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- IISS Analysis
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November 1, 2026 - ERIK PRINCE AND PROJECT OPUS
Project Opus was a privately organized military undertaking intended to support Gen. Khalifa Haftar’s 2019 campaign against Libya’s internationally recognized government. Its planned capabilities included armed helicopters, aerial surveillance, maritime interdiction, and a component to kidnap or kill selected individuals. In 2021, a United Nations Panel of Experts connected the project to three UAE-based companies, a multinational team with a large South African contingent, and the rapid transfer of three fixed-wing aircraft that the Panel said were controlled by Erik Prince. Prince, through counsel, denied any involvement and asked the Panel to retract its report. This paper examines the evidence connecting him to the operation, the corporate and personnel networks that carried it out, the June 2019 collapse and evacuation to Malta, and the legal proceedings that followed. It argues that the strongest publicly reported case against Prince concerns procurement and facilitation, while allegations of direct command, personal financing, and official American authorization require separate proof. The case illustrates how difficult it is to establish accountability when military activity is distributed across companies, subcontractors, and jurisdictions. Continue reading
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October 31, 2026 - Auditing the Same War Twice: SIGIR and SIGAR Compared
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) was established in 2008 along the lines of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR), the office Congress had created four years earlier. The resemblance is visible in the statutes, the reporting toolkit and the lessons-learned programs. It is also visible in the conclusions. SIGIR’s final report held that its entire oversight experience pointed to a single lesson: the need to reform the U.S. approach to stabilization and reconstruction operations. SIGAR’s 2021 retrospective, written after twenty years and $145 billion, traced the shortcomings of the Afghan effort to failures of strategy, timelines, sustainability, staffing, security, local context and the measurement of impact, themes that echo what SIGIR documented in Iraq. In effect, two offices audited the same failure twice. The sections below set out where the two offices were alike and where they were not. Continue reading
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September 11, 2026 - Doug Brooks
Doug Brooks Warning: This not light reading. This is for subscribers only. The following is composed of three separate AI-generated articles. The links to all three iare at the bottom of… You must be logged in to view this content. … Continue reading
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September 3, 2026 - Erik Prince: Corporate Network, Business Failures & Scandals
Running beneath all three eras is a single structural pattern this dossier treats as its central finding: Prince's economic control has become progressively harder to see on paper even as his operational role has remained continuous. Blackwater was undisguised — Prince's name was on the door. FSG substituted a public-company shareholding and subsidiary structure. Project Opus substituted associates, management agreements and, critically, a security pledge: the UN Panel found that 100% of Malta company PBM Limited's shares had been pledged by its nominal owner to Phalanx Holding Company LLC, a Delaware entity the Panel identifies as Prince-controlled — and that Prince personally signed the document terminating that pledge in July 2020. The Panel concluded this arrangement made Prince, "in effect," PBM's beneficial owner despite holding no shares in it directly. That is the strongest documented evidence that formal share registries have understated Prince's economic interest in his network at various points, Continue reading
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August 31, 2026 - 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
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August 24, 2026 - PRIVATE EQUITY & THE PMSC INDUSTRY: From Guards-for-Hire to Integrated Military Capability Platforms, 1990–2050
The private military and security contracting (PMSC) industry is no longer well described as a market for armed guards. Its contemporary form spans armed and expeditionary security, military logistics, aviation support, intelligence, cyber operations, training, engineering, and government mission support. Private equity (PE) has been one of the principal forces behind that broadening. Through leveraged buyouts, platform acquisitions, roll-ups, and recapitalizations, PE sponsors have converted what were once relatively narrow contractors into large, diversified government-services enterprises capable of selling states integrated packages of military and security capability. This report ranks the private-equity firms most consequential to that transformation; examines six portfolio companies — Amentum, Peraton, ManTech, GardaWorld, Allied Universal/G4S, and Constellis — as six distinct models of PE-driven institutionalization; compiles a 50-entry database of PE–PMSC transactions; and projects the industry's trajectory to 2050. Continue reading
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August 20, 2026 - THE DORSAI CONTRACT
Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai novels (beginning with Dorsai! in 1959 and continuing across the Childe Cycle) construct a planetary society whose sole exportable good is elite soldiering, organized around a rigorously contractual ethic of service. This dossier argues that the Dorsai model is not merely a science-fiction invention but a distilled, idealized synthesis of institutional patterns that recur across the historical and contemporary mercenary trade: the economic logic by which resource-poor populations convert martial skill into an export commodity; the use of binding, honor-policed contracts as the organizing principle of loyalty; and the cultivation of elite-selection pipelines as a market signal of quality. Continue reading
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August 14, 2026 - HuaXin ZhongAn
HXZA occupies an unusual position among Chinese private security companies (PSCs): it holds a rare state authorization for armed escort of merchant vessels, is the only Chinese security firm holding ISO/PAS 28000/28007 private maritime-security certification, and was the first Chinese and first East Asian PSC to obtain full certification from the International Code of Conduct Association (ICoCA), the Geneva-based body that sets voluntary human-rights and use-of-force standards for the private security industry. Continue reading
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June 24, 2026 - Estimating the total annual value of the private security contracting industry.
Estimated total annual value of the private security contracting industry. Bottom Line: The Defensible Number: The true global conflict-zone private security market sits between $30 Billion and $75 Billion annually.… You must be logged in to view this content. … Continue reading
