In June of 2007, a federal judge put a halt to an enormous $475 million contract for private security contractors (i.e. mercenaries) in Iraq. It seemed like the end of Erik Prince, Blackwater's CEO. Then along came MAGA and Afghanistan.
The true brilliance of the Trump Administration is on display with what can only be described as Blackwater 2.0.

The United States should hire a mercenary army to “fix” Afghanistan, a country where we’ve been at war since 2001, spending billions along the way. The big idea here is that they could extricate U.S. soldiers from this quagmire, and somehow solve it.
Not surprisingly, the private-military industry is behind this proposal. Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private military company Blackwater Worldwide, and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, each see a role for themselves in this future. Their proposal was offered at the request of Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.

I know what you are thinking, "That's the greatest idea I've ever heard!"
This plan never got implemented, but then Prince got more creative.

An explosive New York Times report revealed Saturday that notorious war profiteer Erik Prince recruited former American and British spies to work with the right-wing group Project Veritas to infiltrate at least one Democratic congressional campaign and organizations "considered hostile" to President Donald Trump's agenda.

Happy days are here again. Blackwater has returned to Iraq.

Blackwater founder Erik Prince's new company is reportedly operating in Iraq, a country from which his former company was banned for killing civilians.

A subsidiary of Frontier Services Group (FSG), a security and logistics company Prince founded in Hong Kong, has set up shop in Basra, Iraq, BuzzFeed News reported Saturday, citing official documents.
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With support from CITIC, a Chinese state-owned investment group, Prince founded FSG. And, like Blackwater, Prince's new company is no stranger to controversy.

Then along comes the 2024 election, and Erik Prince's time truly arrived...again.

In late January, Erik Prince, a long-time ally of President Donald Trump and a notorious private security contractor, gathered a meeting of executives in Washington, DC, to discuss ways their own private security firms might help the new administration deport millions of undocumented migrants.

One proposal in particular caught Prince’s attention: the idea of sending migrants with criminal records for detention in another country as they awaited transit to their countries of origin.

In the months leading up to Trump’s victory in November, Prince had struck up a working relationship with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, which not everyone at the meeting knew. Trump officials had also been having separate conversations with Bukele about accepting undocumented migrants from the US.

Prince eventually excused himself from the group, telling those gathered that he planned to pitch the detention idea directly to Bukele.
The next week, Bukele stood beside Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the presidential residence in San Salvador for a major announcement: