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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 YOUR THREAT MODEL JUST SHIFTED
- Carolyn Meinel on THE ALLIED FLOOR
- Carolyn Meinel on THE LONG SHADOW OF THE SWORD-FOR-HIRE
- David Isenberg on THE DORSAI CLAUSE
- Carolyn Meinel on THE DORSAI CLAUSE
Articles: David Isenberg
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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
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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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
THE DORSAI CLAUSE
It wasn’t nothing, Reyes had to admit. Half the industry ran on verbal handshakes and post-hoc invoices, and a clause that actually bound the client as much as the contractor was, on paper, worth the laminate. The trouble, as always, was the four sentences that weren’t in Section 14(c). No mention of what happened when a client under sanction quietly transferred the paper to a shell that wasn’t. No mention of who audited the audit. No mention, notably, of what a Dorsai soldier in Dickson’s own books would have called the whole point — that the code only meant something because the ones enforcing it would rather lose the contract than the reputation. Continue reading
Posted in Control, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged Control, David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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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
Posted in Academic, David Isenberg, Mercenaries
Tagged Academic, David Isenberg, Mercenaries
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THE LONG SHADOW OF THE SWORD-FOR-HIRE
“Ramesses II fought the Battle of Kadesh with Sherden mercenaries in his personal guard — men recruited, by most reconstructions, from what’s now the eastern Mediterranean, fighting for Egypt’s pharaoh for pay, not for pharaoh’s gods. The distinction matters. A conscript fights because the state compels him. A mercenary fights because the state — or a fragment of one — writes a check.” Continue reading
Posted in David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
Tagged David Isenberg, Fiction, Outsourcing/Privatization
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