Blackwater Retires Brand, Re-Names Its Units

Constant crushing negativism and new business directions have prompted the set of companies collectively known as Blackwater to retire the controversial brand that its critics hated and its supporters loved.

The paradigm-busting set of enterprises founded and built by Navy SEAL and entrepreneur Erik Prince is now a collection of disparate names.

"We've taken the company to a place where it is no longer accurately described as Blackwater," company spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell tells the Washington Post. "The idea is to define the company as what it is today and not what it used to be."

Blackwater Worldwide, best known for its diplomatic security services in Iraq and Afghanistan, and famous within the Pentagon and national security community for other defense and related services, has been re-named Xe.

Blackwater Target Systems is now GSD Manufacturing. Blackwater Airships will become Guardian Flight Systems. And so on.

The famous Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, which started it all to provide first-rate, efficient training for the US military and law enforcement, is now the US Training Center.

The company website, www.blackwaterusa.com, now leads to a scaled down version of its former self to feature the US Training Center.

Blackwater has undergone a gradual change in its brand. In 2007 it expanded its focus from Blackwater USA to Blackwater Worldwide, embracing a new, less edgy, New York-designed corporate logo. The rebranding was planned before the deadly Nisoor Square shootout in September of that year, but was implemented soon afterward. The new change seems to reflect the reality that the controversy has tarnished the companies' overall image and presented a misleading public image that Blackwater's main business line was intended to be diplomatic security. The company at its core is a training and logistics business, with security being a side line.

Blackwater Airships Fill ISR Need

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described the military's appetite for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) collection, including video from unmanned aerial vehicles, as “insatiable.”

But the Air Force Times reports that “the Army and Air Force can’t seem to keep up.... Gates described getting the military to provide more airborne ISR as 'pulling teeth,' even though the number of Predator orbits — or continuous 24-hour patrols — have doubled in theater since last year.”

And that's where Blackwater comes in. The company's new Polar 400 airships can fly twice as long as Air Force Predators and cost just a fifth as much. “In the past, airships have proven ineffective because they were susceptible to weather, especially high winds,” Air Force Times explains. “Blackwater designed a propulsion system so the pilot can control the airship on all three axes.”

True, the airships won't carry Hellfire missiles like some UAVs currently in use, but the airships are perfect for loitering over a dozen city blocks for up to 60 hours at a time, just the sort of coverage our men in uniform often need when they find themselves in difficult urban warfare.

Blackwater founder and CEO Erik Prince “also suggested his airships could replace Predators flying drug and alien interdiction missions over the US-Mexico border and the Caribbean. He proposed using one ship as a 'lily-pad' and launching three to four airships to form a chain.”


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In spite of the obvious advantages that Blackwater airships offer to the military - both in terms of filling the ISR gap and doing so at a lower cost - certain critics are not keen on the idea. Air Force Times quoted Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., as saying “Now we’re talking about a private, for-profit company having grandiose notions of replacing the Coast Guard and the Navy,” she said. “I think that’s very dangerous.”

Ms. Schakowsky, were you paying any attention at all? We're talking about ISR collection, not the complete functions of both the Navy and the Coast Guard.

Maybe Congresswoman Schakowsky is confusing ISR with the IRS, which busted her felon husband for bank fraud tax evasion.

Blackwater successfully test-flies airships

Touting a revolutionary design, Blackwater successfully tested its airship prototypes from a World War II-era Naval air station in North Carolina.

The test of a 170-foot non-rigid blimp, called Polar 400, excited the crew. "It's very responsive. It's the most maneuverable blimp I've ever flown," Blackwater test pilot Doug McFadden tells the Virginian-Pilot.

The Virginian-Pilot's website contains exclusive photos of the airship prototypes and tests.

Blackwater Airships, a unit of Blackwater Worldwide, designed the blimp to carry intelligence-gathering cameras, sensors and communications gear for counterterrorism, counternarcotics and border security operations. The blimp is to be unmanned and piloted by remote control from the ground.

Blackwater intends for its airships to be low-cost alternatives to other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The blimps can fly at 10,000 feet and require only a crew of three.

"With a few engineering innovations, Blackwater hopes to turn a time-tested platform - the Navy used blimps to watch for enemy submarines in World War II - into a modern tool for combatting terrorism and for other 21st-century needs," the Virginian-Pilot's Jon W. Glass reports.

"Hoping to wedge its way into a highly competitive market, the company is touting its airship as a lower-cost, longer-operating alternative to the fixed and rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles now widely used by the Air Force and other military services."

For Blackwater's news release of its airship tests, click here.