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? …
