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I thought they had changed their name to Xe services. What sort of name is Academi for a private mercenary company?
by daveying99 14y ago
I thought they had changed their name to Xe services. What sort of name is Academi for a private mercenary company?
- cpeterso 14y agoThat's probably the point.
- knowtheory 14y agoHonestly, that's probably why they changed it again. Blackwater was a comically villainous name to begin with.
- autodidakto 14y agoNot only is it comically villainous, it's the technical term for waste water from toilets. That is, sewage. Whoever is picking their names needs to be, uhm, shot.
- chubbard 14y agoIt has nothing to do with sewage. Blackwater got it names from the swamps surrounding the area: "the Great Dismal Swamp, a vast swamp on the North Carolina/Virginia border, now mostly a National Wildlife Refuge...There, he created his state-of-the-art private training facility and his contracting company, Blackwater, which he named for the peat-colored water of the swamp.[10]" But apparently if Blackwater wanted to shot the person that named it they can do that.
- rdl 14y agoFor a long time, they did run a lot of training as their primary business, too. (US Training Centers, in NC, is one of the best firearms/combat training centers in the world. They also make excellent reactive target systems.)
- MrMatters 14y agoBlackwater -> Xe -> Academi. For trying to get away from the story book evil sounding-ness of an entity named "Blackwater", they sure didn't do very good with "Xe", which sounds even more mysterious and potentially evil-doing IMO. Academi sounds a lot better though. And they do a lot US LE/gov't/etc. training which is probably what they would rather emphasize than their being a "private mercenary company".
- theorique 14y agoThey also run an online apparel business. I got an Academi T-shirt.