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By Joshua Rhett Miller
Senior Reporter
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The founder of Blackwater has criticized the U.S.-Israeli strikes in Iran, saying the conflict isn't in "America's interests" and will lead to more death and destruction across the Middle East.
Erik Prince—a former Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater, the private military contractor later rebranded as Constellis—provided a blunt assessment to conservative influencer Steve Bannon on Sunday, a day after the killing of Iran's 86-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and more than 40 top Iranian security and regime officials.
"Look, Steve, I'm not happy about the whole thing," Prince said on Bannon's War Room podcast. "I don't think this was in America's interests. It's going to uncork a significant can of worms and chaos and destruction in Iran now."
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Prince said Khamenei's assassination on Saturday would likely lead to tens of thousands of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps vying to replace the former leader.
"Who takes over?" Prince asked on the podcast. He added: "I don't see how this is in keeping with the president's MAGA commitment. I'm disappointed."
Prince then questioned the preparation of U.S.-Israeli forces following Khamenei's death and suggested ground troops would eventually need to partake in Operation Epic Fury.
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"And again, who comes after that?" Prince said. "I don't know that there's a plan. These are ultimately solved by ground combat. I don't think a regime has ever been changed by airpower alone. It's wishful thinking, and now it [has] indeed cost American lives. I don't buy the argument that it was only because of—that they were doing it to preempt. When you load that many troops and that many aircraft in the immediate area, you can almost guarantee a response. But again, how does the regime get changed?"
Prince also criticized U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to align the United States with Israel in the conflict.
"Subjecting our foreign policy to Israeli foreign policy, I have a real issue with that," Prince told Bannon. "I've said it before. I said it weeks ago on your show. This should not be the path forward, and the president's chosen to do it. I just wonder who pressured him that much to do it this way."
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Prince questioned the effectiveness of strikes in Iran last summer to destroy the nation's nuclear ambitions and said he had yet to see evidence of a "viable replacement" for Khamenei.
"Ninety million people, intelligent, hardworking, with a lot of tech and a lot of capability is not an easy endeavor to accomplish," Prince said. "So the airpower alone, I'm concerned. And I'm concerned that this is not our fight, that this is Israel's fight that we got dragged into."
At least four American troops had been killed in action as of early Monday. Trump told reporters on Sunday that he expected additional casualties. Prince, meanwhile, advised the president not to deploy American troops in the conflict.
In a direct address to Trump, Prince said on the podcast, "Don't ever contemplate ground troops in Iran."
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Some observers noted that Prince's dismay over the United States' involvement in the conflict didn't bode well for Trump and his conservative backers.
"Very, very notable, if you've lost Erik Prince," Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative magazine, wrote on X on Sunday.
Trump, for his part, has not ruled out sending U.S. ground troops into Iran "if they were necessary," he told the New York Post on Monday.
"I don't have the yips with respect to boots on the ground—like every president says, 'There will be no boots on the ground.' I don't say it," Trump said. "I say 'probably don't need them,' [or] 'if they were necessary.'"
The conflict is expected to "go pretty quickly," Trump said.
"We're right on schedule, way ahead of schedule in terms of leadership—49 killed—and that was, you know, going to take, we figured, at least four weeks, and we did it in one day," Trump told the Post.
Earlier on Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said U.S. troops were not currently deployed in Iran, but he declined to speculate on whether that might change.
He told reporters, "No, but we're not going to go into the exercise of what we will or will not do."
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