Trump Aides Recruited Businessmen to Devise Options for Afghanistan
“The conflict of interest in this is transparent,” said Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who wrote a book about the growth
of private armies, “The Modern Mercenary.” “Most of these contractors are not even American, so there is also a lot of moral hazard.”
Last month, Mr. Trump gave the Pentagon authority to send more American troops to Afghanistan — a number
believed to be about 4,000 — as a stopgap measure to stabilize the security situation there.
Erik D. Prince, a founder of the private security firm Blackwater Worldwide,
and Stephen A. Feinberg, a billionaire financier who owns the giant military contractor DynCorp International, have developed proposals to rely on contractors instead of American troops in Afghanistan at the behest of Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s chief strategist, and Jared Kushner, his senior adviser and son-in-law, according to people briefed on the conversations.
Prince presented, a former American official said, hew closely to the views outlined in his Journal column — in essence,
that the private sector can operate “cheaper and better than the military” in Afghanistan.
By MARK LANDLER, ERIC SCHMITT and MICHAEL R. GORDONJULY 10, 2017
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s advisers recruited two businessmen who profited from military contracting to devise alternatives to the Pentagon’s plan to send
thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan, reflecting the Trump administration’s struggle to define its strategy for dealing with a war now 16 years old.
