Last Saturday, Trump adviser in chief Stephen Bannon, with Kushner’s backing, went to the Pentagon to arrange a discussion between Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and “two businessmen who profited from military contracting,” the Times reported. These weren’t ordinary contractors: They were Erik Prince, the notorious founder of Blackwater, the all-purpose mercenary army, and Stephen Feinberg, a New York financier who owns and controls DynCorp International, the largest US contractor in Afghanistan.
At the meeting (which neither Prince and Feinberg would confirm), they urged the Pentagon to turn the war over to what they call “private military units” who would fight for profit as an alternative to the Pentagon’s recent proposal to send thousands more US military troops to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. To their apparent disappointment, Mattis, the Times reported, “listened politely” to their audacious proposal, but “declined to include the outside strategies” in a review of Afghanistan policy that is being led in the White House by Trump’s national-security adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
The Times story [archive.is link] screamed conflict of interest. Prince, as most Americans know, cut his mercenary teeth sending his private army into Afghanistan with the CIA shortly after 9/11. He then became persona non grata in the US government after contractors under his command killed dozens of civilians in Iraq. But after selling his company and moving on to organize a private army for the United Arab Emirates, he became a key adviser to Trump on military issues. In an interview with Bannon’s Brietbart News a day after his Pentagon meeting, he spelled out his proposals.
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Feinberg’s expertise is much broader: He helps provide the capital that feeds the military-contracting industry. Through Cerberus Capital Management LP, the $30 billion private-equity firm he co-founded in 1992, Feinberg has acquired dozens of companies engaged in military and intelligence operations. As Bloomberg News reported in a detailed profile last February, “Feinberg has bought companies that refuel spy planes, train Green Berets, make sniper rifles and watch America’s foes from space. He’s handed out jobs, lobbying contracts and campaign cash to some of the most powerful people in the nation’s capital.”
Unlike Prince, however, he, is virtually unknown to the American public, and likes to keep it that way. For those who have never heard of him, here’s a snapshot of who he is, the significance of his private-equity industry, and how he and other national-security investors could benefit in the event that Mattis changes his mind and decides to send Blackwater—or its latest incarnation—back into Afghanistan.