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WARRIORS
FOR HIRE
Mark Hemingway
on Blackwater USA and
the rise of
private military
contractors
Warriors
for Hire
Blackwater USA and the rise of private military contractors
By Mark HeMingway ing targets and shooting ranges. From its original product—
a patented, reactive, reinforced steel target—the company
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Moyock, N.C. now makes everything from modular, endlessly configu-
or obvious reasons, the location of the headquar- rable “shoothouses,” with doors and rooms that simulate
ters of Blackwater USA isn’t well-publicized. urban combat, to concrete, reinforced shipping containers
Officially, the only public trace of the world’s that can be set up anywhere in the world as self-contained
largest private military training facility is a post ranges. (A personal favorite is the “Dueling Tree”—an
office box in Moyock, North Carolina, an unre- upright stand with three targets on each side. Hit the target
markable rib-shack pit-stop on the way to the Outer Banks. and it gets knocked over to your opponent’s side where he
But the place isn’t hard to find. From Washington, D.C., can knock it back. The first shooter with all six targets on
head south. As soon as you cross the state line, follow the his side loses. Think of it as tetherball with guns.)
sound of gunfire until you find an armed compound half But we’re only scratching the surface. Though the com-
the size of Manhattan. Which is not to say the place sticks pany is less than ten years old, it’s already become the alpha
out—it’s just very, very big. Blackwater is a company most and omega of military outsourcing. The target systems
Americans first heard of when four of its contractors were remain a multimillion-dollar business, but now the corpo-
murdered in Falluja, Iraq, in March 2004, and their bod- rate flagship is just one part of a very large fleet. Indeed, it
ies desecrated on camera. It is the most prominent of the would be hard to understate Blackwater’s capabilities:
private security contractors in Iraq. You might think of the • A burgeoning logistics operation that can deliver 100-
North Carolina facility as Blackwater’s Fort Benning or or 200-ton self-contained humanitarian relief response
Quantico. packages faster than the Red Cross.
Still largely subsumed by the swampland it occupies, the • A Florida aviation division with 26 different platforms,
compound is mostly au naturel except for odd aircraft lying from helicopter gunships to a massive Boeing 767. The
around. The company name sounds mysterious, but it’s just company even has a Zeppelin.
the name of the region. If you dig a few feet underground, • The country’s largest tactical driving track, with multi-
the hole will quickly fill with the thick, dark peat water just surface, multi-elevation positive and negative cambered
under the surface. The only building of any real size houses turns, a skid pad, and a ram pad for drivers learning how to
the company’s brand new 60,000-square-foot corporate escape ambushes.
offices, a low profile building with a massive stone entry- • A 20-acre manmade lake with shipping containers that
way that blends into the surroundings nicely. (The massive have been mocked up with ship rails and portholes, floating
double-door handles made from .50 caliber machine gun on pontoons, used to teach how to board a hostile ship.
barrels get noticed, however.) In fact, the company logo—a • A K-9 training facility that currently has 80 dog teams
target sight superimposed over a bear claw—isn’t entirely deployed around the world. Ever wondered how to rappel
figurative. Black bears—at least one of which tops 800 down the side of nine stacked shipping containers with a
pounds—roam freely all over the property. bomb-sniffing German shepherd dog strapped to your
Of course, running into a bear is probably the least of chest? Blackwater can teach you.
your safety concerns at Blackwater. Firing ranges abound on • A 1,200-yard-long firing range for sniper training.
the property. For years, the company’s bread and butter was • A sizable private armory. The one gun locker I saw
its multimillion-dollar business designing and manufactur- contained close to 100 9mm handguns—mostly mili-
tary issue Beretta M9s, law enforcement favorite Austrian
Mark Hemingway is a writer in Washington. Glocks, and Sig Sauers.
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hile Blackwater’s training and logistics operations were rushed out on the mission without adequate prepara-
might be the heart of their operation, that’s not tion or protection.
the reason the company is on the verge of becom- Aside from providing one of the most demoralizing
ing a household name. Among its initial government con- images of the war, the killing of the four Blackwater employ-
tracts was one for antiterrorist training in the wake of the ees did two major things. It was the catalyst for the Battle of
USS Cole bombing. A single marksman could have taken Falluja, a brutal but ultimately successful attempt to reclaim
out the approaching bomb-laden boat, but most soldiers on the city from insurgents, which resulted in 83 additional
deck weren’t even carrying loaded weapons at the time. Rec- U.S. troops killed in action. And it drew national attention
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lackwater insists the money is exaggerated. “The Regardless of his inheritance, Prince’s subsequent shep-
thing that gets all the attention is that it’s a business, herding of Blackwater has proved him as adept a business-
a going concern. But there are nowhere near the man as his father. And there you have it. Erik Prince—mer-
profits that everybody thinks,” Taylor says. They are quite cenary mogul and liberal America’s worst nightmare. Not
serious about the moral importance of their work, a mes- only can he buy and sell you, he can kill you before you
sage that starts at the top. Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, the even know he’s in the room.
company’s founder, “believes to his core that this is his life’s
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work,” says Taylor. “If you’re not willing to drink the Black- or a conservative like Prince, you can’t make the
water Kool-aid and be committed to supporting humane world a better place without harnessing the power
democracy around the world, then there’s probably a better of free markets. He sounds more like an MBA than
place” to go work, “because that’s all we do.” a mercenary. Prince believes that an entrepreneurial spirit
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the financial arrangement really worked. espite the ethical perils inherent in such work,
Blackwater was contracted to provide transport secu- Prince insists not just that the future of warfare
rity for Regency Hotel and Hospitality. The Kuwaiti food depends on private companies driving market effi-
service company itself was a subcontractor of a German ciencies, but that this is the way of the world. “I would go
company, Eurest Support Services. ESS in turn was a sub- back to a deeper view of history. The idea of private contrac-
contractor of Kellogg, Brown and Root, which is itself a tors doing this kind of work is not a recent phenomenon,”
Polaris
million from the government of Papua New Guinea, to help
it regain control of a copper mine that had been seized by Blackwater parachuting demo at a military trade show in Jordan
rebels. This did not go well; Spicer was arrested as soon as
Sandline forces attempted to enter the country and freed prime minister. Weirder still, the coup attempt was likely
only after the British government intervened. Public outcry inspired by Frederick Forsyth’s 1974 bestseller The Dogs of
over Sandline’s contract very nearly destabilized the Pap- War, about a band of mercenaries who attempt to overthrow
uan government, forcing the prime minister to resign. the government of a fictional African country clearly mod-
If Spicer and Mann were chastened by the incident, they eled after Equatorial Guinea. As if that weren’t enough, it is
didn’t show it. By 1998 Sandline was embroiled in a much quite credibly reputed that Forsyth himself bankrolled an
bigger scandal—allegedly violating a U.N. arms embargo unsuccessful 1972 coup attempt in the same country with
in Sierra Leone on behalf of an Indian client accused of funds from his first novel, The Day of the Jackal, and that
embezzling millions from a Thai bank. Executive Out- Forsyth’s real-life exploits were the basis of his allegedly fic-
comes dissolved in 1999 in response to anti-mercenary leg- tional Dogs of War published two years later. The pièce de
islation introduced in South Africa, but Sandline operated résistance to this whole saga? Forsyth is one of a small num-
until 2004. ber of private investors in the current business venture
of Mann’s good friend and former business partner, Tim
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andline’s closing in 2004 was not incidental. That Spicer.
same year, Mann was sentenced to seven years’ While Mann began rotting in jail, Spicer was busy posi-
imprisonment in Zimbabwe. He had been arrested tioning himself and his new company, Aegis Defense Ser-
along with a planeload of mercenaries and former EO and vices. Despite the fact that he was called in for questioning
Sandline colleagues en route to foment a coup in Equatorial by the British government and suspected of being involved
Guinea, a tiny despotic country in the armpit of Africa that in some capacity with Mann’s 2004 coup attempt, in May
happens to have substantial oil reserves off the coast. of that year Aegis was awarded a $293 million contract
Mann’s failed coup made a huge splash internationally, from the U.S. government to provide security for the Army
in part because one of the people allegedly bankrolling the Corps of Engineers and the Iraq Project and Contracting
operation was Mark Thatcher, son of the former British Office, the two U.S. agencies most directly responsible for
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he larger question for Erik Prince and Blackwater water have been involved in charities on the margins of the
has to be: How to remove the stink that clings to humanitarian world for some time now. But the resistance
their industry? How can they convince the world is fierce. “Cofer and I have been speaking about our abil-
that they are “committed to supporting humane democracy” ity to help in Darfur ad infinitum, and that just pisses off
when everyone else in their industry has been eager to sell the humanitarian world,” Taylor says. “They have prob-
it out? With a Democratic Congress and talk of withdrawal lems with private security companies, not because of perfor-
from Iraq, most private military contractors are wondering mance but because they think that in some cases it removes
what’s next. their ability to cross borders, to talk to both sides, to be neu-
Blackwater thinks it has the answer. “I just got back from tral. And that’s great, but the age-old question—is neutral-
Darfur,” says Chris Taylor, the vice president for strategic ity greater than saving one more life? What’s the marginal
initiatives. “I called Erik on my sat phone and said, ‘I was in utility on one more life?”
Juba; there’s 300 U.N. vehicles in a motor pool, there’s any It would also require the humanitarian world to come
number of NGOs driving within a one-mile radius within to terms with one of its greatest failings. Time and again
Juba, and nothing’s getting done. The only time you see humanitarian efforts are foiled and set back because of the
people in their vehicles is when they were going to the tent inability to provide the security that enables relief efforts to
cities, because there’s a bar in every tent city.” go forward in dangerous areas.
Prince and other key Blackwater leaders have also vis- Currently the U.N. Department of Peacekeeping Opera-
ited war-torn Darfur. While there may be other private mili- tions has an annual budget of $7 billion, to say nothing of
tary contractors that are larger, most of them support and the billions in private charities and foreign aid pouring in
conduct operations through a patchwork of subcontracts. to the world’s worst places. Even those suspicious of Black-
By contrast, Blackwater can offer every conceivable service water’s motives must realize it makes good business sense
its people might need, so when they go into an area their that they would be interested in the work. Why chase after
resources are entirely self-contained, making them ideally shady corporate clients when the mother lode is in helping
suited to humanitarian work in difficult conditions—they people?
have the resources to provide both supplies and security It’s true there may be no good way to calculate the mar-
with military precision. “We’re not big outsourcers, which ginal utility of one more life. But just in case the world
is kind of ironic because we play a big role in the outsourc- needs them, in the swamps of North Carolina, a few thou-
ing market. The more layers of subcontracting, the harder sand rough men stand ready—for a price. t