Eric Prince, the current president of Blackwater, was born on June 6, 1969, in a businessman family in Holland, Michigan, USA. Hard work, family and religion are core tenets of the Prince family. Prince's old friends described him as a responsible and enterprising man who acted unexpectedly and had a strong sense of adventure. During Bush Sr.'s presidential campaign, the 19-year-old Prince donated $15,000 in campaign funds to the Republican Party, thus forming an indissoluble bond with the Bush family.
After graduating from high school, Prince attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, but transferred to Hillsdale College midway because the academy was "not challenging and conservative enough". While in college, Prince read a large number of books on market economics, but Prince's interests were not limited to economics. Prince benefited a lot from several internship experiences during college. He once worked as a defense analyst for Republican Congressman Rohra Buck, and also worked as an intern in the White House for half a year during Bush Sr.'s term as president.
After graduating from college, Prince joined the famous special forces "Seals" of the U.S. Navy in 1992. During his service, he was stationed in Haiti, the Middle East, the former Yugoslavia and other regions to perform tasks. After his father Edgar Prince passed away in 1996, Prince retired from the Special Forces and returned home, inheriting an auto parts manufacturing factory from his father.
In the 1990s, although the scale of U.S. overseas troops stationed continued to decrease, the number of U.S. military overseas operations increased day by day, among which the relatively large-scale ones included the Gulf War, peacekeeping operations in Somalia, and the Kosovo War. In order to make up for the shortage of troops, the US military began to hire more private security companies to perform combat missions. This change made Prince smell business opportunities and came up with the idea of ??starting a private security company.
In 1997, Prince sold his auto parts factory and used the funds to purchase nearly 6,000 acres of land in the Great Dismore Swamp in North Carolina, founded Blackwater Security Company and established State-of-the-art shooting and security training camps were set up, and the name "Blackwater" comes from this coal-black swamp. Prince moved all the training facilities he was familiar with during his military service here, including shooting ranges and drill grounds, as well as buildings that simulated holding hostages and bunkers occupied by militants.
Blackwater was founded as a small company with 6 employees, but now it has become one of the largest private security companies in the United States. It has more than 1,000 employees working in Iraq alone. Blackwater's rapid rise is mainly due to Thanks to the war factor