Blackwater

Blackwater was the private military contractor that, more than any other, came to define the outsourcing of warfare in the post-9/11 era. Founded in 1997 in Moyock, North Carolina by the former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince , it began as a training range and grew into a sprawling security business that guarded US diplomats and installations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Its reputation was shaped above all by the 2007 Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad, in which Blackwater guards killed Iraqi civilians — an episode that became shorthand for the legal and moral grey zone of armed contractors operating alongside national militaries. Amid the fallout the company was sold and renamed, becoming Xe Services and then Academi, and Prince moved on to other private-security and defence ventures.

Blackwater itself no longer operates under that name, but it remains a reference point for the privatisation of military force — a thread that re-emerged when Prince took the chairmanship of the Ukrainian drone-swarm company Swarmer in 2025, linking the new defence-technology wave back to an older and more contested model.