BLACKWATER Ammunition, the new kid in town
“BLACKWATER”: a name that attracts the attention of whoever has not been living on Mars in the last 20 years. But now the original Blackwater brand comes to new life, within another business environment, and to make all this possible has been its creator and owner himself, Erik Prince…
Blackwater Ammunition - IWA 2018
The IWA trade show is behind the corner, and some news are difficult to hide...
The name of Erik Prince has been mentioned quite a lot in the last six months, mostly because of bad reviews coming from information sources against the Trump presidency. It’s not our task to judge, but the fact remains that the founder of what once was the Blackwater organization is a businessman.
And in fact, the brand created by him over twenty years ago now comes back to life with Blackwater Ammunition, a company that will deal with the manufacture and sale of ammunition.
From available information, Erik Prince has provided the Blackwater brand, of which he remains the owner, but at the leading of the project we find a name we have already heard before: the Italian Nicola Bandini, once co-founder of Arsenal Firearms, and now CEO of the Maltese company PBM - Precision Ballistic Manufacturing Ltd, which will manufacture the Blackwater ammunition.
The Blackwater Ammunition brand – shortened to BWA – will initially identify a line of center fire ammunition for Military and Law Enforcement uses, followed in a second moment by a production line dedicated to the civilian and sporting market.
The information we have collected talk about last generation manufacturing processes, with the use of materials quite innovative for the ammunition industry standards.
Blackwater Ammunition will debut this week in Nuremberg (Germany) at IWA 2018, where GUNSweek.com will obviously be at the forefront, to know more about this new ammunition brand.
Remember Blackwater?
The businessman Erik Prince, owner of the Blackwater brand and author of the book "Civilian Warriors" dedicated to the story of the Blackwater agency
Established in North Carolina in 1997 by the American businessman and former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince, Blackwater USA originally operated as a training company for law enforcement United States agencies. Its first training center was opened in 1998, and worked initially with SWAT units. The first government contract came following the terror attack to the USS Cole off the coast Yemen in 2000, when Blackwater won a bid to train over 100.000 U.S. sailors.
Starting in 2002, Blackwater became the most important PMC (Private Military Company) in the U.S. and worldwide, helping to make ever more popular the term "Contractor", to designate all those professionals that till that moment had always been simply referred to as "mercenaries".
For almost a decade, Blackwater fielded thousands of well-trained, well-equipped operators in the all the most important theatres of operation - mostly in the Middle East -, providing also an important support in civil defense and disaster recovery operations in the United States mainland, such as when they provided assistance to the New Orleans population in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in August 2005 or when they delivered supplies and set up a tent city for evacuees during the Fall 2007 California wildfires.
Blackwater USA became Blackwater Worldwide, going through several transformations since 2007. In 2009 the founder Erik Prince left the company, which in 2010 was then sold to a group of private investors and since 2011 is now known as Academi.
