Of men and mercenaries

Today, that word, "mercenarism", with its dogs-of-war and soldiers-of-fortune connotations, is frowned upon by the likes of men like Prince, who much prefer the less lurid acronym of PMSCs - private military and security companies - to describe their line of business.

Most people reading this will not, I suspect, have heard of Erik Prince. It's far more likely that they will know something of the US private military company that 45-year-old Prince founded back in 1997 known as Blackwater.

Back in the days of the Iraq war, Blackwater was never far from controversial headlines. But it was the infamous day of September 16, 2007 that perhaps most tarnished the company's reputation. Assigned to protect a US State Department convoy in the Iraqi capital, some Blackwater employees opened fire on civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square, leaving 17 Iraqi civilians dead and 20 wounded.

For that act, five Blackwater guards, all military veterans, have been convicted, including four in the past few weeks in a high-profile case in Washington.

Today, Prince has no connection with Blackwater, having sold the company in 2010 reportedly for about $200 million. By then it had undergone various "rebranding" changes, becoming Xe Services before adopting its now innocuous name of Academi.

Despite this, the ghost of its past Blackwater origins still lingers with Academi recently having had to quash rumours that its employees were operating in wartorn Ukraine.

Earlier this summer, Academi linked up with rival private security company Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings, adding even more branding distance between it and the original Blackwater.

As the US-based Foreign Policy magazine recently highlighted, this merger means that Academi and Triple Canopy between them will have more than 6000 employees. Across the global private security market, such an amalgamation of major players reduces competition and means that only a handful benefit from the big contracts.

Take for example the $4 billion obligated to the US State Department for Afghanistan reconstruction from 2002 up until 2013 and it turns out that the company DynCorp received 69% or nearly $3bn of those allocated funds.

Likewise, in terms of UK-based companies, the massive G4S with its 618,000 employees worldwide is one of the world's largest private security employers.

For his part, Erik Prince has been fairly quiet on the scene since his Blackwater days. Until, that is, these last few weeks, when once again he has started talking and making headlines.

Perhaps this has something to do with the promotion of his just released book, Civilian Warriors, in which he mounts a staunch defence of Blackwater and those employees the book's dustjacket blurb unashamedly claims are the "Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror".

It may also have something to do with the fact that Prince now has a new company known as Frontier Services Group (FSG), which has been described as an "Africa-focused security and logistics company". That FSG has close ties to China's largest state-owned conglomerate, Citic Group, is no secret, as is the fact that Beijing is doing all it can to tap into Africa's natural resources of oil, gas, minerals and precious metals. This, too, before China's proposed spending of $1 trillion on roads, railways and airports by 2025. The firm was incorporated in Bermuda and is listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with numerous Chinese investors.

Over the past 12 months, FSG has invested large sums in two aviation firms with headquarters in Kenya, Kijipwa Aviation Limited and Phoenix. This would enable FSG to fly out of not only Kenya, but Ethiopia, Tanzania, Angola, Uganda and Puntland, a semi-autonomous region of Islamic insurgent-wracked Somalia.

The Kenyan authorities, however, appear to have some reservations about the aviation arm of FSG, with The Kenya Gazette, an official newspaper for the government in Mombasa, reporting that Kijipwa's aviation licence renewal was rejected this month, raising questions over whether Phoenix might encounter similar difficulties.

Running "aviation services" isn't new to Prince. In the old days, Blackwater's aviation arm, ironically called Presidential Airways, flew low-altitude missions to some of the most remote outposts in Afghanistan.

According to a Vanity Fair magazine profile of Prince in 2010, for the previous six years he had led an astonishing double life.

"Publicly, he has served as Blackwater's CEO and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the CIA's bidding, helping to craft, fund and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into 'denied areas' - places US intelligence has trouble penetrating, to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies."

The magazine pointed out that in effect Prince "has been working as a CIA asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5bn in government contracts between 2001 and 2009."

Today, with the winding down of America's military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems that Africa is the new promised land for Prince's latest company and other PMSCs like it. That much was evident recently from remarks made by him on what he sees as a marvellous opportunity for private contractors to help fight the ebola outbreak.

Prince's grand plan centres on the idea of having a giant supply ship floating off the coast of West Africa, the epicentre of the ebola outbreak.

"We could carry 250 vehicles, a couple of helicopters, couple of landing craft, and everything else - so that's all your mobility equipment."

The master planner went on to describe how the entire operation could be "containerised" - food, medicine, field hospitals, tents, water purification, generators, fuel,"everything you'd need for a humanitarian disaster".

The strength of his blueprint for PMSCs tackling ebola, argues Prince, was that one of the contractors' "real core competencies" is their ability to operate in difficult places without any outside support.

In response, critics say it was precisely this very degree of independence and distance from accountability that got his old company Blackwater into trouble in the first place.

Sean McFate, who used to work in Africa for DynCorp alongside Blackwater contractors and is now author of the recent book The Modern Mercenary, argues that it's not the big amalgamated PMSCs that should be the real cause for concern these days, but the smaller less conspicuous companies springing up in Africa and elsewhere in our troubled world.

"The industry is indeed growing, but not the way people think," McFate says. "Private military companies are no longer just US-based; they're appearing around the world ... there are new actors, smaller companies, emerging every day."

As well as this upsurge on the global level, there is what he describes as the "indigenisation" of the marketplace.

"Warlords in places such as Afghanistan and Somalia are creating contracting firms that they staff with local talent. Their embattled national governments are seeing the merits in contracting out security. So America is no longer the only big buyer of private force," McFate points out.

Erik Prince, however, would doubtless still like to see the US government as a client. As recently as September he was making yet more headlines by criticising the strategy of President Barack Obama's administration and its "failure" in taking on Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Iraq and Syria.

"If the administration cannot rally the political nerve or funding to send adequate active duty ground forces to answer the call, let the private sector finish the job," Prince insisted, throwing down the gauntlet to the White House. Guns for hire, US and other mercenaries are the way to go, Prince believes, when taking on IS jihadists and their ilk.

"If the old Blackwater team were still together, I have high confidence that a multi-brigade size unit of veteran American contractors or a multinational force could be rapidly assembled and deployed to be that necessary ground combat team," he wrote recently, underlining his position on his new company's website.

The company names may change, it seems, but at the heart of the private military contractor industry it remains business as usual.

War reporter and author Robert Young Pelton was hired by Prince in 2011 to ghostwrite his newly released memoir, Civilian Warriors, but is now at legal loggerheads with him for failing to pay the agreed fee. Company names, says Young Pelton, mean little in the trade.

"It doesn't matter who has the contract, they're all the same people. Constellis represents a clean slate until they f*** up and get thrown under the bus."

Many observers of PMSCs agree that as the global security industry gets bigger we can expect future atrocities like that which still haunts the old Blackwater from those days in Baghdad's Nisour Square.

The fact that the military in countries like the US and UK outsources some necessary functions is in itself not a cause for concern. Truck drivers, construction firms, laundry and catering services, technical maintenance are one thing. But the creation of a third force able independently to inflict deadly force is something else entirely.

"The private sector has long provided nations around the world with innovative solutions to national defence problems," goes Prince's argument. In some instances that may well be the case.

But the private war industry too remains a predominantly unaccountable one. Time and again in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere we have witnessed the dangers inherent with subcontracting out war.

That being the case, all the more reason why there needs to be rules, regulations, guidelines and close-quarters monitoring of PMSC activities, especially if they continue to function in any armed or combat role. To that end the Montreux Document of September 17, 2008 was at least a step in the right direction.

The result of an initiative launched jointly by Switzerland and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), it is the first document of global significance to define how international law applies to the activities of PMSCs when they are operating in an armed conflict zone. Some 600 companies have signed up, but there remains a long way to go. Perhaps the most worrying thing of all is that PMSCs and their chiefs still have the ear of powerful people in high places. Unpalatable as it perhaps is, Erik Prince is right about one thing: PMSCs are here to stay.

In the past, a few individuals have been convicted for atrocities they carried out in places like Iraq or Afghanistan, but the big money-men, chief officials and CEOs remain largely unhindered in the pursuit of vast profits. At one end are the men in suits - at the other those in Kevlar carrying weapons.