Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any government, client, or partner.
SECURITY IS NOT THE DESTINATION
Winning hearts and minds is not sentiment.
It is strategy and is the only path to a Haiti that no longer needs us.
WHAT HAPPENED?
A violent gang attack in the farming community of Kenscoff, Haiti, on August 23, 2026, left at least 47 people dead and more than 50 kidnapped.
- The Assault: Around 150 heavily armed gang members carried out a nighttime raid on the hillside community, which overlooks routes to the capital, Port-au-Prince.
- Impact and Response: The massacre shattered a brief period where security operations had reduced local violence. Survivors have criticized the police response, prompting national authorities to open an investigation into potential negligence.
- Motive: Criminals atargeting Kenscoff to expand their reach, surround the upscale community of Pétion-Ville, and control alternate transport routes connecting Port-au-Prince to the southern region of Haiti.
- Casualties and Destruction: Attackers executed dozens of residents who had sought refuge in a church, burned 25 homes, and targeted government employees.
An observation from the Founder & CEO of Templar Titan, Inc. Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any government, client, or partner.
On the night of August 23, 2026, armed gangs attacked Kenscoff, the mountain community above Port-au-Prince. At least forty-seven people were killed, five of them children. Twenty-two were injured. Dozens were reportedly abducted. Homes burned.
Every one of those lives mattered. Their loss forces a question that applies to Haiti and to every nation facing organized violence amid scarcity: what does success actually look like?
Seventeen months into Vectus Global's involvement in Haiti's anti-gang operations, that question is fair. Erik Prince set the standard himself. He reportedly expected major roads and territory reclaimed within roughly a year, and offered a clearer benchmark still: an ordinary Haitian driving from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien in an unarmored vehicle, unstopped by gangs.
That was the right instinct. Security is not measured by how efficiently a protected convoy moves. It is measured by whether a mother can take her children to see family, a farmer can reach a market, a merchant can move goods, and a student can navigate his own country without fear.
What does success actually look like?
Seventeen months after Erik Prince's Vectus Global became involved in Haiti's anti-gang operations, that question deserves to be asked with neither ideology nor malice, but with the seriousness that human life demands.
Mr. Prince established a practical standard himself.
He reportedly envisioned major roads and territory being reclaimed from gangs within approximately a year. More importantly, he identified an ordinary person's ability to travel from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haïtien in a normal, nonarmored vehicle without being stopped by gangs as a meaningful measure of progress.
That is the right instinct.
Because security should ultimately be measured not by how effectively a protected convoy can move, but by whether a mother can take her children to see family, a farmer can bring produce to market, a merchant can move his goods, and a student can cross the country without surrendering his future to fear.
That is the standard I believe every serious security enterprise should embrace.
And it is where Templar Titan approaches the problem differently.
The Difference Is Not Capability. It Is Architecture.
Templar Titan is prepared to take on the Haiti mission. We do not see a security problem. We see a scarcity problem, and that distinction determines everything that follows.
A security contractor can suppress a threat. An intelligence organization can map it. A technology company can detect it. An elite team can strike it. None of that produces a functioning economy, restores trust between citizen and state, feeds a family, reopens a school, or convinces a young Haitian his future is worth protecting.
Security is the soil. It is not the harvest.
Erik Prince has built extraordinary capabilities - the ability to recruit exceptional professionals, operate in hostile terrain, move faster than governments, and deliver hard security where institutions have collapsed. We do not question that. Our objection is structural, not personal.
A suppression model produces a condition that must be maintained indefinitely. Remove the pressure and the pressure returns. Territory reclaimed by force is held by force. That is not a solution. It is a bandage over a wound that keeps bleeding underneath, and it creates permanent dependency on the very presence it is supposed to make unnecessary.
The measure of a serious engagement is not how long you can hold ground. It is how fast the country stops needing you to hold it. Nothing in a pure security contract is designed to answer that, because nothing in it builds the civil society that makes the contract obsolete.
Hearts and Minds Is American Doctrine
The United States learned this at heavy cost across fifty years of irregular warfare. Territory can be taken by force. Legitimacy cannot. Populations do not side with whoever is strongest. They side with whoever makes their lives livable, predictable, and safe. Where legitimate governance and economic opportunity fail to fill that space, criminal networks fill it and they stay.
Hearts and minds was never a humanitarian courtesy bolted onto a kinetic campaign. It is the recognition that the population is the decisive terrain. That is why empathy is not a soft addition to a security enterprise. It is an operational requirement. It changes how you enter a country, how you listen, how you negotiate, what you destroy, and what you protect.
That requires professionals who are exceptional at their craft which spans areas of: technology, intelligence, logistics, aviation, negotiation, complex systems and who understand that the person on the other side of an operation is someone's mother, someone's child, someone's neighbor. That conviction changes the definition of winning.
Fight the Scarcity, Not Only the Gangs
The cycle repeats across Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East. Scarcity creates desperation. Desperation creates opportunity for predatory actors. Predatory actors create insecurity. Insecurity drives out capital. Capital flight deepens scarcity.
Breaking it requires a different mission definition. The objective is not to remove gang checkpoints. It is to make them economically irrelevant. That means restoring legitimate movement of food, fuel, medicine, agricultural goods, and construction materials. It means connecting capital to credible Haitian entrepreneurs, clearing infrastructure bottlenecks, and integrating intelligence, sensing, communications, logistics, analytics, and autonomous systems into one architecture built around a single objective: making legitimate life easier than criminal life.
This is not naïveté about violence. Force must sometimes answer force, and gangs threatening innocent lives must be confronted directly. We do not confuse compassion with passivity. There are moments that require measured, disciplined, precisely calculated force, and we are built to deliver it. But force is a tool, never the strategy. The strategy is to create conditions under which Haitians need less of it every year.
Protect the Vulnerable First, Then Build Outward
When a society is under extraordinary pressure, protect those with the least capacity to escape its consequences women, children, families, the elderly. Not because other lives matter less, but because civilization is measured by how it treats those with the least power, and because population security is the foundation every other recovery function is built on.
From that foundation the sequence is straightforward: protect the people, restore movement, restore commerce, restore food security, restore opportunity, restore institutions, restore hope. Security then becomes the consequence of a healthier society rather than a permanent substitute for one.
We would not have arrived assuming outsiders held the answers. We would have listened to government, to communities, to legitimate business, to local leaders, to the displaced and the bereaved. And where lawful and appropriate, to those on the other side of the conflict who might be persuaded that a legitimate future exists beyond criminality. Peace is not always negotiated across a conference table. Sometimes it is negotiated by changing the incentives that make war profitable, or by showing a young person that his talent can build something rather than destroy it. Sometimes it requires confronting evil directly. Wisdom is knowing which moment is which.
To Erik Prince
I hold real respect for Erik Prince as an American entrepreneur, strategist, and operator. He has spent decades proving that private organizations can move faster and think differently than governments, and that lesson should not be discarded it should be expanded.
The question is no longer whether private enterprise can deliver security capabilities to difficult places. We know it can. The question is whether private enterprise can deliver security, prosperity, and legitimacy simultaneously, and then leave behind a society that sustains them without us. That frontier demand more than capital. It demands character.
A Different Standard
Haiti is not a failed security environment. That description is too small. It is a nation of people, talent, history, geography, and enterprise operating under extraordinary constraints. Scarcity is not destiny. Neither is violence, poverty, or corruption. These are problems, and problems can be solved.
Our ambition is not to become another private army moving from crisis to crisis. It is to be the strategic partner that walks into a complex environment and asks what it would take to make this country safer, more prosperous, more connected, and more hopeful ten years from now and what can be built starting today.
We do not want to merely secure tomorrow. We want to help build a tomorrow worth securing and then hand it back to the people it belongs to.
— Founder & CEO, Templar Titan, Inc.
"PROVIDING TIMELY SOLUTIONS TO COMPLEX SCENARIOS"