On a crisp
Saturday in November 2014, a black Mercedes SUV pulled onto the
tarmac of an Austrian specialty aviation company 30 miles south of
Vienna. Employees of the firm, Airborne Technologies, which
specialized in designing and equipping small aircraft with wireless
surveillance platforms, had been ordered to work that weekend because
one of the company’s investors was scheduled to inspect their
latest project.
For four
months, Airborne’s team had worked nearly nonstop to modify an
American-made Thrush 510G crop duster to the exact specifications of
an unnamed client. Everything about the project was cloaked in
secrecy. The company’s executives would refer to the client only as
“Echo Papa,” and instructed employees to use code words to
discuss certain modifications made to the plane. Now the employees
would learn that Echo Papa also owned more than a quarter of their
company.
[...]
One of the
mechanics soon recognized Echo Papa from news photos — he was Erik
Prince, founder of the private security firm Blackwater. Several of
the Airborne staff whispered among themselves, astonished that they
had been working for America’s best-known mercenary. The secrecy
and strange modification requests of the past four months began to
make sense. In addition to surveillance and laser-targeting
equipment, Airborne had outfitted the plane with bulletproof cockpit
windows, an armored engine block, anti-explosive mesh for the fuel
tank, and specialized wiring that could control rockets and bombs.
The company also installed pods for mounting two high-powered 23 mm
machine guns. By this point, the engineers and mechanics were
concerned that they had broken several Austrian laws but were advised
that everything would be fine as long as they all kept the secret.
[...]
In Prince’s
view, these single-engine fixed-wing planes, retrofitted for war
zones, would revolutionize the way small wars were fought. They would
also turn a substantial profit. The Thrush in Airborne’s hangar,
one of two crop dusters he intended to weaponize, was Prince’s
initial step in achieving what one colleague called his “obsession”
with building his own private air force.
Full
report:
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/11/blackwater-founder-erik-prince-drive-to-build-private-air-force/
We see a
rise of private armies that act in various battlefields, like in
Ukraine, exactly because in the absence of the nation-states and
the national armies, someone has to protect the natural resources
and the new means of production for the dominant elite. But
when the arms industry will fully automate the new weapons,
private armies will only serve as assistance to fully automated
war machines. We already see the test fields of the weapons of
future˙
the drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
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