Obligatory reminder via the GREAT
@realErikDPrince, at a security symposium in
#WashingtonDC, circa 2005, on why Neo-
#Marxism and Corporatist-
#Globalists will fail:
“We have our own business, we do full-on construction of tactical training facilities, we have our own aviation arm with twenty aircraft, canine operation with sixty dog teams deployed overseas, full-on construction, and a private intelligence service.” At the time, Prince said Blackwater had eighteen hundred people deployed around the world, “all of them in dangerous places.”
Prince also spoke with remarkable candor about his vision for the future of mercenaries. “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx?” he asked the crowd and his fellow panelists. “It’s kind of our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service—never going to replace it, but we want to make it run better, faster, smarter, make people think out of the box.” The Department of Defense, Prince told the audience, consumes 48 percent of the world’s military spending, “and it’s very hard for an organization that large to transform itself. But if it has outside parties that are doing somewhat similar things, it gives people something to benchmark against.”
“Comparing the military industry to the auto industry, Prince said, “General Motors can only get better if it looks at how Toyota and Honda do. It makes them think out of the box and it gives them a vehicle to perform against.” Prince told a story of how in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin wall, he was driving down the Autobahn in Germany in a rented car. Suddenly, “a Mercedes S500 blew by me at about 140 mph. It was the latest and greatest Mercedes that was available, 300 horsepower, airbags, automatic transmissions, all the bells and whistles.” But after the West German-manufactured Mercedes passed Prince, a slow-moving Trabant—the national car of communist East Germany—changed lanes in front of the Mercedes, almost causing an accident. “I thought, what a study in contrasts,” Prince said. “You have the same two countries, the same language, same culture, same background, different command structure: one of them was central planning, one of them was much more free-market oriented, innovative, risk-taking, and efficient.”
Scahill, Jeremy.
#Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Nation Books, 2007.