Blackwater USA

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Blackwater USA

P.O. Box 1029
Moyock, North Carolina 27958
U.S.A.
Telephone: (252) 435-2488
Fax: (252) 435-6388
Web site: http://www.blackwaterusa.com

Wholly-Owned Subsidiary of The Prince Group
Founded: 1997
Employees: NA
Sales: NA
NAIC: 561612 Security Guards and Patrol Services

Based in Moyock, North Carolina, close to Fort Bragg, the notoriously private company Blackwater USA bills itself as "the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world." Founded by former Navy SEALs, Blackwater is comprised of five business units. The Blackwater Training Center, the company's original focus, is one of the best facilities of its kind in the world, located on some 6,000 acres of private land. More than 50,000 law enforcement, military, and civilian personnel have trained here since opening in 1998. The center includes a number of live fire shooting ranges and tactical training facilities, like mock-ups of urban settings, a high school, and naval ship. Blackwater Security Consulting provides vulnerability assessments and risk analysis and training services, and supplies clients with mobile security teams comprised of former members of U.S. military special operations units and foreign intelligence services. Blackwater Target Systems offers indoor and outdoor shooting range target systems. Blackwater K9 maintains two facilities used to train dogs for law enforcement, the military, and commercial organizations in such areas as patrolling and the detection of explosives. The final business unit is Raven Development Group, which was launched in 1997 to design and construct the Blackwater training facility and now offers its services to government and commercial clients, capable of building an office complex in the United States as well as secure facilities in Iraq. It was in Iraq that Blackwater came to the attention of the general public after a number of its operators were killed in a pair of well publicized incidents, which brought notice to the increasing reliance of the U.S. military on professional security firms in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world.

Private Military Companies Emerge in Early 1990s

Soldiers for hire have essentially been around since man first began forming armies. While the Geneva Convention held after World War II expressly banned the use of mercenaries, "soldiers of fortune" continued to show up at hot spots around the world. With the demise of the Soviet Union an opportunity was created for a new breed of professional security companies. "At that time," according to a 2004 New York Times' article, "many nations were sharply reducing their military forces, leaving millions of soldiers without employment." Many of them went into business doing what they knew best: providing security or training others to do the same. The proliferation of ethnic conflicts and civil wars in places like the Balkans, Haiti and Liberia provided employment for the personnel of many new companies. The United States employed a small number of these private contractors with the 1991 Gulf War. When it was over Defense Secretary Richard Cheney hired Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to study how private military companies might support the military in combat zones.

Blackwater was one of dozens of a new breed of private military companies that sprung up in the 1990s in the United States and the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1997 by former Navy SEALs Gary Jackson and Erik Prince. It was Prince, one of the richest men to have ever served in the U.S. military, who furnished the financial backing and business acumen needed to launch Blackwater.

Prince was the son of Edgar D. Prince, a highly religious man who at the age of 33 in 1965 quit his job as chief engineer of a machine tools company to start his own die cast business. In 1972 Prince Corp. branched into the auto parts industry by inventing the lighted vanity visor for front-seat passengers, first offered on the 1973 Cadillac. This led to the introduction of a multitude of other car interior components and Prince Corp. enjoyed exceptional growth over the next 20 years. As he grew wealthy Edgar Prince became prominent in right wing politics, supporting like-minded candidates around the country. In 1988 he helped Gary Bauer in the establishment of the "pro-family" lobbying group, the Family Research Council.

Erik Prince followed in his father's footsteps to a large degree: devout in his religion, smart in business, and firm in his patriotism. In the late 1980s he attended a small liberal arts school, Hillsdale College, where he studied economics. He also got an education in politics, becoming one of the first interns at the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. He then worked as a defense analyst for conservative republican Congressman Dana Rohrbacher, before becoming a White House intern for President George H.W. Bush. In a rare interview (his father scrupulously avoided the press), Prince told the Grand Rapids Press in 1992, "I saw a lot of things I didn't agree with—homosexual groups being invited in, the budget agreement, the Clean Air Act, those kinds of bills. I think the administration has been indifferent to a lot of conservative concerns."

Prince returned to Hillsdale and became a member of the local volunteer fire department, attending classes with his emergency radio, and sometimes startling classmates as he rushed off to fight a fire. Prince transferred to the U.S. Naval Academy but resigned, preferring instead to join the Navy and earn a commission as a lieutenant. He then became a Navy SEAL (the acronym drawn from the attack routes of sea, air, and land). According to a Special Forces officer quoted by Raleigh, North Carolina's News & Observer, "Prince was a first-class SEAL, he was the real deal." He would serve four years with Seal Team 8 in Norfolk, Virginia.

Erik Prince Inherits Fortune in Mid-1990s

In March 1995 Edgar Prince died of a massive heart attack, found on the floor of an elevator shortly after leaving the executive dining room at Prince Corporation headquarters. By now the automotive industry was going global and the private company faced a crossroads. The Prince family decided to sell off the automotive unit, receiving $1.35 billion from Johnson Controls Inc. A year later in 1996 Eric Prince quit the NAVY and returned home to Michigan to run the remaining family companies, which included the original die cast machine business, an airplane leasing operation, and a real estate development company. However, the 27-year-old soon found a venture that was more to his liking.

In 1997 Prince and Jackson went into business together to build a first class private military training center, believing there was an opening for such a facility as the military closed the doors on a number of its training centers. They bought a large section of farmland in Camden and Currituck counties in North Carolina, some 25 miles from Fort Bragg. Because the large amount of peat in the area turned the water black in the drainage canals they called the company Blackwater USA. For a logo they chose a bear claw, an allusion to the large brown and black bear population in the area.

Blackwater experienced some difficulty in gaining permission from Currituck County to build its training center because officials worried that the firing ranges might disturb residents in nearby Moyock, a growing community. Instead, Blackwater turned to Camden Country where it found a more receptive hearing. What resulted would be a world class training complex. Writing for Handguns in 2000, Katherine Rauch took a three-day handgun course at Blackwater and offered a glimpse at the facilities: "There are steel movers and steel plates, steep Pepper Poppers and stationary steel, along with computerized pneumatic steel targets and automated paper targets. There's Simunitions complex of four buildings, with a live-fire 'Hogan's Alley' right across the 'street,' along with two all-steel shoot houses, a 1,200-yard range and a 7,000-square-foot schoolhouse dubbed 'R.U. Ready High.'… All This, plus breakfast and lunch, along with a private room (by request) in the bunkhouse complex with its own little deck overlooking one of the many ponds on the property."

The Blackwater training center was open for business in 1998, but in the early months had difficulty in drumming up much business. The company became adept, however, at keeping tabs on national and international news, then adding facilities and training programs to meet perceived needs. For example, R.U. Ready High School was built after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. It was essentially a two-story, 24-room, six-stairwell, all-steel building that allowed for the use of live gunfire inside and even the use of explosives for "dynamic entry" through the doors. R.U. Ready was used to teach law enforcement and military personnel special tactics. A catwalk across the ceiling allowed instructors to monitor students as they made their way through the building. The facility found a ready market, clients included a number of police officers who paid for the training out of their own pockets

Another event that caught the attention of Blackwater was the 2000 bombing of the destroyer Cole in Yemen. In response, Blackwater constructed a realistic mockup of a Navy vessel. In the fall of 2002 the company won a $35.7 million, five-year contract with the Navy to conduct two-week training sessions for Navy personnel on topics that included sentry duty, weapons use aboard a ship, and how to board, seize, and search another ship.

Company Perspectives:

Blackwater USA is the most comprehensive professional military, law enforcement, security, peacekeeping, and stability operations company in the world. We have established a global presence and provide training and operational solutions for the 21st century in support of security and peace, and freedom and democracy everywhere.

2001 Terrorist Attacks: A Turning Point

What led to the most significant spike in business for Blackwater were the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the ensuing events. Not only would the training facilities find more use, the company would be called on to provide trained personnel to corporations, the U.S. government, and the U.S. military. Blackwater supplied independent contractors to Afghanistan and later to Iraq when the United States invaded the country in spring 2003. Among their tasks, Blackwater personnel served as the personal guard for Paul Bremer, the head of the civilian administration. The company mostly recruited by word of mouth, hiring from within the close-knit community of former SEALs, Green Berets, Army Rangers, and Delta Force Troops. As the war in Iraq settled into a long-term conflict, the demand for personnel increased and Blackwater had to branch out. Jackson told the British newspaper The Guardian in 2004, "We scour the ends of the earth to find professionals." The company also found recruits in the Currituck County sheriff's office, where a number of deputies went to work for Blackwater overseas, making as much money in a single month as they did in a year at home. In 2004 Blackwater made news when it recruited 60 former commandos and other members of Chile's military and flew them to North Carolina for training before deploying them elsewhere.

Modern day "free lancers" were known in international security circles as "operators." In 2004 The Virginian Pilot offered a glimpse of them in Iraq: "They are easy to spot in a landscape dominated by young, uniformed soldiers and the dark slender profiles of Iraqis. Operators tend to be muscled-up men in their 30s or 40s, wearing T-shirts, ball caps and wrap-around sunglasses. An automatic weapon is ever present, cradled in their beefy biceps." Operators tended to be loners who joined the military but grew bored with the regimen and frustrated by the bureaucracy and low pay. It was not the life for a married man. According to the Virginian Pilot, "A military husband occasionally goes off to war, but an operator is always heading somewhere dangerous. Turn down a job or two, and the phone stops ringing. Retirement and leave don't exist…. Operators rarely discuss their families…. More than just a soft spot to shield, families can doom a man in a war zone if he can't cut off his emotions."

The use of operators and the companies like Blackwater that supplied them were little known until March 4, 2004 when four Blackwater employees were leading a convoy of trucks to pick up kitchen equipment. According to the company, they were assured by men they believed were members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps that they would have safe and quick passage through the dangerous city of Falluja. Instead, the road was blocked, their escape route cut off, and the men were shot to death, burned, and mutilated. Their charred remains were dragged before cameras, the video broadcast around the world. In another well chronicled incident, in April 2005 six Blackwater personnel were killed when the helicopter they were riding in was shot down, apparently by rocket-propelled grenades.

The Falluja incident led to a spike in employment applications for Blackwater, fueled in large part out of a sense of revenge, but it also brought the use of private security firms by the military into public view. To critics of the practice, Blackwater became the face of the entire industry, although in reality there were scores of similar companies. Altogether they added about 15,000 men to the military forces stationed in Iraq. Critics charged that rapid growth in the private military industry was leading to inexperience and poorly trained units. Moreover, the cost of using such forces could be hidden from the public, and the personnel were not subject to the same kind of accountability as U.S. soldiers. Miscreants were simply shipped home. Given that U.S. forces were stretched thin, however, the military had little choice but to continue to rely on private contractors. Following the events in Falluja, according to Nation magazine, Blackwater "hired the Alexander Strategy Group, a PR firm with close ties to GOPers like [House Majority Leader Tom] DeLay. By Mid-November the company was reporting 600 percent growth. In February 2005 the company hired Ambassador Cofer Black, former coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department and former director of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, as vice chairman."

Blackwater continued to see training as its core mission and made major upgrades to its North Carolina facilities. In 2004 the company received permission from Currituck County to expand operations into that county, including firearms ranges, parachute landing zones, and explosives training. Later in the year Blackwater began to build a roadway through 90 acres of its property that would be suitable for training in high-speed chases (above 100 miles per hour) as well as motorcade protection against terrorist attacks.

Blackwater was again in the news in the autumn of 2005 when about 150 Blackwater men were spotted in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the city. Not only did they—along with operators from other firms—secure government facilities, they guarded private businesses and homes. The company also lobbied in 2005 for Homeland Security contracts to train 2,000 new Border Patrol agents. Jackson testified before Congress regarding the business and made a pitch for Blackwater as a one-stop shopping solution for the government. There was every reason to believe that because of military limitations and the company's strong political ties Blackwater, despite the notoriety it had received, was well positioned to prosper in the years to come.