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Isenberg Video
- Here and There with Dave Marash, February 3, 2015
- Sep. 2, 2014 Al Jazeera English segment on Blackwater trial - Comment by David Isenberg
- Jan 2, 2010, Al Jazzeera (English), re Judge Urbina’s dismissal of charges against Blackwater contractors
- June 28, 2010. heard in “Controversy over CIA Blackwater contract,” The World
- August 17, 2010, on C-Span III, speaks on private military contracting
- Examining the role of the military contractor
- Has the Privatization of National Security Gone Too Far? The Future of Military Contracting, November 14, 2008, 9:30-11:00am, New America Foundation
- David Isenberg on PressTV - US contractor with poor ratings hired again
- Outsourcing War and Peace – Video
Recent Comments
- Carolyn Meinel on THE LICENSE TO FIGHT
- Carolyn Meinel on THE CONTRACT CENTURY
- Carolyn Meinel on THE CONTRACT CENTURY
- Carolyn Meinel on THE CORDILLERA PROTOCOL
- David Isenberg on Former student blasts military school for private defense contractors
Tag Archives: David Isenberg
Professor Christopher Kinsey
Professor Christopher (Chris) Kinsey is one of the United Kingdom’s most established academic authorities on the privatisation of military force. He holds the title of Professor of International Security in the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London (KCL), based at the Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC), Defence Academy of the United Kingdom, Shrivenham, where he teaches military officers from partner nations and supervises doctoral research on the market for force. Continue reading
Priced but not Costed: The Empirical Status of Cost-Effectiveness Claims for Private Military and Security Companies
This paper asks what the evidence actually establishes. It proceeds from a deliberately narrow question—does contracting a given security function cost the buying government less than performing it in-house?—and then shows why that question cannot be answered without first specifying what “cost” means, against what counterfactual, over what horizon, and for which function. The central finding is not that PMSCs are expensive. It is that the proposition “PMSCs are cost-effective” has, for thirty years, functioned less as an empirical claim than as a premise: asserted by advocates, assumed by policymakers, and left untested by the institutions best placed to test it. Continue reading
NO RAIN IN ST. JAMES’S
Sierra Leone is the same shell game with real chips,” Kinsey said. “Executive Outcomes, two hundred and twenty men, drives the RUF ‘to the point of defeat’ for under forty million dollars. His own footnote three concedes most sources say thirty-five or thirty-six, plus mining concessions that don’t fit cleanly under any dollar sign. Then he sets that against UNAMSIL — eleven thousand troops, ninety million, a peacekeeping and stabilization mandate with a different scale and a different decade entirely. He’s pricing the cost of winning a fight against the cost of keeping the house from burning down afterward. And the war didn’t end when EO left in 1997. It ran on through coups and Sandline and British intervention until a formal close in 2002 — which his own 2000 footnote all but concedes.” Continue reading
Posted in David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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THE UNLISTED PARTNER
Colton: Better than that. I watched the filing cabinet get formally decommissioned, the ashes swept up, and a press release issued thanking everyone for their patience. August eleventh. Treasury killed it clean — beneficial ownership reporting, gone, for every domestic company and every U.S. person behind them. Then FinCEN said the quiet part out loud: they’re deleting what’s already on file. Thirty-three million entities, and the record of who actually owns them just — Continue reading
THE LONG SHADOW OF THE SWORD-FOR-HIRE: Part Two: The Corporate Sovereign
“Who actually oversees a private military and security company once the ink on the contract is dry? The instinctive answer is the client government. Look at the chart. By the time the money and the mandate trickle down to the man kicking in a door in Mogadishu or guarding a pipeline in the Niger Delta, the principal-agent chain has stretched so long it snaps.” Continue reading
Posted in Control, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged Control, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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VECTUS AIR DEFENSE SYSTEMS
Vectus Air Defense Systems (“Vectus”) is a newly launched, privately held venture led by Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA, offering what it markets as “Air Defense as a Service” (ADaaS) — a subscription-style managed-service model applied to layered counter-air and counter-UAS protection for critical infrastructure and government sites. The company was publicly unveiled on Friday, August 21, 2026, through a coordinated announcement with Swarmer, Inc. (Nasdaq: SWMR), an Austin, Texas-headquartered drone-autonomy software company in which Prince serves as Non-Executive Chairman. Swarmer took a disclosed 20% founding equity interest in Vectus as a strategic technology partner; Prince is reported, though not confirmed in a primary Vectus filing, to hold the remaining 80%. Continue reading
YOUR THREAT MODEL JUST SHIFTED
For decades, the defense procurement process was bogged down by antiquated concepts: national sovereignty, Congressional oversight, multi-year appropriations, and owning your hardware outright. If a hostile neighbor launched a salvo of loitering munitions at your national oil refinery or sovereign palace, you had to call the U.S. State Department, fill out Foreign Military Sales (FMS) paperwork, and wait four years for a battery that arrived with a 1,200-page manual and no spare parts.
No longer. Borrowing a page from Silicon Valley, Blackwater founder Erik Prince — alongside Ukrainian software partner Swarmer — has unveiled Vectus Air Defense Systems: the world’s first enterprise Air-Defense-as-a-Service (ADaaS) platform. Continue reading
Posted in Companies, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged Companies, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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THE ALLIED FLOOR
This document is a work of AI invented satire produced by the Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire. Warburg Pincus, Allied Universal, and G4S are real entities referenced solely to ground a fictional premise; every executive, analyst, financial figure, contract, lawsuit, and quotation appearing below is invented and does not describe any actual statement, transaction, or event. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to actual corporate communications, is coincidental and unintended. No portion of this document should be relied upon for investment, legal, journalistic, or operational purposes. Continue reading
Posted in Companies, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged Companies, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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AIR DEFENSE PREMIUM+
Now, for one low monthly payment, your critical infrastructure can enjoy the peace of mind formerly reserved for sovereign states, integrated air-defense commands, and people who own several aircraft carriers. Continue reading
THE MOUTAI ANALYSIS
Rain again. Beijing does its best noir impression maybe four nights a year, and the private room at the Nine Dragons had drawn one of them — low light, lacquered table, a lazy Susan turning like it had somewhere better to be. Six chairs, six scholars, one bottle of Moutai reserved for a toast nobody had earned yet.Song Bowen poured first, because Song Bowen always poured first. It was less hospitality than choreography — he liked to have something in his hand before he started dismantling an argument, the way other men like a cigarette.
loud, in the same room, what the Western literature gets wrong about us. And to enjoy ourselves while we do it.” Continue reading
Posted in Australia, China, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged Academic, China, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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