A plane like this, but retrofitted to launch missiles. Photo by Jon Schladen.

This afternoon I read The Intercept’s blockbuster report on “Erik Prince’s Treacherous Drive to Build a Private Air Force”, which is about military outsourcing. It’s a very long piece, so stuffed with facts that the excitement is sucked out of a pretty provocative story. Dryness aside, Jeremy Scahill and Matthew Cole’s reporting is excellent, so I look forward to watching the eventual movie about this debacle. Hopefully a Hollywood budget will revivify the somewhat insane plot. War Is Boring provides a useful summary:

“The story reads like a spy novel. It describes how Prince allegedly hid behind a network of shell companies, concealing the real nature of the airplane modifications from the board of the very company that paid for them, Frontier Services Group, of which Prince is the founder and chairman. […] But even more baffling than Prince’s criminality is his obsession with the concept of a mercenary air force — and its utility and profitability in counterinsurgency operations, especially in African countries.”

I’m going to climb onto one of my usual hobbyhorses and point out that Erik Prince’s fantasy is essentially libertarian. He and his partners expended a lot of effort to dodge Austria’s arms export regulations as well as similar laws in the United States. Weirdly, national governments don’t want you to weaponize crop dusters and drop-ship them to whatever African civil war is handy! A telling excerpt from The Intercept’s article:

“In early 2014, Prince and Citic Group, China’s largest state-owned investment firm, founded Frontier Services Group, a publicly traded logistics and aviation company based in Hong Kong. […] Over the past two years, Prince has given interviews and speeches describing his vision of FSG. ‘This is not a patriotic endeavor of ours,’ Prince said of his new company. ‘We’re here to build a great business and make some money doing it.’ China, he said, ‘has the appetite to take frontier risk, that expeditionary risk of going to those less-certain, less-normal markets and figuring out how to make it happen.’ But while he burnished his new image as chairman of a public company, he was secretly overseeing the clandestine attack aircraft program.” (Bold added.)

The amount of money, time, and falsehoods that Prince devoted to this endeavor is astounding. It also surprises me that someone so corrupt and willing to break the rules — and with so many resources at his disposal — could be so incompetent. He didn’t ever manage to sell the planes! If you want a shorter write-up of this debacle, War Is Boring published it.