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
EPILOGUE
BLACKWATER BEYOND BUSH
IN EARLY 2008, Blackwater’s name had largely receded from the headlines save for the occasional blip on the media radar sparked by Henry Waxman’s ongoing investigations into the company’s activities. Its forces remained deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and despite the international infamy attached to the Blackwater name, business continued to pour in. In the two weeks directly following the Nisour Square massacre in September 2007, Blackwater signed more than $144 million in contracts with the State Department for “protective services” in Iraq and Afghanistan alone and, over the following weeks and months, won millions more in contracts with other federal entities like the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center.1 Erik Prince continued to portray his company as the victim of a partisan witch hunt. “I met the president twice,” he said after appearing before Waxman’s committee. “Iraq is a controversial war—no question. If they can go after contractors and take some of them down… it’s another way to embarrass the administration.”2
Amid rampant speculation as to whether Blackwater’s lucrative State Department security contracts would be extended in Iraq, Prince and other executives seemed unfazed. While quietly maintaining Blackwater’s Iraq work, they aggressively pursued other business opportunities for the Prince Group empire. As Blackwater absorbed a barrage of incoming fire over its conduct in Iraq, there was a silver lining for the company. It had secured a very public reputation for being a badass operation that protected—and kept alive—its “principals” in the most hostile of settings by any means necessary. Its very presence in Iraq after Nisour Square, over the objections of the Iraqi prime minister and amid multiple Congressional, military, and Justice Department investigations, sent a clear message: Washington needed Blackwater more than the pretense of Iraqi sovereignty. Blackwater’s boots on the ground were too important to lose, even in the face of growing outrage in the United States over the lack of accountability of Washington’s private forces in Iraq. “I know we’re there not only to be a protective screen,” Prince said in late 2007, “but maybe the fall guy when something goes wrong. That’s probably what’s happened to us in this case.”3