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