As President Trump prepares to send a to-be-determined number of American troops to Afghanistan in the latest effort to bring this 16-year-and-counting war to a close, a gentleman named Erik Prince has taken to the venerable opinion pages of the New York Times to humbly offer a modest alternative: Why doesn't the president just send contractors to fight this fight instead?

My proposal is for a sustainable footprint of 2,000 American Special Operations and support personnel, as well as a contractor force of less than 6,000 (far less than the 26,000 in country now). This team would provide a support structure for the Afghans, allowing the United States’ conventional forces to return home.

Prince goes on to explain that he would leverage the historical successes of Special Operations forces in the region by retaining those veterans as hired guns, deploying them through private security firms as a sort of souped-up shadow army that would train Afghan forces and supervise combat operations. (They'd fly in Afghan planes, for example, but would leave decisions about when to use weapons to Afghan pilots.) This strategy, Prince argues, would cost the United States less in terms of both dollars and lives, providing it with the best chance to end an ill-conceived war that, as of this year, is old enough to get a driver license in just about every state.

Incredibly, not until the very end of Mr. Prince's column does he drop this little nugget:

If the president pursues this third path, I, too, would vigorously compete to implement a plan that saves American lives, costs less than 20 percent of current spending and saves American taxpayers more than $40 billion a year.

Yes, before he was famous for being Betsy DeVos' brother and/or the alleged wannabe fixer of a secret meeting between the White House and Russia on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, Erik Prince was best known as the founder of Blackwater, which is—you guessed it!—a giant private security contractor! Blackwater, which has since been re-branded as Academi, did billions of dollars in business with the federal government, primarily during the Bush administration, and most famously in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Although Prince is no longer a part of Blackwater, he now chairs something called Frontier Services Group, which is—again, prepare to be shocked—also a giant private security contractor, and precisely the type of enterprise that might be interested in being paid hilarious sums of money to fight a war overseas, should said sums of money suddenly be subject to a formal bidding process.

Perhaps sensing that some people might find this arrangement a tad unseemly, Prince offers the following preemptive rejoinder: