Blackwater: Portrait of America's Most Notorious Private Military Contractor

They are an organization that has gone by many names, but one stands out above all the rest. Ask them today, and they would call themselves Constellis Holdings, one among a patchwork of acquisitions alongside fast-food chains, dot-com giants, and global retailers, all happily nestled under the publicly traded corporate umbrella of Apollo Global Management. Ask them a little more than a decade ago, after the departure of controversial CEO Erik Prince, and they would call themselves Academi, a critical partner to the United States during its long-running War on Terror. But ask them at the height of America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they would have called themselves by a name far more recognizable, and one that cuts to the heart of both their organization's reputation and its operational history around the world. That name is Blackwater. Asking what this organization calls itself, and asking what the organization actually is, are two fundamentally different questions, and what this organization is, no matter what you call it, is a mercenary company. During its years in operation, the organization formerly known as Blackwater has been America's premier private military contractor, or PMC, a position that has earned the organization everything from acclaim by the United States government to condemnation as instruments of American violent interventionism around the world.

Key Takeaways

Erik Prince and Al Clark founded Blackwater in 1997 on 7,000 acres in the Great Dismal Swamp using proceeds from Prince's billion-dollar family auto-parts sale.
Blackwater's first War on Terror contract in early 2002 paid over five million dollars for a six-month CIA protection mission in Kabul led personally by Erik Prince.
The March 31, 2004 ambush in Fallujah killed four Blackwater contractors — Helvenston, Zovko, Batalona, and Teague — and a 2007 Congressional investigation found Blackwater sent them unprepared into an insurgent stronghold.
The Nisour Square Massacre on September 16, 2007 left seventeen Iraqis dead, with the FBI determining at least fourteen were shot without cause, leading to criminal convictions later pardoned by Donald Trump in 2020.
Blackwater manager Dan Carroll threatened to kill a US State Department investigator in Iraq in August 2007, weeks before the Nisour Square massacre.
The company rebranded to Xe Services in 2009, then Academi in 2011, and finally Constellis after merging with Triple Canopy under Apollo Global Management.

Two Navy SEALs and 7,000 Acres of Swampland

The Blackwater organization was founded in 1997 under the name Blackwater Worldwide, in a move that was, at the time, hardly a blip on the radar of the American defense-industrial complex. It was the brainchild of two veterans and former Navy SEALs, Erik Prince and Al Clark, each of whom had an intimate knowledge of the American military's capabilities, as well as the gaps in its architecture. Prince had spent two years as an officer with the SEALs, deploying to Haiti, the Balkans, and other hot zones around the world. By his own accounts, that experience — plus an acute awareness of the Rwandan genocide of 1994 — showed Prince that the United States needed private military training capabilities, to prepare potential special operators for service. In 1995, Prince quit the SEALs after the death of his father, and after selling his family's auto-parts company in a billion-dollar deal, he used much of that newly found wealth to personally finance his new company. His partner, Al Clark, had spent a decade with the SEALs and had even served as a firearms instructor, but had grown frustrated at the Navy's lack of firing ranges, and independently come to the conclusion that the military would benefit from what he called "one-stop shopping" for their training capabilities. Together, Clark and Prince created their organization with the goal, as Prince has since explained it, to provide training support and infrastructure to support military and law enforcement professionals in their current positions. Instead of raising a private army, the goal was to support the military America already had — or, as Prince stated, to "do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did for the Postal Service." In Prince's view, that appeared to mean taking an unwieldy and rather blighted state organization, and augmenting it with a private partner. The two purchased about 7,000 acres of land on the border between the US states of North Carolina and Virginia, known as the Great Dismal Swamp. According to most accounts, the organization drew its name from the black, putrid water of the marshes that surrounded that original base of operations. Less frequently, it is attributed to the Navy SEAL code for black ops — that is to say, covert or clandestine operations that are meant to be kept secret and meant to happen in a way that cannot be tied back to the people responsible. Their logo, a five-clawed bear paw in the crosshairs of a scope, was done as a reference to the bears that roamed the property. On that land, they built a massive training center, featuring several indoor and outdoor shooting ranges, simulated reproductions of urban environments, a driving track, and an artificial lake, alongside other amenities. According to the company itself, it is the largest combat training facility in America, while the Center for Land Use Interpretations describes it as "one of the largest and most sophisticated private security training sites in the country." There, Blackwater had the capacity to train their clients on everything from marksmanship, to tactical driving, to convoy protection, to maritime security operations, to urban peacekeeping and combat tactics. They welcomed trainees sent from SEAL and other American special-operations groups, alongside people sent courtesy of SWAT teams to expand their capabilities, and for a while, they were quite successful. Said one local writer, Jay Price, then working for the nearby city of Raleigh's The News & Observer: "To the degree that [Prince] was thought of, it was as this patriotic guy who had built this Hail Mary facility to help the SEALs, and probably hoped to break even. The big contracts weren't on the horizon, not even a glimmer." Blackwater had found their niche, their clients responded well to the services they offered, and they even managed to secure a US contract in the year 2000. At that time, Al-Qaeda had just bombed the USS Cole in the port city of Aden, and Blackwater got the call to send trainers to Yemen in order to provide Navy sailors with counterterrorism training.

September 11 and the First Afghanistan Contract

Like many other companies throughout modern history, Blackwater is an organization that happened to be in the right place, at the right time, to fill a need that the world did not know about until catastrophe struck. That catastrophe was the terror attack of September 11, 2001, in which Al-Qaeda successfully targeted the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. Once it became clear that the event was a massive, organized act of aggression against the United States, the American military kicked into gear, but in a practical sense, the need for a major, unplanned military response meant that the United States had had no time or advance notice to shift onto a war footing. America needed to fill in the gaps quickly, and Blackwater was going to figure massively into their solution. Blackwater's first contract as part of the War on Terror came in early 2002, when high-ranking CIA officials solicited the company's services for a protection job. The CIA was looking for twenty men, all with top-secret security clearances and the ability to travel to Kabul, Afghanistan, who could protect the CIA's headquarters in the country and keep an eye on a second, more remote military base. At that time, American intervention in Afghanistan was still in its early stages, with active CIA operators being the primary forces on the ground hunting for Osama bin Laden. But, then as now, the American roster of top-level operators is not a particularly long list, and Blackwater's connections with experienced and highly trained operators like the Navy SEALs meant that they were an ideal way to outsource some of the lower-priority needs of the Agency. Put Erik Prince's men on guard duty, and America's black-ops best and brightest could do more with their limited numbers. For an initial six-month contract, in exchange for over five million dollars, Prince personally led his team to Afghanistan. By all accounts, the mission was a success. That first contract in Afghanistan was an eye-opening one for Blackwater, and particularly for Erik Prince himself. The cost-effectiveness with which Blackwater had provided security, as Prince would later explain it, had been good for everybody. The individual men on the mission had made some very impressive earnings, with daily wages equivalent to nearly a thousand dollars in today's money, but for the United States, the price of their services would not have even made for a noticeable rounding error in the budget. Over the coming months, Blackwater began hiring and restructuring itself to provide private security to the United States at a much larger scale, all the while picking up more individual contracts for which the organization rarely suffered competitors.

The Invasion of Iraq and the Rise of Private Security

Blackwater had optimized their services just in time for the United States to decide to launch a full-scale invasion of Iraq, on faulty intelligence that indicated the presence of weapons of mass destruction. Militarily, the invasion was not a difficult one for the United States; during a surprise operation beginning on the 20th of March, 2003, with no declaration of war, an American-led coalition stormed into Iraq and captured Baghdad within three weeks. By April the fifteenth, the military offensive was all but wrapped up, and a couple of weeks later, US President George W. Bush declared mission accomplished. Of course, anybody with even the most cursory awareness of how the Iraq War went knows that the mission was, in fact, not accomplished, and before long, America was dealing with a full-blown insurgency. That was going to be a particularly massive problem, because now, the US had pivoted toward the long, hard slog of rebuilding. American diplomats, intelligence officers, humanitarians, and more were all pouring into Iraq, just as the American government was realizing that much of the Iraqi population really did not want them there. To address that problem, Blackwater conferred three particularly helpful advantages to the US government, when compared to the prospect of using its own troops for protection duties. First, it allowed the US to save their well-trained personnel for other, more important high-risk missions, where their manpower was badly needed. Second, it provided a means to put more boots on the ground in Iraq, and for more dangerous purposes, without the US military having to actively send the American taxpayer's sons and daughters into particularly dangerous assignments. And third, it meant that if an operation went sideways — whether by killing Blackwater contractors, leading to the deaths of American VIPs, or having personnel act out some not-so-acceptable animosity toward local Iraqis — then it would be Blackwater, not America itself, taking the blame. Blackwater made its entrance to Iraq in the fall of 2003, when it was awarded a nearly 28-million-dollar contract to protect one Paul Bremer. A long-time member of the US Foreign Service who had cut his teeth as a prominent wingman to Henry Kissinger, Bremer had been appointed as the leader of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the organization that the US had set up to run Iraq for a while. In that post, Bremer had the authority to rule by decree, exercise control over an Iraqi interim governing council, and write whatever conditions he wanted into the new Iraqi constitution. All of that meant that Bremer had a massive target on his back, now that there was a full-blown insurgency running amok through the country. Blackwater provided a large security detachment around Bremer, relying on multiple helicopters and a highly visible contingent of very well-armed, very scary-looking American gunmen to deter any attempts on Bremer's life. They would oversee Bremer's security until the end of June, 2004, when Bremer finished up his work and left Iraq in the hands of an interim government. Days later, Blackwater would receive its biggest military contract yet, for nearly half a billion dollars in exchange for offering protection for US State Department diplomats in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other nations. During those same years, Blackwater would be called upon to guard American military installations in Iraq, and provide training for the new US-backed Iraqi security forces. Blackwater would start picking up duties: organizing and protecting convoys, providing supplemental assistance to train Americans on the ground, and guarding a wide range of civilian VIPs. They even had the resources to start running aerial surveillance operations. During Hurricane Katrina, Blackwater dispatched a contingent of several hundred employees to the American South, largely to guard the wealthier inhabitants of New Orleans from what was, at that time, portrayed as a lawless environment in the wake of the disaster. Jamie Wilson wrote for The Guardian: "Hundreds of mercenaries have descended on New Orleans to guard the property of the city's millionaires from looters. The heavily armed men, employed by private military companies including Blackwater and ISI, are part of the militarisation of a city which had a reputation for being one of the most relaxed and easy-going in America." Blackwater would work alongside other American and Israeli mercenaries at that time, guarding points and properties of interest, while a smaller detachment from the group assisted directly in rescue efforts.

Fallujah: The Ambush That Changed Everything

By the time Blackwater forces deployed to assist in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the organization had already been caught up in the first of many incidents that would later come back to haunt it. The first such incident was one that prompted outrage at the time, not against Blackwater contractors, but to avenge them. In an incident on March 31, 2004, a Blackwater convoy conducting a food delivery in the Iraqi city of Fallujah was attacked by insurgent forces. The four Blackwater contractors operating the convoy — Scott Helvenston, Jerry Zovko, Wesley Batalona, and Mike Teague — were killed, and their corpses were beaten, desecrated, burned, dragged through city streets, and eventually hung on a bridge over the Euphrates River. The attack was a shock to the United States, one that the US military would ultimately avenge during the Second Battle of Fallujah. But according to the families of the victims, after the fact, the Blackwater employees had been ill-prepared to lead the convoy that day. According to legal testimony from a former Navy SEAL who had known one of the killed contractors, former SEAL Scott Helvenston, quite well, people receiving training through Blackwater were trained largely to operate armored vehicles, not the un-armored vehicles the contractors had been given in Fallujah. They had been promised semiautomatic rifles, belt-fed machine guns, and time to gather intelligence and prepare their convoy routes in Iraq, but when they arrived, the weapons were nowhere to be found, and their manager pushed them to run their convoy routes without adequate preparation. Finally, the men on the convoy had expected to have three operators per vehicle; instead, there were only two, meaning that nobody had been watching the rear of each vehicle. A Congressional investigation found in 2007 that Blackwater had sent the convoy into an insurgent stronghold unprepared, and was directly responsible for not only their violent deaths, but for creating the conditions in which not one, but two battles for Fallujah became unavoidable — all the while, insisting its contractors were trained and ready to work. Blackwater blasted the report after the fact, but by then, Blackwater's track record was far worse than it had been at the time the four contractors were killed.

A Pattern of Questionable Conduct Across Iraq

It was at about this time in Blackwater's history that what had, at first, been seen as relatively harmless corner-cutting during a free-for-all stage of American private contracting, started to become a pattern of questionable conduct inside Iraq. In early 2005, Blackwater contractors working to protect a State Department convoy fired seventy rounds of ammunition into a car that had been perceived as a threat after it had refused initial orders to stop; Blackwater would later be found not to have been justified in carrying out the shooting. Claims that the convoy had been fired upon were later dismissed when it was found that a Blackwater contractor had fired his own gun into his own vehicle accidentally. Months later, six Blackwater contractors were killed alongside five international contractors when their helicopter was shot down, marking the first instance that a civilian helicopter had been felled from the sky during the US-led intervention. In early 2006, a Blackwater sniper killed three Iraqi guards while shooting down from the roof of Iraq's Justice Ministry, in an incident that Iraqi witnesses, including an army commander and guards from the Justice Ministry, called unprovoked. The US State Department would find that the act "fell within approved rules governing the use of force." That same year, Blackwater contractors would crash their SUV into a US Army Humvee, and rather than working with the soldiers on the scene, the contractors disarmed them and forced them to lay prone at gunpoint until the situation was resolved. Toward the end of that year, a Blackwater employee would shoot and kill a security guard working for the Iraqi Vice President, in an incident during which that employee was reported to have been drunk. All the while, the organization proved that it was too valuable to the United States for the US to risk severing ties. In 2006, Blackwater would secure an even larger contract than it had done before, landing a bid to provide security to the US embassy in Iraq. At that time, Iraq hosted the largest American embassy in the world, making it a massive target for insurgents at a time that American reconstruction efforts were at a high point, and when anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 military contractors were believed to be at work in the country, although no official figures have been established before or since. At the embassy and their other high-profile guard postings, Blackwater employees would frequently fire on the Iraqi population, including many instances in which Iraqi drivers at Blackwater checkpoints did not comply quickly with Blackwater orders. Nonetheless, they were a cheaper option than American soldiers, they kept US manpower set aside for more important tasks, and they made sure that when incidents of violence occurred, the Americans behind the trigger were not technically US military personnel.

The Nisour Square Massacre of September 2007

And even worse was what came on September 16, 2007, in an incident that would later become known as the Nisour Square Massacre. On that day, a nineteen-man team of Blackwater contractors, in a four-truck convoy, responded to an explosion of a car bomb at a site where US and Iraqi leaders were having a meeting. The Blackwater team was supposed to secure an evacuation route, but, refusing orders, the team's leader decided to instead advance to a location called Nisour Square. There, as contractors locked down a traffic circle, the driver of a Kia car failed to stop when ordered, and was shot once in the head by a Blackwater operator. The car continued to roll forward, the person in the passenger seat — who was the mother of the driver — was also shot and killed, and the car was eventually incinerated by a grenade. Although accounts of the incident vary sharply according to Iraq versus the US State Department, fifteen additional Iraqis were killed in the incident, with an FBI investigation after the fact establishing that a minimum of fourteen of them had been shot without cause. It was a catastrophic event, roundly condemned as a massacre carried out by US mercenaries, and it would eventually lead not just to regulatory action against Blackwater, but to a series of decisions that would see the US pull up stakes in Iraq years later. Five Blackwater contractors would be convicted of serious crimes, including first-degree murder for one, and fourteen counts of voluntary manslaughter by three others, although the four who faced the most serious charges would be granted full presidential pardons by Donald Trump in the year 2020. And even the Nisour Square Massacre was not the full extent of the abuses Blackwater was accused of, even just in the year 2007 alone. Also in that year, Blackwater would be investigated for smuggling weapons into Iraq, with those weapons then alleged to have passed into the hands of a US-designated terrorist organization through the black market. They were accused of instigating a standoff in Baghdad between themselves and commandoes from the Iraqi Interior Ministry, a group that was ostensibly on the same side of the war. They shot a civilian who was said to have been "driving too close" to a State Department convoy. And in August of that year, a manager from Blackwater named Dan Carroll — who was, at that time, the leader of Blackwater's Iraq deployment — threatened to kill a US State Department Investigator, who had been working on, and who eventually produced, a fierce condemnation of Blackwater's practices and lack of oversight. Wrote the investigator: "The management structures in place to manage and monitor our contracts in Iraq have become subservient to the contractors themselves. Blackwater contractors saw themselves as above the law. The contractors, instead of Department officials, are in command and in control." In describing the incident in which the investigator was threatened, the report reads that Carroll stated "that he could kill me at that very moment and no one could or would do anything about it as we were in Iraq." That report was finalized just weeks before the Nisour Square massacre. Said strategist Peter Singer about these years for Blackwater, well after the fact: "The Blackwater-State Department relationship gave new meaning to the word 'dysfunctional'. It involved everything from catastrophic failures of supervision to shortchanging broader national security goals at the expense of short-term desires."

Institutional Rot: Weapons, Overbilling, and Misconduct

Investigators would soon find that Blackwater employees had been improperly storing automatic weapons in the same rooms where they would get drunk and party with female visitors, and often carried weapons for which they had no certification, training, or authorization. The New York Times wrote: "The armored vehicles Blackwater used to protect American diplomats were poorly maintained and deteriorating, and the investigators found that four drunk guards had commandeered one heavily armored, $180,000 vehicle to drive to a private party, and crashed into a concrete barrier. Blackwater was also overbilling the State Department by manipulating its personnel records, using guards assigned to the State Department contract for other work and falsifying other staffing data on the contract, the investigators concluded." A firm affiliated with Blackwater enlisted Yemeni, Pakistani, and other foreign nationals to guard Blackwater's own compounds, but provided them only "squalid conditions, sometimes three to a cramped room with no bed, according to the report by the investigators." American journalist Jeremy Scahill alleged that Blackwater operatives had worked alongside the CIA to perform snatch-and-grab operations in Pakistan, where Blackwater claimed only to have a single employee. In one other incident around this period, as reported by the New York Times, Erik Prince himself had demanded that Blackwater employees at the company headquarters in North Carolina swear an oath of allegiance to the PMC itself, and sign and return a copy of the oath, which mirrored the oath that US military officials are supposed to take before beginning their service. Between mounting legal pressure, increased frustration from the US government, and a rising tide of disgust toward Blackwater on the American home front, Blackwater began to face real scrutiny for its actions abroad. Erik Prince would admit in testimony before Congress that Blackwater lacked legal mechanisms to deal with overreach or misconduct by his employees, although he would refuse to provide financial documentation on the PMC, and would largely avoid questions about his own role in cultivating a permissive environment for the sorts of abuses Blackwater was accused of. The US House of Representatives began to issue firmer regulations on Blackwater, and the State Department recommended in 2008 that Blackwater be dropped by the US government, before announcing in 2009 that Blackwater would not see its contracts renewed the following year. In Iraq, the PMC would have its blanket immunity revoked by the Iraqi-led transitional government, and a barrage of legal action following the event would result in lawsuits against a long list of Blackwater employees. One American lawsuit filed in Alexandria, Virginia would allege that Blackwater employees murdered fellow Blackwater staff who intended to testify against the PMC, encouraged the murder of Iraqi civilians, laundered money, smuggled weapons, and engaged in child prostitution, while another, filed by an American legal advocacy non-profit, directly accused Blackwater of engaging in war crimes.

Rebranding: From Blackwater to Xe Services to Academi

But even that withering legal onslaught would bring down Blackwater only in name. Beginning in 2007, Blackwater had worked to change its image, replacing its logo with a less-threatening emblem and stating publicly that it would start to move away from security contracting. In 2009, the company changed its name to Xe Services LLC, and announced that it was restructuring its company, with the goal being to move away from security operations for the most part, and begin providing a broader range of services to its global clients. Most important of all, Erik Prince resigned, leaving his post as CEO while maintaining his chairmanship on the company board. Prince made no secret of his displeasure at stepping down, emphasizing that after what he claimed was 35,000 personal-security missions to protect Blackwater clients, "no one under our care was ever killed or seriously injured." A new roster of friendlier-looking faces was appointed in his stead, people with far less of a tendency to cause PR nightmares, and when it came to their legal troubles, the company largely buckled down and shut up, doing the long, hard legal slog required to dig themselves out from a quagmire that only seemed to get worse from month to month. But by 2010, the worst of the legal trouble was already out in the open, and Blackwater, now Xe Services, had done enough work on their optics and their public relations that the crisis seemed somewhat navigable. Perhaps it was an effort for the State Department and the American military to save face, perhaps it was a lack of will to prosecute Xe Services for Blackwater's overreach, or perhaps it was because the US government felt that the punishment Xe Services was already weathering was enough. Regardless of the precise reason, Xe Services would not be shut down, and the bulk of their employees under Blackwater would either remain on staff or leave of their own volition. Partway through 2010, Xe Services went through another change, being purchased by a group of investors called USTC Holdings, and Erik Prince fully left his leadership position with the company. A new board was assembled, including reputable figures from the US like former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Jack Quinn, and former director of the National Security Agency Bobby Ray Inman. A new team was put atop the organization's operational structure, and by 2011, the transformation was complete. Blackwater's newest name would be Academi, and with the pain and hardship of Iraq now a relic of the past, the organization set out toward the future.

Constellis Holdings: A Modern American PMC Under Corporate Ownership

By the time the American federal government transitioned into its second term under President Barack Obama, the organization formerly known as Blackwater was a very different organization from what it had once been. No longer was it a somewhat haphazard mix of elite former special operators and relative amateurs looking to take advantage of a lucrative opportunity. Now, the organization was large and well-developed, with a new compound in Illinois, a much more robust training program to their name, and a well-developed menu of services that included everything from intelligence work, to protection operations, to large-scale training, to maritime security, to consulting. Meanwhile, employees who had not proven trustworthy during the Blackwater days had been cut loose. The organization completed a merger with another PMC, an organization previously known as Triple Canopy, that featured a much cleaner track record and a much stronger code of conduct than the Blackwater of old. Finally, they passed into the hands of the company's current owners, Apollo Global Management. That company is an American asset management firm that does a little bit of everything; also among their past and present holdings are the photography company Shutterfly, the video-streaming and rental company Redbox, the Mexican-style fast-food chain Qdoba, the for-profit University of Phoenix, and Yahoo Incorporated. Under Apollo, the newly merged PMC would be granted what is, at the time of writing, still its current name: Constellis. A quick visit to the Constellis website tells of revenues far past the billion-dollar mark in 2023, and operations ongoing in over fifty countries, with duties shared between a workforce fourteen thousand strong. The company has soaked up a handful of other private military organizations, and proudly offers services as wide-ranging as executive protection, disaster relief, K-9 training, and even nuclear security. They provide ships to practice boarding and defense, airfields and drop zones for para-jumping, racetracks for tactical driving, and several ranges set aside specifically to blow things up. The company's exterior is smooth and corporate, its management is beholden to shareholders and investors that have very little connection to the world of private military contractors, and Constellis has even flirted with bankruptcy in recent years due to a relatively low demand for their services, although the company has since made a financial recovery. That is not to say that Constellis has been without occasional controversy, or that it has been without fatalities among its operators. In 2015, several Colombian nationals employed by the company — then still called Academi — were killed in Yemen, while under the command of an Australian operative working for the United Arab Emirates. The year later, missile strikes in Yemen killed numerous employees of the company, most hailing from Sudan, but some from a range of other nations, including the US. Somewhat less common nowadays is for the quality of Constellis operators to be called into question because of the company's history. While the decision to solicit the services of Blackwater's descendant organization occasionally does raise eyebrows from country to country, the organization has been largely successful in making the overreaches and catastrophes of the past seem like a distant memory. Whatever Constellis is, whatever it does around the world, it has gone to great lengths to ensure that the world understands that it is not Blackwater — and that grand initiative appears to have been successful.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Erik Prince leave the Naval Academy?

Erik Prince left the U.S. Navy, not the Naval Academy, after two years as an officer with the SEALs, deploying to Haiti, the Balkans, and other hot zones around the world. He quit the SEALs in 1995 after the death of his father.

What did Erik Prince do?

Erik Prince is an American businessman, investor, author, and former U.S. Navy SEAL officer who is the founder of Blackwater. He founded Blackwater Worldwide in 1997 with Al Clark, aiming to provide training support and infrastructure to support military and law enforcement professionals.

Where can I watch the Blackwater documentary?

The documentary 'Blackwater: Portrait of an American PMC' is set to be released on May 25, 2024, in the United Kingdom. Specific streaming or viewing platforms are not mentioned, but it can be found on IMDbPro.

How much do Blackwater mercenaries get paid?

The specific pay rates for Blackwater mercenaries are not provided in the given context. However, as a private military contractor, Blackwater's employees likely received varied compensation packages depending on their roles, experience, and contracts with the U.S. government or other clients.

What is the PMC controversy?

The PMC (Private Military Contractor) controversy surrounding Blackwater involves allegations of misconduct, excessive use of force, and operating outside the law in conflict zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater has faced criticism for its role in the wars and its reputation as a mercenary company.

Does Eric Prince still own Blackwater?

Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, sold the company in 2010. Blackwater has undergone several name changes and ownership shifts, with the company currently operating as Constellis Holdings under the publicly-traded corporate umbrella of Apollo Global Management.

What is Blackwater called now?

But ask them at the height of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they would have called themselves by a name far more recognizable, and one that cuts to the heart of both their organization’s reputation, and its operational history around the world. In fact, during its years in operation, the organization formerly known as Blackwater has been America’s premier private military contractor, or PMC, a position that’s earned the organization everything from acclaim by the United States government, to condemnation as instruments of American violent interventionism around the world.

What is the story of Blackwater?

Blackwater was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince and Al Clark as a private security firm providing training support to law enforcement and military professionals. The company grew to become a premier private military contractor, playing a significant role in the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Blackwater has faced controversy and criticism for its actions and has undergone several ownership and name changes, now operating as Constellis Holdings.