Blackwater's Anne Tyrrell (left), Mary Katherine Ham (center), and Marc Danziger chill during the flight down to North Carolina.
Blackwater President Gary Jackson points out the damage done in an explosive test on one of Blackwater's Grizzly APC's. The driveshaft was destroyed, but the cabin remained intact --- soldiers inside would survive to fight.
Blackwater Grizzly APC's.
Early models of the Grizzly. If at first you don't succeed...
Mary Katherine Ham, Marc Danziger, Gary Jackson, and Matt Burden check out an early Grizzly.
The largest power turbine connected to North Carolina's power grid is Blackwater's...
...and they are also converting their vehicles to use vegetable diesel (the fence is to keep the bears away!). Greenpeace, Sierra Club --- call me, I'll give you Blackwater's address for your Christmas lists.
Left to Right: Christian Lowe, Bryan O'Leary, Matt Burden, Marc Danziger, Uncle Jimbo. Reservoir Dogs, anyone? I actually thought Buckaroo Banzai myself, but that's just me.
Your humble blogger. For most people, holding a rifle automatically makes them look badass. I am not most people.
Blackwater's driving instructors don't teach parallel parking. But what they do teach...
So, what did you do with your day last Friday? Me, I went to the training facility of one of the most famous --- and infamous --- military contractors in the world.
A small group of bloggers, myself included, were invited to Blackwater Worldwide's headquarters down in North Carolina to get a "VIP Tour" of the facility. How could I resist? Even being in California; not exactly a short hop to North Carolina. And so across the country I went.
Right up front I should clarify my background in military affairs --- or rather, lack thereof. It's simple, really: I don't have any. Yes, I do try to pay attention, and have had a hand in efforts like The Victory Caucus, but as for any real military experience or expertise: nada. So if you're looking for a military vet's perspective of our visit, go read Matt or Jimbo's accounts. If you want the perspective of a blogger who knows his firearms, Marc Danziger (Armed Liberal) is your guy. Prefer an real live professional journalist? Christian Lowe. Professional blogger? Mary Katherine Ham.
But if you want the view of a random new media guy who used to blog a lot but now not so much --- well, I'm your man! For the large swath of the Internet out there with no particular martial knowledge, consider me in my blissful ignorance your perfect stand-in.
Our day began at the Dulles private air terminal, where Bryan O'Leary of Capitolink (Blackwater's lobbyist) and Anne Tyrrell (Blackwater's PR spokeswoman) met the aforementioned crew and we hopped on a nicely appointed private plane for the trip down to Blackwater's North Carolina campus. A brief hour flight later, we arrived at Blackwater's HQ and were whisked up to the conference room to be greeted by Gary Jackson, Blackwater's President.
Jackson proved to be everything you'd expect a former Navy SEAL who became President of a company like Blackwater to be --- plus at least one thing you wouldn't. Full of energy and more specifically enthusiasm for Blackwater's work, he (and, quietly, we) expressed relief upon finding that the conference room's projector was kaput and therefore he wouldn't be able to show us a Powerpoint on Blackwater's story. Instead he launched into a free-ranging history of the company, starting with the lean early days in the late 90's. Jackson himself approached the company as, of all things, a web designer (that would be the unexpected part). He brought founder Erik Prince an early web site for Blackwater which he himself now describes as "terrible", and was quickly brought into the fold. As he described his joy at tinkering with computers --- noting with pride the $600 he spent for one of the first 28.8 modems --- I had to adjust my impression of the Navy SEAL who looked like he could snap me in half. Dude was a web geek! Given my own experiences in the good old analog days of pre-Web history, I couldn't help but see a kindred soul in the fellow.
But back to Blackwater itself. Erik Prince had a vision to provide training support to military and law enforcement personnel, and identified the campus's location as an ideal spot within range of numerous military bases to locate the new company. But it wasn't until the USS Cole bombing in 2000 that the military caught up with Blackwater's idea.
The Navy, Jackson explained, realized after the Cole that its sailors had no real firearms training to protect themselves from similar attacks in the future. A crash course was needed, and the Navy itself simply had no way to deliver the necessary skills to its sailors in a reasonable timeframe --- and so looked for an outside contractor to fill the job. Blackwater got the contract, and at that point, the company's trajectory was set. Last minute, fast-execution projects the military or other government entities can't address themselves became the company's bread and butter in a pattern that continues through to today.
This brought us right to one of the key debates that surrounds Blackwater: why is it needed at all? Why should taxpayers pay for a company like Blackwater to train sailors in how to fire their weapons (they are still running that same original contract today)? Why can't the Navy do that itself?
The "why" is a good question --- and one neither Jackson nor anyone else seems to have a definitive answer to. But listening to Jackson and the group discuss the issue, one thing began to crystalize it for me, even if it didn't fully explain the military's dependence on the company. Blackwater has molded itself as everything the military isn't --- and perhaps can't be: organizationally agile, quick to try new approaches, able to go from thought to vision to design to product in the time it would take the service branches (or traditional military contractors) to form a study group to develop the commmittee that would make a recommendation on whether or not to study the feasibility of that original thought.
After our conference room session, we jumped into two vans and proceeded out on a tour around the campus. (For the virtual equivalent, try this video on Blackwater's site.) To my surprise, rather than vanishing after the conference room session, Jackson jumped in as our personal tour guide. He drove the vehicle I was in, eagerly pointing out the details of each particular facility as we drove by. Shooting ranges; tactical training areas; a lake with two ship-like platforms; a lonely train on a hundred yards of track that goes nowhere. The whole place was, as had been said earlier back in the conference room, "Disneyland for operators". ("Operators", I noted without having to be lame enough to ask, is the cool military kids lingo for special forces types.)
And --- a windmill. Blackwater, Jackson explained with obvious glee, was going green. The largest wind turbine connected to the North Carolina power grid is in Blackwater's backyard. Why? Because Blackwater decided that it needed to understand wind power to lower costs in the field. Diesel fuel to run generators in Iraq or remote parts of Africa can be upwards of $80 a gallon. Blackwater intends to use the experience it gains with its on-site turbine to develop small, portable turbines that can generate power in the field for its worldwide operations. "So you just decided you needed to figure out wind power?" I observed to Jackson, increasingly getting the impression that he and his company didn't seem to have "we don't know how to do that" --- nevermind "we don't do that" --- in their vocabulary.
That impression only got stronger throughout the day. Turns out Blackwater also is building airships. "Whatships?" we all wondered, until someone had the presence of mind to realize: "Blimps?"
"We don't use blimp," Jackson noted, "because people laugh."
But they're serious. The idea is to create "a poor man's UAV" which is suited for reconnaissance and arial observation. The production ships will be able to remain aloft unmanned for 48+ hours. And as they are designed to operate above 5,000 feet, they're pretty difficult for Joe Insurgent with his AK to shoot down. Sadly, we didn't get to actually see the prototype airship, but Jackson was clearly excited to note that it had undergone its first fully automated flight just the day before.
After our spin around the campus, we got to the real fun: range time! As luck would have it, I was actually the only person in our group who was a complete newbie to firearms. (For a second I thought I could commiserate with Mary Katherine, when she asked if this was new to me and seemed to say it was to her --- and then clarified that sure she had done shotgun and pistols before...) Blackwater ensured I got a good start: after being presented with the choice of having the group shoot pistols or AR-15 carbines, the consensus was the carbines. So none of that pissant pistol nonsense for me --- I went straight to the good stuff!
Blackwater's instructors were just as professional and thorough as I expected, walking us through the basics of loading and unloading the weapons before lining us up for actual shooting. To my surprise, I wasn't a bad shot: even at the 50 yard distance we eventually worked up to, I was able to to hit the target a surprising amount of the time. Being a mechanical idiot, I had far more trouble remembering exactly how to load and unload the weapon rather than the actual shooting part.
Once we finished, I realized I hadn't gotten any photos, and snapped a few shots of the boys walking to the side of me and then asked one to take a quick shot of me. As a newcomer to weapons, I had been extremely conscious of not screwing around and staying focused on the training, but at this point we had unloaded our rifles and so it seemed like a good time to get a picture. So I posed with my rifle quickly --- only to hear our instructor yelling over at me. Whuh-oh, I thought, guess that was still too much screwing around as he strode over.
"You can't take a photo of you holding an unloaded weapon," he declared, "you look like a loser." He proceeded to have me re-load my rifle and suggested the 'action position' pose --- resulting in the deeply intimidating pic you see of me to the right. Stallone, Schwarzenegger --- meh. Pansies.
The last activity of the day was a trip around Blackwater's driving training course. The purpose of their driving instruction is simple: teach how to maintain control and stay safe in high-stress, dangerous situations. They do instruction in everything from Crown Victorias to uparmoured Humvees. For us, it was the Crown Vics: we hopped into three cars driven by Blackwater instructors and took off down the curved track (which is really a 'track' only in name: if you stumbled across it, you'd see it as a badly paved road curving around this way and that in a few interlocking loops. Since realistic road conditions are the idea, it's not what you picture when you think of a pristine "race track").
The drive was a blast, and consisted simply of the three drivers accelerating to roughly twice the speed I would have considered safe for such a curving road and zipping around each turn with tires squealing. Great fun, and even just being in the passenger seat as the car was skidding around --- without the driver losing control --- made me realize how this kind of instruction could quickly remove the panic instinct that most drivers experience once things start to go pear-shaped on the road.
It was a long, fast, fun day. One site visit hardly makes me an expert on Blackwater, and I don't presume to know all the good or the bad about the company. There are legitimate debates about what role private contractors like Blackwater should have in our national defense strategy, and I'm frankly not even trying to address those controversies here.
I went in expecting it to be a "cool" place, in the testosterone-driven, guys-with-guns, military macho sense of "cool". And it was. But what I didn't expect, and found to be equally true, was that Blackwater itself is just a cool company. As an entrepreneur myself, I couldn't help but notice the sheer devilish inventiveness they brought to solving problems. The same kind of "let's just figure it out" attitude I expect from Silicon Valley startups was being applied there to solve military problems. IEDs? Build a better armored vehicle. Supply problems in remote areas? Harness wind power, and oh yeah, do precision parachute drops of supplies. UAV's too expensive? Try a cheap blimp.
At one point in our drive around campus, I summed up this attitude to Jackson. "It seems like somebody forgot to give you the rule book for how things are Not Supposed To Be Done," I observed. Jackson seemed perfectly happy with that description --- and the company he, Erik Prince, and their team has built certainly shows it.
Comments (3)
Buckaroo Banzai written by SkyePuppy,
August 25, 2008
Buckaroo Banzai is one of my guilty pleasures. You could be Jeff "New Jersey" Goldblum in that final picture, if you'd put on some furry chaps...
What a great visit. I like the greening of Blackwater: It has to throw the military-hating envronmentalists into a tizzy.
A great report. Everytime I hear someone call Blackwater people mercenaries, I am compelled to launch to their defense. I tell people that if the the military cannot think out of their box as fast as BW, and since the service is not available from the Army,et al that indeed they fulfill a need. Little did I myself know it was as broad as what you describe. Awesome!! Cause somebody's gotta do it!
How RUDE! written by Kevin Baker,
August 26, 2008
You guys were on site last Friday and nobody thought to get you together with the gunbloggers ALSO on site? What kind of planning is THAT?
What a great visit. I like the greening of Blackwater: It has to throw the military-hating envronmentalists into a tizzy.