A Man For Our Times
A Review of Civilian Warriors by Erik Prince
I was on Spring Break in St. Augustine, Florida and 16 years old when the US military streaked across the border into Iraq using the doctrine they called “Shock and Awe.” It was definitely awesome to see. I was raised as a Neo-con, and at the time my opinions were limited mostly to “get bad guys.” Less than two years before that day, I witnessed the destruction of several landmarks that I had never visited and may not have been able to find on a map, at the hands of Islamic terrorists on a Tuesday morning in September. We didn’t get anything done in school that day. Every class just had at least one of the 24-hour news networks tuned to 9/11 coverage. I saw the towers fall, live. I remember my history teacher telling me that this was a turning point in US history.
While I was still a sniveling high school student, other men were preparing to deal with the fallout.
One such man was Erik Prince. The book Erik wrote called Civilian Warrior: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror (2013), is purported to focus on Blackwater, Inc. Blackwater was a private military contractor that played an outsized role in US foreign operations, especially in the Middle East during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. Though at it’s peak, Blackwater was busy everywhere. The book features an abbreviated biography of Prince who comes from the Midwest and was the son of a self-made industrial tycoon. Prince learned his work ethic from his father, who learned his work ethic from his father and with supplemental lessons from the school of hard knocks. Erik’s grandfather died too young and his oldest son was expected, at the age of 12, to help pay the bills. And he did. After a brief stint in the Air Force, Edgar Prince returned to his home in Holland, Michigan and took a job as a die caster for a company that was sold off a few years later. Along the way, he obtained a degree in engineering and saw the opportunity to go his own way. This is a major theme of Civilian Warriors.
Edgar Prince started Prince Manufacturing by working around the clock to fill orders for 600-ton die casting machines, which he eventually sold to major manufacturers of military ordinance and automobiles. A true man of vision, Edgar is credited with inventing the illuminated mirrors on the underside of your car’s visor. He also developed designs for many other commonly used automotive gadgets such as digital compasses, programmable garage door openers, and even swiveling armrests. Edgar modeled an intense work ethic for his son, Erik, from a very early age.
After a nearly fatal heart attack at the relatively young age of 42, Edgar relented and rededicated himself to his Catholic faith and focused more on family. Witnessing his own father’s death, when he was only 36, made him realize that there was more to life than work, even highly successful work.
Edgar devoted his company to the welfare of his employees and placed a heavy emphasis on physical fitness. Corporations know that fit employees are more efficient and less costly with regards to insurance payments, worker’s comp incidents and lost productivity due to sick leave, of course. But, Edgar’s desire was more benevolent after his own near death incident, and he wanted his employees to take care of themselves. This switched Edgar’s reputation in the town from good to great, as he was viewed as a kind of father to his many employees. A model corporate statesman.
Erik would take all these lessons to heart as he set out on his own journey. Never allowed to be a trust fund brat, Erik did not require much persuasion to be his own man. The young Erik Prince loved unusual things. He loved boating and being on the water from an early age. He loved to analyze US foreign policy at an age when most guys are trying to score cheap booze illegally for the party on Friday night after the high school football game. His father, who would not let him have a job during his school years, encouraged him to join the Navy when he graduated, citing his love of sailing. Edgar expected his son to rise to a new height since he had been given so much in life, and Erik wanted to rise to that challenge.
After enrolling at the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Prince was disenchanted with the lack of intellectual rigor and left after three semesters, returning home to Michigan to enroll at Hillsdale College. He spent his spare time as a volunteer firefighter and as a rescue diver. Prince got involved in politics with an internship and developed several relationships with legislators and staff that would pay off for him later. It also allowed him to travel to some rougher parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe during the reshuffling post-Warsaw pact and Central America during the various color revolutions of that era.
After college, Prince went back to the Navy and joined the SEALs. Which I hear is kind of tough to do. During this time he might have learned a few other useful skills he would need later. He stayed with the SEALs for a few years, but when his wife got a troubling diagnosis, and with two kids at home, he resigned and returned home.
It is at this point that the biography of Prince himself mostly closes and the biography of Blackwater begins. Prince inherited his father’s vast wealth after his passing, which brought a great deal of heartache to Holland, Michigan as well as to his family. Now Erik was the scion of the Prince clan and in control of a significant portion his father’s fortune and was determined to put it to good use.
Early on, Prince demonstrated his grasp of entrepreneurship during his time with the Navy when he noticed that special operators, who love to train, were constantly waiting on training facilities to be available. If you are not a veteran, it may surprise you to learn that in spite of the staggering budget of the Department of Defense (DOD), there are still shortages of facilities to train war fighters in special skills (and even more conventional sorts of training facilities). These facilities are extremely specific and must be able to stand up to live-fire and heavy use from people training to do destructive activities professionally and in sometimes highly specific conditions.
Among other things, Blackwater was founded to be a training facility, privately owned, that could be booked for use by, well, anyone really. The DOD was the big target for the operation, but local police and sheriffs, even civilian gun enthusiasts, were able to take classes at Blackwater in all kinds of interesting things. Some classes were as simple as civilian concealed handgun training, and some were as exotic as evasive driving for personal protection details. Blackwater eventually got a full sized ship simulator to help maritime warriors train for the unique challenges presented by combat on ships.
Prince started out his operation with people. One of the things he learned from his father was that people make the place successful. He set out to hire the right people to help launch the venture, and he set out to find a location. He chose a bog in North Carolina because it was strategically located near his preferred clientele. There were numerous large bases that housed elite infantry units with a couple of hours, and he was relatively close to Washington, DC and even the CIA’s shadowy field training center known as “The Farm.”
When 9/11 occurred, the connections and reputation of Prince and his Blackwater facilities gave them the ear of the intelligence community. Prince had even attempted to get hired as a CIA spy but was ultimately turned down due to lack of field experience. Ahem. This was the beginning of what would become known as the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and Prince was in the thick of things right from the outset. Blackwater incorporated an offshoot and was awarded a temporary contract to provide security to CIA sites in Kabul, the first stop of the GWOT.
This is an important moment for Blackwater, not just because it opened the door to them getting business, but because it reveals their over all ethos as a company. They wanted to serve in whatever capacity they could, and that would be profitable (ideally). I would like to point out that there are several instances of Prince and his team doing the right thing with no payment or at least no payment guarantees on the front end because they wanted to do what was right for their country. However, security was needed, and it was something his team was competent enough to provide. The ethos of Blackwater basically became, “What do you need done in dangerous places? We can do that.”
During my college years, I happened upon Blackwater because they were in the news a lot at that time. Not always in complementary ways. But I recognized a very interesting business when I saw it. At the time, I was still planning to enter law enforcement, and I was keenly interested in the tactical career track in that field. I had a desire to attend Blackwater training for pistol and carbine. I lived in Knoxville, within driving distance, but alas as a poor college student I lacked the funds to afford their shooting schools and the ammo needed to go through a week of hard training there. The going rate at the time for a mid-tier training school was $250 a day, and ammunition almost doubled the cost. Blackwater was actually a pretty good deal at about that same price, but it was a premier quality training school. Looking into Blackwater, I found that their services were unexpectedly diverse. They performed construction projects in high risk areas, ferried passengers and cargo, provided security and a few other things. This represents Prince’s attitude of quickly and easily identifying unmet needs in a unique industry and positioning himself to meet those needs. He carried the excellent reputation of his company into several different business offerings, and it always worked because people knew that Blackwater did not fail.
At this point, the book pauses to point out the historic normalcy of private military contractors in America and worldwide. It was common practice in the British navy for independently wealthy lords with an itch for adventure could build or buy and then arm a warship and serve the navy as privateers, or if they preferred, to hire someone else to captain it for them. The US Navy was heavily supplemented by privateers until well after our Revolution. Privateers were privately owned and crewed and given official permission to engage the enemies of a particular nation. Private detective services are credited with being the foundation of American intelligence services, including the US Secret Service. Many explorers during the age of exploration, while not strictly military, were serving as private captains on behalf of a contracting national power. US military men volunteered for foreign service as contractors in multiple wars, including WWI and WWII. Some of the stories of these men, such as the 45th American Volunteer Airmen, aka the Flying Tigers, became personal heroes to Prince in his formative years.
Blackwater’s biggest breakthrough in business terms was the protective detail of Paul Bremer, ambassador to Iraq under George W. Bush in 2003. Bremer was theoretically protected by government employees of the Department of State, but they were not equipped to handle the extreme nature of his protective needs in what was essentially an active war zone. Bremer’s security was to be handled by a relatively affordable contracting agency that had high marks from previous contract work and was already in the system as a vetted contractor and could go heavy on short notice. Due to the extreme urgency, Blackwater was awarded a fixed price contract to get the job done, right now.
Another side note is needed here. Most government contract work in this industry is awarded on the basis of what is known as “Cost Plus.” Cost plus means that contractors are awarded fees based on how much they spend to do the job, plus a negotiated profit. You don’t have to have an MBA to spot the potential for out of control spending and the lack of any real incentive to reduce costs with this model. Blackwater developed a reputation for extreme efficiency, without any apparent sacrifices made to their actual effectiveness. Prince’s background in more normal business environments made him actually prefer this model. Blackwater was more than once scrutinized closely and even lost some bids, because the awarding agencies believed that their bid was too cheap, and they couldn’t possibly be forecasting their costs accurately!
While this was going on, Prince’s wife was suffering severe setbacks in her cancer battle. Prince is honest with his readers about his own moral failings and his regrets over his actions during this time. He found comfort in work and neglected his household, succumbing to the temptation of his fathers to pour himself into his professional world. When his wife ultimately passed away from cancer, Prince dedicated himself to raising Blackwater into a monument to his wife and was determined to do anything he could to make that happen.
Blackwater had it’s first major catastrophe when four of its experienced contractors were killed in an ambush attack on a bizarre but seemingly simple escort mission in Fallujah in 2004. Deviating from the normally rigid pattern of meticulous planning, and in an effort to meet the unexpected needs of a customer, the men on the ground were given permission to perform the escort mission. I remember seeing their bodies suspended from the bridge in Fallujah on TV. This was an important moment in the Iraq conflict. The carefully cultivated illusion that the people of Iraq were grateful to their benevolent liberators in the USA was shattered when crowds of people gathered to abuse the remains of these men that surely didn’t deserve what was happening. Prince was taken to task by various committees for not arming and armoring his men well enough. This detail is important to remember later.
Throughout the Iraqi occupation, Blackwater didn’t lose a single principal (person under their protective care), though a handful did suffer minor injuries like cuts and scrapes. They even saved a few people that were not their responsibility. Prince maintained a high standard for hiring contractors. By the time I was out of college, there was a part of me that considered applying for protective detail work with Blackwater. I ultimately chose not to do that, I had made it on to a police department by that time. It is a laughable notion that I could have gotten hired by them now that I know more about their hiring practices. You pretty much had to know what you were doing when you got there, and they would bring you up to speed on the specifics of your detail once you were brought on board. Almost all their contractors were veterans with combat experience and often from high performing units, and most of the others were some kind of specialist, such as helicopter pilots.
Prince’s business came under fire again because they were sued by the families of the four men who were killed in Fallujah. Ambulance chasing lawyers convinced them to do this because they believed that Blackwater had deep pockets and would likely settle for a major payout. It’s important to note that Prince had already compensated the families of the men who were killed, company policy, and a particularly important act to Prince, who learned from his father that employees need to be treated like human beings regardless of the work they do or how they died. The case lasted for seven years and brought Blackwater a great deal of negative press because of the aggressive negative spin campaign waged by the plaintiffs lawyers.
The darkest day for Blackwater was in 2007. In a place called Nisour Square in Baghdad, the Blackwater squad known as “Raven 23” was urgently escorting a state department official away from an area that had just endured yet another car bombing. Once in the traffic circle known as Nisour Square the squad was approached by a vehicle that refused to stop after being ordered and a single shot from Raven 23 killed the driver, who, it turned out, was not a bomber. The confusion was exacerbated by the sudden eruption of gunfire from nearby buildings that struck the convoy. Raven 23 returned fire and it became a gun fight. In the confusion, Iraqi police and civilian Iraqis were shooting, and Raven 23 was not sure who was friend and who was enemy, as many Iraqi police were secretly insurgents also. One of the Blackwater convoy vehicles was disabled and after rigging up a hasty tow-line and with air support the convoy managed to limp out of the square. Subsequent investigation by the Iraqis and the US piled all the blame on Blackwater. Four of the men were convicted in 2019 of several counts of manslaughter but were pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020. The men of Raven 23 have only ever given one complete interview about the incident viewable by the public. I highly recommend getting their side of the story.
Prince was castigated by congressional democrats for equipping his men with excessive firepower this time. Ahem. He was blamed in committee hearings, and Blackwater ultimately had its license to operate in Iraq suspended at the request of the Iraqi government. The nakedly political nature of the prosecutions and the extreme scrutiny that Blackwater was placed under going forward put a bad taste in Prince’s mouth to say the least. In the book, he admits that if he could do everything over again, he may not choose to launch the Blackwater project. Blackwater was ultimately rebranded as “Xe,” in and effort to rehabilitate the public image and was put up for sale.
The book ends with Prince stepping aside to allow Max Boot to finish up a section on Prince’s work for the CIA. Prince being unable to comment, he allowed Boot to search publicly available information and use a standard historian’s toolbox to reconstruct the story of those events.
Prince is not gone. His family is devoted to America, and he is a supporter of Donald Trump and several conservative causes. Prince is actually Betsy DeVos’s brother, who served in the first Trump administration as Secretary of Education. He continues to write and opine regularly on blogs and in magazines, and is a frequent guest on a number of podcasts about foreign affairs and business. He even has his own podcast. Prince continues to advocate for more privatization of government operations and to oppose government waste. As the father of twelve children, Prince has a vested interest in the future of this nation.
My assessment of this book is that it is essential reading for anyone desiring a comprehensive understanding of the GWOT and The Iraq war. Blackwater played a huge role in US foreign policy, and this work sheds a lot of light on the private military contractor industry. It is a fascinating story and will keep you interested until the end. There are a plethora of books written against Prince and Blackwater. Read them if you want, but after finishing this book, I see a man who was doing good work. Not just one man, actually, but many. The contractors of Blackwater were almost all good men. The troublemakers were quickly moved out. Blackwater, by my estimation, was simply a political scapegoat. As the war for Iraq became less popular, the Obama administration needed a release valve for public discontent. Blackwater, and their high profile shootout at Nisour Square, were convenient targets. Blackwater’s dismantling at the hands of our Government was wrong. The prosecution of the Raven 23 men was also wrong. The pardoning of the men of Raven 23 was one of Donald Trump’s most charitable actions in office. He undid a grave injustice.
My assessment of Erik Prince himself is that he is a “great man of history.” Like all other great men, he is very imperfect and complex. He makes no effort to conceal this fact in his book. But his accomplishments are great, and he is motivated by a desire to serve his nation as an entrepreneur. Prince’s aptitude and resources means he will continue to find success, and from the outside looking in, he makes it look almost easy. Reading this book will reveal how hard it actually was to get Blackwater off the ground and to see it through tough times, though. One wonders how far he could have taken it had the US government not turned their sights against his company. His driven nature will cause him to continue to try and seek out more opportunities. I get the distinct impression that he is a man who is uncomfortable with being at rest for too long. The world is getting weirder and men with the ability to forcefully stop evil will be a scarce resource that is in high demand, and soon. Erik Prince is a man for that kind of time. He is a man for our time.
Given the now two attempts on the life of President Trump, perhaps a phone call should at last be made to the man who never lost a person he protected, is a known and trustworthy ally of the protectee, and he can do it cheaper and better than our increasingly inept government equivalents.