Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial mercenary group Blackwater, has published an opinion editorial in the online magazine IM-1776, claiming that “neoconservatives” have taken over the armed forces of the United States of America—and outlining a plan for patriots to seize control of the nation’s fighting force.
Prince, despite his own formidable military experience, is a self-described libertarian with views distinct from those of the more hawkish American foreign policy consensus.
It is little wonder, then, that the mercenary extraordinaire has taken a stance in opposition to the status quo of U.S. military policy, putting the strategic failures of the world’s supposedly strongest fighting force under a miscroscope of intense scrutiny.
“It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world,” Prince’s essay begins. “The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?”
Prince sets out to answer that question, attributing the current dismal state of the U.S. military’s ability to project force—or lack thereof—to a constellation of financial and political factors.
One cause of the purported decline in America’s armed forces is attributed to the degree to which the U.S. military has had its expenses covered by debt spending. Rather than making the military stronger, as might be expected, this spending leads to a lack of discipline and tact about the allocation of resources, in Prince’s estimation.
“All warfare has an underlying economic basis and a nation’s military power reflects its economic structure,” Prince writes. “Today in America the ‘exorbitant privilege’ of the US dollar and the unlimited printing press of fiat currency it enables means current US defense spending is essentially covered by debt: indeed at least 30% of the current national debt consists of military overspend from the so-called Global War on Terror. This reality has created an absence of strategic discipline, and a military policy that prioritizes a tiny guild of contractors feeding an obese top-heavy structure rather than winning wars.”
Prince goes on to offer his perspective on U.S. foreign policy disasters in West Africa, Rwanda, and the Middle East, saving his most savage critique for the response to the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001 and here beginning to paint a picture of his own robust but measured approach to foreign policy.
“The US response to 9/11 should have resembled a Scipio Africanus-style Roman punitive raid, killing all Taliban and Al-Qaeda remnants within reach, including those sheltering in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and then withdrawing,” Prince said, invoking the name of the ancient Roman general who reduced Carthage to a pile of salt. “Instead, the Neocons saw a lucrative opportunity to ‘nation build’. Because the Pentagon runs on the bureaucratic principle of budget cycles and the internal war for promotion rather than the principle of victory, a vastly inflated occupational army ultimately comprising 120,000 soldiers was deployed to the country. This force represented a repetition of the failed Soviet plan of the 80s, to the extent of occupying the same bases.”
Prince describes many of the tactical snafus made by the U.S. military during this period. Unsurprisingly, according to Prince, these nation-building efforts were an unmitigated failure for the United States.
“The Neocon plan for Afghanistan, or at least the story, was to impose a centralized Jeffersonian democracy on a largely illiterate, semi-feudal tribal nation by throwing infinite money at a paper-thin civil society. The result, unsurprisingly, was corruption, not infrastructure. Meanwhile, the military operation remained chaos incarnate. Not only was there never a truly empowered supreme commander, but authorities were split between the US Ambassador, CIA Station chief, the current 4-star US General, the CENTCOM Commander and their staff residing in Qatar or Tampa, and various representatives from NATO. This committee from Hell produced predictable results,” Prince writes.
The solution, according to Prince, is a regimen of privatization, which the mercenary believes can bring efficiency to the United States military. He cites the advent of the Federal Express as an example of this phenomenon, noting that while FedEx has not entirely replaced the U.S. Postal Service, it has improved the system’s efficiency. The same, he claims, can be achieved by the military.
“The American taxpayer is paying far too much for much too little,” Prince writes. “The cozy cartel of defense contractors must be broken up, and the military made competitive again. Anti-trust enforcement and competitive tenders will stop the corruption of the thousands of lobbyists in Washington milking congress like a cow while delivering overpriced and ineffective products. The current status is unacceptable. The more consolidated the defense base, the more it behaves like the Pentagon bureaucracy: exactly what America cannot afford.”
“America’s private sector has always outperformed government in solving problems. It is time to unleash America’s entrepreneurs in foreign policy to cut costs and restore American credibility,” Prince concludes.
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