The U.S. government has made it harder for the military to fight wars thanks to more and more legal restrictions being enacted, according to Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL and founder of private military contractor Blackwater.
"They're getting much worse than ever before," Prince told "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV.
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"If you're in Afghanistan and you're under heavy fire, you can't drop a bomb without getting a lawyer's permission to do that."
Blackwater employees were notoriously involved in a series of deadly shooting incidents in Iraq.
In 2007, they killed 17 Iraqis in Baghdad, prompting the Iraqi government to boot them from the country. Several now face manslaughter charges related to the shootings.
Prince compared the scrutiny of the U.S. military by the government to that of the former Soviet Union.
"In the Soviet Union … they had a unit commander but they had a political officer right next to the commander [who] really decides what was in keeping with the party's decision," he said.
"That's what we've really allowed lawyers to become as we're trying to fight away and it hamstrings the guys from getting the job done."
Prince, author of the new book,
"Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror," added that the U.S. could not have fought World War II successfully with such rules.
"It would be impossible to fight a conventional war with that kind of a hamstring," he said.
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