Angry Planet - Erik Prince Wants a Private Air Force

Episode Date: September 18, 2018

The man behind defunct mercenary provider Blackwater sees private air power as the key to winning the war in Afghanistan. A new report links Erik Prince to efforts to buy or build private gunships - the kind of weapon only the United States and a few other countries have at their disposal.David Axe, who writes for the Daily Beast, joins us to discuss the results of his investigation.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. To serve a very wrong-headed cash grab in the form of a private air war would be corruption on a scale that we have not witnessed in a long time. You're listening to War College. A weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Matthew Galt and Jason Fields.

Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Matthew Galt. Jason Fields is on assignment in D.C. today. He can't be with us. Private military contractor Eric Prince is back in the news and back in our minds. Prince, you may remember, is the founder of Blackwater and once pitched the White House on a plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan. Now, he's attempting to build a private air force with the kind of firepower that few countries have, let alone private individuals. David Axe has just published a story about Prince's ambitions and The Daily Beast called Air War for Profit inside Eric Prince's push to rule the skies. He's here to explain to us today what's going on. Axe has covered war and politics for the Daily Beast, Vice, the Village Voice, and C-SPAN.

David, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. Okay, can you give us the Cliff Notes version? of Eric Prince? Eric Prince is a former Navy SEAL. He is brother to Betsy DeVos, who is Donald Trump's Secretary of Education. Eric Prince and his sister are the children

of a Coke brother-style wealthy industrialist who has played a sort of profound role as a political donor in right-wing circles for decades. He recently died. after his Navy career, Prince set up a kind of kaleidoscope of companies, Blackwater being the most famous example, to at first provide kind of training and consulting services for the U.S. military with the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, demand for those kinds of services and demand for contractors to play a much more prominent role in warfare, played into Prince's business plans, and his Blackwater, contractors became kind of frontline mercenaries in the war in Iraq in particular. That company kind of ended tragically for its victims. And Prince has moved on to more quietly running a separate set of companies whose probably most notorious ambition is to privatize the war in Afghanistan.

to run it heavily from the air. Right, this idea of a private air force is kind of an old dream for Prince, correct? That's the centerpiece of his idea for Afghanistan. Prince loves airplanes, and you could see that in Iraq during the height of the U.S. occupation in the early aughts. Blackwater had a big presence in Baghdad, running security, most notably for that dangerous stretch of highway between the airport and the main U.S. compound. in the city, and Blackwater's little bird helicopters with gunners dangling outside,

sort of distinctively painted dark blue and white, were a constant presence over the city and are kind of an iconic image of that phase of the Iraq War. Now with his more recent idea to privatize the war in Afghanistan, among other foreign for-profit adventures, air power plays a much, much bigger role. All right, can you describe what that role would be? What does he envision, or at least, you know, what we know of what he envisions? What would this private air force look like? Well, you have to, first of all, understand that this is a private air force in the context of a private counterinsurgency campaign.

So in proposing to run the Afghanistan war to, in effect, take the war away from the Pentagon and run it as a business, Prince is proposing to deploy several thousand of his own contractors, let's just call them mercenaries, on the ground, to train and advise Afghan forces, which is currently the role, the main role of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, and to work alongside the CIA and presumably special operations command on the more covert side, again, this is Prince's proposal, on the more covert side of the war. Meanwhile, Prince's companies would also take over air operations, again, currently handled by the United States and its allies, including the Afghan Air Force. So Prince's proposal includes taking over the air war and running that, again, as a private business venture.

So we're talking about one of the proposals is for 90 aircraft to undertake the bulk of, you know, 90 of his own aircraft undertake the bulk of the counterinsurgency air missions in Afghanistan. The proposal is not complete. For example, nothing in Prince's proposal indicates that he's proposing to take over the logistical airbridge from foreign countries, including the United States, into Afghanistan, the airbridge that feeds fuels and supplies the war effort there, whoever is actually, you know, actually accounts for those boots on the ground, whether it's U.S. troops or private mercenaries, they need to be fed and supplied.

Prince has not proposed to take that over. I don't know what his idea would be for that. But for spying on, surveilling, dropping weapons on insurgents, Prince has proposed, like I said, 90 aircraft, including refurbished old jet fighters, propeller-driven agricultural planes modified as attack planes, sort of lightweight surveillance aircraft, a range of helicopters, including armed models, and airships for surveillance. He also, perhaps most controversial, has proposed to take a small number, presumably a small number of Antonov transport aircraft and to outfit them as side-firing gunships for attack missions

against insurgents. Right, this is where your story picks, where your story starts, essentially. And I want you to explain to the audience why that's important. Like what is a gunship? How many people have them? Why would it be a big deal for a private individual to have one of these things? A gunship in today, that term, most of us understand that term to mean a cargo aircraft that has been modified to carry a large number of powerful guns or in some cases also bombs and missiles, primarily guns. that fire out of the side of the aircraft's fuselage through a window or some opening so that the aircraft can circle over a battlefield for a long period of time,

pummeling the ground below with a steady stream of gunfire day or night. The biggest user of these aircraft today is the United States Air Force, has used them since Vietnam, AC-47. AC-130 models. Today, the U.S. Air Force, specifically its Special Operations branch, flies about 30 of these aircraft, or it's building a fleet of 30 of these aircraft, AC-130J models, that have side-firing 30-millimeter cannons, the same kind of cannon, basically the same kind of cannon, as equips the A-10 tank killer, plus also these aircraft can carry small glide bombs. The U.S. Marine Corps also has a small number of C-130s that it uses as sort of gunships. They don't, they don't tend

to undertake the kind of long-duration loitering battlefield attack mission that the AC-130s do. The Marines use them for more limited strikes. So the United States is the biggest user of these aircraft. They are some of the most powerful warplanes in terms of how long they can stay over the battlefield, the number and variety of weapons they can carry, and the amount of firepower that they can deliver to a battlefield in a single mission. There are other countries that have a very small number of smaller gunships. The Colombian Air Force has a few World War II era C-47 cargo planes that it has fitted smaller machine guns to, and I believe the Italian Air Force is either developing or has already acquired a very small number of, again, smaller transports

with a few guns. But primarily, it's the United States Air Force that uses these aircraft. They are expensive. They are very powerful. And you need specially trained crews and plenty of support on the ground to identify targets in order to use them safely. The potential for misuse with these aircraft is profound. If you recall a couple of years, years back in Kunduz in Afghanistan during a major battle in that city, the U.S. Air Force sent in an AC 130 to support Afghan troops on the ground and ended up demolishing by accident an MSF, Doctors Without Borders Hospital, and killing dozens of people. So these aircraft, why do they not belong in private hands?

They are extraordinarily powerful. That's why they don't belong in private hands. And to be clear, he does not have any right now, correct? He's – Right. It looks like he's – He's trying to acquire them. Whether he aims to acquire them prior to potentially winning a contract to privatize the Afghanistan war or some other conflict remains to be seen.

Prince has already begun building his Air Force in the sense that he has already acquired aircraft and modified them for military missions, sometimes in potential violation of State Department regulations. which has severely complicated his private air war scheme. But we have reported that, we at the Daily Beast, have reported that Eric Prince and one of his front companies have met at least twice with Ukrainian industry officials and inquired about acquiring some of these Antonov aircraft, Ukrainian-made Antonov aircraft,

and potentially fitting them with guns. So the talks have taken place. According to our sources, Prince has not yet succeeded in actually acquiring these aircraft. It's a difficult, complicated, in some ways unprecedented, and potentially legally problematic program. So according to our sources, Prince has asked about fitting American-made weapons to these Ukrainian-made aircraft. that would require State Department approval. In the past, Prince has skirted the law, skirted U.S. regulations in his efforts to add weaponry to what were previously civilian aircraft.

And that has so deeply complicated his efforts to do so that those aircraft have more or less been rendered unfliable at this point. So whether he's, I mean, I'm sure he's conscious of the risk that he's taking in trying to add. American guns or in proposing to add American guns to these Ukrainian-made airplanes, I don't know whether he's made the effort on the diplomatic, sort of the regulatory level to get State Department clearance to actually do so. All right. I want to back up just a minute. To be clear, we keep using Prince's name attached to a lot of this.

Did you talk to Prince for your story? And what does he have to say about all of this? We did speak to or we exchanged emails. extensively with Prince's spokesperson. So, no, he did not speak to Prince directly. And what does he say? Yeah, what does he say? That's what I'm interested.

He denies everything. Denies everything. But you have other sources kind of within these companies that are, like he denies even being attached to some of these companies, correct? So when you start talking about Prince and the companies that he's apparently or even obviously involved in, it gets real. murky real fast, and that is apparently, I would say, obviously by design. So Prince has been circulating a proposal to privatize the war in Afghanistan, particularly the Air War in Afghanistan,

for about a year. He's been very public about this. He's made media appearances. The sort of centerpiece of his proposal on a PR level was an op-ed he wrote for the Wall Street Journal, where he was very clear. He said, we should privatize the Afghani. He said, we should privatize the Afghan Afghanistan war. Here's how many people I would use. Here's how many aircraft I would need. Here's how much money it would cost. Here's what I would aim to achieve. And here's why I believe it would be better than the current U.S. approach to the Afghanistan war. So it is no secret that Prince is trying to privatize the Afghanistan war. Quite the contrary. Prince is happily attaching himself to this effort, trying to claim that he could do this better than

anyone else. In several of his proposals, he has handed out, written, kind of a written pitch for how the basic shape of how his private war would look and work. Military Times has reported on one of those, for example, BuzzFeed has obtained the actual pitch. I've seen a few pages from other sources. So that pitch itself is not terribly secret. And I don't believe that Prince has been shy about showing that to people. Military Times reported that he personally delivered a copy of it to Afghan officials. In that copy, the copy of the proposal that Prince handed to Afghan officials, according to military times, the proposal was sort of attributed in part to a company called Lancaster Six.

Lancaster Six claims it's a Dubai-based security and consulting and engineering company. I did speak to their CEO, Christian Durant, and he says we have no ties to Eric Prince, which is weird because this proposal that Eric Prince handed the Afghan officials had Lancaster 6 all over it. Same proposal that BuzzFeed obtained that in BuzzFeed's copy, I don't believe, mentioned Lancaster 6. Anyway, Lancaster 6, our reporting says, according to several of or two of Prince's former colleagues, is a Prince front company, but only unofficially. other words, Prince calls the shots, and the formal, the legal CEO of that company, Christian Durant, who is one of Prince's former pilots, kind of does Prince's bidding, and is one of the containers for this privatized air war. Several other of Prince's companies are clearly also involved in this private air war. Prince has proposed as part of the private air war to use what he calls T-Bird aircraft,

which are modified agricultural planes from the Thrush Company, you know, field spraying planes, that Prince has, the Prince acquired from Thrush through one of his companies called Frontier Services Group. But Prince sort of secreted those aircraft away from the United States, sent them to another one of his companies in Austria called Airborne Technologies, in order to modify them. Frontier, the board of Frontier minus Prince, thought that Prince was modifying them for surveillance missions, which would not necessarily violate State Department regulations. Instead, Prince added weapons. When Frontier, when the board found out, it commissioned lawyers to study the issue, they warned that this was a potential violation of State Department regulations, and Frontier tried, essentially boxed up those aircraft, and they are now stranded.

I'm sorry, Prince essentially boxed up those aircraft. He sent one to Bulgaria and one to Uganda, and they are now stranded in those two countries. So they are now part of the private air war proposal, which means that Frontier Services Group is part of the private air war proposal. And then sort of implicitly, every company that has, again, Prince's companies that have modified these aircraft, including Lhasa, the Bulgarian company, Bulgarian-based company, that actually did some of the work on the T-Bird aircraft.

So what's my point here? My point is Prince is legally or unofficially affiliated with a wide range of companies, many of them based outside the United States, that have worked on his aircraft, these aircraft that he acquired through one means or another, and have then fronted these aircraft as the substance of his proposal to privatize the Afghan-the-Afghanistan Air War. but getting Prince to publicly, comprehensively, and fully account for his relationship with all of these companies and the company's relationships to his proposal to privatize an American war is a very difficult thing to do. Prince will deny everything and attack the source of any claim. So what we think we know is that at least three official or unofficial Prince companies are affiliated with this proposal to privatize the air war. At least two aircraft have already, Prince has already acquired and modified as warplanes. And he is trying or has had talks with Ukrainian companies to acquire others.

It's confusing. No, I know. It's reading the article especially was very like following those tea birds. Yeah, it's confused. And I assume that that's all by design, right? It is by design. It's throwing people off the scent and keeping in keeping governments from ever clearly know exactly what's going on. Right. Okay. Right. How much would this cost? How much would his Air Force proposal cost? He has quoted a price for winning the Afghanistan war. Hang on, I want to get the number exactly right, so I'm scrolling through my own story to recall exactly what the number was. 3.5 billion. With the Air Force kind of as the centerpiece of that,

we assume that a large portion of that $3.5 billion would go towards those aircraft and the Rupkeep, right? Yes. Yes, and that's something that a couple of our sources have repeatedly stressed in talking about prints, that the money that flows from various investors, primarily Chinese and Emirati entities or individuals, the money that flows through prints companies from those sources, and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least. Much of that is either earmarked for aircraft or has already been spent on aircraft. Prince is apparently very serious about building this Air Force and does have access to the resources to at least begin doing so.

Tell me about the drone. Right, the drone. Okay, so Prince's proposal for privatizing the Afghanistan Air War includes a drone. The drone is called a lion's eye. The drone, as best we can tell, is fiction. It's very, very weird. We asked Prince's company about this drone, and they said, that's proprietary, and we won't talk about it. So we can't get Prince or his rep himself to explain this. But try Googling Lion's Eye drone.

That's one word, lion's eye. And all the references to Lyons-Eidron will be back to Prince. So in his proposal, Prince lays out a list of aircraft that he wants, that he, you know, that he is proposing to use to run the air war like a company. All of these aircraft exist. Some of them we know we can safely assert we know where they are and which aircraft, which specific aircraft Prince has in mind to acquire and weaponize. The one exception is this lion, a lion's eye drone.

Because unless Prince is secretly running a robotics lab on the scale of General Atomics or some Chinese company, I don't see how he can get drones. Every indication is that this lion's eye is an analog to the U.S. predator drone. Getting, buying predator drones. What do you mean by analog? That it's essentially similar in shape, size, power, flight characteristics, and armed capabilities. Okay. So a lightweight, say, a drone smaller than a Cessna, but still, you know, 20, 30 feet wing span

that could orbit over a battlefield at 10,000 feet for 12 hours, fitted with cameras for surveilling the ground down below, and like the predator and most of its kin, being compatible with missiles and bombs. So buying drones like that is very, very hard if you want the original model. If you want to buy predators from General Atomics, like an American company. Not only do you have to sort of navigate the standard State Department regulations

regarding arms exports, you also have to deal with a separate, a more specific body of regulations that governs the U.S. export of missiles because the U.S. government in its debatable wisdom has classified predator-style drones as missiles. This is a point of great contention in the U.S. defense industry, the industry arguing that that classification is inaccurate and unfair to the industry because it makes it very, very difficult for U.S. industry to export predator-style drones, which gives competitors a leg up. So right now, one of the hottest commodities on the drone market is the Chinese wingway. balloon drone, which is essentially a copy of the predator. Now, when I say copy, I'm not implying that the Chinese stole a predator and took it apart and reverse engineered it. You don't have to. The predator is actually a relatively simple aircraft. By simply looking at it, at its physical

shape, you can guess what it's made of, how it's built, and duplicate its capabilities. The genius of the predator really is someone finally just settling on design and using that design to its maximum potential. Also, the communications infrastructure underpinning the control of a predator drone. In other words, the satellite links, the radio links, the software, these things are also key to the predator's performance. Another thing that is not hugely complicated to design, it's a bit expensive to deploy because you have to be able to either build your own satellites or rent reliable

access to communication satellites. Anyhow, point being, because of the restrictions on exporting missiles and drones, General Atomics and other American companies have a very hard time selling predators, predators in similar drones. Chinese, by contrast, have no such qualms. So the Chinese predator analog, the Wingloon, is a very popular drone in the Middle East, Central Asia, places like that. So, for example, the Iraqi Air Force has them, Nigerian Air Force has them. And these two countries, among others, have strapped missiles to these drones, running their own kind of American-style drone wars in their own conflict and could do so more

cheaply, more efficiently than they could do if they went through the laborious process of trying to buy predators. So it should come as no surprise then that a former prince associate believes, told us that he believes that the lion's-eye drone is a Chinese predator analog that Prince is either proposing to rebrand or modify somewhat with his own equipment to add to his private counterinsurgency Air Force. We did ask about that. Again, we just got the response. This is proprietary.

We're not going to talk about it. But we did also sort of ask about the seeming, imaginary nature of this aircraft. Like, it doesn't actually exist at this point. It's just a figment of Prince's imagination and a line item on a written proposal. The Prince's spokesperson's response to that was essentially to laugh at us, like, how could you be so silly? But I don't understand in the real world of the armed drone market, in the context of U.S. regulations that make it hard to export these things, where else you get to one of these aircraft, it's except to buy them from China and repaint them in your own colors.

Now it should also not surprise you that Prince has deep ties to Chinese companies. One of Prince's main companies today, Frontier Services Group, which is the company that Prince used to acquire the T-birds, these armed agricultural aircraft, the ones that are now lying in weight in Polkaria and Uganda, and that feature prominently in Prince's plane. that same company Frontier Services Group increasingly has come under the control of Chinese investors, a Chinese conglomerate, has been buying up more and more of Frontier Services Group. Prince is still on the board and still heads at the company, but he answers to a board that's dominated by representatives of one Chinese company. That same Chinese company has hired Prince to run security. for the Chinese one-belt, one-road infrastructure project

that is aiming to build billions of dollars worth of rail lines and ports and transportation links all over the world to facilitate Chinese exports. So it shouldn't be shocking if we discover that indeed Prince is proposing to acquire Chinese drones, considering his strong ties to Chinese industry, in order to add them to his private air force. I highly doubt even in the Trump administration, the Trump, that Prince would get approval from the State Department to buy predator drones.

Iraq could not get permission to buy predator drones. And Iraq bought F-16s. You said in his Air Force proposal, he does not include planning for logistics and supply lines. Is that correct? Right. So what's, does he just ostensibly plan to, should he win a kind of contract to privatize it? if the Afghanistan war, which to be clear, all indications are that that's not going to happen, correct? As long as Jim Mattis is Secretary of Defense, it will never happen. How long Jim Mattis will

remain Secretary of Defense is increasingly in doubt? Good times. Okay, so you're not wrong. Right. He would, would he then the idea be that he just plugs in his private air force and military into America's existing logistic structure? That is a chilling, chilling thought, because what that would mean, if that were true, and I'll loop around to the alternatives to that, but if that were true, that would amount to the vast weight of U.S. taxpayer-supported military capabilities,

essentially underwriting a for-profit, and I should be very clear about my own personal opinion here, doomed scheme to privatize the Afghanistan war. So you think like U.S. government subsidies to agriculture, big ag, and oil companies is bad. Now imagine, I mean, the U.S. government already funnels billions of dollars. a year into the private military industry, but now scale that up by an order of magnitude. The logistics for a long-distance counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, which even after all these years is still a very remote and underdeveloped country, logistics are staggering. I've seen it firsthand. The rail links, the air bridge infrastructure, the warehouses, the convoys, to simply to transport, feed, fuel, and arm a foreign army that in a historical context was never really that big.

It's vast. And for the Pentagon to serve a very wrongheaded cash grab in the form of a private air war would be corruption on a scale that we have not witnessed in a long time. I don't see any alternative to it, though. More than anything else, the U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan is a logistical effort. It's staggering. I mean, we just have, what, 9,000 people there, but we're spending more than $10 billion a year, mostly getting stuff to Afghanistan to take care of these people and to allow them, you know, to arm them and fuel them so they can go do their job. I don't see how Prince can duplicate that without, and here I'm just speaking purely conjecturally, because I have not seen any proposal from Prince to privatize the logistics of the Afghanistan War.

But I wouldn't put it past people like Prince to want to make that a strictly private effort. I mean, there certainly are logistics companies that could scale up and harden themselves and become military supply. chains working, you know, funded by huge government contracts. Imagine like a more militarized FedEx. And something like that. Honestly, if Prince were thinking way ahead, that's where he would be focusing his efforts, not this like rickety air force with a couple Ukrainian gunships and some old New Zealand A4 fighter jets. Forget that. Try to front a private company. that could take over the logistical effort for long-distance U.S. wars. That's where you'd make a killing.

David Axe, thank you so much for coming on to War College and scaring all of us to death. Thanks for listening to This Week's show. If you enjoyed it, let the world know by leaving us a review on iTunes. It helps others to find the show, or at least that's what they tell us. We're putting transcripts of most shows online at warcollegepodcast.com, and you can reach us on Twitter. We're at war underscore college and on Facebook,

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