As the United States debates an Iraq withdrawal, Blackwater doesn’t appear threatened. Some leading Democrats have advocated a gradual military withdrawal that would leave in place a counterterrorism “strike force,” the Green Zone, and security for U.S. Embassy personnel, who would staff the largest embassy in the world—potentially tens of thousands of armed forces. In fact, one of Blackwater’s senior executives, Joseph Schmitz, seemed to find a gold lining for Blackwater and other war contractors in a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq: “There is a scenario where we could as a government, the United States, could pull back the military footprint and there would then be more of a need for private contractors to go in.”203
CHAPTER ONE
MAKING A KILLING
THE WORLD was a very different place on September 10, 2001, when Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. For most Americans, there was no such thing as Al Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein was still the president of Iraq. Rumsfeld had served in the post once before—under President Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977—and he returned to the job in 2001 with ambitious visions. That September day in the first year of the Bush administration, Rumsfeld addressed the Pentagon officials in charge of overseeing the high-stakes business of defense contracting—managing the Halliburtons, DynCorps, and Bechtels. The Secretary stood before a gaggle of former corporate executives from Enron, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Aerospace Corporation whom he had tapped as his top deputies at the Department of Defense, and he issued a declaration of war.
“The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America,” Rumsfeld thundered.1 “This adversary is one of the world’s last bastions of central planning. It governs by dictating five-year plans. From a single capital, it attempts to impose its demands across time zones, continents, oceans, and beyond. With brutal consistency, it stifles free thought and crushes new ideas. It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk.” Pausing briefly for dramatic effect, Rumsfeld—himself a veteran Cold Warrior—told his new staff, “Perhaps this adversary sounds like the former Soviet Union, but that enemy is gone: our foes are more subtle and implacable today. You may think I’m describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world. But their day, too, is almost past, and they cannot match the strength and size of this adversary. The adversary’s closer to home. It’s the Pentagon bureaucracy.” Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD bureaucracy with a new model, one based on the private sector. The problem, Rumsfeld said, was that unlike businesses, “governments can’t die, so we need to find other incentives for bureaucracy to adapt and improve.” The stakes, he declared, were dire—“a matter of life and death, ultimately, every American’s.” That day, Rumsfeld announced a major initiative to streamline the use of the private sector in the waging of America’s wars and predicted his initiative would meet fierce resistance. “Some might ask, How in the world could the Secretary of Defense attack the Pentagon in front of its people?” Rumsfeld told his audience. “To them I reply, I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself.”
The next morning, the Pentagon would literally be attacked as American Airlines Flight 77—a Boeing 757—smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn’t take long for Rumsfeld, the chess master of militarism, to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11to put his personal war—laid out just a day before—on the fast track. The world had irreversibly changed, and in an instant the future of the world’s mightiest military force had become a blank canvas on which Rumsfeld and his allies could paint their masterpiece. The new Pentagon policy would draw heavily on the private sector, emphasize covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems, and greater use of Special Forces and contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. “We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach: one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists,” Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled “Transforming the Military.” 2 Rumsfeld’s “small footprint” approach opened the door for one of the most significant developments in modern warfare—the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat.
Among those to receive early calls from the administration to join a “global war on terror” that would be fought according to the Rumsfeld Doctrine was a little-known firm operating out of a private military training camp near the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina. Its name was Blackwater USA. Almost overnight following the great tragedy of September 11, a company that had barely existed a few years earlier would become a central player in a global war waged by the mightiest empire in history. “I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security,” Blackwater’s owner Erik Prince told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shortly after 9/11. “The phone is ringing off the hook now.”3
But the story of Blackwater doesn’t begin on 9/11 or even with its executives or its founding. In many ways, it encapsulates the history of modern warfare. Most of all, it represents the realization of the life’s work of the officials who formed the core of the Bush administration’s war team.
During the 1991 Gulf War, Dick Cheney—Rumsfeld’s close ally—was Secretary of Defense. One in ten people deployed in the war zone at that time was a private contractor, a ratio Cheney was doggedly determined to ratchet up. Before he departed in 1993, Cheney commissioned a study from a division of the company he would eventually head, Halliburton, on how to quickly privatize the military bureaucracy. Almost overnight, Halliburton would create an industry for itself servicing U.S. military operations abroad with seemingly infinite profit potential. The more aggressively the U.S. expanded its military reach, the better for Halliburton’s business. It was the prototype for the future. In the ensuing eight years of governance by Bill Clinton, Cheney worked at the influential neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, which led the charge for an accelerated privatization of the government and military. By 1995, Cheney was at the helm of Halliburton building what would become the U.S. government’s single largest defense contractor. President Clinton largely embraced the privatization agenda, and Cheney’s company—along with other contractors—was given lucrative contracts during the Balkans conflict in the 1990s and the 1999 Kosovo war. One military consulting firm, the Virginia-based Military Professional Resources Incorporated, staffed by retired senior military officials, was authorized by the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s to train the Croatian military in its secessionist war against Serb-dominated Yugoslavia, a contract that ultimately tipped the balance of that conflict. That contract was a foreshadowing of the kind of private-sector involvement in war that would become standard in the war on terror. But privatization was only part of the broader agenda. Cheney and Rumsfeld were key members of the Project for a New American Century, initiated in 1997 by neoconservative activist William Kristol.4 The group pressed Clinton to enact regime change in Iraq, and its principles, which advocated “a policy of military strength and moral clarity,”5 would form the basis for much of the Bush administration’s international agenda.