The Blackwater era - Proxy Conflicts, Mercenarism and Military Joint-Ventures

Blackwater had became the most important actor in the conflict with Iraq and the War on Terror, becoming important not only for the new stage of new wars as important to the economy and new forms of business of war. Use of private intelligence, private aviation, special air services, and special operations in war by mercenaries, was a successful business, that elevetad to a new level of business and conflicts.

Following the tradition of Executive Outcomes, Blackwater became strategically the projection of the government in the places of they wanted to assure influence. As Executive Outcomes was for Africa, Blackwater was for USA in the War on Terror.

The new stage of wars became with the proxies and small actors, not State, with projection of geopolitical, under contract, and projection of politics and influence. After the fall of Iraq and Ba'ath party, the USA politics started a new social convertion of USA way of live in Iraq, corrupting the society and implementing new politics of fake democracy, USA life style and a place of USA influence, but it laft a vaccuum of power, that raised new terrorist groups, like ISIS.

This vaccuum of power and the raise of ISIS showed the weakeness and the lack of credibility of USA politics in Middle East, and also, in world wide, as it has became stronger in Obama administration, specially intern to the USA. 

Regretting to Blackwater, Trump has the strategy of raise again the political influence on Middle East, by strenght, and also, contract local people to do it in the name of USA. 

This can be a backfire, but anyway a good strategy anyway, specially because the proxies are into the new mercenarism era, as Sadat, Wagner group and other mercenary groups in middle east. The business of War became strong in with joint-ventures, and promoting new services, as the Malhama Tactical happened in Syria, promoting terrorist scool, or rebel school, for tactical training for paramilitaries against the government.

Raising a Blackwater in Middle East must assure that there will be a great inteligence service, technological capability, hybrid warfare capability on act in diverse possible scenarios.

To be greatest the stragegy, the Back chanel on Prince and Russian Government can link both countries to disrupt rebel policies in region, and also, restore a possible Eurasian order with the borders. Can it be a new-neo-colonialism in Middle East??

Haushofer was right, but Russia will not open the legs for the Eurasia, specially when Balkans are trying to joing NATO and EU, the use of power in Middle East, can be answered with force in Balkans.

Blackwater’s Dark Prince Returns

A DECADE AFTER BLACKWATER’S RETREAT AMID SCANDAL AND A MASSACRE, ITS FOUNDER ERIK PRINCE WANTS TO PRIVATIZE AND SHRINK THE CONFLICT IN AFGHANISTAN. RECENT WHITE HOUSE TURNOVER HAS GIVEN HIS PLAN A FIGHTING SHOT

By Noah Kirsch 

Illustrations by Sean McCabe

https://www.forbes.com/return-of-erik-prince/#4d3c986150aa

Amid reports that special counsel Robert Mueller had taken an interest in his activities, Erik Prince decided to host a fundraiser. On March 18, more than 100 people flocked to Prince's sprawling farm in Middleburg, Virginia, for an afternoon of pistol shooting in support of Putin's favorite congressman, Dana Rohrabacher, who the FBI reportedly found had his own Kremlin code name. As the day progressed, the group headed to the barn, where, over sandwiches and Budweiser, they heard from Oliver North, the central figure in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal, and Matt Gaetz, a member of the House who's big on Deep State "cabal" conspiracy theories.

Even among this motley bunch, Prince has enough notoriety to trump them all. The founder of Blackwater — the military contractor infamous for the 2007 massacre in Iraq in which a convoy of his mercenaries gunned down 14 unarmed civilians — he's kept a lower profile since he sold the company in 2010. But that doesn't mean he's been idle. Since then, he's pursued projects across the globe, from the United Arab Emirates to Somalia to Hong Kong.

But as the Rohrabacher event underscores, the so-called "Merchant of Death" again feels comfortable flexing his domestic muscles. The Trump administration "inherited a world on fire," Prince says. "And I think some out-of-the-box thinking can help put those fires out."

Following a decade in the wilderness, Prince has the White House access that will allow him to spread those ideas. He spent $250,000 to help get Trump elected; his sister Betsy DeVos now serves as Trump's secretary of education; and when Prince pitched a plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan last year, the White House took him seriously. "He actually had the most cogent argument, much more than the guys who were 'stay the course,' " Trump's former chief strategist Steve Bannon tells Forbes.

One major impediment to his privatization concept was national security advisor H.R. McMaster, a lieutenant general and war scholar adamantly opposed to the idea of replacing American soldiers with mercenaries. Nor did the Prince plan seem to fit the worldview of then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson. But now that McMaster will be replaced by neocon favorite John Bolton, and Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo, who once ran an aerospace supplier, the dynamics have changed. Bolton's selection, particularly, is "going to take us in a really positive direction," a source close to Prince tells Forbes. "Do the math." The assumption, of course: Prince would reap a big cut of the action.

As he planned his comeback, Prince met with Forbes at length, across two interviews, in the summer and fall of 2017. He stopped speaking to us after the Washington Post reported that a grand jury in the Mueller investigation heard evidence that Prince traveled to the remote Seychelles to try to establish a back channel between Trump and Russia. But Prince, still in muscular military shape at 48, had already laid out his grand strategy and provided a window into his temperament, one that mixes a belief in destiny, rooted in religion, with a warrior's calm in the heat of battle. "My favorite miracle in the Bible is when Christ is on the Sea of Galilee and there's an enormous storm," Prince says, "and they're in the boat and they're at risk of being drowned." He pauses. "He says, 'Peace, be still.' And the sea calms. Fantastic."

To understand Prince, the first thing to know is that he's never wanted for anything or had any reason to moderate his ambition. His father, Edgar, cofounded the auto-parts giant Prince Corp., based in Holland, Michigan. The religious family sent Erik to parochial school and made him a shareholder of the firm at a young age. "I didn't have to put gas in my car," Prince says.

The second thing: His family traveled widely, including behind the Iron Curtain, infusing Erik with a fervent belief in the primacy of free-market economies. (This upbringing clearly imprinted his sister, who espouses private education.) It fit his messianic worldview, where life is black and white, with only good guys and bad. As a teenager, Prince argued vociferously with his more liberal teachers about the threat of communism and Reagan's military policies, and he's never really stopped. "He's a warrior," says the Reverend Robert Sirico, who has known Prince since 1990 and baptized his children. "He thinks deeply about things, but... he's very hardheaded."

So it's no surprise he's been drawn to hot spots of dysfunction, with a mission to clean them up. "China and Russia are not the major threats to American security," Prince says. "Instability and sanctuaries where little pockets of psychopaths can breed and replicate — that's our problem." What about his critics, who have labeled him everything from hubristic to a neocolonialist to a war criminal? "Any mammals have parasites," he shrugs.

Third: Despite his charmed upbringing, his father insisted he forge his own path before possibly joining the family business. After graduating from Hillsdale College, a Christian school near the Ohio-Michigan border, he became a Navy SEAL, enduring its legendary training regimen, including a "hell week" that allows just four hours of sleep over five and a half days. Even now, he says, "I try to do what most people would call an extreme event three or four times a year." Recent examples include a 24-hour bike race in South Africa's desert and a 600-mile sailboat race.

After Edgar Prince died in 1995, the family quickly sold Prince Corp.'s automotive unit to Johnson Controls for $1.35 billion. Erik, then 26, walked away with at least $50 million. Around the same time, he left the SEALs when his first wife, Joan, was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She died in 2003.)

Flush and underemployed, Prince used a piece of his inheritance to build a training center for special forces in Moyock, North Carolina, which he called Blackwater, after the region's murky swamps. A series of domestic tragedies fueled the business' ascent. The shooting at Columbine High School brought police contracts. The U.S.S. Cole bombing beckoned the United States Navy. And after 9/11, Blackwater became the Pentagon's mercenary army of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq. Through 2006, Prince's firm generated $1 billion in government work.

But as public support for the conflicts waned, things began to unravel. Tension boiled over in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater contractors shot 31 people in Iraq's Nisur Square, killing 14. The contractors said they had been ambushed; Justice Department prosecutors thought otherwise. One Blackwater guard pleaded guilty to manslaughter, three others were also convicted of manslaughter and one of first-degree murder in 2014. (The murder conviction was vacated last August; prosecutors have appealed to the Supreme Court for a retrial.) The event — hardly Blackwater's first deadly incident — was viewed in much of the world as an indiscriminate massacre.

Prince was summoned to Congress for questioning. Government officials, many of whom had sanctioned Blackwater's aggressive tactics — even if tacitly — condemned him. Prince thinks he was singled out unfairly. Blackwater "was the perfect bogeyman for them to make up," he says. "I was a sole owner, my guys carried weapons [and] I came from a conservative family."

Whatever the reason, Prince's name became toxic, and the new Obama administration wanted nothing to do with him. Blackwater rebranded as Xe Services, and in 2010 Prince sold the company to an investment group led by two private equity firms, Forte Capital Advisors and Manhattan Growth Partners, for over $100 million.

Prince is still not over the loss. "I've stuck it all out there for America. The previous administration was extremely abusive of us, and I don't forget that," he fumes with an unflinching stare. "That means I'm very cautious about sticking it out there for any government."

To most of America, that chapter spelled the end of Erik Prince. But it's not in Prince's nature to slow down, much less concede defeat, and he quietly took his gambits offshore. He moved to Abu Dhabi in 2010, where, he says, he worked on his energy-and-mining investment firm, Frontier Resource Group. But according to a New York Times report he was also helping assemble a "secret army" for the UAE. (His spokesman denies the story.)

At the same time, he zigzagged around the globe on similar projects. Using Emirati funding, he helped create an antipiracy force in Somalia in 2010. The outfit targeted criminals on land rather than waiting for them to attack boats, "the way the U.S. or NATO or the EU was trying to do it," he says. "If you have a wasp problem, you deal with the nest."

To Prince, that endeavor offers proof of concept for his Afghanistan privatization proposal. "It worked," he says. "Have you heard of Somali piracy anytime recently? And that program cost less than the pirates were taking in ransom." But a 2012 UN report called the project "the most brazen violation of the [Somali] arms embargo by a private security company." Others say Prince deserves little credit for the pirates' demise. "It was ultimately the intensity of international naval patrolling, combined with the defenses that ships developed," says Vanda Felbab-Brown, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Prince next shifted to Asia. In 2014 he cofounded Frontier Services Group, a logistics and security business that trades on the Hong Kong stock exchange. He says he spends more than 80% of his time on FSG. According to its literature, the firm provides straightforward services for "companies operating in frontier markets." It has a market cap of $325 million.

"PRINCE ACTUALLY HAD THE MOST COGENT ARGUMENT, MUCH MORE THAN THE GUYS WHO WERE 'STAY THE COURSE,'" SAYS STEVE BANNON

Once again, Prince's work has government backing. One of FSG's principal shareholders is CITIC Group, a Chinese state-owned conglomerate. CITIC and another state-owned enterprise, China Taiping, agreed to invest an additional $107 million in FSG on March 2, though the deal has not yet closed. President Xi's corruption crackdown made raising the money a challenge. "I had meetings that were scheduled with senior executives," Prince says, "and we were called: 'Don't come, state security is here arresting people right now.' "

By all appearances, FSG is an incredibly dry business. "We deliver groceries," Prince told students at Oxford last April. Intuitively, that makes little sense. Prince isn't the type to go from battling al Qaeda and pirates to shipping rice and beans. Indeed, in 2015 a civil war broke out at the company over side projects Prince was allegedly running, two sources familiar with the events tell Forbes. Multiple executives left the business, while Prince remained chairman. The details behind the split are murky. The muckraking site The Intercept, cofounded by a longtime Prince critic, journalist Jeremy Scahill, reported that he was secretly planning to build armed aircraft in Europe, may have worked with Chinese intelligence and was under investigation for "attempting to broker military services to foreign governments." Prince again denies the allegations, terming them "fantasy."

Either way, Prince's years in exile demonstrate one underlying fact: Blackwater was only the start for this young, ambitious tycoon. And the current political climate gives him a window to get back in the game in America.

On a dewy morning in Washington, D.C., last year, Erik Prince is waiting outside a cafe. While it hasn't opened yet, he's already scoped the place out. He gathers his things and moves to a table by the storefront, where he can keep an eye on nearby foot traffic. A hanging plant shields him from above. Dodging scrutiny, often unsuccessfully, is his habit and his business. "It is what it is," he says.

Prince's eyes dart around as if he's on guard while he shares the early framework of his Afghanistan proposal. It revolves around a private force of 6,000 contractors, supplemented by 2,000 U.S. special operations troops and support personnel, who would embed with local Afghan units. Air power would be led by Afghan pilots, paired with contractors. All would be overseen by a "viceroy" who ultimately reports to the president.

Prince thinks his plan, which includes an overall drawdown, could save more than $40 billion a year. The current approach, he says, focuses on cycling in soldiers, who never fully adapt to the local climate. "How stupid is that?"

Prince first aired his full proposal last year via an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. According to Prince, Trump took notice. "He liked it very much," Prince says.

It's a relationship years in the making. Prince displayed early devotion to Trump, a president famously obsessed with loyalty. He donated $250,000 to entities supporting Trump's candidacy even when he looked like a general-election long shot and unofficially shilled for the campaign. "If you actually want to change things, and take power away from a centralized, bloated and elite-serving government, vote for Donald Trump," he told the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos in a podcast interview. "It's a pretty clear choice."

PRINCE'S FAMILY TRAVELED AROUND THE WORLD, INFUSING ERIK — AND HIS SISTER BETSY DEVOS — WITH A FERVENT BELIEF IN FREE MARKETS.

The trust is allegedly mutual. Prince traveled to the Seychelles prior to the inauguration, according to a Washington Post report, to meet a "Russian close to President Vladimir Putin." The purported goal: arranging a "back channel" between the Kremlin and the incoming administration. The Post recently reported that George Nader, an advisor to the UAE who reputedly helped arrange the summit, confirmed the meeting to a grand jury.

Prince had previously testified to the House Intelligence Committee that the Seychelles encounter was a coincidence. He said he was there to talk business with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan. After a discussion focused on terrorism and mining, a member of the Emirati entourage suggested he meet "an interesting guy from Russia" who, like Prince, did "business in the commodity space." They grabbed a quick drink at the bar. Did he contribute to or know about any sort of Trump-Russia collusion? "Zero."

Prince stands by his testimony, according to his spokesman.

The Seychelles blowback likely eliminated any thought of a primary race that Prince had been considering against Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming (his family owns real estate there). No matter. The recent White House shakeup has buoyed the prospects for his Afghanistan plan, which Prince claims had momentum last year. "If it was not for the debacle of Charlottesville," he says, "and the lady that got killed and all the political blowback that fell on the president... I'm almost sure he would not have made the decision [against it] today."

McMaster's departure removes one obstacle, though top military brass and think-tank eggheads revile the idea. Pompeo could be the wild card. The secretary of state designate traveled to Afghanistan last year in part to evaluate Prince's ideas, according to the Financial Times. He also pitched an Afghanistan proposal at Camp David in August 2017 that included elements of Prince's plan, a source familiar with the events tells Forbes. A CIA spokesperson, however, disputes those claims, telling Forbes, "You have been provided wildly inaccurate information."

Steve Bannon sees things differently: "Prince's voice is only going to get stronger, not weaker, because everything he said was going to happen [in Afghanistan] has happened."

Prince seems fine either way. Ever the SEAL, with Mueller potentially circling, he has backup plans. Libya could use a police force to choke off migrants; Somalia would benefit from armed boats patrolling its fisheries. Prince follows opportunity. And no matter how bad his PR, he always seems to find new backers. "If people think it gets to me," he says, "they have sorely misunderstood."