Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

DATELINE: Headquarters of Blackwater USA, Moyock NC, 2 June 2006

Facinating day, but tiring.

Got home from Paramount King’s Island with Em’s class around midnight, which gave me only 4 hours to sleep before rising and catching 0600 flight to Dulles. There Steve DeAngelis swings by and we go to Piedmont Aviation terminal, to fly down to Blackwater USA’s HQ in Moyock NC with CEO Erik Prince in the small company plane (hoping for some slick G-3, but got some very practical prop, which was indicative of their whole facility--very utilitarian but nothing that said “we spend money freely”).

Landing on their own little runway amidst their great number of firing ranges, it was a bit weird to debark plane with so much gunfire all around, but the place is definitely busy.

Blackwater, as you might know, is a top-flight private military company that got it’s start with former Navy SEAL Prince about ten years ago. First big contract was to train sailors on ship security in port after USS Cole bombing, and that’s basically what they do most--train military, police, and security personnel from all levels of U.S. government, plus some foreign. After 9/11, according to Prince, their direct work of supplying high-quality personnel on the ground expanded a lot, but the roots and the ethos of the company remain in training, whether its their own people or those of others.

To that end, they have one big facility down in Moyock, as in tens of thousands of acres. Prince and his head of training drove us around for “windshield tour” that included several short tours of various facilities--like their very innovative shooting gallery houses that are reconfigurable. Blackwater also sells a lot of their training equipment and gear to other companies and government agencies, because it’s stuff they developed on their own, being unsatisfied with what they could buy commercially. Since it’s good stuff, people want to buy it direct, in addition to the training services, so apparently they sell a lot of gear on-line through their site.

Overall, a very impressive facility--again, nothing gold-plated, just very utilitarian and efficient and often quite elegant in design. A lot of thought went into building this place, and this company, so you can’t come away from the tour not feeling impressed.

And, I confess, I came away a bit surprised. Like most people, I tended to view Blackwater primarily in terms of the high-quality bodies they put on the ground. For many people, the first time they heard about the company was when four of their guys died in Falluja in April 2004 (the former SOF guys whose bodies were torn up by the locals). But touring the place, you really get a sense that the company is more about training than anything else--in effect, a serious capacity-building multiplier, much like Pinkerton was in the Civil War and the subsequent settling of the West.

Prince gave us a fascinating brief about the company over lunch, with lotsa historical details on the evolution of private military contractors through history (favorite point being about how many of our Revolutionary War heroes were actually foreign military contractors, like Lafayette; but frankly, they’ve appeared in every war we’ve fought).

My point was that it’s only natural for PMCs (private military companies) to be thriving in an era when the global economy is expanding, because markets are moving into previously untapped and often more dangerous environments. When that sort of expansion is happening, PMCs end up filling a substantial niche in the military-market nexus.

Steve’s point was that this also happens when government structures and market conditions get out of whack, so there is a backfilling function. In effect, he noted, Blackwater and Enterra approach Fourth Generation Warfare very similarly in terms of building capacity to defeat asymmetrical threat actors. Blackwater’s just very real and very on the ground, while Enterra’s based in the cyber universe.

In combination then, Blackwater’s future couldn’t be brighter.

Rest of afternoon given over to discussion between the two of us and a cluster of Blackwater senior execs. That was truly interesting, simply in terms of realizing how similar our approaches are to similar markets, so clearly we talked a lot about Development-in-a-Box and the market-making templates of how to connect up previously disconnected economies and societies. Blackwater’s contention is basically that, all things being equal, private firms will jump-start both local security and markets better than government or international agencies, simply because they take on the risk with more equanimity and can respond with greater agility. Plus, there’s just the more direct profit motive. Frankly, as I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s a bit weird to think that the combo of the military and aid groups/agencies will succeed in postwar reconstruction, because between them there isn’t really any entrepreneurial spirit or experience. It’s just not in their genes.

A great example of this is how Blackwater got quickly pulled into the Katrina effort in New Orleans (the subsequent subject of many conspiracy tales). Prior to the hurricane, Prince said, the company has no intention of ever getting involved with domestic crisis response, but the reality was, when push came to shove, Blackwater could put together an effort so much faster than government entities that, once on the scene and proving themselves, the offers just poured in. Now, they have a standing capacity ready to go at a moment’s notice, which shows you how quickly they adapt to new market conditions.

So all in all it was a fascinating day, with good discussion of future collaborative possibilities between Enterra and Blackwater. Steve and I both know that Development-in-a-Box lives and dies as a strategic concept on the basis of the talent and professionalism of the people on the ground who do the initial implementation--but even more so the training. Getting my head turned a bit on what Blackwater’s all about was useful (and very instructive), but getting a sense of how systematically they approach training was truly encouraging--yet another example of how we overthink the complexity of the problem, overestimate the cost of the problem, and underestimate the private-sector’s ability to get things started and moving in a rapid, on-the-ground, market-driven sort of way. No surprise, Blackwater looks at it in much the same way, noting that the simplest and most direct solutions tend to be the most empowering to the locals, and that’s what really matters at the end of the day.

What should really die with Iraq are a lot of assumptions about governments building nations--much less militaries building nations. What we need most for the future is a robust industry sector that’s competently arrayed and properly incentivized to get us out of that post-conflict/disaster “quagmire” mentality and into the “virgin markets” mindset.

And no, that’s not a new realization for me. I’ve always said SysAdmin needs to be more civilian than uniform, more rest-of-USG than DoD, more international than American, and definitely more private-sector than public.

Globalization remains in an expansive phase, so understanding how the Blackwaters of the world replicate many of the same functions played so famously by Pinkerton back after the Civil War helps orient a lot of people’s minds to the more correct historical analogies.

In short, this ain’t a rerun of Vietnam, cause this ain’t an extension of the Cold War. Adjusting to that environmental and strategic reality is crucial for understanding both the Fourth Generation Warfare characteristics of this struggle, plus its Long War timeframe.