Erik Prince, America’s most notorious mercenary, spies opportunity in chaos
The return of the Blackwater founder is a sign of the times
Nov 21st 2025FIFTEEN YEARS ago the future looked grey for Erik Prince. A string of scandals had forced the American executive to sell Blackwater, the private military company (PMC) he had founded in 1997. The Bush years had given way to the Obama era, and the war on terror—which had fuelled Blackwater’s rise—was being scaled back. Neo-cons were out; multilateralism was in. Dogged by lawsuits and negative headlines, Mr Prince packed his bags and left America for the United Arab Emirates. The age of the modern mercenary, in the West at least, was drawing to a close.
Or so it seemed. Today, the industry’s rise appears unstoppable—and Mr Prince is back at the heart of it. From Ukraine to Haiti to Congo, America’s most notorious mercenary is everywhere. His services are more in demand than ever, and his worldview, which he discussed on a recent episode of “The Weekend Intelligence” podcast, more influential among America’s powerholders. Inspired in part by Russia’s Wagner Group, a Kremlin-backed outfit, PMCs are cropping up across Africa and the global south. Commercial operators have mushroomed across Ukraine. Even the delivery of humanitarian aid in war-zones is increasingly being farmed out to the private sector. For a glimpse of how the global spread of instability and the fraying of the international order is affecting the murky world of mercenaries, keep an eye on Mr Prince.
The scion of wealthy Michigan industrialists, Mr Prince had an intensely conservative upbringing. His father, whose factory made die-cast machines, was a big donor to organisations promoting traditional Christian values. His older sister Betsy married into the nearby DeVos clan, a dynasty described by one writer as the “Medicis of Michigan”. The two families were, and remain, deeply entwined in Republican politics. Mrs DeVos went on to become education secretary in Donald Trump’s first administration.
After leaving school the young Mr Prince joined the United States Naval Academy, but quit after just three semesters reportedly because he found the place too liberal. After a spell in Washington, which included an internship in George H.W. Bush’s White House, he became a Navy SEAL, serving in the Balkans, Haiti and Middle East (though he saw no combat). But two tragedies in short succession—the death of his father in 1995 and his first wife falling ill with cancer (she died in 2003)—prompted the 25-year-old to return home, whereupon he sold the family business for a reported $1.35bn. With the proceeds he set up Blackwater, which thrived in Iraq following the American invasion in 2003—until it attracted criticism for the behaviour of its contractors. Four were convicted of killing 14 Iraqi civilians in a notorious massacre in Baghdad in 2007.
Despite his ostensible retreat from the limelight, the following decade included its fair share of controversies for Mr Prince. The UAE reportedly hired him to set up a battalion of 800 foreign mercenaries, at a time when autocracies across the Middle East were being buffeted by the Arab Spring. His involvement with a PMC hired to train an anti-piracy police force in Somalia led to him being accused by UN monitors of violating an arms embargo. And then, in Libya in 2021, the UN accused him of raising a private army in support of a warlord attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government there. (Mr Prince strongly denied the allegations.)
Recently, as competition has heated up between China and America over control of critical minerals, Mr Prince has focused much of his attention on Africa. Ever attuned to America’s shifting overseas priorities, Mr Prince has been in and out of Congo, a mineral-rich giant in central Africa, since around 2015. Shortly after taking office in January, Mr Trump put Congo at the heart of his administration’s Africa policy, helping to mediate a fragile ceasefire in the country’s conflict-wracked east in return for a stake in its riches. Around the same time, Mr Prince struck a deal to help the Congolese government collect taxes, specifically from the mining sector. He tells The Economist he is helping boost state capacity. Critics fear he will undermine it.
Unusually for a mercenary, Mr Prince is not media shy. He is cocksure and combative, brimming with the MAGA-style machismo that his friend Pete Hegseth, America’s Secretary of War, calls a “warrior ethos”. On his podcast, “Off The Leash”, he vents against liberals and espouses a starkly Darwinian vision for the global order. He has suggested ideas such as flooding Hamas’s tunnels under Gaza with seawater. Last year he proposed a return to colonial rule in African and South American countries “incapable of governing themselves”.
Some will dismiss this as bluster: there is something Trumpian in Mr Prince’s knack for grabbing attention. But it would be a mistake not to take some of what he says seriously. The world according to Mr Prince is one in which private firms with private firepower are the solution to many of its most intractable problems. The choice in many places, he says, is between private companies bringing order, or “total anarchy, meltdown”. Whether or not his prognosis is correct, expect many more governments in the future to sign up to it. ■