Blackwater’s Erik Prince On How He Got Into The White House – (huffingtonpost.com)

WASHINGTON ― Last week at Fort Myer military base in Virginia, President Donald Trump gave a speech outlining his new policy in Afghanistan, which was in fact not so very different from the previous administration’s policy in Afghanistan.

“My original instinct was to pull out. And historically, I like following my instincts,” Trump said. “But all my life I’ve heard that decisions are much different when you sit behind the desk in the Oval Office ― in other words, when you’re president of the United States.”

He went on to say that he would be sending more troops ― estimates have suggested around 4,000 ― without committing to any deadlines for pulling out.

Trump’s U-turn came as bad news to Erik Prince, founder of the private security company formerly called Blackwater, whose employees were accused of committing a number of crimes during the Iraq War, including the killing of 14 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, Baghdad, on Sept. 16, 2007. The incident sparked numerous federal investigations, and Prince sold the company in 2010.

Now he’s the chairman of Frontier Services Group, a logistics company based in the United Arab Emirates, and he feels newly emboldened by Trump’s election. In May, the 48-year-old former Navy SEAL wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal advocating a completely different solution in Afghanistan. Prince’s five-point plan suggested that, instead of sending U.S. troops, private contracted soldiers ― including U.S. and NATO veterans, Prince has said elsewhere ― should be used alongside U.S. Special Forces troops. They would serve under the command of a “viceroy,” who would coordinate all military strategy and report to the president.

“There are too many cooks,” Prince wrote, outlining the financial waste (approximately $1 trillion) and the massive damage to U.S. lives (around 2,000 deaths and 20,000 injuries) since the war began 16 years ago.

Prince’s views are popular with some inside the White House and on Capitol Hill, where he is scheduled to meet with 50 members of Congress next week. I met with him on Monday in Washington, D.C., to discuss how close he came to convincing the administration to go his way and what he plans to do for the rest of Trump’s tenure. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Your Wall Street Journal piece got a lot of attention in Washington. Did you ever speak to the president about it?

We didn’t meet about it, but he read it, and I’m told he circulated it around. I wrote it for an audience of one, and it worked.

This was after [national security adviser] H.R. McMaster had asked for 70,000, 80,000 troops. McMaster basically wanted a redo of the Obama surge, where we have tens of thousands of Americans come back to Afghanistan and do the fighting there. I think that’s a bad idea. I think the president did, too.

So Trump reads it. Then what happens?

Well, I get calls from McMaster and from [then-White House chief strategist] Steve Bannon. They say, “Hey, the president saw your article. Please come in and tell us what you were thinking.” So I came in, and I gave a presentation [to Bannon, McMaster and then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus] that fleshed out more of the points made in the op-ed and hit the notion of vetting contractors and all the rest.

Your use of the word “viceroy” in the op-ed stirred up a lot of controversy, raising questions of colonial power and accountability. Surely, the Afghans would not want to answer to a viceroy?

To be very clear, when I say a viceroy, that is not to rule over Afghanistan, but rather to harmonize what has been a very chaotic U.S. policy. Between the Department of Defense, the Department of State and the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there has been no unity of commands. Seventeen commanders in 16 years. Come on. It’s a joke. It’s embarrassing.

Talk me through the timeline. You write the piece. You get called in to talk with McMaster and Bannon and Priebus and …

And H.R. automatically hates it.

Does he say that to you?

Pretty much.

In other words, he’s called you in because the president is interested in your ideas, not because he wants to meet you.

Correct. I went through the slides, and he completely discounted it. The nature of the questions he asked made it clear that it was going to be an all-Army solution, period.

Give me an example.

I pointed out the challenge of deploying U.S. troops the way they had been for 16 years, where they go for six or nine months and they leave and all that local knowledge leaves with them.

Here’s the thing. Every U.S. trooper is statistically at the highest risk for the first 60 days they’re in country, because most of those guys, it’s their first deployment and they’re figuring it out. Meanwhile, the same Taliban that have been there for 16 years, the ones that have survived, are the smartest, most capable fighters.

They see the Americans come and go every six to nine months. They know exactly how they patrol. They know exactly how they clear mines. They know exactly how they communicate. They know exactly the response times for aircraft. They know the deal, so doing the same thing for another 16 or 17 years means the outcome is going to be the same. It’s like the last two kids that were killed two weeks ago, blown up in a roadside bomb in their fully armored vehicle. Terrible. What a loss. What a waste.

What was McMaster’s response to that argument?

He largely just refused to answer, and I wasn’t there to debate him. I was there to pitch an idea.

What happened after the meeting?

Steve and Reince liked the concept. They saw it as something the president would or should consider. A couple weeks later, I got a call from Steve saying, “OK, lay it out. Figure out what that costs. And tell me exactly because the typical Beltway pundits will discount a low number.”

So I did a very hard number: 91 aircraft, 84,000 flight hours, all the food, fuel, ordinance, man days, insurance, 3,200 ground mentors [Special Forces members or contractors who attach to Afghan army battalions], the whole thing. It comes out to about five and a half thousand personnel. It was 7 percent of what they’re spending now, way less than $4 billion.

Still, if you got what you suggested, you’d get a big cut from that, no?

What I’d say is that Elon Musk advocates for private space flight. Is he demonized for that? I would be very happy to compete for a solution that saves American lives and saves the taxpayers $40 billion a year. I will not apologize for that in any way.

You wrote about the vulnerability of air power in Afghanistan. Presumably you also mentioned that in your meeting?

Yes. The U.S. has completely failed to deliver on this. There is no adequate Afghan air force, ranging from maintenance deficiencies to pilot training shortages to operational support capability.

My old company, we used to have 26 aircraft in Afghanistan doing that kind of support for the U.S. Army. So even as large as the U.S. military is ― and it’s the most expensive military in the world ― they still had a requirement for extra aviation capacity. So they rented it from the private sector. I thought, Why don’t they let the Afghans do the same thing?

The premise of what I’m laying out with ground mentors and with the air package is that they serve as an adjunct in the Afghan forces, wearing an Afghan uniform, Afghan rules of engagement. The premise of this is a true Afghan-ization.

One big question is what happens if something goes wrong, like it did in Iraq with Blackwater. Who is accountable?

Sure, if the guys do an evil act, they can be held to account under the Uniform Code of Military Justice with a trial held in Kabul. I thought long and hard about that. A cell of JAG [Judge Advocate General] lawyers can be detailed to handle this for the contractors that are there, just like they’re there for any active duty forces.

I assume your position on this is related to the yearslong case against a few Blackwater contractors for the killing of 14 people in Iraq.

Well, a week and a half ago, the appeals court threw out the murder conviction [of Nicholas Slatten, who had been sentenced to life in prison], and they threw out the sentences of the other guys. It was a pretty stinging review of the federal government. They still have to be resentenced. I think they’ll get time served.

The issue there was this: If the government had asked us, we would have preferred to be under the Uniform Code of Military Justice [which regularly tries military crimes where they occur], because all the guys that were doing that job were former military veterans. They know the deal. Having the trial close to battle makes way more sense than [having it] 7,000 miles away in a D.C. courtroom with people who have fortunately never seen the aftereffects of a car bomb. But the State Department prohibited that because they didn’t want their people [civilian government employees] held under that standard.

Why?

Don’t get me started on the State Department.

Why?

It was a turf issue between the agencies. Leave it at that.

OK, back to your discussions with the administration. After Bannon and McMaster and Priebus, who did you talk to next?

I saw [Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis three weeks after that first meeting at the White House, and he just fired away with questions ― practical questions ― for an hour. They were questions like: How could the men operate? Under what authority? How would they be accountable? Basically, how would this actually work? He is a historian. He gets it, He was not as quick to discard [my ideas] as many in the Pentagon bubble would be.