A Better Model of Military Intervention?
A Better Model of Military Intervention? By Michael P. Noonan, U.S. News & World Report.
Sunday's Washington Post contained a fascinating article about U.S. covert assistance to the government of Colombia in its war against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN) rebels. The Central Intelligence Agency and elements of the U.S. Special Operations Command worked with the Colombian military to provide training, assistance and capabilities such as intelligence fusion and off-the-shelf kits to convert regular "dumb" bombs into precision-guided munitions. (Not only do such accurate weapons help to reduce the probability of so-called "collateral damage," but the U.S. used encryption on the guidance systems to ensure that the Colombians used them against approved targets. When the Colombians showed that they were reliably using them they were provided with full access in 2010.)
This covert assistance coupled with the publicly acknowledged Plan Colombia assistance, in turn, has helped the Colombian government to re-gain large swathes of territory from the rebels, to work with locals to assuage grievances and to drastically reduce the numbers of kidnappings, homicides, and the hectare area of coca plant cultivation.
This type of intervention is generally referred to under the rubric of the "indirect approach" – although such approaches are highly scalable in terms of the commitment put forward. The assistance in Colombia is probably more rightly described as an "indirect indirect approach" because U.S. troops weren't directly engaged in the fighting. Such a mode of operation stands in stark contrast to the large commitments of personnel and materiel such as Iraq and Afghanistan and might be seen as the road not taken over the past decade. But is it feasible and replicable elsewhere? …
This is great news and an effective approach but you can’t ignore decades of other types of aid in getting the Colombians to this point. Just applying electronic targeting means and PGMs isn’t a panacea. If it were Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia would have been over a long ago.
The comparison of our multi-decade support to the sovereign nation of Columbia to our actions in Afghanistan is almost comical and undermines an otherwise good article. We certainly couldn’t overthrow Saddam by training his security forces to suppress the Kurds and Shia for example. Articles like this concern me because they focus on the approach and then assume it has wide applicability worldwide regardless of unique factors associated with every conflict. Approaches to achieve our ends have to be tailored based on the situation, not replicated because it may have worked in another nation. That may be the major shortcoming of our COIN doctrine, among other doctrines, since it prescribes a generic clear, hold, and build approach which is resource intensive and still hasn’t worked anywhere as of yet.
Our approach to the security issues in Columbia were probably appropriate for Columbia, but I think it is important to point out that the FARC have not been defeated (after three decades plus of conflict), and reportedly more cocaine flows out of Columbia now than prior to our major drug war successes in eliminating some of the Cartels. Nonetheless it does seem to be moving in a positive direction.
The article also focused on “our” approach, and dismissed the efforts of the Columbians which were obviously much more decisive than ours. I think if one does just a cursory read of the history there they’ll realize there are multiple factors that have influenced the situation there. Many of them we didn’t influence at all. Our collective New Year’s resolution when it comes to COIN/FID/SFA is to reduce the impact of our egos on our assessments and strive to be a better partner instead of a grandstander.
By all means study the conflict in its entirety, and add the techniques SOUTHCOM used to your toolbox and use those tools when relevant. Don’t blindly assume this is a better way to intervene with the military. Better than what to accomplish what?