AFAIK Blackwater was mostly for guard duty, but I'm sure in practice it wasn't just for that. There's also a lot of smaller orgs out there that do "guard duty", not just american (for example britain is also active).
Also there was a point when Blackwater boasted that they could deploy a light brigade (~3k troops) anywhere in the world, people in the Pentagon figured it out and very quickly killed that org. Compare with Prigozhin and his adventures, just for reference he had more than 10k soldiers under his command, on heavy equipment (arty, tanks, ifvs), permission to illegally recruit from prisons, he even had air defence like Pantsirs, the motherfuckers even tried to get nuclear backpacks (man-portable nuclear bombs) from a storage site near Voronezh.
I think those entities are being tolerated and even welcome, as long as they don't exceed some potentially threatening size.
Yup, mostly guarding important people and locations. Though they had itchy trigger fingers and shot up a lot of civilians and cars, and a massacre or two. Eric Prince also wanted them to be a mercenary army for hire. He fooled some Swiss engineers to adapt a small airplane so it could be armed with missiles and tried to sell that as a service (believe it was confiscated on the way somewhere in Africa to be used against insurgents or something).
> Also there was a point when Blackwater boasted that they could deploy a brigade (~3k troops) anywhere in the world, people in the Pentagon figured it out and very quickly killed that org.
That... didn't happen.
Blackwater went through several reorgs, rebranding, and acquisitions, initially starting with at least superficially deemphasizing security in favor of other functions because of “business risk” just after the Nisour Massacre, but (as Constellis Holdings) is still doing the things it did before, notably as part of the Saudi intervention in Yemen.
But largely you're right, the story is more complicated. I originally heard it in a non-English interview with some Colonel (OF-5, the rank just below General of brigade).
Personally I am very much against the idea of a democratic nation allowing a private company have a combat strength of an infantry brigade. Definitely too much. (And of course such structures, if they exist, must be penetrated by intelligence, though this is not something you can legislate or even admit).
Right, I wasn't disagreeing that they said that they can supply forces (and that article is a year before Blackwater forces were involved in the Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq), just that the Pentagon didn't shut them down in response to them saying it, though the relationship wuth the government was complicated by what troops they supplied did not long after that.
Also there was a point when Blackwater boasted that they could deploy a light brigade (~3k troops) anywhere in the world, people in the Pentagon figured it out and very quickly killed that org. Compare with Prigozhin and his adventures, just for reference he had more than 10k soldiers under his command, on heavy equipment (arty, tanks, ifvs), permission to illegally recruit from prisons, he even had air defence like Pantsirs, the motherfuckers even tried to get nuclear backpacks (man-portable nuclear bombs) from a storage site near Voronezh.
I think those entities are being tolerated and even welcome, as long as they don't exceed some potentially threatening size.