4 days ago
This article has been edited to clarify that Constellis no longer trains forces at Camp Integrity and that Blackwater, if it returns, would not have a connection to Constellis.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis is out.
Mattis’ resignation comes amid news that President Donald Trump has directed the drawdown of 2,000 U.S. forces in Syria, and 7,000 U.S. forces from Afghanistan, a U.S. official confirmed to Military Times, a story first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
This month, in the January/February print issue of the gun and hunting magazine “Recoil,” the former contractor security firm Blackwater USA published a full-page ad, in all black with a simple message: “We are coming.”
Is the war in Afghanistan — and possibly elsewhere ― about to be privatized?
If Blackwater returns, it would be the return of a private security contractor that was banned from Iraq, but re-branded and never really went away. By 2016 Blackwater had been re-named and restructured several times, and was known at the time as Constellis Group, when it was purchased by the Apollo Holdings Group. Reuters reported earlier this year that Apollo had put Constellis up for sale, but in June the sale was put on hold.
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President Trump is growing increasingly interested in a proposal from Erik Prince, the former head of Iraq War security firm Blackwater, to replace military personnel in Afghanistan with private contractors, NBC reported Friday.
Prince, the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, said the Pentagon’s 17 years of armed conflict in Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks haven’t yielded a decisive victory partly because military personnel are rotated through the country without spending enough time there to effectively implement winning strategies.
Initial efforts in Afghanistan in 2001, with Central Intelligence Agency officers, warplanes and Special Forces personnel, devastated the ruling Taliban in a matter of weeks, he said, and using private contractors who would work side-by-side with Afghan forces on a long-term basis could duplicate that success. Prince’s former company, Blackwater, shows the challenge involved, however: Some of its guards were convicted in 2014 of federal charges linked to a September 2007 shooting at Baghdad’s Nisur Square that left 14 unarmed civilians dead and more wounded.
