Master of War: Blackwater USA's Erik Prince and the Business of War by Suzanne Simons

The Barnes & Noble Review

Erik Prince didn’t have to go into the military at all, but he’s ended up as the leader of America’s shadow army, Xe (formerly known as Blackwater). CNN executive producer Suzanne Simons’ detailed new book, Master of War, chronicles the story of the 40-year-old Navy SEAL who left the military after his entrepreneurial father (who made the family a boatload by inventing automobile sun visors that light up) died and his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Prince took his inheritance and started Blackwater in 1997 to simply provide training sites for law enforcement and the U.S. military. Instead, he’s frighteningly changed the nature of war. Simons traces the company’s dramatic growth and changing mission, as well as the rise of the billion-dollar military-contracting business that Blackwater has come to represent. The government can now outsource many of its nastier military assignments to a once virtually unchecked band of well-armed former cops and soldiers from across the globe. Prince, who recently stepped down as CEO of the company, ran Blackwater with the same industrious zeal his father embodied: “The lion wakes up in the morning, he knows he has to outrun the gazelle, or he’s gonna starve,” Prince says in the book. “The gazelle wakes up and knows he has to outrun the lion, or he’s gonna be eaten.… Whether you’re the lion or the gazelle, when you wake up, you’d better be running.” All that running and explosive growth can get you in some trouble, though. In the past few years, Blackwater has brought the U.S. some controversial black eyes in Afghanistan and Iraq and has become a symbol of the gunslinging, tough-talking Bush administration. While the world is changing, the outsourced military isn’t going away anytime soon. Simons’ book offers a tremendously important look into the hidden corners of that world. --Mark J. Miller

From the Publisher

In the long annals of military privateers there has never been a story quite like that of Blackwater USA. No company has ever so quickly amassed its size, fire- and man-power, and full-service military capability. No company did so well during the Bush years, nor crashed to the ground more quickly as those years came to an end. And no man better exemplifies the risks and rewards taken and offered during the Bush years than Blackwater's founder, Erik Prince.

Blackwater became radioactive after one particular violent eruption killed more than a dozen innocent Iraqi civilians in 2007. It was only a matter of time before the Iraqi government banned the company from working anywhere within its borders. By 2009, with its Iraq contract finished, its reputation and balance sheet were in tatters. In February, the company changed its name to Xe (short for xenon, an inert and noncombustible gas) and Erik Prince stepped away from actively managing his fiefdom.

Master of War is a close-up, unvarnished, and unbiased case study of hubris and power—and a disturbing story of a democracy's foreign policy placed in private hands.

Publishers Weekly

CNN executive producer Simons balances private and public accounts of Erik Prince, founder and owner of the country's most notorious private military contractor. In this often glowing, mildly critical portrait, Prince is depicted as a fierce individualist, visionary entrepreneur and patriot, an upstanding guy's guy, albeit born into enormous privilege, right-wing values and Beltway ties. A determined overachiever, Prince trained as a navy SEAL until his father's death led him to an enterprising idea to provide the training facilities SEALs needed. Certain contradictions ensue: Prince is known to be deeply religious, so his affair while his first wife is dying of cancer surprised many friends. Likewise, Prince's free market faith denigrates government involvement in business, but his Blackwater project only survived by means of hefty government contracts. Simons's premise-that all questions arising from Blackwater's relevance go back to "one man"-justifies emphasis on the personal, but the book is most instructive when straying to include Dick Cheney's impact on Pentagon outsourcing or General Sanchez's frustration over boundary confusion in Iraq between U.S. soldiers and the State Department's veritable "private army." (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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