Angry Planet - Erik Prince’s terrible plan for Afghanistan

Episode Date: August 18, 2017

The United State's war in Afghanistan drags on with no end in sight. Worse, the current administration doesn’t have a clear vision of how it wants to proceed in the country. With all options on the table, private military contractor and entrepreneur Erik Prince - the founder of Blackwater - has gone on a lobbying tour around the U.S. pitching his own plan. Prince’s vision for Afghanistan calls for a viceroy to take over the country, drive out the Taliban and exploit the country’s natural resources. He’s likened it to the Marshall Plan or the Dutch East India company’s exploitation of India. This week on War College, author Robert Young Pelton and retired Green Beret Derek Gannon sit down to walk us through why Prince’s plan is bad for Afghanistan and bad for America. By Matthew Gault Produced by Bethel HabteSupport 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. The views expressed on this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters News. What he's pointing back to is the East India Company. It's somehow a positive example of how to run Afghanistan. So he's literally proposing a colonial exploitation model to the Afghan president

and to the American people who kicked the British out of America as the way forward. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Hello, welcome to War College. I'm your host, Matthew Galt. Today we're going to talk about the future of Afghanistan, the role of private military contractors in modern war, and one PMC mogul in particular.

particular, Eric Prince. To help me sort through this topic, I'm joined by two guests this week. Both have been on the show before. The first is retired Green Beret and soft rep reporter Derek Gannon. The other is journalist and documentarian Robert Young Pelton. Robert, Derek, thank you both so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. So America has been at war in Afghanistan for more than 16 years. Indications are that it's not going well. There are conflicting reports from the White House about how U.S. President Trump and his administration planned to handle that War. Today, the show is going to focus on one of those plans in particular. On May 31st of this year, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed authored by Eric Prince, titled The MacArthur

Model for Afghanistan, in which he calls for a viceroy to take over the country, literally the consolidation of power into one individual. In interviews, he's compared to both MacArthur's occupation of Japan after World War II and the British East India Company's occupation of India. One wonders just who Mr. Prince thinks that lucky vice-roy should be. This op-ed isn't just mission statement of a high-profile contractor. Prince is a man with White House access and the ear of the president, which makes the plan frighteningly possible. He's also going on something of a lobbying tour with the plan right now,

appearing at Oxford University and various Fox News programs talk about it. So, Mr. Pelton, my first question is for you. You remind our audience exactly who Eric Prince is. Well, Eric Prince first introduced himself to the American public in the opening chapter of my book, Licensed to Kill, which was an interview I did back in the mid-2000s. And he had never done any major interviews. And I was profiling three companies who provided private military resources. And the opening chapter basically lays out his grand vision for this private army, a 1700-man battalion. with aviation, humanitarian, all these things that are supposed to be self-contained.

Now, at that time, nobody twigged on what he was talking about because he was pitching it in Darfur. And he was also mixing it with a brand new gunship, a homemade gunship, he had developed out of a CASA 212 airplane. So to answer your question, Eric Prince has many things. He is a gyro gear loose of military hardware. He is a man who worships Alfred Sloan's GM model of verticalization of services. And he is very much a man who once put into the field causes major disasters and heartburn for governments. And right up here at the top, I want to clarify something.

You've got a kind of a contentious relationship with Mr. Prince, correct? And there's some legal issues? Yeah, Eric came to me and with tears in his eyes and said, my background is in marketing and brand protection and creation. And he said, you know, can you help me protect the Blackwater brand for my children? And I would not normally be in business with Eric Prince, but I said, look, I'm not going to mark it up or charge you any money. But what I'll do is I'll have a group of people put together a plan and protect the Blackwater brand until you can have. hand it over to your children. And Eric realized that he had signed a five-year contract, giving me the exclusive rights to all his personal projects and his corporate projects.

When one of his lawyers pointed that out, instead of doing it on a gentlemanly way by saying, hey, Robert, I think I made a mistake. He turned to artifice and deceit. So that's what the court case in Loudoun County this December is about. All right. And you've actually, Eric Prince is the founder of Blackwater, which became XE, which is now Academy. Is that correct? Is that what the current name of the organization is called? No, it's Constellis. So his buddy from Michigan, Andrew Deonkers, has constantly acted as a broker and a person who has done backdoor deals to keep control of Blackwater.

So it's buried in a conglomerate owned by a investment company managed by Deonkers. All right. And you, in the early days when it was still called Blackwater, you kind of embedded with them, correct? Yeah, I don't do embeds. I basically asked Eric what the most dangerous thing that Blackwater did was. And he jokingly said it was the run down Route Irish, about a 10-minute run, to go to the airport twice a day to pick up people. And it was a group of misfits. And these were people that were kicked off the State Department details.

and I seized on that as a perfect window to show people what it's like to risk your life every day for $600 and get shot at and blown up. All right. Derek, what have your interactions been with Eric Prince and Blackwater? I've never really had any interactions with Eric or EP himself ever. When I was in the Green Berets, we did, I was in a specialized unit and we were obviously invited to go down to what. what was Blackwater compounded Moyoc, I believe, to train. To use their facilities, you know, they didn't have any instructors or anything, you know, instructing us.

We went down there with our own, you know, base of instruction. And we used the blackwater facilities, which were amazing. And that compound is absolutely amazing. It's a huge compound in the middle of nowhere outside of Moyoc, North Carolina. And when we were there, I mean, you have to understand how big this compound is they have, I believe four drop zones where you can do airborne operations, landing zones where you can have helicopters come in and I don't know how many, probably 10, I might be a little bit wrong with that, about 10 major buildings, facilities that you can configure for direct action, CQB training, and flat ranges and known distance ranges for sniping and for long distance shooting. And what was interesting about it when we were down at Blackwater was the facilities where we stayed, where they called the bunk houses, were actually just, they were actually pretty nice. They were built kind of like hotels.

And they were really, I mean, we wanted for nothing. Breakfast was catered. And, you know, everything was just kind of laid out for us. It was really kind of what we called Gucci, if you will. And at the end of the day, at training, you know, they had food and everything prepared for us. And I do remember one specific day on a Saturday, because I think they were down there for about two weeks training, that a couple of us went around and we were running around the compound, kind of just to go for a run on it, obviously, but to also kind of check it out and to kind of expand on what Mr. Pelton said about the advancements of Eric's CASA 212. They have a massive manufacturing facility on that compound, at least when I was there. where they had aircraft of various sizes and in between being constructed. Plus, they also were creating and manufacturing their own armored vehicles.

I think they were called mambas, I believe, or something similar to that. But what I found interesting was the air strip that was actually there was large enough to accompany, at least a C-130, that could land and take off from there. Plus, they had various Lear jets and everything. But what was towards the culmination of, towards the end of our training, you know, we were honest, obviously told by our sergeant major like, you know, watch out for being recruited, you know, because there was a lot of guys that were from fifth group where that was my unit that I was, a special forces group that I was currently working with down there are already kind of working as instructors slash, you know, private military contractors for the then Blackwater that were at the facility. And towards the end, they threw this huge barbecue, you know, everything, spared no expense, gave away hats, you know, all the lickies and chewies that everybody likes to get. And it was just a huge, huge, like, hey, you know, when are you, when's your service date up? When are you getting out? You know, are you thinking about reenlisting?

You should think about coming over and working for Blackwater. And I just found that really interesting. It was a, it wasn't, it was a very passive to then, it just kind of towards the end of night was almost like an. overt recruiting kind of like gala event. But I never, we won a tier one J-Soc unit. So obviously Eric didn't come out of his, Eric probably wasn't there. He was probably lobbying for something in Washington, but none of the big headshed folks came out of their Crystal Palace to come say hello to us because we obviously weren't a national asset like like J-Soc units were. All right. The next question is to both of you. As you've both kind of been in places where

Blackwater and other private military contractors operate, is there any material difference that either of you have seen between how Mr. Prince does business and how other PMCs do business? I can look to that. You know, I've been with a number of private military groups. And what Eric does is conceptually come up with very solid ideas. He goes out to very talented people with lots of experience, puts together PowerPoints, ideas, pitches it as a fixed price contract to solve a certain problem. But as Derek mentioned, when he said tier one, there's a very limited pool of talented people that you can strip the assets from the government and resell back to the government.

So if you were to say to me, okay, on the agency side, when Eric provided security for the CIA bases along the border, he quickly ran out of talented people. And obviously, you go towards the money, so people would rather make $1,200 to $600, $600. dollars a day with clearances, but on the other side of the coin where you have to do fixed facility or convoy or things like that, you know, it's it goes down to the lowest bidder. It's an economic model that brings us Ugandans, Bangladesh, you know, people from developing nations that are getting paid horrific fees. And this is what we're seeing now is that the economic model destroys the moral model.

So the idea that talented American soldiers now retire and then go work for a private contractor with the same quality and skills has been erased by basically saying a contractor is more likely to be from a poor country than from Michigan or Florida. And so that's kind of the real difference then that you're seeing with Blackwater is that he's more likely to recruit those kinds of people? No, the difference is that the concepts that he initially presents, for example, he's presenting aviation response packages, training packages at the brigade level. These are already been done by people. You know, DynCorp is one of the companies. DynCorp is a very dull, boring, legally compliant company that does a lot of work for the government. Eric Prince has been caught violent federal laws and had to basically buy off the government to the $2.42 or $49 million so he wouldn't go to jail.

In other words, there's a very, very different modus operandi between the way Eric Prince works and some of these dollar, you know, less flamboyant company. So when Eric Prince is pitching an idea, when you look at the PowerPoint, it has been developed by somebody with good, solid military skills. When you look at the execution of Eric's projects, and I'm talking about R2 in the UAE, the PMPF project in Somalia, they dissolve very quickly. And there's been disasters internally that employees try to reach out to the media to say, look what happened in South Sudan or, you know, why did all these people quit last year? And there's even leaked emails from Otabi, the UAE ambassador,

in which former friends and employees of Erics are saying, I hope he doesn't get into trouble because he's twice violated UN arms embargoes lost, both in Somalia and Libya. So all I'm saying is that if I go to a traditional PMC provider, and there's nothing wrong with PMCs, and I say, look, I need a guy to provide security or to change the oil in my generator. There's typically not a problem with that.

But when you go into this very high-level sort of bad history book reading concepts, they're destined for trouble. Derek, do you have anything to add to that? The talent pool, I do believe Mr. Pell has spot on with that. I noticed I had some interactions. Now, I can't say if they were Blackwater, Dina Chloricackey, whoever else was during, in Iraq, because that's where I spent most of my time,

was in Iraq during the heyday of the private military push where everybody was making money off the government and everyone was having a great time. I did interact with some of these guys in Iraq, and a lot of them, a lot of us really thought that these guys were just out of control. They had no oversight whatsoever. to us. Now, they probably had something along the lines of some sort of corporate rules of engagement,

but a lot of these guys just were kind of running around like cowboys in the early years of Operation Iraqi Freedom. And we really didn't have that much interaction with them other than an errant gunshot here or there into a crowded street or them just, you know, running in like it was fast and furious through, you know, Rao Irish, because Rao Irish was pretty bad during that. That could have been Blackwater. I kind of want to tap on what Mr. Pelton said about the talent pool. I believe he's absolutely correct. I think after the great unpleasantness, the Blackwater got into where in the early 2000s

where a couple of their contractors killed about, I think, 17 civilians. Blackwater and private military corporations started to get a really, really critical eye put onto them. And we started seeing that Mr. Pelton's absolutely right. E.P. or Eric himself really wants those tier one. one special operations soft SF type of mentality trained guys to be really kind of the forefront kind of team managers on a lot of these PMCs and he did but unfortunately that is a very small talent pool and that talent pool does get pulled away to more established companies like blackbird reethelon things like that where we've we've worked with them exclusively through government DOD

contracts so of course it's easy for these careers to just go went into a retired, retired from the military going to these, well, more established Department of Defense, you know, sanctioned companies. When you go to work for Blackwater, you could be a green beret like myself standing next to a guy who spent three years in the 82nd Airborne Division and is now doing the same mission, same operation that you are, who has, you know, collectively three years compared to my 18 in combat zones. So now you're basically managing guys who have no oversight.

running around. So I think what Eric Prince has done, and I believe what Mr. Pelton hit on it, was that you now take guys who have those specialized training, and then you put them in charge of doing a corporate, if you will, for an internal defense program with the Ugandans, or what Eric tried to set up in South Sudan with the Machir issue down in there with the rebellion that was going on in the late 2000s down there. Where I believe he also did. get caught trying to sell military-grade equipment to both sides. And I think the State Department shut that down as well before you could break the law again. I couldn't be wrong with that.

But my experience is with contractors, it's been a mixed, kind of a mixed bag because because I do have friends that do contract. And I do have friends that do a very good job at contracting, make a good living out of it. And a lot of people are like, well, why don't you just, why do these guys retire and then go right back into doing the same exact thing that they were doing in special operations. I said, well, you know, think about it. Some of these guys spent 20 to 24 years doing this exact work for minimal amounts of money only to be enticed from a contract company making 1,300, 1,300 a day, you know, 60 days on,

60 days in-country working 30 days off wherever the company can send them. So you get a 60-30, 60-30 for a year, you could come back with quite a chunk of change tax-free. as long as you survive whatever they're doing, whatever the contract is. All right. I want to ask a big picture question. And Mr. Pelton, if you can start us off, what does Eric Prince want? I'm not just talking about Afghanistan. I'm talking about big picture.

So this is where we really need to keep the focus. Two things. The first thing is when you change a national foreign policy into a mercantile event, you lose every shred of respectability and accountability for the end result. And that means if I hire a cleaning crew to clean my house and they do a crappy job, they can just quit. They don't necessarily have to keep at it until they figure out how to do it right. So we're asking the Afghans,

which is a democratically elected government running a nation of 25 million with lots of European donors besides us, to allow in a mercantile lethal operation to kill dissident members. Now, I'm not supporting the Taliban. I'm just saying that there are numbers of people that form militant groups and go against the government that may or may not be around a year from now or two years from now or may get into a horrific civilian casualty event in which we as the country take the blame, but the actual perpetrator can simply dissolve his company because it'll be registered offshore and just quit and go work somewhere else.

So that's one thing. The second thing is Eric Prince has a very interesting history of being involved in clandestine disinformation operations. And that goes back to when he had Greystone and some very senior members of the CIA working for him like Koffer Black, Rob Reacher. right here. And they were engaged in trying to start a war in Iran under Dick Cheney. Now, most people would say, what? There is a political and religious agenda buried inside Eric Prince's activities that people don't quite catch. They know it exists. They've seen documents.

They've heard about it. But there was some very serious goings on. His father was a very well-respected man who created a business from scratch. After his first heart of the attack, he aligned himself with the extreme right. In other words, anti-gay, anti-abortion, family values, all that kind of thing. Eric perpetuates that with his mother and his family. And he is linked with people that you might call them neocons, you might just call them, you know, right-wing, sort of Reagan-esque folks like Ollie North. And their goal is ultimately to take down the great Satan states. In this case, it's Iran, a singular focus of Eric Prince. is Iran. And a lot of the covert things he was doing while he was disappearing were to support

military activities in North Africa, in the Middle East, as basically a straw mat. And if you remember the whole Iran-Contra mindset, where you had sort of a shadow government doing things that were theoretically deniable, this is what he wants to reintroduce to the Trump administration. Derek, do you have anything to add to that? I agree with him. I'll even take it a step further. I believe Eric Prince is, I believe he thinks he's a part of some sort of little known U.S.-based sect of the Templar Knights, to be honest with you.

He's very into that whole Templar Knight, Templar Shield type of mentality, as well as some other retired, I believe, retired generals were in special operations and in the United States military itself. But I have heard rumors. and talk to many different people that have had time with Eric Prince or assume that they know him. He is very, he is very, very, very conservatively religious. And yes, his main goal has always been to rid the world of, you know, Islam, if you will. I'm just going to say it, Islam, if you will.

I mean, it's kind of what he was accused of down in South Sudan, where he was supporting the rebel movement that were very anti-Islamic proliferation down there. and you're going to get pinched for that. But yeah, I agree with that. I think there is a, there is a religious undertone that nobody wants to, people see it, but nobody wants to talk about it because then we have, you know, then we have to really look at what is, what is, what is extremism? Is it just on one side or is it in both sides? That's my opinion. But yeah, I've heard the rumors and also talk to people that believe that Eric Prince does have a very, very, very interwoven religious ideals into his company, into his company model. And keep in mind, the idea of a private military corporation actually goes back to the ancient

knights that formed the first banks, which were the Templars. We're the Templars, yes. You can actually create your own self-funded military operation that is transnational, very much like ISIS or Al-Qaeda, but you can do it as a corporation. And this is the thing that people try to get their head around, but have a hard time thinking it through. Can Eric Prince go to the UAE, find private backers, use covert either agency money or Saudi money, create a military made out of mercenaries who are actively engaged in combat, flying commercial aircraft that are adapted with hard points, hiring ex-military? Is this possible? It's like, no, it's actually happening now.

So I think the scrutiny should be put on just how far off the map has Eric gone in places like Libya, Yemen, Somalia. The evidence is all there. He actually is very proud of making documentaries and hiring journalists to write stories about it. So he's already done it. The question is if we then invigorate him in Afghanistan, what happens next? Do we create a monster that is doing something completely different than what we originally hiring him? it to do. All right, well, let's get into this.

What is his plan for Afghanistan? What is it that he's pitching here? So, Eric has a machine gun that just fires things at the wall. He's always told me that, you know, he just needs one good idea. Like his father came up, or not his father, but his employees, came up with the lighted sun visor, which then GM integrated into the Cadillac in the 80s, which then expanded into Prince auto manufacturing, providing all the interiors as a turnkey product. So he knows that when his dad did a ham deboning machine or a sock drawer that has a built-in

light, that that failed. But if you keep coming up with ideas, one will stick. Secondly, he wants to verticalize military provision. And that means everything, the aircraft, the people, the logistics, even the hardware and the guns. He wants to make and sell all that stuff to nation. So the Afghan plan is his big moment in history. You know, he's always believed he's going to die young because genetically his family, you know, has heart problems and they collapse at early age.

So it's very, very driven to show that he can independently conduct a war if you just let him alone and just give him enough money. So he's got a number of things. He's got FID, which is foreign internal defense being conducted by contractors. Well, that's not a big deal. That's already been done. He's got aviation packages where he says he can respond anywhere in Afghanistan within one hour with close air support. That's BS, but it sounds good. He's got ideas for logistics.

In other words, being able to move and supply the Afghan army, which I'd like to see that happen without corruption in Afghanistan. But these are all good ideas. These are ideas that have been done before. And then this Viceroy idea is sort of like. When you talk to a guy and he looks you straight in the eye and he seems very earnest and experience, and suddenly he says something. He said, are you saying? He's not suggesting a Paul Bremer, a Paul Bremer type person to run the country.

And we all know what Paul Bremer did with his edicts, launching the insurgency and basically causing a lot of American deaths. He's then saying, let's just put all our faith and trust in one human being that's not an Afghan and let's just let him run with it. Now, to me, I would say, okay, get out of the room. That was a great idea. But what he's pointing back to is the East India Company as somehow a positive example of how to run Afghanistan.

So he's literally proposing a colonial exploitation model to the Afghan president and to the American people who kicked the British out of America as the way forward. So then I keep going, okay, this is a comedy. Let's just shut this down and let's talk to somebody else. And that's why people like Mattis who went into Phlujia, because of Eric's mess-ups is just looking at this guy like, get out of here.

But his relationship with Steve Bannon is very tight. They work on a lot of, you know, underhanded stories and disinformation programs. They also know Rebecca Mercer. So they're pitching this idea as so outrageous

that nobody will pay attention to it. But again, this is a guy that has, that does have White House access, right? I mean, his sister is, who is his sister? Betsy the boss. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's not like this plan isn't being listened to. He's on Fox News doing little five-minute segments, talking this thing up. And I want to circle back around to the Dutch East India or the East India Company because I think that's important because it wouldn't be the first time that the British East India Company was in Afghanistan, right? They fought a war there in the 19th century or they were part of one. No, to understand that concept, what the colonial powers did, is hire enterprising people like Eric Prince, and this is his role model.

He wants to be the John Smith that goes to the Newark country. They would hire, sorry, an experienced military commander, retired, and say, go take a bunch of soldiers, go train up some sepoys, you know, these are the locals, on a 1 to 12 over 1 to 100 ratio, depending on the country, go find some nice emperor to sign a trade deal with it, and go kick the hell out of the other people who oppose him. And then when you've got enough land under your control, and you can show a profit, the British government or the Dutch government will come in sign a charter with you and suddenly we'll have a colony.

But it's already up and running. This was the idea of these private companies. And he wants to recreate that model. How is it any different than kind of what we're doing now? Because we would just be giving one person carte blanche? No, this is ridiculous. Okay. do some homework.

But the bottom line is this. We're fighting three wars in Afghanistan. We have a counterterrorism mission, which is the people that dropped the Moab, and this is a very well-funded, kill ISIS, kill Al-Qaeda, global battle that we have. And it's going very well. We have a NATO program, which is really a stabilization and peacekeeping mission, which is called Resolute Support. And this is the thing where people have killed. cappuccinos and argue about, you know, what schools to build and whatever. But this has shrunk dramatically, and most of our troops over there don't even go out of the base.

The third war we're fighting is on the political front in which we're trying to prop up a former American, you know, President Ghani and a democratic country that is literally falling apart as we speak. So in order to come up with a solution, we have to get the facts right. Now, you opened the show by saying, we've been a... war for 17 years. No, we've been at war in Afghanistan for 38 years. President Carter signed a presidential finding to support the Mujahideen, you know, out of Pakistan to fight the Russian influence government. So we've actually won and lost in Afghanistan, and we've been there for 38 years.

Derek, do you have anything to add? No, that's actually, it was just as soon as he said 38 years, the first person I thought it was Charlie Wilson, Charlie Wilson's war. I thought, yeah, that's, he's right. we've been in and out of Afghanistan for 30 plus years. Yeah, we were in the 50s building houses down in Kandahar. We actually created these poppy fields because of the irrigation system we put in. In other words, we're not newcomers to Afghanistan, but to solve the problem, let's define the problem accurately. All right, I want to drill into two different aspects of his plan.

But both of these are mentioned in his Wall Street Journal op-ed, and he keeps hitting both of them in interviews. The first is rules of engagement. And every time he gives an interview about the rules of engagement in Afghanistan, he has kind of the same line that a soldier under fire shouldn't be calling a lawyer 500 miles away to ask whether or not it's okay to attack or respond. Do we have any idea what he wants to change the rules of engagement to? Yeah, first of all, it's fiction. A lot of things that Eric says in public are demonstrably false. and just cause more confusion when people listen to them. In Afghanistan, we have a very successful program in training the commandos and the Afghan special forces.

These guys are airlifted in. They have complete authority to call in air support. There's no lawyer in Washington talking Dari or Pashto to a local air controller. What he's trying to say is our troops, and he is absolutely misinformed when he says our troops are fighting war there. Our troops are not lined up, you know, fighting the Taliban. We're assisting and training very competent Afghans to go in and arrest their lives. And I've done many of these missions where we go in with a group of special forces, a small ODA. We rehearse for a day. We take the commandos. We draw up the village in chalk and we practice breaching, you know,

who's doing top cover for sniping. We jump in the heloes. We drop off in the mountaintop at three in the morning. We have drones, we have gun ships. It's absolutely beautiful how much technology is up in the air. We can see every single member of the village. We can see every gunman on every roof. He can be neutralized within about three seconds. When I say, hey, what's that building over there? A guy reads out a number and this giant IR light comes out of the gunship and lights up the house like it's daylight. So we know what we're doing and we do it very, very well. The thing is, There's a limited number of commando groups. There's a limited amount of airlift.

And of course, we need to put in more trainers. And what I'm saying is that this is already happening. So when Eric says, I need this, no, I'm not ever going to put that in Eric's hands. And I don't want a contractor to make a lethal decision in a democratic country like Afghanistan that might affect our relationship with the government and the actual troops that are there. So these are, anyway, I'm going on, but I'm just saying that we already do exactly what he says we should do there. And Derek, that kind of speaks to what you were talking about earlier about some of the missteps that Eric Prince's companies have made before. Yes. And that was a really good brief back, Mr. Pope.

That's exactly how, that's exactly how direct action operation actually occurs. Lights come out of nowhere. It's absolutely amazing the U.S. military might and technology. that special operations and special forces can actually bring down on one target. However, that's a small, very small group of people, very small group of people within the United States military. Most of the military actually doesn't even get that. And Eric Prince is wrong. Every time we deployed, our rules of engagement was clearly established.

We don't call back to a lawyer, and most of major commands in the United States military don't have any lawyers that they wait. What do we do? How do we get clearance? I don't know where he got that from. I think maybe that was during, I believe, the Obama administration transition from the Bush to Obama administration where everybody kind of had a stand down for two weeks in Iraq. I remember that being a part of that. That wasn't because the Obama administration didn't want to fight the war.

It's just that they had to revamp those rules of engagements from a national level down to the maycoms down in Iraq and Afghanistan. Let me just, I think I know what he's talking about. You remember the incident in Kunduz where they called in Kandu's where they called in Kass. and they hit the MSF hospital. Yeah, actually, yeah, that's okay. So if he's talking about that, that's how many incidents is, that's a unique, and I do remember that, Mr. Poe. Actually, I do.

Yeah. Yeah. I do remember. I worked with two four stars in Afghanistan after what they call Civcast, which is civilian casualties, where an action, whether I think was Marsock and Shindad, killed 125 people, and their after-action report said it was 12. We proved that that was wrong. They then shut down all airstrikes because they had to be approved, right?

And then remember there was another incident? So anyway, so what happens is after you have these major civilian casualties, they shut everything down and they bottleneck it, and then they go back to the normal. Right. And it's a knee jerk because they're like, oh, oh, God, this is now in the media. It's a knee jerk reaction. Everybody gets shut down. Everybody gets shut down.

Everything is. Let's flip it around. So what is Eric famous for? is famous for having his employees kill murder, 17 people in Mr. Square. Yes. So on the state department moves. Had there been a lawyer in the middle, he would have said, no, no, do not kill those people, you know, wave off. And this is, this was humorous about Eric Prince.

He's trying to reset the narrative to make him look like the good guy when the actual fact, those lawyers were put in place because of Eric. Yes. And that's the scary part is that he's briefing. He's informing the major, the public, who's like, Yeah, let's put him as a viceroy. And he basically is saying, well, the United States military is being his hands are tied behind us back because of legalese. When in the simple fact, he's saying send us in and we're guns hot, we're guns free, whatever we can do whatever we want. When he, a private corporation that deals with military, you know, application should have as many lawyers as it does weapon systems in its arms room.

He's kind of presenting this weak, send us in, you know, we won't have our hands tied. We're kind of weapons free. We can do what we want. Plus, his next greatest thing he did on Fox News the other day was, you send me in and my group in, my private military in. That's less Americans' boots on the grounds in Afghanistan and less likely to have Americans die. Well, okay, that sounds great. That sounds amazing.

Yeah, let's pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, but then we're going to put in U.S. contractors training up local nationals to be guns free without any legal ramifications. It doesn't make any sense. That sounds like a bad situation in the making, like a very bad go-to. All right. The other aspect of this that he's touting as a positive is the financial aspect. He's saying that he can get this done or a good company should be able to get this done for under $10 billion. Do we have any sense that that is in any way accurate? Well, let's just add one thing.

What he's also saying is that we've got a trillion dollars, or Afghans have a trillion dollars worth of resource. in the ground. And there's sort of a financial calculation that shows that this is a profitable venture. I mean, this is inherent in every one of these presentations. And the interesting thing is I just spent two months doing a lot of research on the mining industry in Afghanistan. And what's fascinating is that the major mines like Messanayak have already been sold off to Chinese partners.

And these partners have chosen not to lift a finger, but it's all part of the one road, great belt, whatever you want to call it, concept that Eric is also mining on the other side, meaning that he's got a China-based company in which he suddenly switched to security provision for the Chinese in the region, in the contentious region of West Turkestan or the area around Arumchi, Pakistan. So he's playing multiple cards in multiple games, hoping that it all comes together. for his satisfaction. So when you said that, okay, he can do this for this much money, he's also saying, but there's a profit made there if I'm successful. Somebody really needs to hold Eric Prince to the fire and say, can I see all your corporate assets? Can I see where your income coming?

Can I check your loyalty to see who you actually are working for? And this is something that hasn't been suggested yet. No. Why doesn't anyone do this? Why doesn't anyone hold him to the fire? Well, when I first interviewed him, you know, I asked him why he was talking to me, and, you know, not the New York Times or whatever. And he said, well, you know, he's a fan of my book.

In other words, he is a child at heart. He is a guy who, in his defense, has great ideas that come from other people that he sort of skims through. And when he approached me about his Somali anti-piracy project, he had just read a book about the very foundation of America in which we saw. sent over a Navy ship and we thumped the the Pirates of Tripoli and I'm like, that's Tripoli, dude, that's not Somalia. So he has these ideas, very wacky misreadings of history books. And at the same time, he's a deeply bitter man. He's very, very bitter about the way he was treated by Hillary Clinton. He's literally been in exile, you know, for eight years in his bat cave coming up with ideas.

and he's been doing strange things and strange countries, and he's always just one step ahead of the UN sanctions, and he glorifies himself as being sort of a pirate, a mercenary, a romantic figure. And I just caution people that Eric Prince himself is a normal person, but then when he gets this mantle of power put on his shoulders, he suddenly turns into that guy that we all think only exists in comic books. And what exactly is that guy? And we've kind of danced around some of his previous failures that I'd like to drill into them as we kind of wrap up the episode to really bring this home for people.

You know, what happened in South Sudan? What has happened in places where Prince has gotten more or less what he wanted? Well, South Sudan began with a very strange incident. He was asked to set up a private military company, the same one he's been pitching over and over again, in the UAE. It's called reflex responses. He very clearly distances himself from that idea. But this was set up by the UAE, some say with Saudi assistance funding,

to then start a commotion either on Kish Island or some border area that would then trigger a war with Iran. We would have to go in and rescue them. He was then sliced off of that. He was busted in New York Times. He moved to Somalia to set up an army. anti-piracy force. And I had a ground network in Somalia, I had about 75 people. And he was one of my biggest subscribers. And he was very interested in commercial opportunities in Somalia, which is

weird. And secondly, wiping out the pirates. So he hired all the EO guys that I know, executive outcomes from South Africa. And I used to call his camp, like the retirement camp for mercenaries, because they were all there. And they smuggled in helicopters, all kinds of things. And then they went live and they chased after a pirate who had hijacked the UAE ship. And they were immediately shut down by the UN threatened with sanctions. And sanction means you can't travel. You can't transfer money. It's quite serious. He then pretended like nothing happened to abandon his people in the field, which you can imagine 1,200 untamed, Somali gunmen and about 200 very sweaty white men. It was not pretty. he then went to South Sudan as part of a $500 million investment fund and wanted to build a refinery in the north.

And it's about $120 million refinery convinced, once again, these are all good ideas, right? South Sudan needed to refine its own products. The only minor detail is that they had sold all their oil to Khartoum to pay for their independence. So the idea that they were siphoning off their own product and selling it local didn't make a lot of people happy. when Rick Meshire fled and Kyr suddenly realized that his country was falling apart, he leaned on Eric, who had a logistics company based out of Kenya, to allegedly provide transshipment of weapons and also medevac of wounded troops. Now, I'll just tell this as an apocryphal story from somebody who was there.

He tried to go in to medevac some people, and his planes were painted white, and they shot the hell out of those planes. The rebels did, thinking that, okay, this is Keir bringing weapons via the UN because the rebels confused the white FSG planes with UN planes. The rebel commander said, if any UN planes take off our lands in this area, we're going to shoot them down. Now, you can imagine the impact to the UN of that kind of screw up. So, bottom line, he then snagged a deal to do, and I'm using air quotes, pipeline security and he tried to sell his air tractor and

weaponized contractors to then fight the rebels under the guise of protecting the pipelines and by this time the EU was just pissed I mean they'd already gone through the Somalia thing where there's a blanket arms embargo and now Eric pops up again and once again he vanished from South Sudan so these and he's of course supporting activities with General Haftar and I'll say these are all allegedly, allegedly. He's part of that jiggery, pokery thing where they sell air tractors to Jordan. They donate them to the UAE.

The UAE donates them to Libya. So he's got them in Eritrea. He's got them in Benina in Libya. So it goes on and on. So I'm just saying that there is a lot more under the covers with Eric Prince's business activities than meets the eye. Derek, do you have anything to add to that? That's actually exactly the rundown for South Sudan.

I'm aware of. He just he got 200, I think he got 200 to 350 million out of the 500 million contract through Keir. Because Keir in his group shut it down, shut the payments down because the air tractors that he was flying around

I don't know the nomenclature. The air tractors that started to show up weren't weaponized. And through what Keir said when he had secret meeting, or not secret, but closed-door meetings with Eric was that Eric promised him weapons of war. tons of them. These aircraft will be dropping, you know, laser guided bombs,

ISR missions, everything that you could think of under the sun to destroy Macher or Mocker. I think that's how you say his name. I always screw it up. Rachmishar. Thank you. I know you met him, so tell him, I'm sorry, but his last name. And it was all under the guys of what Mr. Pelton just said was pipeline security for, I think it was, senokam, one of the larger Chinese petrochemical companies that are in, they're working Sudan and South Sudan. So he kind of shoehorned himself into an issue that Sudan and South Sudan

were in the middle of with Khartoum and Kyr was one of the other reasons why a lot of the rebels were pissed was because the South wasn't getting any of the money. that eight thought it was going to be getting from the north, from Khartoum, from the oil sales. So that's a part of the issue with some of the rebellion. But Eric started delivering these systems and started smuggling in some of these weapons systems. And then the key regime shut the payments down. Eric disappeared. He just, I'm out.

He got $200, $350 million out of it. And he took off. You're right. Mr. Pelton is also right from what I've researched and read is that, yeah, he's been able to wash his. his hands and these airframes through several Gulf states. And somehow they're ending up at Eutrera and Libya and even in, I think, I believe, I believe, and this is a rumor that some of these planes that actually have been seen are in and around the Sinai. As recently as in around the Sinai, just doing all these supposedly ISR missions.

So he's, he really likes the Gulf states. He really likes North Africa in the Middle East region. He really wants to be kind of like the guiding, if we're going to go with the temperament. our night type of stuff. I think he wants to be kind of like that that that lit sword that guides everybody into the right path in the Middle East and kind of controls that. And to go back to Matthew, to go back to your order to what Mr. Belton actually said is he likens himself to a comic book character. I think Eric thinks he's more like Tony Stark, but he actually kind of comes across as, you know, sort of like a bad guy in itself, like Lex Luther almost.

I mean, without the bald head. He just, he has all these ideas. He just kind of hit fires him thinking he's like, this is going to be the one that kills Superman. And it really, it never really kind of pans out. It never really does. Well, Lex Luther is bitter, if I remember correctly. And this is the key emotional element in a lot of Eric's verbal statements. is that he's angry at something and that he's bitter and that he's doing this because those other

people don't know what they're doing. I think that's ultimately what leads to the meltdown of these projects. All right. I think that will about wrap it up. Do either of you have anything else you think we should be covered, we should cover in this discussion or talk about before I kind of say our goodbyes? Matthew, I just want to say one thing as sort of a seasoned analyst and viewer of these things. We are actually watching an American presidential administration consider secret unpublished plans that will guide the future of our country and the safety of our soldiers in foreign countries.

I have never seen an outsider present whatever plans they are that don't at least get exposed to public scrutiny or at least expert commentary that make us feel comfortable that these are. These are the right things to do. And this is what bothers me the most about this new idea of, let's write an op-ed and then call Steve Bannon and go meet with Mattis and pitch this wacky idea. And then let's get on a plane and talk to Ghani, President Ghani, pitch this wacky idea. And then do the American public ever get a chance to review or decide on whether this is a good idea or not? And I say that in Prince's favor. If you've got a great idea, let's see it.

All right. Robert Young Pelton, Derek Gannon, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to this week's show. War College was created by Jason Fields and Craig Hedek. It's hosted by the incomparable and kind Matthew Gult. It's produced by me, Bethlehapte.

Well, it has been produced by me. This is my final War College episode, I'm sad to say. I'm off to my next adventure outside of Reuters, and if you're interested in finding out what I'll be up to, next, you can follow me on Twitter. I'm at Bethel underscore Hobte. That's H-A, B-Leg-B-Lag-Brigade, T-Lag-T-Lamahawk, E. But the show will go on. You can follow War College on Twitter, at War underscore College, and suggest ideas for future shows there. Be sure to leave us a rating and review on iTunes, too. Take care, and thanks for listening. Right till the very end.