In August of 2017, Erik Prince, the founder of the private military company (PMC) Blackwater, proposed a plan for privatizing the war in Afghanistan, where he would replace approximately 23,000 multinational forces currently serving there with 2,000 special-forces and 6,000 security contractors. Despite widespread rejection of the proposal, it is not entirely without merit nor historical precedent. Having said that, recent experience suggests that employing PMCs in combat advisory and direct combat roles comes with significant moral risk. Solutions to these risks usually take the form of separating governmental from private-sector support functions or limiting employment of PMCs to humanitarian crises. Neither solution is satisfying or stable. Moving forward, we can understand these risks as well as mitigate them by understanding how the statePMC proxy relationship sets conditions for these moral concerns but also provides a way to resolve them.