Erik Prince has a message for ISIS: You’re lucky Blackwater is gone... Last week, the controversial founder of the private military company had plenty to say about what the organization he once ran could be doing in the fight against the so-called Islamic State—and also why Republicans need to stop being such losers. “It’s a […]
While this is a slight exaggeration, a recent examination by Sean McFate, a former Army paratrooper who later served in Africa working for DynCorp International and is now an associate professor at the National Defense University, suggests that the Pentagon’s dependence on contractors to help wage its wars has unleashed a new era of warfare […]
Despite the volume of accountability initiatives and the involvement of various governmental bodies, it is still unclear what will guide the selection of armed contractors for future conflicts. Back in May 2012, for example, the then US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, Daniel Baer, gave a speech at a […]
Dismissing private military contractors as mercenaries can be simplistic and misleading, as their deployment in Sierra Leone’s Civil War displayed. That the country is rebounding despite 2014’s Ebola crisis is due in part to the success of contracted firms neutralising destabilising rebel groups. For impoverished Sierra Leone with its history of civil warfare, more unwelcomed […]
Absent on Wednesday in a Washington courtroom, where a federal jury entered guilty verdicts of murder and manslaughter against four Blackwater Worldwide guards in the killings of 14 Iraqi civilians, was a man synonymous with the United States’s infatuation with contractors. He is Erik Prince — billionaire, former Navy Seal, ex-CIA spy — the founder […]