Blackwater to Academi to Constellis: The DBA Carrier Trail

Your Client Worked for Blackwater. Which Blackwater?

A claimant walks into your office. They were injured in Iraq in 2007 working for Blackwater. That should be straightforward. One employer, one carrier, one claim. Except Blackwater USA became Blackwater Worldwide in 2007. Then Xe Services in 2009. Then Academi in 2011. Then Constellis absorbed the whole operation in 2014.

Each name change was not just a rebrand. It created a separate legal employer identity in Department of Labor records. The carrier that wrote the DBA policy for Blackwater Security Consulting in 2006 is not necessarily the carrier that covered Academi in 2013. And the carrier covering Constellis Group today may be different from both.

ClaimTrove data shows 27 distinct employer name variations across DOL case summaries for this single corporate lineage. FOIA database results reveal 28 different employer name spellings in coverage filings. That means a paralegal searching for "Blackwater" will miss claims filed under "Academi Training Center," "Constellis Holdings LLC," "Xe Services LLC," and dozens of other variations unless they know the full corporate genealogy.

This article maps the complete Blackwater corporate timeline, explains why each name change happened, and shows how the subsidiary structure complicates carrier identification at every stage.

What Is the Full Blackwater Corporate Timeline?

The company that became America's most recognized private military contractor started as a training facility in northeastern North Carolina. Erik Prince founded Blackwater USA in 1997, originally focused on firearms and tactical training for law enforcement and military personnel. The company had no overseas security contracts and no DBA exposure at that point.

Everything changed after September 11, 2001. Blackwater won its first State Department Worldwide Personal Protective Services (WPPS) contract, and personnel began deploying to Afghanistan and Iraq. By 2004, Blackwater Security Consulting, LLC was a major subcontractor providing protective details for diplomats and government officials in Baghdad. USAspending records show a single State Department contract for protective services in Iraq valued at over $641 million.

The corporate name changes followed a pattern: controversy, rebrand, repeat.

• Blackwater USA (1997-2007) - The original entity. Operated training center in Moyock, NC. Deployed to Iraq under State Department WPPS contracts starting 2003.
• Blackwater Worldwide (2007-2009) - Rebranded in October 2007 after the Nisour Square shooting in Baghdad that killed 17 Iraqi civilians. The incident triggered congressional investigations and criminal prosecutions.
• Xe Services, LLC (2009-2011) - Renamed in February 2009 as the company attempted to distance itself from the Blackwater name entirely. The State Department did not renew the WPPS contract, but existing work continued under the new name.
• Academi (2011-2014) - Renamed in December 2011 after new ownership under USTC Holdings (later Constellis Holdings). The company emphasized a shift toward compliance and governance under Ted Wright and new private equity investors.
• Constellis Group (2014-present) - In June 2014, Academi merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellis Group. The combined entity also absorbed Olive Group, Edinburgh International, Strategic Social, and other subsidiaries.

That is five distinct corporate identities in 17 years. Each one appears separately in DOL records.

How Do Blackwater's Subsidiaries Complicate DBA Claims?

The name changes alone would be manageable if each entity operated under a single legal name. They did not. Blackwater ran operations through multiple subsidiaries, each of which could appear as the employer of record on a DBA claim.

Blackwater Security Consulting, LLC was the primary operating entity for Iraq and Afghanistan protective details. This is the employer name that appears most frequently in DOL records, with 1,264 cumulative DBA cases reported in DOL case summaries from 2001 through 2024. But the same workers might have been employed through a different subsidiary depending on the contract.

Presidential Airways provided aviation services, operating aircraft in Afghanistan for Department of Defense contracts. DOL records show cases filed under "Presidential Airways and Blackwater USA" as a combined employer name. Presidential Airways was the entity involved in the 2004 crash in Afghanistan that killed three crew members and three U.S. soldiers, generating some of the earliest high-profile DBA litigation involving this corporate family.

Greystone Limited (also appearing as "Greystone SRL" in FOIA filings) was a Blackwater affiliate that recruited and deployed third-country nationals. ClaimTrove data shows 6 coverage card filings under Greystone variations. Claims from Greystone employees may not obviously connect to the Blackwater lineage without understanding how alias resolution maps 20 or more name variations to a single employer.

Blackwater Lodge and Training Center was the domestic entity that ran the Moyock, NC facility. DOL records show it as a separate employer, sometimes combined with other entities: "Blackwater Security Consulting LLC/Blackwater Lodge & Training Center Inc & XPG LLC" appears as a single employer entry in coverage filings. Good luck parsing that without a structured alias database.

Why Does Each Name Change Create a Separate Carrier Identification Problem?

DBA insurance policies are issued to specific legal entities. When Blackwater Security Consulting held a DBA policy, that policy covered employees of Blackwater Security Consulting. When the company rebranded to Xe Services, the new entity needed its own DBA coverage. The prior policy did not automatically transfer.

This means each name change is a potential inflection point where the DBA carrier could change, the same dynamic that played out when Engility's coverage shifted through its SAIC acquisition. ClaimTrove's employer-carrier mapping data confirms this pattern. The Blackwater-era claims appear with different carriers than the Academi-era claims. The Constellis-era claims show yet another carrier mix. The carrier landscape shifted at least three times across this lineage, and the transitions do not align neatly with the name changes.

For practitioners, this creates a specific problem. If your client was injured working for "Blackwater" in 2008, you need the carrier that covered Blackwater Security Consulting during that period. If your client was injured working for "Academi" in 2013, you need the carrier that covered Academi, LLC or Academi Training Center during that specific year. Those are two separate carrier identification tasks with potentially different answers. The same period-by-period analysis applies to any prime, even ones whose overseas exposure is less obvious than a security firm, such as an engineering and environmental prime contractor.

The complexity multiplies when you consider that some claims remain in litigation for years. A claimant injured in 2007 under Blackwater might not have their case adjudicated until 2015, by which time the employer is operating as Constellis. DOL records from that adjudication year may list the employer as "Constellis Holdings (Prev. ACADEMI)" - a hybrid name that did not exist when the injury occurred. ClaimTrove data shows exactly this pattern in DOL case summaries, where entries like "Balckwater (Constellis)" (note the misspelling) and "Blackwater (Academi)" appear as employer names, blending past and present identities in a single record.

Understanding how carrier families operate under multiple subsidiary names is equally important here. The carrier listed on a Blackwater-era claim may itself have gone through name changes or corporate restructuring in the years since the policy was written.

What Happened When Academi Merged Into Constellis?

The 2014 formation of Constellis Group was not a simple acquisition. It was a merger of equals between Academi and Triple Canopy, two of the largest private military contractors still operating in the Middle East. The new entity also absorbed several smaller firms: Olive Group (a UK-based security company), Edinburgh International, Tidewater Global Services, and Strategic Social.

This merger created the most complex employer identification problem in DBA records. DOL case summaries after 2014 show claims filed under at least 15 distinct Constellis-related names, including:

• Constellis Group
• Constellis Group / Triple Canopy Inc.
• Constellis Group Inc.
• Constellis Holdings LLC
• Constellis Holdings (Prev. ACADEMI)
• Constellis Holdings, LLC ACADEMI01
• Constellis Holdings, LLC- Acad01
• Constellis/Triple Canopy
• Constellis/Olive Group
• Olive Group/Constellis
• Constellis Group (Triple Canopy)

Each of these names corresponds to real filings in DOL data. The "ACADEMI01" suffix appears to be an internal policy or account identifier that bled into the employer name field. Some filings combine two pre-merger entities in a single name: "Constellis Group / Triple Canopy Inc." likely reflects a claim where the employer's heritage includes Triple Canopy's own pre-merger DBA history.

The Constellis Group itself generated 2,960 cumulative DBA cases in DOL case summaries from 2001 through 2024. That figure only counts filings under the exact name "Constellis Group." Add the 1,609 cases under "Constellis Group / Triple Canopy Inc.," the 914 under "Constellis/Triple Canopy," the 657 under "Constellis Group Inc.," and the hundreds more under other variations, and the true scope of this employer family's DBA exposure becomes clear. This is one of the largest DBA claim generators in the entire system.

How Many DBA Cases Has the Blackwater Lineage Generated?

Aggregating across all name variations in DOL case summaries gives a picture of this employer family's DBA footprint. The numbers are staggering for a single corporate lineage.

Under the Blackwater name alone: "Blackwater Security Consulting" accounts for 1,264 cumulative cases. "Blackwater" as a standalone name adds 71 more. "XE Services" contributed 204 cases during its brief existence from FY2009 through FY2012. "Academi" variations (Academi, Academi Training Center, Academi LLC) total over 800 cumulative cases.

The Constellis era dwarfs everything before it. "Constellis Group" at 2,960 cases is the largest single-name entry. But adding the combined name variations pushes the Constellis-era total past 7,000 cases. And that includes legacy claims from Blackwater and Triple Canopy employees whose cases were adjudicated after the merger.

Consider the FY2020 data alone. DOL records show cases filed under "Blackwater Security Consulting" (15 cases), "Blackwater (Academi)" (9 cases), "Blackwater" (8 cases), "Balckwater (Constellis)" (9 cases), "Constellis Group" (680 cases), "Constellis Group / Triple Canopy Inc." (444 cases), and several other variations. That is seven different employer names for claims that all trace back to the same corporate family - in a single fiscal year.

These numbers matter for carrier identification because each name variation may have been filed under a different DBA policy. A carrier search limited to "Blackwater" or "Constellis" alone will miss a significant portion of the relevant records. Practitioners handling Iraq-era DBA claims from the surge and drawdown periods frequently encounter this fragmentation.

What Makes the Carrier Trail So Difficult to Follow?

Three factors make the Blackwater-to-Constellis carrier trail uniquely difficult compared to other overseas defense contractors like Raytheon.

First: the sheer volume of name variations. ClaimTrove tracks 16 confirmed aliases for the Constellis family in its employer alias database. But DOL records contain 27 distinct spelling variations in case summaries and 28 in FOIA coverage filings. The gap between "confirmed aliases" and "names that actually appear in records" reflects the messy reality of federal data entry. Misspellings like "Balckwater" and hybrid identifiers like "Constellis Holdings, LLC- Acad01" appear in official DOL filings.

Second: multiple carrier relationships across time periods. ClaimTrove's employer-carrier mapping data shows this lineage connected to carriers from at least three different carrier families across the Blackwater, Xe, Academi, and Constellis eras. The carrier landscape is not static. Policies expire, get renewed with different underwriters, or shift when ownership changes, the same dynamic that makes the PAE to Amentum carrier trail so tangled. Each era potentially involved different carriers, and some eras involved multiple carriers simultaneously depending on which subsidiary held the contract.

Third: third-party administrator confusion. Some carrier entries in DOL records include TPA references. For example, Constellis-era filings reference "Gallagher Bassett Services" alongside the carrier name. Gallagher Bassett is a TPA (third-party administrator), not a carrier. Practitioners who mistake a TPA for the actual carrier will file against the wrong entity. Understanding which other private security contractors like SOC LLC share similar TPA-carrier confusion patterns helps build a framework for navigating these records.

The practical takeaway: tracing the correct DBA carrier for any claim in the Blackwater-to-Constellis lineage requires knowing the exact employer name at the time of injury, the subsidiary that held the contract, and the carrier that wrote the specific DBA policy for that entity during that period.

How Should You Investigate a Blackwater or Academi DBA Claim?

Start with the employment dates and the employer name your client actually used. A claimant who says "I worked for Blackwater" may have been employed by Blackwater Security Consulting LLC, Blackwater Lodge and Training Center, Presidential Airways, or Greystone Limited. The specific subsidiary determines which DBA policy applied.

Next, map the employer name to the correct era. If the injury occurred before February 2009, you are in the Blackwater era. Between February 2009 and December 2011, you are in the Xe Services window. From December 2011 to June 2014, it is Academi. After June 2014, it is Constellis - but which Constellis entity depends on whether the contract came from the Academi side or the Triple Canopy side of the merger.

Then verify whether the DOL records for that period use the name your client provided or a variant. A search for "Blackwater Security Consulting" in DOL records will not surface claims filed under "USTC/Blackwater Lodge & Training" or "Blackwater Aviation & Presidential Airways & Blackwater Security Consulting." These compound names exist in actual DOL filings.

Finally, identify the carrier for that specific entity and time period. This is where the investigation gets expensive in billable hours if done manually. Cross-referencing FOIA results, DOL case summaries, and adjudication records across 27+ name variations requires either deep institutional knowledge of the Blackwater lineage or a tool purpose-built for this kind of multi-name, multi-era employer family resolution.

ClaimTrove maps carrier history across the entire Blackwater-to-Academi-to-Constellis lineage, connecting each name variation and subsidiary to the carrier that held the DBA policy during the relevant period. Search any Blackwater, Academi, or Constellis name variation to trace the carrier trail in minutes instead of hours. Start your investigation at ClaimTrove.