan, “Blackwater spends a lot of time thinking, How can we contribute to the common good?” What Blackwater executives rarely, if ever, discuss in public is the tremendous profit to be made in servicing disasters, crises, and wars. In Jordan Blackwater and other mercenary firms aggressively promoted an internationalization of the rapid privatization of military and security the benefits of which they now enjoy in the United States. Under the soft banner of “humanitarianism,” these companies hoped to take “business” away from international governmental bodies like the UN, NATO, and the African and European Unions. For Blackwater, such a transformation would mean permanent profit opportunity, limited only by the number of international crises, disasters, and conflicts. “World stability and peacemaking/-keeping operations have been criminally cost-ineffective and operationally failed,” said Blackwater’s Taylor. “Send 10,000 UN troops to Darfur? A colossal waste of money. You do not create security and peace by throwing more mediocre, uncommitted people into the fray.”²⁹

Singer, who has extensively studied the role of private military firms in international conflicts, observed the following about Blackwater’s Sudan pitch:

But Sudan’s value to Blackwater stretched beyond a single peacekeeping contract or purported humanitarian concerns for the victims in Darfur. It was Blackwater’s ticket into a whole new world of potential growth—Darfur became the rallying cry for a rebranding operation aimed at winning massive international contracts for mercenary firms. Unlike the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which was overwhelmingly opposed by a majority of the world, calls for intervention in Darfur are much more widespread and, therefore, an easier sell for Blackwater and its allies for increasing the use of private soldiers. Indeed, even at antiwar rallies, scores of protesters held signs reading, “Out of Iraq, Into Darfur.”

A quick survey of Sudan’s vast natural resources dispels any notion that U.S./corporate desires to move into Sudan derive from purely humanitarian motives. First off, because of Sudan’s designation by the State Department as a sponsor of terrorism, U.S. corporations are prohibited from investing in Sudan. As a result, China has become the major player in exploiting Sudan’s tremendous oil supplies.³¹ While Sudan is not a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, it was granted observer status in August 2001, a distinction reserved for significant global oil producers. ³² Four years later, its proven oil reserves had expanded sixfold to 1.6 billion barrels, the thirty-fifth-largest in the world³³—all inaccessible to U.S. oil corporations. The China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent—the largest single share—of the Greater Nile Petroleum Operating Company, the consortium that dominates Sudan’s oilfields.³⁴ Sudan also has a significant natural gas reserve, one of the three largest deposits of high-purity uranium in the world, and the fourth-largest deposits of copper.³⁵ Regime change in Sudan would open up extremely lucrative investment opportunities to U.S. corporations, potentially capturing them from Chinese companies. It would also mean the end of a strong Islamic government that has continued to modernize, despite tough U.S.-led sanctions. Sending in private U.S. forces, under the guise of an international humanitarian mission, could give Washington a major foothold in Sudan for future action.

At the time of Cofer Black’s trip to Jordan, Darfur was very much in the headlines. Black himself had spent a significant amount of time in the country as part of his work for the CIA. “Cofer and I have been speaking about our ability to help in Darfur ad infinitum, and that just pisses off the humanitarian world,” said Chris Taylor. “They have problems with private security companies, not because of performance but because they think that in some cases it removes their ability to cross borders, to talk to both sides, to be neutral. And that’s great, but the age-old question—is neutrality greater than saving one more life? What’s the marginal utility on one more life?”³⁶ In February 2005, the month Black joined Blackwater, Erik Prince publicly raised for the first time the prospect of private peacekeepers at a symposium of the National Defense Industrial Association. “In areas where the UN is, where there’s a lot of instability, sending a big, large-footprint conventional force is politically unpalatable; it’s expensive, diplomatically difficult as well,” Prince told the military gathering. “We could put together a multinational, professional force, supply it, manage it, lead it, put it under UN or NATO or U.S. control, however it would best be done. We can help stabilize the situation.”³⁷ Prince suggested that Blackwater could deploy a “Quick Reaction Force” to protect nongovernmental organizations in Darfur or other conflict areas. “You talk about Darfur: I don’t think you need an 8,000-peacekeeper force,” he said. “If there’s an atrocity in progress, it’s the Janjaweed [militia] that has to be stopped, and we have to move and stop the problem, and solve the immediate threat. Not bring an 8,000- or 10,000-man force.”³⁸

Similar to the company’s use of the Columbine “massacre” to win new business, Blackwater was taking advantage of a global crisis that found parties spanning the political spectrum calling for intervention and decrying the perceived indifference of the UN and other international bodies. Sudan has become a pet cause of many of the right-wing Christian forces Blackwater is in bed with, not the least of which is Christian Freedom International—on whose small nine-member board both Erik Prince and his lobbyist Paul Behrends sit. Christian Freedom, founded by a consortium of well-connected Republican evangelicals, has been accused of using its “humanitarian aid” designation as a cover for missionary activities. Despite operating largely in Muslim countries, the group publicly states, “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.”³⁹

The leadership of Christian Freedom has had a long relationship with the crisis in Sudan because of the Christian/Muslim conflict. Early on in its work there, CFI engaged in the practice of “slave redemptions”—purchasing Christians it believed to be enslaved—but later denounced the practice, saying the “redemptions” had become a source of funding for rebel groups and that people were “faking their stories of enslavement in an attempt to make money.”⁴⁰ For years, CFI has cast its vision for Sudan in the very economic terms that have fueled the Bush administration’s global policies and Blackwater’s corporate strategy. “Many Christians in Southern Sudan desire to break free from international handouts and learn free-market principles, useful skills and technologies that will move them from dependence to independence,” wrote Christian Freedom founder Jim Jacobson, the former Reagan official, in a 1999 column. “It’s time to help the Christians of Sudan begin to walk. When this day comes—and it will come—slavery in Sudan will end.”⁴¹ Like Blackwater executives, Jacobson has disparaged the work of the United Nations, charging that the UN has a vested interest in keeping refugees impoverished. “I consider a lot of the [UN] organizations to be merchants of misery,” Jacobson said. “The UN welfare organizations need people in miserable conditions to justify their own existence. The more people they have depending on them, the more money they get. We are trying to promote self-sufficiency to get people off handouts.”

As Blackwater continued to aggressively push its Sudan campaign, Behrends—the company’s top lobbyist—hit the airwaves of conservative radio to push for support. “We can be a huge help and catalyst and enabler to save those people,” said Behrends in a 2006 interview on The Danger Zone, the syndicated radio program of the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On the program, Behrends was simply identified as a representative of Blackwater. “I’d like to make a point that any money that we made, we would pour back into the community there, clinics, schools, roads, whatever, because this is not a place that we want to make any money, this is just a place that we feel very strongly about helping,” he said.⁴²

As with many of Blackwater’s deployments under the Bush administration, the company could rake in profits while serving the political and religious agenda of the administration and Erik Prince’s theoconservative allies. But aside from the political and religious motivations for Blackwater’s push to deploy in Sudan, the proposal provided a vivid glimpse into the corporate strategy Blackwater sees as a key to its future—repackaging mercenaries as peacekeepers. “There’s a lot of crises in the world,” said Singer, author of Corporate Warriors. “If they could get their foot in the door in them, it potentially opens up an entire new business sector for them.”⁴³ While media reports at the time of the Jordan military conference suggested that Cofer Black’s “peacekeeping” proposal was a new development in Blackwater’s strategic vision, it had actually been in the works for at least a year. Author Robert Young Pelton said the company developed a detailed proposal for Blackwater deploying in Sudan soon after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Darfur in June 2004. “If you look at the presentation, it includes not only men with guns. They’re offering helicopter gunships, a fighter bomber that has the capacity to drop cluster bombs, and [satellite-guided weapons], armored vehicles,” Pelton said. “You say: ‘Wait a minute. That’s a lot of offensive force. What does that have to do with peacekeeping?’”⁴⁴

In January 2006, three months before Cofer Black was dispatched to Jordan, Prince spoke to yet another military conference attended by scores of U.S. military officials. “One of the areas we could help is peacekeeping, perhaps. In Haiti you have a 9,000-man peacekeeping brigade at a cost of $496 million a year, the garrison commander just committed suicide, it’s in total disarray,” Prince said. “List for me—if you could—any really successful UN peacekeeping operations. I mean, I see the movie Hotel Rwanda and I get sick, and I say, Why did we let that happen? We can do something about that next time without a huge U.S. footprint. We can build a multinational brigade of professionals vetted to the same kind of State Department standards that they use for guarding embassies so we know we’re not employing war criminals and bad guys, train them, vet them, equip them, and now you have a multinational capability to do something with.”⁴⁵ But, as Singer pointed out, “there is simply no support for such an overall privatized operation at the UN. The official line from the spokesperson is that it is ‘a nonstarter.’ I find it telling that two separate high-level panels of world leaders look at how to fix peacekeeping, and neither one even put privatizing peacekeeping as a point of discussion, let alone support it. They also didn’t talk about Martians coming in and running the peacekeeping operations, but then again, I guess Martians don’t have the same lobbying effort.”⁴⁶ In a highly promotional cover story about Blackwater in 2006 in the neoconservative Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway wrote, “Currently the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Operations has an annual budget of $7 billion, to say nothing of the billions in private charities and foreign aid pouring in to the world’s worst places. Even those suspicious of Blackwater’s motives must realize it makes good business sense that they would be interested in the work. Why chase after shady corporate clients when the mother lode is in helping people?”⁴⁷ He called Blackwater “the alpha and omega of military outsourcing.”⁴⁸

Not long after Black’s Sudan proposal in Jordan, Blackwater received boosts for its cause from several prominent commentators. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, penned a widely distributed column in the Los Angeles Times called “Darfur Solution: Send in the Mercenaries.”⁴⁹ Boot wrote:

Boot subsequently suggested that Blackwater or another mercenary firm could be deployed in Sudan after being hired “by an ad hoc group of concerned nations, or even by philanthropists like Bill Gates or George Soros.”⁵¹ But it wasn’t just conservatives lining up to support Blackwater. One of the most venerable newsmen in U.S. history, Ted Koppel, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times published on May 22, 2006, called “These Guns for Hire,” which opened with the line, “There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army.”⁵² Koppel went on to provide “only a partial list of factors that would make a force of latter-day Hessians seem attractive:”

After running through that list, which seemed to have been lifted from mercenary industry talking points, Koppel opined that “Just as the all-volunteer military relieved the government of much of the political pressure that had accompanied the draft, so a rent-a-force, harnessing the privilege of every putative warrior to hire himself out for more than he could ever make in the direct service of Uncle Sam, might relieve us of an array of current political pressures.”

Koppel then spent a fair portion of his op-ed presenting a virtual advertisement for Blackwater:

What Koppel neglected to mention in his piece was the likelihood that the type of insurrection that Blackwater’s forces could potentially be fighting off in Nigeria in defense of Chevron or ExxonMobil could be a popular one, seeking to reclaim Nigeria’s vast petrol-resources from the U.S. government/oil corporation-backed kleptocracy that has brutally governed Africa’s most-populous nation for decades. Nor did Koppel mention that transnational oil corporations already use brutal forces to defend their interests from indigenous Nigerians, particularly in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Nigerian playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa was executed—hanged—with eight others in 1995 for his resistance to the Shell Oil Corporation, and Chevron has been deeply implicated in the killing of protesters in the Niger Delta.⁵³ What was most disturbing about Koppel’s op-ed was that he appeared to be lending his credibility and reputation to the mercenary rebranding cause—at a crucial moment. In late 2006, Bush eased sanctions on Christian southern Sudan, paving the way for Blackwater to train the region’s forces.

While Blackwater’s campaign intensified, one of the company’s few Congressional critics saw the talk of deployment in Darfur as an ominous sign. Blackwater “has the power and the influence with the administration that [leads Blackwater] to believe that it could be a force stronger than NATO, for example, in a place like Darfur,” said Representative Jan Schakowsky. “Which means that suddenly you’ve got a for-profit corporation going around the world that is more powerful than states; can effect regime change, possibly, where they may want to go; that seems to have all the support that it needs from this Administration (that is also pretty adventurous around the world and operating under the cover of darkness). It raises questions about democracies, about states, about who influences policy around the globe, about relationships among some countries.”⁵⁴ Maybe, Schakowsky said, it was Blackwater’s goal “to render state coalitions like NATO irrelevant in the future, that they’ll be the ones and open to the highest bidder. Who really does determine war and peace around the world?

“It’s really disturbing and has enormous consequences,” Schakowsky said. “Who are they loyal to? And it also empowers, then, an administration like the Bush administration—if they can engage in this kind of private war-making or a private army, then what do they even need us for? They can operate in a totally separate arena and engage in conflicts all over the world, and it seems they don’t much need to consult with us about it.”

Blackwater and the Sleeping Lion

Cofer Black has advised others in the mercenary industry to “be opportunistic” ⁵⁵—a quality that has come naturally to Blackwater. “We have a dynamic business plan that is twenty years long,” bragged Blackwater president Gary Jackson in the summer of 2006. “We’re not going anywhere.”⁵⁶ But while Blackwater enjoyed almost unparalleled prosperity in the wake of 9/11, the rise of the Bush administration, and a Republican-controlled Congress, its executives know that such a moment, filled with such powerful backers in charge, may not present itself again soon, if ever. While the Bush administration enthusiastically encouraged the privatization of the military and the use of unsavory forces and tactics, future administrations may not be so thrilled about the idea of using mercenaries. An obvious part of that “dynamic business plan” Jackson spoke of is a sophisticated rebranding campaign aimed at shaking the mercenary image and solidifying the “legitimate” role of private soldiers in the fabric of U.S. foreign and domestic policy, as well as that of international bodies such as the UN and NATO. Knowing that the Bush administration would govern for a finite period of time, Blackwater and its allies took full advantage of the overwhelming enthusiasm for their cause in the chambers of power during the Bush years to make swift headway in their long-term rebranding mission.

The rebranding is happening on many levels, and the terminology is already resonating in the broader discourse. Mercenary firms are now called “private military companies” or “private security companies.” Rather than mercs, their men are now “private soldiers” or “civilian contractors.” While there is fierce competition among the mercenaries, they clearly recognize the need to develop a common language to promote their cause. Many firms have their own lobbyists on contract. Blackwater was instrumental to the rapid growth of the mercenary trade association, the Orwellian-named International Peace Operations Association. Its logo is a cartoon sleeping lion that would fit perfectly in a Disney sequel to The Lion King. Under the auspices of the IPOA, Blackwater and its allies became aggressive promoters of regulation of the “private security/military industry.” IPOA boasts, “We are in the business of peace because peace matters,” and spokespeople say the organization is made up of “the most professional forward-thinking and ethical companies in the industry.”⁵⁷ Among its members are many of the leading mercenary firms operating in the “war on terror”: ArmorGroup, Erinys, Hart Security, and MPRI.⁵⁸

Though many corporations shun the idea of regulation and oversight, Blackwater assumed a leadership role in pushing for such policies—at least those that fit its agenda. Blackwater “has been a leading proponent of increased regulation, accountability and transparency, which undoubtedly is good for any industry,” asserted IPOA spokesperson J. J. Messner in 2006.⁵⁹ The reason was simple: in the long run, it is better for business. But, more important, it also allows the mercenary companies to favorably shape the rules that govern their deployments, as Blackwater did in the aftermath of the Fallujah ambush when it was reported to be “leading a lobbying effort by private security firms and other contractors to try to block congressional or Pentagon efforts to bring their companies and employees under the same justice code as [active-duty] servicemen.”⁶⁰

Well aware of the severe image problems plaguing the mercenary industry, the IPOA has attempted to bring in representatives from Amnesty International and other respected human rights organizations as consultants. ⁶¹ The IPOA boasts of a “code of conduct” written with “the input of dozens of international and non-governmental organizations, human rights lawyers, and scholars.”⁶² In Congressional testimony in 2006, Chris Taylor pointed to his company’s membership in the IPOA as evidence that Blackwater is “committed to defining the standards by which our independent contractors are credentialed as qualified to work in the industry, improving the federal contracting and oversight process, providing increased transparency in business operations, and encouraging discussion of our industry so that it can become more fully integrated into the process of finding solutions to difficult challenges.”⁶³ Taylor hads also suggested that “contracting agencies” use the IPOA as a “certification, somewhat like an ISO 9000 quality-management program.”⁶⁴

The IPOA Code, which all member companies are required to sign, commits its members to “agree to follow all rules of international humanitarian law and human rights law that are applicable as well as all relevant international protocols and conventions.”⁶⁵ It has sections on transparency, ethics, and accountability, and IPOA warns: “Signatories who fail to uphold any provision contained in this Code may be subject to dismissal from IPOA at the discretion of the IPOA Board of Directors.”⁶⁶ But the IPOA Code is not a binding document with any legal weight whatsoever. In the aftermath of Nisour Square in 2007, Blackwater quietly withdrew from the IPOA, saying it was “pursuing other aspects and methods of industry outreach and governance.” Blackwater’s logo was swiftly scrubbed from the IPOA Web site.

The crucial role the IPOA has played in the rebranding campaign has been to lobby lawmakers, journalists, and human rights groups to support greater privatization of military and peacekeeping operations by promoting the idea that society stands to benefit from a regulated mercenary industry. At the same time, its completely unenforceable, nonlegal code of conduct is used by the mercenary companies as a talking point to show how responsible and conscientious they are—voluntarily.⁶⁷ The IPOA has functioned as the political wing of the organized mercenary industry, which it has renamed the “peace and stability industry.”⁶⁸

Despite the fact that there were an estimated one hundred eighty thousand contractors operating in Iraq as of spring 2008, there remained no effective oversight system in place, nor was there a legal body with effective jurisdiction over the contractors. Paul Bremer’s Order 17, which granted contractors immunity from prosecution in Iraq, remained the law of the land under successive puppet governments—from Iyad Allawi to Nouri al-Maliki—that ruled Iraq after Bremer departed and the CPA was dismantled. In theory, it is the responsibility of the home countries of contractors to police them. In reality, this has translated to impunity. That point was hit home in a dramatic way in one of the rare Congressional hearings on contractors in Iraq, which took place in June 2006. Representative Dennis Kucinich questioned Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s director of Defense Procurement and Acquisition, the department in the DoD responsible for contractors. Kucinich pointed out that U.S. troops are subjected to enforceable rules of engagement and have been prosecuted for violations in Iraq, while contractors are not:

Incredulous, Kucinich asked Assad and the other government officials on the panel, “Anybody here qualified to answer that, and if they’re not, why are you here, with all due respect?” Kucinich pointed out that as of the date of the hearing in June 2006, “no security contractor has been prosecuted” for crimes in Iraq (that remained the case as of spring 2008). He then directly asked Assad, “Would the Department of Defense be prepared to see a prosecution proffered against any private contractor who is demonstrated to have unlawfully killed a civilian?”

“Sir, I can’t answer that question,” Assad replied.

“Wow,” Kucinich shot back. “Think about what that means. These private contractors can get away with murder.” Contractors, Kucinich said, “do not appear to be subject to any laws at all and so therefore they have more of a license to be able to take the law into their own hands.” (In late 2006, Senator Lindsey Graham quietly inserted language into the 2007 defense authorization bill, which Bush subsequently signed, that sought to place contractors under the Pentagon’s UCMJ, but what effective impact—if any—this could have remains unclear, with experts predicting resistance from the private war industry.)

At that same hearing, Blackwater’s Taylor and IPOA founder Doug Brooks were the two primary defenders of the mercenary firms. “This industry is highly responsible,” Brooks told the Congressional hearing. “IPOA includes the most professional forward-thinking and ethical companies in the industry, and all members are always publicly committed to our code of conduct.” But while Brooks was preaching from the accountability gospel in front of the U.S. Congress, he was simultaneously fighting attempts to rein in mercenaries on the African continent, where the industry stands to make substantial money if allowed to operate in Sudan and other crisis zones.

The South African Example

Perhaps the most visible work the IPOA has done in recent years was not actually in the United States, though it has far-reaching implications for Blackwater and other U.S. companies—particularly when it comes to their aspirations for peacekeeping deployments on the African continent. Despite their rhetoric about supporting regulation of the industry, the IPOA and Brooks were deeply engaged in a coordinated effort to defeat South Africa’s groundbreaking antimercenary legislation, supported by the overwhelming majority of the country’s elected legislators.

South Africa—indeed, the African continent—has had a long, bloody history with white mercenaries. After the fall of the apartheid regime in the early 1990s, many white South African soldiers and police, who had spent the past years terrorizing black Africans, found themselves looking for new jobs. An unknown number of these soldiers farmed out their services to companies, governments, and counterrevolutionary causes, bringing yet more infamy to South Africa—this time as a base of operations for mercenaries. Among the most notorious South African companies, Executive Outcomes was founded in 1989 by a former apartheid-era commander and operated openly until it was shut down in 1998. Among its clients were the diamond giant DeBeers and the government of Angola, where EO was contracted in 1993 to retake strategic oil-rich areas on behalf of government forces. But EO is perhaps best known for its operations in diamond-rich Sierra Leone, where its forces were contracted to defend the government from a rebellion by Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front movement, which was committing widespread human rights abuses. The government paid EO approximately $35 million—a third of its annual defense budget—in 1995 to crush the insurgency after the U.S. and British governments and the UN declined to intervene.⁷⁰ It took EO just nine days to stop the rebellion and two days to retake the prized Kono diamond fields. Supporters of the mercenary industry have held up the work of EO and Sandline (Tim Spicer’s old company) as evidence of the success of private forces.

But the ends do not always justify the means. EO’s success was largely attributed to the fact that it was a descendant of elite South African apartheid forces from which it had inherited a vast system of corporate connections, underground networks, and counterinsurgency apparatuses throughout Africa that had been used to oppress black populations and dissidents.⁷¹ Despite the touting of the tactical “successes” of EO in Angola and Sierra Leone, there was a broader issue raised by the involvement of mercenaries in international conflicts: who determines international order? The UN? Nation-states? Rich people? Corporations? And to whom are these forces accountable? This issue assumed a higher profile with the wide privatization present in the Afghanistan and Iraq occupations. While the United States largely avoided the issue of accountability for private forces, that was not the case in South Africa, with its firsthand tumultuous and lengthy experience playing host to mercenaries. After the apartheid government fell and the Truth and Reconciliation process began, calls spread for shutting down mercenary firms, especially given how closely linked many of them were to the apartheid regime. This led to the enactment of antimercenary legislation in South Africa in 1998.

But just a few years later, with reports of South African mercenaries deployed in Iraq, lawmakers in Johannesburg alleged that the law was not being applied effectively. They asserted the legislation had resulted in “a small number of prosecutions and convictions,”⁷² notwithstanding the clear evidence of mercenary activities by South Africans—and not just in Iraq. The Prohibition of Mercenary Activities Act, introduced in the South African Parliament in 2005, was sparked not only by Iraq but also by the alleged involvement of more than sixty South Africans in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea in 2004. The incident grabbed international headlines because of the alleged involvement of Sir Mark Thatcher, son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.⁷³ The small country of five hundred thousand had recently discovered great oil reserves and at the time had become Africa’s third-largest oil producer. The alleged leader of the coup attempt was Simon Mann, an ex-British SAS officer, a founder of both Executive Outcomes and Sandline, and a friend of Mark Thatcher’s.⁷⁴

The sponsors of the South African bill said that the coup plot demonstrated that “mercenary activities are undertaken from within the borders” of South Africa and pointedly noted, “There is a continuation in the recruitment of South Africans by so-called private military companies from outside the Republic, to provide military and security services in areas of armed conflict (such as Iraq).”⁷⁵ At the time, the South African government officially estimated that four thousand of its citizens were employed in conflict areas across the globe, including an estimated two thousand in Iraq.⁷⁶ Most of these were members of the country’s white minority.⁷⁷ Other estimates put the number of South Africans deployed globally and in Iraq much higher.

The act sought to prevent any South African from participating “as a combatant for private gain in an armed conflict,” or from involvement in “any act aimed at overthrowing a government or undermining the constitutional order, sovereignty or territorial integrity of a state.”⁷⁸ It required South Africans seeking employment with private security or military firms to obtain permission from the government and provided for fines and imprisonment for violators. It also banned South Africans from serving in foreign armies if the South African government opposed that country’s involvement in a war or conflict. At the time, some eight hundred South Africans were active in the British military, along with an unknown number serving in the Israeli military. ⁷⁹ Interestingly, the act allowed South African participation in “legitimate armed struggles, including struggles waged, in accordance with international humanitarian law, for national liberation; self-determination; independence against colonialism, or resistance against occupation, aggression or domination by foreign nationals or foreign forces.”

Among the most prominent forces to oppose South Africa’s attempt to rein in mercenaries were Doug Brooks and the IPOA. Teamed with South African minority political parties and mercenary firms, Brooks and the IPOA worked feverishly to prevent its passage. In the year leading up to the vote on the legislation, Brooks wrote op-eds and policy papers and traveled to Johannesburg, where he met with members of Parliament. He expressed frustration that lawmakers had “eschewed” the participation of the mercenary industry in drafting the legislation⁸⁰ and said its passage could prove “disastrous” for private firms operating in hot spots and could undermine peacekeeping operations. “Many international efforts will be at risk… (some) will have to close their operations if they can’t rely on South Africans,” Brooks pleaded with lawmakers. “South Africans are more robust, able to live under more austere conditions, have increased flexibility and can adapt to changing conditions.” ⁸¹ Brooks found himself on the side of white South African politicians who complained the act targeted white former members of the armed forces who would now find it “virtually impossible to find work.”⁸² While Brooks was mobilizing against South Africa’s attempts to crack down on mercenaries, he was also showing his true agenda: aggressively promoting the use of mercenaries on the African continent, not just in Sudan, but also in the Congo and other crisis zones. “NATO is insanely expensive; it’s not a cost-effective organization. Neither is the [African Union]. Private companies would be much, much cheaper,” Brooks declared.⁸³

On August 29, 2006, the Prohibition of Mercenary Activities Act passed by a whopping 211-28 vote in South Africa’s National Assembly.⁸⁴ South Africa’s Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota rejected the attempted rebranding of mercenaries, framing the debate by drawing on Africa’s bloody history with mercenaries, which he said dated back to 1960 in the newly independent Congo. “No sooner than Congo achieved independence, the dogs of war were unleashed on the country,” he said. “Mercenaries are the scourge of poor areas of the world, especially Africa,” Lekota declared shortly before the act was passed. “These are killers for hire. They rent out their skills to the highest bidder. Anybody that has money can hire these human beings and turn them into killing machines or cannon fodder.”⁸⁵ South Africa had dealt a rare blow to the rapidly expanding world of mercenary firms, but it was just one setback in a story of progress for the industry as a whole—and Blackwater in particular.

Greystone

Blackwater’s plan wasn’t just about breaking into the world of peacekeeping. Prince and his allies envisioned a total reshaping of the U.S. military, one that would fit perfectly into the aggressive, offensive foreign policy that had emanated from the White House since 9/11. The main obstacles that prevented the Bush administration from expanding its wars of occupation and aggression were a lack of military manpower and the on-the-ground insurgencies its interventions provoked. Domestic opposition to wars of aggression results in fewer people volunteering to serve in the armed forces, which historically deflates the war drive or forces a military draft. At the same time, international opposition has made it harder for Washington to persuade other governments to support its wars and occupations. But with private mercenary companies, these dynamics change dramatically, as the pool of potential soldiers available to an aggressive administration is limited only by the number of men across the globe willing to kill for money. With the aid of mercenaries, you don’t need a draft or even the support of your own public to wage wars of aggression, nor do you need a coalition of “willing” nations to aid you. If Washington cannot staff an occupation or invasion with its national forces, the mercenary firms offer a privatized alternative—including Blackwater’s twenty-one-thousand-man contractor database.⁸⁶ If the national armies of other states will not join a “coalition of the willing,” Blackwater and its allies offer an alternative internationalization of the force by recruiting private soldiers from across the globe. If foreign governments are not on board, foreign soldiers can still be bought.

“The increasing use of contractors, private forces, or, as some would say, ‘mercenaries’ makes wars easier to begin and to fight—it just takes money and not the citizenry,” said CCR’s Michael Ratner. “To the extent a population is called upon to go to war, there is resistance, a necessary resistance to prevent wars of self-aggrandizement, foolish wars, and, in the case of the United States, hegemonic imperialist wars. Private forces are almost a necessity for a United States bent on retaining its declining empire.”

With an adventurous President in the White House, mercenaries could enable an endless parade of invasions, covert operations, occupations, coups d’etat—all with the layers of bureaucratic protections, plausible deniability, and disregard for the will (or lack thereof) of the population. Moreover, private soldiers are not counted among the dead, providing yet another incentive for the government to utilize them. “These forces can be employed without a lot of publicity—and that’s a very useful characteristic for any government. It’s politically easier, and there is less red tape,” said Thomas Pogue, a former Navy SEAL who enlisted in the Blackwater Academy. “We’re expendable. If ten contractors die, it’s not the same as if ten soldiers die. Because people will say that we were in it for the money. And that has a completely different connotation with the American public.”⁸⁷

While Blackwater’s operations in Iraq and New Orleans have garnered the most attention and controversy, they are temporary deployments and only part of the company’s global reach and aspirations. Despite the firm’s projection as an all-American business ready to fight genocide at the drop of a hat, Blackwater is deeply invested in a secretive project that has the company recruiting mercenaries in some of the shadiest human-rights-abusing locales on the planet, some of whom could be repackaged as privatized international peacekeepers or ground forces in another military action of the coalition of the willing. The project is called Greystone.

About a month after the infamous 2004 Fallujah ambush, Blackwater’s quietly registered “Greystone Limited” in the U.S. government’s Central Contracting office, which listed its “business start date” as May 13, 2004.⁸⁸ But instead of incorporating it in North Carolina or Virginia or Delaware, like Blackwater’s other divisions, Greystone was registered offshore in the Caribbean island-nation of Barbados.⁸⁹ It was duly classified by the U.S. government as a “tax-exempt” “corporate entity,” listing as its services: “Security Guards and Patrol Services.”⁹⁰ But this description, which evokes images of shopping mall guards, is nothing like the picture that emerges in Greystone’s promotional literature and videos for prospective clients. Blackwater’s original Web site for Greystone opened with a flash presentation where the word “Greystone” appeared on the screen over a large rock. Suddenly from the top of the screen, a fancy silver medieval sword came smashing into the rock forming the “T” in GreysTone à la King Arthur. After this little intro, the site then jumped to a page with the sword in the stone next to the motto “In Support of Peace and Security Everywhere!”

On February 19, 2005, Blackwater held an extravagant, VIP, invite-only Greystone “inauguration” at the swank Ritz-Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. The guest list for the seven-hour event was a revealing mixture of foreign embassy diplomats, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, and representatives of the International Monetary Fund.⁹¹ The diplomats were from countries like Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Romania, Indonesia, Tunisia, Algeria, Hungary, Poland, Croatia, Kenya, Angola, and Jordan. Several of those countries’ defense or military attachés attended. “It is more difficult than ever for your country to successfully protect its interests against diverse and complicated threats in today’s grey world where the solutions to your security concerns are no longer as simple as black and white,” Greystone’s promotional pamphlet told attendees. “Greystone is an international security services company that offers your country or organization a complete solution to your most pressing security needs. We have the personnel, logistical support, equipment, and expertise to solve your most critical security problems.”⁹² The invitation promised guests “the opportunity to meet with recognized experts from the global security industry. You will have the opportunity to see cutting edge capabilities presentations, and view tactical displays showcasing innovative equipment, and technology solutions for the global war on terror.”⁹³ The keynote speaker was Cofer Black, who, on the invitation, was identified only as the “Former Ambassador for Counterterrorism Department of State and Former Director of CIA’s Counterterrorism Center.”

Materials distributed to prospective corporate and nation-state clients proclaimed, “Greystone is dedicated to providing the best physical security assets from around the world in support of freedom, peacemaking, and the maintenance of peace. Our international focus enables us to develop unique and creative solutions to match each client’s individual needs.” Greystone said its forces were prepared for “Ready Deployment in Support of National Security Objectives as well as Private Interests.” Among the “services” offered were Mobile Security Teams, which, among other functions, could be employed for personal security operations, surveillance, and countersurveillance. Greystone’s Proactive Engagement Teams could be hired “to meet emergent or existing security requirements for client needs overseas. Our teams are ready to conduct stabilization efforts, asset protection and recovery, and emergency personnel withdrawal.” It also offered a wide range of training services, including in “defensive and offensive small group operations.” Greystone boasted that it “maintains and trains a workforce drawn from a diverse base of former special operations, defense, intelligence, and law enforcement professionals ready on a moment’s notice for global deployment.”

A Greystone two-minute promotional video opens with the sword-in-the-stone graphic and quickly fades to a scene of a Blackwater helicopter delivering supplies to its troops on a rooftop.⁹⁴ Next it cuts to a scene of mercenaries in civilian clothes distributing aid by hand to a desperate crowd of people, perhaps Iraqis or Afghans. A cheesy Casio keyboard beat plays in the background. The video then runs through a montage of images: heavily armed commandos in camouflage and ski masks storming a room, paramilitaries patrolling a smoky street, troops busting down a door and throwing a smoke grenade inside. Then the words “Providing Protection” flash on the screen, and mercenaries are shown securing a perimeter with a K-9 unit before escorting a “principal” from his SUV to a building. The words “International Security” appear before dissolving into a smoke-filled corridor through which black-clad commandos storm forward, weapons raised. More images of VIP escorts, then a helicopter zooming over a body of water. The video cuts to scenes of jungle warfare, then to paratroopers jumping from planes, and back to the jungle. “Vulnerability Assessment” flashes on the screen. A camouflaged face appears, followed by white men in black T-shirts, khaki vests, and sunglasses wielding automatic weapons as they escort another VIP from her vehicle. The video cuts to a car aggressively cutting off another vehicle before the Greystone sword-in-stone logo reappears.

While Blackwater portrays itself as an all-American operation, even Greystone’s name is a play on the moral and legal ambiguity of its mission and modern warfare, one backed up by its recruitment efforts. Greystone’s application asked prospective mercenaries for their “recruitment source”—listing agencies with names like Beowulf, Spartan, and AVI. The countries from which Greystone claimed to draw recruits were: the Philippines, Chile, Nepal, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, and Peru. It asked applicants to check off their qualifications in weapons: AK- 47 rifle, Glock 19, M-16 series rifle, M-4 carbine rifle, machine gun, mortar, and shoulder-fired weapons (RPG, LAAW). Among the qualifications the application sought: Sniper, Marksman, Door Gunner, Explosive Ordnance, Counter Assault Team.

Outside of its targeted marketing to prospective clients, Blackwater was quiet about Greystone. Not long after launching the project, Blackwater took down the original Web site, replacing it with a softer image and a new brand. The sword in the stone was gone, and so, too, was the overt combat imagery, replaced by a camouflaged soldier in a beret holding a small child on his lap with the phrase “Humanitarian Aid” above the photo. Another picture was of a man in a fancy suit speaking into a walkie-talkie—this picture was labeled “Security.” The new slogan, “Fostering Stability, Promoting Peace,” was splashed across the top of the page, and the services offered were security, training, logistics, and humanitarian aid/peacekeeping. Greystone’s mission statement too had been revamped. “Greystone focuses on providing stability to locations experiencing turmoil whether caused by armed conflict, epidemics or natural or man-made disasters. Greystone has the ability to quickly and efficiently deploy anywhere in the world to create a more secure environment for our customers,” the new statement read. Greystone could support “large scale stability operations requiring large numbers of people to assist in securing a region. Our goal is to foster a positive environment that promotes civilian security allowing commerce to flourish.”

“The Knights of the Round Table”

The same month Blackwater launched Greystone, Erik Prince began, at least publicly, raising the prospect of creating what he called a “contractor brigade” to supplement the conventional U.S. military. “There’s consternation in the DoD about increasing the permanent size of the Army,” Prince told a military symposium in Washington, D.C., in early 2005. “We want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier.”⁹⁵ Prince confidently asserted Blackwater could do it cheaper. For Prince it was a rare public appearance, and like most of his speeches, it was based on the free-market gospel and delivered in front of a military audience.

That was the case in January 2006, when Prince addressed “West 2006,” a massive conference of military commanders, weapons manufacturers and dealers, contractors, and other militarist entities. It was sponsored by the biggest names in war technology: Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.⁹⁶ Prince was the lone mercenary representative on a panel of senior military commanders including Dennis Hejlik, commander of the Marine Corps Special Operations Command; Sean Pybus, commander of the Naval Special Warfare Group; and Col. Edward Reeder, Commander of the Seventh Special Forces Group. “Why us? Why a private organization? Why am I even here?” Prince asked rhetorically. “This idea of private organizations doing things that used to be the sole realm of the U.S. government.”⁹⁷ In his presentation, Prince outlined the rapid rise of Blackwater, speaking proudly of building his “field of dreams,” Blackwater’s massive compound in Moyock, North Carolina. “We now have 7,300 acres, it’s a large private military facility,” he said as he gave an overview of some of the company’s operations, saying it trains about thirty-five thousand military and “law enforcement” representatives a year, including active-duty military, special operations forces, and personnel from the Department of Homeland Security as well as state, federal, and local governments. “We’re vertically integrated up and down across the board,” he said. “We have our own target business, we do full-on construction of tactical training facilities, we have our own aviation arm with twenty aircraft, canine operation with sixty dog teams deployed overseas, full-on construction, and a private intelligence service.” At the time, Prince said Blackwater had eighteen hundred people deployed around the world, “all of them in dangerous places.”

Prince also spoke with remarkable candor about his vision for the future of mercenaries. “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx?” he asked the crowd and his fellow panelists. “It’s kind of—our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service—never going to replace it, but we want to make it run better, faster, smarter, make people think out of the box.” The Department of Defense, Prince told the audience, consumes 48 percent of the world’s military spending, “and it’s very hard for an organization that large to transform itself. But if it has outside parties that are doing somewhat similar things, it gives people something to benchmark against.” Comparing the military industry to the auto industry, Prince said, “General Motors can only get better if it looks at how Toyota and Honda do. It makes them think out of the box and it gives them a vehicle to perform against.” Prince told a story of how in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, he was driving down the Autobahn in Germany in a rented car. Suddenly, “a Mercedes S500 blew by me at about 140 mph. It was the latest and greatest Mercedes that was available, 300 horsepower, airbags, automatic transmissions, all the bells and whistles.” But after the West German-manufactured Mercedes passed Prince, a slow-moving Tribant—the national car of communist East Germany—changed lanes in front of the Mercedes, almost causing an accident. “I thought, what a study in contrasts,” Prince said. “You have the same two countries, the same language, same culture, same background, different command structure: one of them was central planning, one of them was much more free-market oriented, innovative, risk-taking, and efficient.”

If you take Prince’s message that day at face value, it all boils down to efficiency. At the end of his talk, Prince said he didn’t want to “slight” the Pentagon. “The DoD has great numbers of fantastic people, but they get so trapped in so many bureaucratic layers that have been around for probably the last seventy years that it stifles a lot of innovation,” he said. “We come with a different footprint.” That “small footprint,” which Prince loves to speak about, is growing larger by the day. And it is growing because of the very concerted effort of a powerful clique of modern-day mercenaries who understand public relations, hire lobbyists, and engage in spin, and who have been very effective at riding the tide of privatization. As the size of the pool of official active-duty U.S. soldiers has plummeted over the past twenty years, from 2.1 million in the 1980s to 1.3 million at the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion,⁹⁸ the payouts and contracting to mercenary firms have skyrocketed. Before the United States invaded Iraq, from 1994 to 2002, the Pentagon doled out more than three thousand contracts to U.S.-based firms worth more than $300 billion.⁹⁹ As P. W. Singer has observed, “While contractors have long accompanied U.S. armed forces, the wholesale outsourcing of U.S. military services since the 1990s is unprecedented.”¹⁰⁰ This certainly escalated under the Bush administration with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pledging early on in the war on terror to “pursue additional opportunities to outsource and privatize,”¹⁰¹ in part because of his personal obsession that the modern military has a “small footprint.” As New York Times columnist Paul Krugman observed, “Conservatives make a fetish out of privatization of government functions; after the 2002 elections, George Bush announced plans to privatize up to 850,000 federal jobs. At home, wary of a public backlash, he has moved slowly on that goal. But in Iraq, where there is little public or Congressional oversight, the administration has privatized everything in sight.”¹⁰² Iraq was not the end of the trend but rather the model for the future. “Militaries are smaller than they were at the end of the Cold War,” said IPOA’s Doug Brooks. “So if anybody wants to do anything, essentially they have to go to the private sector now. And what they’re finding is that it’s faster, better, cheaper. Militaries are incredibly capable organizations, but they’re not designed to be cost-effective.”¹⁰³

There is no question that the Fallujah killings in March 2004 boosted Blackwater’s corporate success. On the one hand—some would say the cynical way of seeing things—you could say that Erik Prince cashed in on the deaths and saw right away the benefits of the highly publicized killings. Another way of looking at it is that the fortuitously timed killings happened to provide Blackwater the perfect venue and audience to further its already-active campaign to blaze a path toward greater privatization—with it, of course, at the forefront. The mercenary rebranding campaign, aimed at accelerating the pace of privatization to maximize profits, has allowed companies like Blackwater to build a permanent institutionalized presence for themselves within the structures of the state. The rebranding provides great PR opportunities and recruitment rhetoric while rolling out a ready-made justification scheme for politicians and various bureaucracies to outsource and privatize more and more taxpayer-funded military and security operations leading to added legitimacy and ever-growing profits. And this brings it all full circle: at the end of the day, it still boils down to money—a lot of it.

Exactly how much money the U.S. government has paid mercenary firms is nearly impossible to pin down—a fact due in no small part to the apparent lack of transparent or comprehensive bookkeeping. A June 2006 Government Accountability Office report acknowledged “neither the Department of State, nor DOD, nor the USAID—the principal agencies responsible for Iraq reconstruction efforts—had complete data on the costs associated with using private security providers.”¹⁰⁴ But the report found that “as of December 2004, the agencies and contractors we reviewed had obligated more than $766 million for security services and equipment” in Iraq.¹⁰⁵ The GAO found that security often accounted for more than 15 percent of the cost of operating in Iraq, not including the security costs of subcontractors, and the State Department reported that security costs accounted for 16-22 percent of reconstruction projects.¹⁰⁶ Given estimates of the total reconstruction cost from 2004 to 2007 of $56 billion, even a conservative 10 percent allocation for security would mean $5.6 billion.¹⁰⁷ The bottom line is that the U.S. government has not provided publicly verifiable information on many of the private military companies it is increasingly hiring with taxpayer dollars.

Blackwater alone has won more than a billion dollars in publicly identifiable U.S. government contracts under the war on terror, not including much of its “black” or “urgent and compelling need” business or its work for private actors. And its rhetoric of saving taxpayer money through free-market efficiencies seems increasingly empty. With the U.S. government unable or unwilling to effectively tabulate its own expenditures on private security /military services, a worldwide estimate proves even more elusive. In 2003, just as the Iraq War was getting under way, and before the major mercenary boom had begun, P. W. Singer estimated the value of the private military industry at more than $100 billion globally.¹⁰⁸ Homeland Security Research, an industry tracking company, estimated that governments and businesses globally spent $59 billion in 2006 to fight terrorism, a figure that does not include many “passive” private security services and that represents a sixfold increase from 2000.¹⁰⁹

What this means in practical terms is that the rebranding campaign is enabling the mercenaries to affix a permanent sieve to the most lucrative feeding trough in the world—the national budgets of the United States and its war-making allies. These “services” are no longer reserved for unstable nations struggling to maintain power but are being welcomed by the great powers of the world as an integral part of their national forces. In talking about the “expanding role” of the mercenary industry, Cofer Black said, “I think it is something that we all need to think about. We need to talk about and sort of agree. I do not see us going back. I do not see the national forces being increased exponentially, and I see [using companies like Blackwater] as a useful cost-effective tool.”¹¹⁰

What is particularly disturbing about the “expanding role” of Blackwater specifically is the issue of the company’s right-wing leadership, its proximity to a whole slew of conservative causes and politicians, its Christian fundamentalist agenda and secretive nature, and its deep and longstanding ties to the Republican Party, U.S. military, and intelligence agencies. Blackwater is quickly becoming one of the most powerful private armies in the world, and several of its top officials are extreme religious zealots, some of whom appear to believe they are engaged in an epic battle for the defense of Christendom. The deployment of forces under this kind of leadership in Arab or Muslim countries reinforces the worst fears of many in the Islamic world about a neo-Crusader agenda masquerading as a U.S. mission to “liberate” them from their oppressors. What Blackwater seemingly advocates and envisions is a private army of God-fearing patriots, well paid and devoted to the agenda of U.S. hegemony—supported by far lower paid cannon fodder, foot soldiers from Third World countries, many of which have legacies of brutal U.S.-sponsored regimes or death squads. For its vaunted American forces, Blackwater has expanded the mercenary motivating factor (or rationalization) beyond simple monetary gain (though that remains a major factor) to a duty-oriented, patriotic justification. “This is not about business and widgets and making money, at least not in our company it is not,” said Cofer Black.¹¹¹ “If you’re not willing to drink the Blackwater Kool-aid and be committed to supporting humane democracy around the world, then there’s probably a better place” to go work than Blackwater, “because that’s all we do,” Taylor told The Weekly Standard.¹¹²

In the bigger ideological picture, Blackwater executives fancy themselves part of a “just” mercenary tradition. “This is nothing new,” asserted IPOA’s Doug Brooks. “Even George Washington had contractors.”¹¹³ It is a line that Blackwater executives love. Indeed, they often cite the statues in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House as monuments to their trade and tradition. In the middle of the park is a statue of President Andrew Jackson on horseback. Flanking the four corners of the park are statues of mercenaries who fought on the U.S. side in the Revolutionary War: France’s Gen. Marquis Gilbert de Lafayette and Maj. Gen. Comte Jean de Rochambeau; Poland’s Gen. Thaddeus Kosciuszko; Prussia’s Maj. Gen. Baron Frederich Wilhelm Von Steuben (the object of Prince Group general counsel Joseph Schmitz’s obsession). “The idea of contractors on the battlefield, contractors doing this sort of thing, that it’s a new idea, is just wrong,” Erik Prince told a military conference in 2006.¹¹⁴ Citing the statues at Lafayette Park, Prince said, “Those are four military officers, foreign officers, contractors if you will, that came here and built the capability of the continental army, the continental army was having a tough time until they showed up. On Von Steuben’s statue it says he gave military training and discipline to the citizen-soldiers who achieved the independence of the United States. That’s what we’re doing in Iraq or Afghanistan, wherever we get hired and authorized to do so by the U.S. government, we’re giving them the capability to defend themselves, and to clean out their own problems, so you don’t have to send big conventional military to do that. You know, German mercenaries fought on behalf of the union in the civil war, even won the medal of honor.” Cofer Black echoed the narrative: “There is nothing new in this. What we are really talking about is the management of this for the good of the country and to achieve the objective. Lafayette Park could be called Contractor Park for our heroes that came to this country that trained us, trained our forebears.”¹¹⁵

In February 2006, the mercenary industry won a major victory in its rebranding campaign when private contractors were officially recognized in the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review as part of the U.S. military’s “Total Force.” In releasing the report Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said the review “sets out where the Department of Defense currently is and the direction we believe it needs to go,” adding, “Now in the fifth year of this global war, the ideas and proposals in this document are provided as a roadmap for change, leading to victory.”¹¹⁶ Cofer Black, was particularly pleased about the line in the report that explicitly recognized contractors like Blackwater:¹¹⁷ “The Department’s Total Force—its active and reserve military components, its civil servants, and its contractors—constitutes its warfighting capability and capacity. Members of the Total Force serve in thousands of locations around the world, performing a vast array of duties to accomplish critical missions.”¹¹⁸ Pentagon policy, according to the review, “now directs that performance of commercial activities by contractors… shall be included in operational plans and orders. By factoring contractors into their planning, Combatant Commanders can better determine their mission needs.” It was a momentous occasion for the mercenary industry—one that Blackwater and other firms recognized as a watershed moment in the drive for the kind of integration and legitimacy they viewed as central to their survival and profitability. Hiring mercenaries was no longer an option; it was U.S. policy. That it was issued as an edict from Rumsfeld, without public debate, was irrelevant. By 2007, Blackwater had its forces deployed in at least nine countries. Some twenty-three hundred private Blackwater troops were spread across the globe along with another twenty-one thousand contractors in its database should the need for their services arise.¹¹⁹ The rise of Blackwater’s private army is nothing short of the embodiment of the ominous scenario prophesied decades ago by President Eisenhower when he warned of the “grave implications” of the rise of “the military-industrial complex” and “misplaced power.”

Riding high on the privatization caravan aggressively pushed forward by the Bush administration, the right-wing think tank the American Enterprise Institute, which has long been at the forefront of the movement to privatize the government and military, sponsored a mercenary conference in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2006. They called it “Contractors on the Battlefield: A Briefing on the Future of the Defense Industry.” It featured two former Pentagon officials who were instrumental to privatization schemes, as well as Blackwater’s vice chairman, Cofer Black. The conference room was packed with representatives from various private military companies, as well as the State Department, Pentagon, and a variety of NGOs. The event felt very much like a reeducation camp for mercenaries, with the godfather, Black, presiding over lessons in rebranding and marketing the product: mercenary services. “We are in a state, as a planet, of disorder,” Black told the crowd. “I’m rather personally upset about this because coming out of the Cold War, I indeed thought that we would have a period of calm and relaxation and goodwill among men. This disorder is subversive.”¹²⁰ Turning directly to the mercenary trade itself and with the room silent before him, Black spoke slowly, choppily, methodically, as though he were a hypnotist talking someone into a trance. “It may sound a little bit like the Knights of the Round Table, but this is what we believe,” the veteran spy declared. “Focus on morals and ethics and integrity. This is important. We are not fly-by-night. We are not tricksters. We believe in these things. We believe in being represented. We believe in providing the support. We are ethical. We give training to our employees. This is something that will grow and grow. We want to be able to contribute for a significant period of time.”¹²¹