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Nov. 28, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:58
3513 An Honest Conversation About Blackwater | Erik Prince and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
So, we have on the show Eric Prince.
You've probably heard of him.
He is a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer who founded Blackwater in 1997.
And boy, the things that you don't know or understand about Blackwater, like myself, could probably fill a book.
And interestingly enough, he has filled a book.
He's the author of Civilian Warriors, the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror.
He served as the CEO of Blackwater until 2009 and its chairman until 2010.
He currently heads the private equity firm Frontier Resource Group and is chairman of the Hong Kong listed Frontier Services Group Limited.
And we'll put the links to all of his vital statistics on the link below in the description bar.
Thank you so much for taking the time today.
Blackwater, of course, has been called a wide variety of terms, a lot of it by Congress, by the State Department, and other people who may have a bit of a vested interest in misrepresenting what the organization was all about.
You hear, of course, mercenaries and reckless and so on.
I wonder if you can help introduce people to what Blackwater is, or at least was, while you were in charge of it, and what its mission was, and what it wasn't that people constantly misinterpret it to be.
Well, look, I started Blackwater when I got out of the SEAL teams.
SEAL teams have been using private facilities, private training facilities, really since the 1970s, and no one had done it on an industrial scale, and I was in an unusual position to do so, and so bought a bunch of land, built the training facilities, and then I didn't know anything about defense contracting.
I never endeavored to be a defense contractor.
You know, at that time, my My father died.
My wife was sick with cancer.
So I got out of the SEAL teams and built this place.
And then customers started coming.
SEAL teams, other special operations units.
And then the Navy came to us after the USS Cole was attacked.
That was probably our first big defense contract.
And after Columbine High School was attacked, we ended up building a big mock-up and trained tens of thousands of police officers to do that better.
And then 9-11 happens.
And so we...
We've just been providing training at that point, and then many of our customers asked us to come overseas and help them with more training, with security, with aviation operations, with construction in weird places.
And basically, Blackwater was run by former special operations guys with that kind of never-say-die attitude, and we said yes to our customers and then ran hard to make it work for them.
And it's not a private army.
It's got nothing to do with mercenary and it's not a private army.
What are the distinctions that can help people understand the differences?
Well, look, we hired U.S. military or law enforcement veterans that had already said yes to their country and served in some kind of active duty role.
They went overseas to do a job clearly defined by the U.S. government, paid for by the U.S. government.
In this case, it was training or aviation or a security role.
So, look, lots of ignorant people say lots of disparaging things.
That they don't understand.
It wasn't a private army, this idea that I could give these guys direction to go do nefarious things in weird places.
That's not what it was about.
It was very much another government services contractor that, yes, we did things in more dangerous places than most.
You know, three of our aircraft were shot down.
41 of our men were killed in action doing this very dangerous job for the U.S., But a government services contractor, nonetheless.
Well, and you actually were under more restrictive rules of engagement, as far as I understand it, than the general military.
That's correct.
So we weren't there to win firefights.
When we're doing a security job, we're just there to provide a protective bubble around whoever it is we're protecting and move them away from the scene of danger as quickly as possible.
And we ended up doing...
Pretty much all the security for the diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan did that job more than 100,000 times, 100,000 missions, and no one under our care was ever killed or injured.
And a lot of people, they even get the math wrong, you know, in less than one half of 1% of all those missions were the guys involved in any kind of firefight.
So it's taking the most terror-worthy targets in an active war zone and Out every day through the same areas means it's very easy for the enemy to shoot first and to hit you with car bombs or explosive form penetrators or suicide vests or any number of kinetic attacks.
And our guys did a heck of a job preventing their protectees from being killed or injured.
And it seems like the State Department made your job harder and more dangerous than it would have otherwise been, insofar as they're saying, well, here are the routes they're going to take, here are the times they're going to take, here's where they're going to be there.
And you had to take some pretty extreme measures to try and not be sort of sitting ducks on those routes.
Is that right?
Correct.
So if we were in control...
So this is another misnomer.
We were not...
We, Blackwater, were not in operational control of those missions.
We were a personnel provider or an aircraft provider...
Or a vehicle provider to the State Department and they said who you will take, where you will take them, and what route you will take.
If we were in operational control, like if we were working for an NGO, we would put them in a armored but very beat-up looking vehicle so as not to attract attention.
But the State Department rules with their 1,000-page contract, competitively bid contract that we operated under, made it very clear license sirens, Brightly polished GMC Suburbans on the same predictable routes every day.
For any deer hunters that may be watching, you know to go hunt the deer if you follow the trails where they're going to be moving every day.
Sadly, the terrorists could do the same thing to us.
The big picture that I've always been a bit confused about, and please forgive my ignorance if it's something that's obvious, but why does the government need to hire someone like Blackwater?
I mean, the military budget is so enormous.
The competence of the individual military personnel can be extraordinary.
Is it just there's a massive blow to bureaucracy?
It becomes so difficult to get things done that it's easier to outsource?
And what is the economic driver?
I mean, I know you studied Austrian economics in school.
What are the economic drivers behind the need for something like Blackwater in the U.S. military?
Two things.
One is the U.S. military is fantastic at conventional maneuver warfare operations, right?
When they rolled from Kuwait into Baghdad in 2003 with the tanks, the artillery, and the armored personnel carriers, fantastic at that.
But now you take a 1st Armored Division, and now you have to retask it to be a stabilization force, a bodyguard force, a police training force, All those things.
It's difficult for the Army to retask an artilleryman to now become a bodyguard.
They're not trained.
You can't expect the military to be all things to all people all the time.
So when you take a huge conventional force and you push it into an area, and now they're completely retasked with different missions, there's gaps.
And so if you need more trainers, more security people, more aviation support, you hire it.
Just like if you're going somewhere else for the weekend, you don't buy a car, For the weekend, you rent your car in the same way they rented support staff.
Second, the one part of the military, their tooth to tail ratio, meaning how many guys are actually teeth, meaning they go outside the wire to engage the enemy, versus tail, staying at a base, doing a support function or a bureaucratic function, that number is completely out of hand.
It's about 10 or 12 tail per one tooth.
And so it becomes a staggeringly high figure, a staggeringly expensive figure, and that's where for the free market economic thinking people, they have lost the essential information that comes with price.
And I'll give a simple example of why outsource something.
So we had a very capable aviation operation at the company.
We bid and we replaced the Navy who was doing the vertical replenishment mission.
That's embarking Our helicopters with our people on a Navy supply ship and doing the supply mission flying loads onto a warship.
We showed up to do that job with two helicopters and eight guys replacing the Navy who was doing the same mission with two helicopters and 35 guys.
And for every 35 they had deployed another 70 to 100 back in the States waiting to deploy or just back from deployment.
The problem is the Navy Admiral that says I need 35 people to do that never had to pay for them.
And that That is the power of the free market, of letting entrepreneurs find cheaper, better, faster ways to do some of these functions.
I've never advocated privatizing the entire military.
Of course not.
But maintenance, support, training, so many of the peripheral functions, not combat functions, not direct offensive combat functions, can indeed be done cheaper, better, faster by entrepreneurs if you give them a chance to do it.
And what was the tooth-to-tail ratio at Blackwater?
It was about the inverse.
It was normally eight or nine per one tail.
Wow.
Okay.
I mean, I'm always fascinated by how far you can push free market efficiencies into government operations because, as you pointed out in some of your speeches, governments, it's almost impossible to fire people sort of once they're in.
As you point out, you kind of have to lead them out in handcuffs to get them I mean,
that's how we got into the airdrop business in Afghanistan, out of desperation from the army, because they had a – this was about 2004, 4 or 5?
Army came to our guys.
We had two aircraft sitting in Bagram, in Afghanistan.
And they said, hey, we have a large unit pinned down, running out of ammo.
The Air Force won't drop to them because it's not a certified drop zone.
So the Air Force would not fulfill their mission with a $100 million aircraft because they wouldn't fly to an unsurveyed drop zone.
And they said, hey, can you guys drop these ammo pallets to these guys who are fighting the Taliban?
And sure enough, within an hour, the Army had their ammo.
And thus a contract was born from that because we moved into the breach when a rather bureaucratic Air Force would not.
Right.
Now, when you speak, Eric, you talk about your childhood, which I always find very fascinating to look at how much of someone's life is rooted in early experiences.
And in particular, you tie it into the parable of the talents.
Now, this is something I try to get across to my listeners who sometimes are raised in a little bit more of a sort of self-serving mindset.
I wonder if you could help people understand how your childhood shaped what you were able to do with your life and how the parable of the talents ties into your life work.
Well, I grew up in a Christian home, and my father had been...
He grew up in a fairly difficult circumstance.
I mean, he was working...
His father died when he was 13 during the Great Depression, and he was working 40 hours a week in middle school already.
And in high school, he was managing a car dealership already at age 16.
So the man worked hard.
And when he achieved some success in life, he definitely gave back to his community.
And...
Hopefully a lot of that stuck in me.
When I went through BUDS, I managed to keep my family's background pretty hidden.
I just wanted to be one of the guys.
A guy that did his job and then some.
Coming out of the SEAL teams, knowing what the SEAL teams needed, In an unusual position to be able to self-fund it at a time when there was no...
You know, the late 90s was the peace dividend and peace, love, and happiness was breaking out everywhere and no focus on terrorism.
So the idea of building a training facility to prepare for that was very, I guess, antithetical to the reigning paradigm at the time.
So, again, trying to make the most...
You know, the parable of the talent says, to whom much is given, much is expected...
I've been given a lot in life.
Great health, great education, very loving parents that had significant resources, and I've tried to make the most of what they entrusted me with.
And the Christianity, of course, I think is important because one of the things that I find kind of chilling about the sort of postmodern, in many ways, post-religious West, is a loss of belief in the reality of evil.
And since, of course, you were in command of a fighting force or an aggressive force, do you think that your belief in evil, your acceptance of the reality of evil in the world, helped motivate you, helped drive you in the mission to keep people safe against bad guys?
Sure.
You know, I had my seventh birthday in East Berlin, 1976.
I'll never forget it.
And I remember seeing the guns and the dogs, the barbed wire, the minefields, all facing in, all keeping people from leaving East Germany.
Now, you know, even after my time in the SEAL teams and in Blackwater, traveling around parts of Africa, you definitely see the face of evil in some of these places.
And for those...
We live in a high-speed Wi-Fi environment with air conditioning and electrical power that works perfectly.
Things that we really take for granted in America, they kid themselves if they don't think that there are places that the wolf is at the door.
I remind people that the 9-11 terrorists killed 3,000 people in New York and Pennsylvania and Washington.
Because they didn't know how to kill 3 million.
Or 30 million.
And so, to deny that fact, to ignore that fact, we ignore it at our peril.
Thank you.
talk about your experience at Blackwater was, of course, when people hear the numbers, you know, $100 million contracts and so on, they think that, you know, you're just like Scrooge McDuck sitting on an astounding amount of money.
But one thing you said I found really interesting, and if you can tell me a little bit more about it, I'd appreciate that.
So after being accused of being a war profiteer, you say that, you know, after lawsuits and expenses and other problems, you view your time at Blackwater, at least financially, as 13 lost years.
What does that mean?
Sure.
Well, for example, so I pretty much put every dollar the business made back into the business to build out more capacity.
So, you know, we bought an air operation in 2003 and went from one aircraft to 73 aircraft in six years.
All self-financed.
And so every dollar, like I said, the business made, went back in to make a deposit for the next aircraft to buy, to send overseas, to serve the U.S. government.
We did some really cool R&D programs.
We actually developed an armor which stopped the nastiest explosive form penetrator that the U.S. was encountering in Iraq, in Afghanistan, an airship, other surveillance technology.
So Put all that money back into the business and then along, you know, Nisera Square, the attack from the congressional left and the bureaucracy and spending then two and a half million dollars a month in lawsuits for a couple of years.
And yeah, I ended up selling the business for about one-sixth of what it was worth two years previous.
So, hey, a financial loss, a financial hit.
the people that lost their lives or limbs or marriages over, you know, their cost of stepping up and doing what's expected.
Would I have been better off if I had just gone off and done the oil and gas business?
Absolutely.
Or just take the money and throw it into hedge funds somewhere.
But, of course, you were out there, and because you've got free market incentives, you were saving lives.
You were protecting people.
As you point out, nobody under your care was either killed or injured.
Killed, yes.
Injured is, to me, a remarkable achievement.
Now, what happened, though?
As far as I understand, it was the anti-war left, of course, really started going after contractors rather than the enlisted soldiers, which is different as far as I remember it from what happened in Vietnam.
Why did the anti-war left go target the contractors so strongly?
Well, correct.
In Vietnam, they went after the troops.
This time they went after contractors.
They...
They could change the narrative to basically an ignorant populace that didn't realize how present contractors had been on the battlefield since before America was even founded.
I talk about that as an entire chapter on that in my book, but we were by no means the largest.
We were a fraction of some of the very large DOD support contractors, but in our case, our men carried firearms, and sometimes they had to use those firearms, and And, you know, we were shot at, and sometimes it made it a very easy, you know, all the pejorative things that they threw at us, which were not fact-based, but emotional-based.
Look, people got tired of the Iraq War, of the time it takes to fight an insurgency.
The American population generally has a short attention span.
And people were right to be ticked at casualties with nothing to gain for it, with no visible winds.
And so, yeah, you get caught in the plate tectonics of Washington, and we definitely fell into that crevasse.
Well, okay, and you said something to me quite striking.
You said as an investor you would rather deal with insurgencies in Africa than the politics in Washington, and that your greatest regret was going to work for the State Department.
I mean, because it's one thing to have protesters, you know, they can be out there chanting and waving their signs, but of course it's quite another thing when people internal to the government seem to turn on you.
So what was your experience of all that happening?
Well, you know, after Nusra Square...
You know, tens of thousands of missions with the State Department doing exactly what they said.
And then, you know, one unfortunate mission.
And then the bureaucracy comes after you and literally a blizzard of subpoenas show up.
And, you know, we'd never played the Washington game before that.
We never had lobbyists.
We weren't donating to politicians' campaigns.
We stayed out of it.
I mean, the business grew because we said yes.
And people called us and said, will you help us with A, B, or C? And so now we're under political attack from all sides, literally the Department of Agriculture coming after us as to how we're shipping dog food.
I mean, again, I cover, I go into it ad nauseum in my book, but, and then when you, you know, you do have a lawyer representing us, goes up to Capitol Hill and meets with the congressional staff, and they say, we don't care what you guys do, we're going to ride you until you're out of business.
So, I mean, that was the pervasive attitude from the left on Capitol Hill.
And so I made, I think, the irrational economic choice to say, I guess my country doesn't want me to serve them anymore, and I'm out.
And I sold the business and moved on.
Right.
One thing that the left seems to have trouble understanding is why people in Congress, particularly the Republicans, are still interested in Benghazi.
You say, oh, well, you know, it's just a couple of people.
It was a long time ago.
I think your perspective on Benghazi is something that people really need to understand.
I mean, from a political standpoint, to me, it seemed fairly clear that this was all suppressed and kept under wraps and misdirected to this Internet video because it was on the anniversary of 9-11, right before an election.
When, of course, Obama and his administration had said, oh, don't worry, Al-Qaeda's on the ropes, they're on the way out, and then this savage attack occurred.
From a military standpoint, what went on that was so egregious that people, I think, really, really need to understand?
Sure.
I would say, you know, in my Blackwater days, one of the proudest moments I had was a colonel that came up to me after speaking at the War College, and he said...
He had just come back from Brigade Command in Baghdad, and he said on the dashboard, Blackwater call signs and frequencies, because they knew if something went bad, the Blackwater guys would come for them.
To leave no one behind.
To have combat search and rescue capability, to have response capability from all sorts of ways, so that a Benghazi scenario doesn't happen when something goes bad.
But yet, when you find out in Benghazi, there was all kinds of options to respond to these guys, from Special Forces guys in Croatia on an airplane on a C-130 with the blades turning, strike aircraft in Sicily, F-16s, an aircraft carrier battle group, all these things, all of it prevented by politics.
Waiting for the State Department, for Secretary Clinton to say, yes, you can cross into Libyan airspace, or for the request to come.
But no, because it was a few weeks before an election, and again, that campaign narrative, it's disgusting.
And so it is a real violation of trust.
And these guys weren't even troops.
Yes, they were contractors.
A couple of them used to work for me at Blackwater.
It's another interesting to note that the diplomatic service agents, none of them died.
Some of them were found hiding in closets when the Agency contractors made it over to the State Department Annex.
Were it not for those contractors that basically violated the direction given from their bureaucrat boss, they moved to the sound of the gunfire and provided rescue and ended up rescuing, preventing an overrun and having 20 or 30 Americans killed that day.
I don't think anyone should kid themselves into thinking that...
If they had overrun the CIA annex or any other U.S. facilities there, that peace, love, and happiness was suddenly going to break out.
So people are pissed, and it is an issue in Benghazi because Hillary Clinton in her previous campaign said, what are you going to do with that 2 a.m.
call?
We have a tough decision to make.
Well, she balked.
She did the wrong thing, and she left her people hanging.
You know, there's two kinds of courage to fight a war.
According to Clausewitz, the great Prussian military philosopher, individual soldier courage to go attack that position.
We have a surplus of that in America.
Plenty of brave men and women.
The other bravery you need is moral courage.
The ability to send your people into an uncertain situation with an uncertain outcome.
And that moral courage was truly lacking up and down the chain of command that night.
From the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, and especially Secretary Clinton not taking care of her people.
I can't imagine what it must be like to feel that you're being left hanging in the wind, exposed to this kind of violence for political considerations, and that I think has got to be quite demoralizing to people in the military as a whole.
Now let's turn to current events.
I just did this presentation on America and Russia.
There's a lot of saber-rattling going on, and In the Russian media, one of the number one topics is the fear of war with America, particularly if Hillary Clinton gets in.
Donald Trump, they feel that they can work with because he's a sort of nationalist and it's going to be just a negotiation of people with their own self-interest or their national self-interest at heart.
And, of course, the flashpoint appears to be this sort of tripartite battle that's going on in Syria.
How do you think this might play out, and what do you think the level of risk is at the moment regarding some escalation between America and Russia?
It's completely ridiculous and completely unnecessary.
The fact is, if FDR in World War II could get along with Joseph Stalin to defeat German fascism, we can certainly...
Get along with Vladimir Putin to defeat Islamic fascism now.
The Obama administration has screwed this up, and Clinton, as Secretary of State, has screwed this up from the very beginning.
We do not need to risk any kind of war with Russia over Syria.
Syria is not of strategic interest to us.
It is not a place that we need to send American soldiers to die fighting, and especially not to fight against the Russians.
It's asinine to even be posturing like that.
Yes.
The port of Tartus in Syria is important to the Russians.
Fine.
Having Syria as a client state is important to the Russians.
Fine.
Tartus is the only port that the Russians have on the entire Mediterranean.
The U.S. has a lot of them.
America...
The current administration, the next administration needs to embrace, hopefully it's a Trump administration, needs to embrace the fact that the borders that we're fighting to defend in the Middle East right now are gone.
The Sykes-Picot Treaty 100 years ago this year is now null and void.
That negotiation for what the Middle East looks like, you need to literally let the Alawites and Assad, with the Russians as their sponsor, Take the western part of Syria, eastern Syria, western Iraq, the Sunni areas.
Let that become some greater Sunistan.
Give the Kurds independence.
That deal has to be made.
I think the demonization of the Russians, could they be more careful with their bombing?
Maybe.
The Assad regime definitely could be more careful with their bombing.
However, I know people in Mosul right now that are also being bombed by American bombs, and there are civilians dying.
Sadly, ISIS is the one that started this fight, and ISIS was made possible by the vacuum created by the Obama administration pulling out of Iraq prematurely and ignorantly.
So, you know, the big push on Mosul right now is a purely political fight.
The administration has been doing nothing and hasn't been pushing to push them to retake Mosul for many of the last months, but now all of a sudden, Right before the election, there's a hurry up and take Mosul, and they're pounding away with aircraft, and having telegraphed that they were going to do something in Mosul, right?
Mr.
Trump is right to say, hey, look, I'm not going to telegraph exactly what our plans and intentions are.
You know, speed, surprise, violence of action is the first thing they taught us in the SEAL teams that still applies on battlefields today.
So the Middle East is a mess.
It is safe to say that a...
A Clinton administration approach to this would be an even greater mess, and this idea that we need to be saber-rattling and at odds with the Russians on this is ridiculous.
Do we agree with them on everything?
No.
The Russian position in Ukraine, I believe, is wrong, but it's certainly not something we, as America, need to go to war with them over, and especially not for in Syria.
You have to remember that the Russians have a true concern, fear, a valid fear of Islamic fascism happening in their own country.
You know, the Beslan massacre, they have a Chechen-Dagestani problem, and they don't want the problems of the Levant spilling north into Russia because they do dozens of kill-capture missions inside their own country against Islamic extremists as it is now.
Well, and of course, when it came to Libya, they allowed for the Hillary Clinton's sponsor of No-Fly Zone to go forward on the express promise from Hillary Clinton that it was not going to lead to regime change.
So now when she's talking about No-Fly Zone in Syria, I think they have the same concerns that it's going to be used as a pretext to ground the Russian Air Force, to expand U.S. military power, to further arm the rebels and support the rebels, and then there will be regime change, regime overthrow, and given the disaster that is Correct.
And they saw how the Clinton and Obama team royally screwed up Libya, and they're not going to let the same thing happen.
Especially, look, the Assads have been their client since Hafez Assad took over, I think, in 1972, or even before then.
So, look, they're not going to do it.
Look, America's foreign policy should be that our friends trust us, our rivals respect us, and our enemies need to fear us.
And in this case, America's friends don't trust us anymore, our rivals don't respect us, they don't know what we're doing, and clearly our enemies don't fear us.
When you have the Houthis, Shia rebels in Yemen, that on three separate occasions laid off Surface-to-surface missiles and shoot at our billion-dollar warships patrolling off the coast in international waters without real fear of reciprocity?
This is not serious.
We do not have a serious foreign policy or defense policy anymore.
It's ridiculous.
It's embarrassing.
One of the concerns that I have, Eric, is that if America, in conjunction with Russia and perhaps others in the region, go in to try and deal with ISIS, it seems like whenever the West goes in to try and clean up a mess in the Middle East, it is temporarily cleaned up, but if the constant presence of US military power doesn't sustain itself in the region...
It seems like there's always a power vacuum, and boy, you thought the current lot of people you were trying to clear up was bad.
The next lot always seems to be a lot worse, and that's sort of my concern about the West getting involved again.
Clean up ISIS, Lord knows what could come after that, unless there's a permanent presence, which I don't know that Americans have a lot of stomach for.
Look, it is now a blind willful ignorance or desire that we can impose democracy on all these people that are living in In centuries-old paradigms of thought is ridiculous.
So bringing Jeffersonian democracy to Afghanistan or Iraq, some places aren't ready for it yet.
So having leaders that have more of a tribal base that can swing a bigger stick to keep some of these real criminal elements at bay, sometimes that might be necessary.
Going forward, you know, we have an amazing military, but it's very good at doing pacification and long-term counterinsurgency kind of work.
I'm not really in the business anymore, so don't think it's self-serving, but I think allowing the private sector to be that long-dwell presence and so that the Economic development.
The British used to say that a functioning workshop is better than a battalion of soldiers.
So a functioning economy, real economic development comes from putting people to work and entrepreneurship being unleashed.
And of course that requires some security and some rule of law.
So letting America's pacification effort look more like the East India Company did versus what the First Armored Division does.
I mean, look, we're spending as a country $44 billion in Afghanistan this year yet, and the Taliban control more land than they did 15 years ago on 9-11.
So let's have that debate about the best way to pacify some of these smoldering fires around the world, because if we don't, you're going to continue to have refugee crisis, you're going to continue to have terror cells spitting out of those places,
putting those fires out, Once and for all, however you do it, there's got to be a discussion we need to have because otherwise we can't keep spending more than the next 17 countries combined in defense.
It's a crazy number.
We don't need to spend that much as a country.
There are cheaper, better, smarter ways to do it.
As I've always said, America is uniquely positioned for a more pacifist civilization, peaceful neighbors to the north and south, giant oceans to the east and west.
It shouldn't be that impossible to live a more peaceful life and not go abroad, as the old saying goes, in search of enemies to destroy.
So let's close off, Erica, help people to understand what's going on with Frontier Resource Group, this private equity firm, and the work that you're doing, particularly in Africa, which I find very interesting.
Well, so Frontier Resource Group, we do some direct investing in some mining, upstream energy exploration stuff.
We have a fantastic business that does, we look for oil and gas.
With airborne and maritime methods, you basically fly around a very high dollar piece of equipment that measures the micro variations in the magnetic or gravitational field of the earth.
And you come back and you put it through a supercomputer and it gives you a pretty good model of where to look.
The oil and gas business hasn't been great with $40 a barrel oil.
We're still doing okay in that space.
Frontier Service Group is a Hong Kong listed company and it does trucking, transportation, warehousing, logistics, and aviation throughout Africa.
We're actually the biggest medevac provider for the United Nations, for example.
So we fly in and pick up a UN peacekeeper when they get injured and need medical care.
All right.
All right.
Well, thanks so much.
I just wanted to remind people we'll put links to this book below.
Highly recommended.
Civilian Warriors, the Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War.
On Terra, we'll put links to Frontier Resource Group and Frontier Services Group as well, in case you're interested in pursuing that information.
Eric, a real pleasure to chat with you.
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