Guerracontralas Drogas&Militares
Guerracontralas Drogas&Militares
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Strategic Studies Institute
and
U.S. Army War College Press
Geoffrey Till
September 2013
The views expressed in this report are those of the author and
do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the
Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S.
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ISBN 1-58487-591-7
iv
FOREWORD
DOUGLAS C. LOVELACE, JR.
Director
Strategic Studies Institute and
U.S. Army War College Press
v
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
vii
SUMMARY
ix
shown that this is, first of all, a clear and present danger
in that the threat is already here, rather than a threat
that might or might not materialize in the future. It
currently constitutes a threat at the individual level (in
terms of death, injury, and human misery to be mea-
sured in terms of hundreds of thousands every year),
at the national level because it undermines the fabric
of state and society, and at the level of the interna-
tional system because it destabilizes essential regions,
especially when the illicit trade in drugs becomes
aligned with other forms of threat such as inter-
national terrorism (as in the case of al-Qaeda in the
Northern Maghreb).
Because of these political, economic, and social
linkages, appropriate responses have to be holistic too,
and this returns us to the question of the contribution
that the military can make to the campaign against
the illicit drug trade and its relative cost-effectiveness
when compared to other nonmilitary responses to the
problem. While the military can do little about the
demand side of the issue (which many experts consider
key to effective control and management of the trade),
it can usefully contribute to responses to the manufac-
ture and transportation of illicit drugs ashore, in the
air, and especially afloat, since the illicit drug trade
is distinctly transnational in character. Moreover, in
many cases, the warfighting characteristics of the mili-
tary (the availability of speedy interceptors, precision
fires, surveillance systems, campaign planning skills,
and so forth) can be employed in this function without
detriment to those higher functions.
If this is accepted as the case, then U.S. Army plan-
ners, like their naval and air service counterparts, need
to seriously address the issue of how best to integrate
the requirements of these tasks with their more famil-
x
iar ones. This may be an intellectual as well as a mate-
rial issue. First, dealing with the drug problem requires
acceptance of the need to integrate the military effort
with the nonmilitary. Second, if the counterdrug effort
is the war that many claim, it is one that is likely to
last for very many years and to be resolved, or at least
managed, by attrition rather than decisive victories of
the sort to which armies have usually aspired.
xi
THE REAL “LONG WAR”:
THE ILLICIT DRUG TRADE
AND THE ROLE OF THE MILITARY
INTRODUCTION
1
argue that the Army’s greater engagement in the war
on drugs would necessarily be an “exercise in futil-
ity”2 and, second, from the argument that this mission
is already catered for sufficiently. Any further invest-
ment in times of budgetary constraint, it is argued,
would undermine the Army’s core warfighting capa-
bilities. The issue evidently demands serious thought.
This Paper will argue, first, that the scale of the
threat posed to Western security by the illicit trade in
drugs is sufficiently serious to warrant both the label
of a “war” (if with some reservations and caveats) and
the extensive involvement of the military. It will then
explore the extent, and the limitations, of the military
contribution to the war on drugs. The Paper will pres-
ent some conclusions and a review of the implica-
tions of the war on drugs for the U.S. military of the
21st century.
Introduction.
2
the state, and the international system, is useful for
helping do this.4 (See Figure 1.)
Supply Supply
Demand
(Production) (Transportation)
The Individual
The State
The System
3
The Threat to the Individual.
4
Such no go areas can become mini-states within
states, where the writ of the elected government does
not run. In 1980s Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) taxed drugs, producers,
and traffickers, and became a quasi-administration
that built schools and provided welfare programs.
Likewise, Christopher “Dudus” Coke in Jamaica took
over parts of the capital, stopped petty crime, and kept
children off the streets after 8 p.m.7 More prosaically,
even the perception of lawlessness in one part of a
country can damage the national economy by under-
cutting investment, travel, and other legal business.8
Individuals pay taxes to the state in the expecta-
tion that the state will look after them. When it fails
to do so, its entire legitimacy is imperiled. A failure
to deal with the drug threat, therefore, undercuts the
social contract that binds the individual and the state
together, and so destabilizes government. This pro-
cess is especially rapid where the drug trade leads to
the wholesale corruption of the politicians, adminis-
trators, law enforcement agencies, and legal authori-
ties of the state, for example, in South America and
West Africa.9 More insidiously, the penetration by
illegitimate business into legitimate business contami-
nates the second, while making the first harder to deal
with. In Colombia, for example, the leaders of drug
cartels took over much of the country’s cattle ranching
business for this reason and with this effect. In West
Africa, successful drug traders often choose to invest
their earnings into legitimate as well as illegitimate
business, sometimes for purely commercial reasons.
There are clear linkages between the trade in illicit
drugs and terrorism, both national and transnational.
The close association between FARC in Colombia and
the country’s traffickers is well known.10 This toxic
5
combination resulted in between 100,000 and 200,000
deaths and the emigration and displacement of over
five million people. 11 The “Shining Path” organization
in Peru (and parts of Bolivia) is similarly financed, as
is Afghanistan’s Taliban, in its case from the opium
business. Reports that al-Qaeda is increasingly seek-
ing refuge in the ungoverned spaces of Latin America
have accordingly alarmed many.12 Al-Qaeda in the
Maghreb [AQIM] appears to handle cocaine traffick-
ing from West Africa and heroin from East Africa
northwards across the Sahara, although it should be
said that many suspect its ideological commitment;
this may well be largely a legitimacy branding exer-
cise by out-and-out criminals.
A problem in one country can easily spread in a
variety of ways. One is when the trade within one
country becomes associated with the citizens of anoth-
er. The American pursuit of Jamaica’s “Mr. Coke,” for
example, derived in large measure from the estimated
24,000 drug-related killings that Mr. Coke’s alleged
associates had been responsible for over the years
within the United States itself. American foreign poli-
cy toward Central America has, for many years, been
shaped by the perceived threat of the cocaine trade
from that region. At the moment, the cost of the drug
trade for the United States is estimated to be approxi-
mately 19,000 drug-induced deaths and $160 billion a
year.13 This and other consequences constitute “a seri-
ous threat to the national security of the United States
requiring a concerted effort by all appropriate Depart-
ments and Agencies.”14
International consequences can also result from
the large-scale movement of people escaping from
the collapsed and lawless area of one country into
another neighboring country. The social challenges
6
already faced by Ecuador have been greatly exacer-
bated by the arrival of 300,000 refugees from Colom-
bia, for example. Again, Mexico’s southern neighbors
are vulnerable to Mexican drug trafficking organiza-
tions (DTOs) spreading their activities southward.15
All of these undermine the stability of particular
states as units in the system and thus may well consti-
tute a threat to U.S. security, as well as to the system
as a whole.
7
300 percent.19 Similarly, Mr. Coke is held to be respon-
sible for widespread mayhem in the United States and
is believed to be connected to the United Kingdom’s
(UK) Yardie gangs. Such activities in fragile areas
such as Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of
Southeast Asia, Oceania, and West Africa undermine
prospects for “a course towards stability and sus-
tained economic growth that will build capital, attract
foreign investment and overcome . . . current need(s)
for external assistance.”20
That West Africans and Iranians are now beginning
to penetrate the Asia-Pacific Region and Oceania21
demonstrates the increasing geographic spread of the
drug trade; and as it spreads, it corrupts, like cancer.
The sad current state of parts of Mexico reflects the
fact that the country was once a transit area through
which cocaine from Central and South America was
supplied to the United States. Local criminals saw the
benefits of participating in this traffic, especially when
the cartels first paid for their services with cocaine
rather than in cash. From the early 1990s, these Mex-
ico-based organizations evolved into “vertically inte-
grated multinational criminal groups,” with distribu-
tion arms in over 200 U.S. cities.22
Much the same now appears to be happening in
West Africa, an area, like northern Mexico, already
under economic and social challenge.23 A vicious circle
may appear in which internal conflict and the rise of
all forms of organized crime, the drug trade included,
feed off themselves, especially when either is asso-
ciated with the large-scale importation of firearms.
Sometimes, indeed, the state may even come under
the control of criminals as happened to Liberia under
Charles Taylor (1997-2003) and very nearly to Sierra
Leone under the Revolutionary United Front.
8
The destabilization of West Africa, an area from
which the United States may need to draw up to
25 percent of its oil imports within the next decade,
would have serious strategic consequences. This
oil is “sweet” (with low amounts of sulphur), pro-
duced mainly from offshore rigs, which are safer than
onshore equivalents and can be conveyed directly to
the United States without choke points en route. There
is evidence that South American cartels have moved
into West Africa to expand their markets and improve
access to Europe. There are also indications of specific
links in West and North Africa between the drug trade
and terrorists. Terrorists seem able to access the trans-
port services offered by drug and other smugglers
along the African coast and across the Mediterranean
on their way to Europe.24
Were the drug trade to create conditions in which
the security of this energy source becomes seriously
imperiled, American (and other Western) interests
would be seriously affected, hence the major invest-
ment in maritime security in the area in recent years.
For the same reason, the European Union (EU) has
become extensively involved in this area as well.25 The
drug trade creates systemic disorder most easily in
fragile states, but when it affects increasingly impor-
tant constituents of the system, such as Brazil and,
indeed, Mexico, the systemic consequences become
greater still.
Nor should the environmental consequences of
the trade be forgotten. Two grams of cocaine con-
sumed in Glasgow, Scotland, will have cost about
eight square meters of Colombian rainforest. Over 20
years, Colombia has lost some 2.2 million hectares of
rain forest to the production of cocaine and other illicit
drugs. Environmentalists and human rights groups
have concluded that settlers working for drug traffick-
9
ers have been responsible for the destruction of nearly
a fifth of the Maya biosphere rainforest in Guatemala
since 1990, some 306,000 hectares being lost between
2001-06.26 The “unrecorded tribes” of the area become
victims, too.
In short, the effects and consequences of the drug
trade are transnational and threaten the system itself,
as well as individuals and particular countries, since
the legitimate trade on which the system depends can
only be conducted in conditions of reasonable social
and political order, and it requires free and unimped-
ed access to the global commons. Transnational crime
is a systemic threat because it threatens those com-
mons. At sea, these threats include illegal fishing, peo-
ple smuggling, arms smuggling in its various forms,
piracy, terrorism, and the illicit drug trade. Although
this Paper will concentrate on the latter, it is worth
emphasizing the point that much of this may be inter-
connected. The rise of piracy off Somalia is due mainly
to the breakdown in order in that unhappy country, to
the illegal dumping of poisonous wastes in the coun-
try’s waters, and to illegal fishing. The combination of
these crimes have added up to the loss of some $300
million per year, which has ruined the Somali fish-
ing community, thereby forcing the fishermen to seek
other forms of livelihood. Unsurprisingly, the huge
profits to be made from piracy have attracted many
of these dispossessed fishermen, and their success has
drawn in many others, further eroding good order
within the state and damaging the international trade
upon which the system depends. There are, moreover,
often real links between the illicit trade in drugs and
other threats against the system, most obviously its
role as a source of finance for terrorism.
10
The interconnections between drug traffickers and
other criminals and their potentially serious strategic
effects is well illustrated by the 2010 hijacking of two
Chinese vessels and the brutal murder of their crews
in the upper reaches of the Mekong River in the so-
called drug Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia. Gangs
from disaffected ethnic groups in the region, whose
normal modus operandi was largely to extort money
from all passing traffic, had evidently decided to seize
the vessels and their cargoes, mainly in order to trans-
port a large amount of drugs downriver, in the expec-
tation of much higher rewards. The ferocious reaction
of the Chinese population to these murders caused a
major diplomatic row between China and Thailand
and the suspension of all marine traffic on the river.
It resulted in significant Chinese involvement in the
policing of the river, and the successful extradition of
the perpetrators from Laos (where the crimes were
actually committed) constituted a major strategic step
forward for the Chinese in their bid to strengthen their
position in Southeast Asia.27
11
Moreover, as argued later, there is considerable evi-
dence that terrorist groups are resorting to drug traf-
ficking as a means of raising income and, in some
cases, of sapping the strength of their adversaries.
Arab penetrations into Central/South America can be
seen as revenue raisers for Hamas and Hezbollah, for
example. From this perspective, the drug campaign
can also be regarded as an indirect defense against
terrorism.28
Nonetheless, some dismiss the easy analogy of the
anti-drug effort as a campaign, or even a war, as a mis-
leading and unhelpful one, not least because it only
seems to relate to the supply side of the drug prob-
lem and risks fatally neglecting the demand side of
the issue to be discussed shortly. The conclusion that
often follows is that the illicit trade in drugs should
be treated less as a problem to solve and more as a
problem to manage; less as a war to win and more as
a business model to disrupt.
Those sceptical of the war analogy tend to focus on
issues of cost effectiveness that have particular attrac-
tion at times of budgetary constraint. They argue, first,
for the decriminalization of drug possession and use;
and, second, for a strategy of controlling the supply
of drugs rather than simply seeking to stop it. Some
suggest that state authorities themselves may need
to assume responsibility for the regulated supply of
carefully monitored drugs, much as do Scandinavian
countries with the supply of alcohol.
Such critics also argue that calling the struggle
against the illicit trade in drugs a “war” may also
encourage exaggerated expectations of victory. Cer-
tainly in this complex business, it is difficult to estab-
lish the metrics by which we can tell who is winning
and who is losing because answers depend in large
measure on counterfactual assumptions about what
12
would happen if efforts to control the trade were
abandoned and partly because the performance indi-
cators are inherently so very complex. The street price
of drugs in U.S. and European cities is often used as a
performance indicator, since it tends to rise when suc-
cessful interdiction results in a lowered supply; but
there again, so do the profits of the successful DTOs—
hardly the objective of the exercise! In fact, there is
evidence that drug producers sometimes deliberately
withhold supplies themselves as a way of manipu-
lating the street price and so assuring their future
income streams.29
The U.S. Government target for interdictions is 40
percent. A level of 25 percent was apparently reached
in 2009,30 but most estimates of interception rates
in the most contested areas, the Caribbean, the East
Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Arabian Sea, are about
20-25 percent for coca-based products and 10-15 per-
cent for opium-based ones.31 As is so often the case
when measuring the effectiveness of governmental
action against global crime, statistics are important
in driving policy but remain basically insecure.32 Suc-
cessful interception rates, for example, are notoriously
difficult to measure. They depend on some initial esti-
mates of the amount imported each year. The British
Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), for
example, estimates that about 25-30 tons of cocaine
are smuggled into the UK every year; accordingly, the
seizure of 1.2 tons of Venezuelan cocaine in the con-
verted luxury cruiser Louise in August 2011 was said
to have accounted for 4 percent of the annual total.33
But the validity of this metric depends on the accuracy
of the initial estimate. The problem is aggravated by
the fact that many enforcement agencies, especially in
West Africa, do not even try to keep reliable statistics
of their interception rates.34
13
Moreover, it should be remembered that the sei-
zure of products in transit is only one indicator of
success, if the most obvious. More important in many
ways might be the effects of the disruption to the
DTOs’ transportation system and the extra business
costs entailed that apparently “failed” operations may
cause—but these are much harder to calculate.
But on their own, neither the difficulty of defining
success nor the necessity for a hard-headed cost-effec-
tive approach to the making and implementation of an
anti-drug strategy seem persuasive arguments against
thinking of the effort as a long war, for there have
been many conventional and unconventional military
campaigns where both have been equally true. Wars
also often include a very clear economic dimension to
them, and so the “war” analogy can easily accommo-
date the concerted focus on attacking the adversary’s
business model advocated by many experts in the
counternarcotics field.
To conclude, the analogy of the struggle against
the trade in illicit drugs as a war does seem, despite its
critics, a reasonable one, not least because of its impor-
tance, given the scale of threat it represents to the
world’s peace and prosperity, through, first, the drug
trade’s association with internal conflict and regional
instability;35 and, second, due to the very high prob-
ability that the world’s militaries will be significantly
involved in it for the foreseeable future.
One of the clear reasons for this is the conclusion
of many experts and three-quarters of the American
respondents to a recent poll that the United States is
losing its war on drugs. This conclusion has resonated
across the world. The scale and nature of the drug
problem may vary from place to place and from time
to time but remains substantial.
14
While estimates differ widely, the UN Office on
Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2010 Drug Report esti-
mated that there are up to 250 million people access-
ing illegal narcotics, some 16-38 million of whom are
“problem users.” The report also estimates there are
approximately 21 million users of heroin, morphine,
and opium; another 19 million users of cocaine; 52
million consumers of ATS; and between 128 and 190
million cannabis users.36
However, many of the trends are moving in the
wrong direction. In 2011, opium production in Afghan-
istan, after a relatively good year in 2010 (thanks largely
to providential plant disease), rose by over 60 percent.
At the other end of the stability scale, even in tightly
regulated and efficiently run Singapore, the Counter
Narcotics Bureau had to report that increases in the
seizure of heroin, cannabis, methamphetamines, and
nimetazepam ranged from 3 percent to a staggering
856 percent. The estimated market value of seizures in
the first half of 2010 was S$5.9 million, and increased to
S$7.7 million in 2011. There was a 20 percent increase
in the number of abusers arrested, which was particu-
larly worrisome in that the biggest increase was in the
hard-core methamphetamine abusers, characteristic
of the region, but especially in Thailand and the Phil-
ippines.37 In its 2012 report, UNODC predicted a 25
percent rise in illicit drug users by 2050.38
The general picture, then, is not an encouraging
one; if it is, indeed, a “war,” victory is not in sight.
Illegal activity on such a scale can hardly fail not to
endanger the world’s peace and prosperity for pro-
ducer communities, emerging transit areas, and con-
sumer societies. Clearly, then, given its characteristics
and advantages, the military will have to engage seri-
ously in the business of tackling the problem.
15
THE MILITARY CONTRIBUTION
TO THE WAR ON DRUGS
16
by keeping it just for recreational use, but a significant
minority are capable of neither. Pushing the positive,
as well as attacking the negative, would seem to be an
important part of such a strategy.
The UNODC concludes that “International drug
control efforts cannot be successful in the long term
without continuous efforts to reduce illicit drug
demand.” Accordingly, it is a keen advocate of pre-
vention through persuasion and, where necessary,
mass reeducation and rehabilitation through such
initiatives as the Global Youth Network. It makes the
point that these methods often prove cheaper and
more effective in prevention than prosecution and
incarceration.40
A complementary strand to a strategy of preven-
tion and demand reduction is directed less at reducing
demand and more at the profits of meeting it. Here,
the focus is on reducing the profits of the supplier.
Instead of regarding the campaign against the trade
in illicit drugs as a “war,” this approach derives from
the analogy of attacking it as a business. Decriminal-
izing drug use, if not drug supply, it is argued, would
reduce the glamour of the drug habit and, less prob-
ably, demand. More importantly, it would also reduce
the profits made by the cartels, and this, in turn, might
reduce demand.41 Thus Portugal’s cautious venture
into decriminalization of the possession of drugs for
personal use, which has apparently reduced prob-
lematic drug use, has attracted interest elsewhere in
Europe.42 Indeed, the trend toward partial decrimi-
nalization as a significant contribution to winning
the war on drugs appears to be gaining momentum
elsewhere, too.43
The notion that supplying and taking drugs are
inherently immoral and should be banned is, in fact,
17
comparatively recent. Drug use, in various forms,
was not regarded as illegal until relatively recently,
even in Europe. References to the availability of opi-
um were frequent in the advertisements of European
newspapers well into the 20th century, and opium-
based products were freely available. In Singapore
and Malaysia, moreover, the government only banned
the sale of opium in 1946.44 Historically, drug-taking
has not been regarded as a criminal act, and there are
many who advocate a return to this position.
Jeffery A. Miron, an economist from Harvard, adds
the hard-headed point that decriminalization would
inject the equivalent of $76.8 billion into the U.S. econ-
omy, through savings from the $44.1 billion currently
spent on enforcement, plus an estimated $32.7 billion
to be derived from a tax regime sufficiently low to dis-
courage unsustainable smuggling.45
Treating drugs as simply another commodity that
needs to be regulated like cigarettes or alcohol rath-
er than banned raises a number of moral and social
issues that are beyond the scope of this Paper. Suffice
it to say here that, according to many studies, many
of the common drugs are not as harmful, when used
recreationally, as either cigarettes or alcohol.46 Social
factors raise other related and legitimate issues. Evo
Morales of Bolivia, for example, has argued that coca-
chewing is an intrinsic and traditional part of the cul-
ture of many in Bolivia, and so justifies growing the
crop. Allegedly for this reason, Bolivia has withdrawn
from the UN Drug Convention since it does not allow
this exception.47 Peru, the main source of coca leaf, has
61,000 hectares under cultivation, traditionally used in
food, tea, and indigenous native ceremonies. Plans to
eradicate it, according to Geronimo Villogas, a lawyer
for the Association of Coca Growers, are just “a witch
18
hunt against coca growers.”48 Much the same could
be said about the cultivation and use of kat in Yemen
and elsewhere.
The conclusion that might well be drawn from this
is that perhaps selective decriminalization, together
with the kind of campaign of dissuasion that has so
reduced levels of smoking in Europe, has an impor-
tant part to play in the campaign against the trade
in illicit drugs. Redefining the nature of the product,
would, its supporters claim, helpfully shift the cam-
paign from the trade in illicit drugs to the illicit trade
in drugs, a potentially quite significant difference.
Nor does this appear to be a hopeless quest. The use
of illicit drugs across much of the UK, for example,
has been steadily falling over the past decade as it falls
“out of fashion.”49
Three things emerge from this: First, nuanced poli-
cies of this sort are, indeed, quite hard to reconcile
with the analogy of a war on drugs. Second, sensitive
and effective regulatory policies are only possible in
stable, well-governed societies. Third, decriminaliz-
ing the use, if not the supply, of drugs is very unlikely
to reduce the need for monitoring and regulation, and
for the continued prosecution of the illicit produc-
tion and supply of harmful drugs. The use of alcohol
and cigarettes remains legal in most countries, but
for all that, criminal organizations still seek to profit
from their illicit supply and so support their contin-
ued regulation.50 Partial decriminalization, in short,
is neither generally claimed to be a single answer to
the problem, nor to make the attack on the production
and transportation of illicit drugs unnecessary.
The mere fact that such opinions exist, whether
they are right or wrong, means that attitudes toward
the consumption and, indeed, production of drugs
19
vary widely within individual countries and between
them. Some authorities have much more relaxed atti-
tudes than others. The result is a singular lack of uni-
formity of view about the correct response to the prob-
lem. Moreover, and with this we begin to move into
systemic considerations, nimble DTOs will exploit the
differences in regulatory approach taken by countries
even within the same region. It is held, for example,
that the more relaxed anti-drug policies adopted in
parts of Australia have resulted in some DTOs shift-
ing their drug factories there away from the stricter
conventions applied in much of Southeast Asia.51
20
larly damaging for society as a whole. Moreover, the
military may have an important role to play in the
strategic communications aspect of the task, as will be
discussed later.
21
is claimed to have resulted in a 10-20 percent mortal-
ity level and large-scale physical displacement among
affected populations. Alienated by the consequences
of the destruction of their crops, such growers may
well turn against the government that authorized it.
These socioeconomic effects can be avoided only if
crop eradication is regarded as part of a wider policy of
investment in the rural infrastructure, which facilitates
the growing of alternative crops like wheat and cotton
in Afghanistan. Here, though, crop eradication some-
times appears to have reduced the growing acreage,
but at the price of driving the growers into the arms
of the Taliban, at least in Kandahar.52 This approach
explains why crop eradication has been more effective
in Laos and Thailand than it was in Myanmar, where
this approach initially was not taken, though now is.53
It can, moreover, be prohibitively expensive; opium
growing in Afghanistan, for example, provides about
40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product
(GDP), so filling the gap caused by successful eradica-
tion would be expensive indeed.
The socioeconomic problems of crop eradication
and the difficulties and expense of enforcement have
led some to argue that the cheapest strategy in the bid
to attack drug production would be for the govern-
ment simply to buy the product at prices the DTOs
cannot match, which would keep the product out of
their hands. The costs of this, it is argued, would be
largely, or indeed some would claim wholly, defrayed
by subsequent and consequent savings in enforce-
ment. The difficulty here is that many of these savings
would be enjoyed by the governments of consumer
countries, while the costs of eradication are borne by
those of producer countries. Making eradication work-
able may therefore require the former to subsidize the
crop eradication efforts of the latter.
22
A new problem has appeared that has particularly
bad effects on the individual (and therefore on society)
and that analytically muddies the difference between
the production and transportation sides of the sup-
ply dimension of the illicit drug trade. This is the rise
in the use and manufacture of methamphetamines
(meth), especially in the Asia-Pacific region, where
over 70 percent of meth abusers are found and more
than half of meth seizures occur. The manufacture of
meth depends on the supply of precursor chemicals
such as monomethylamine and ethyl phenyl acetate
which, in themselves, may be legitimate forms of car-
go since they are used in the production of insecticides
and cosmetics, respectively, and which are the source
of significant and perfectly legal profit to bulk manu-
facturers, especially in China and India. The conjunc-
tion of these two main centers of manufacture means
that most of the seizures in illicit precursor chemicals
for meth production have taken place in and around
East and Southeast Asia.54
Law enforcement is, however, another important
part of the bid to tackle the production and supply of
drugs. Experience shows how necessary it is to arrest
and successfully prosecute known producers. But this
is often difficult in countries where the police and the
judiciary are themselves vulnerable to bribery or phys-
ical attack55 and where the DTOs have the resources to
command the services of the best lawyers money can
buy. In 1980s Colombia, drugs producers had access
to a disproportionately high number of the total of
100,000 domestic lawyers. The result was that they
were able to exploit “excessive legality” and operate
with judicial impunity.56 As a first step, regimes need
to enact more precise regulatory statutes to deal with
such problems and appropriately empower enforce-
23
ment authorities. Sadly, this is often a painfully slow,
heavily bureaucratized and politicized process, espe-
cially in the countries that need it most.
A final and equally intractable problem in dealing
with illicit drug production is to deal with the finan-
cial infrastructure and money launderers who sup-
port the trade and often are from outside countries.
The drug trade rests on a financial network that oper-
ates regionally, if not globally. Dealing with it is not
easy for many reasons:
• the intrinsic difficulty in distinguishing between
legitimate and illegitimate transactions,
• the varying financial regimes adopted by coun-
tries around the world seeking broader com-
mercial reasons to preserve the freedom and
confidentiality of banking procedures,
• most of it is transacted on the Web,
• successful prosecutions in this area require col-
laboration at a transnational level.
24
Crop Eradication.
25
fying Police Units.60 Interestingly, the Brazilian Navy,
rather than the Army, conducted the November 2011
operation against the Rocinha favella, providing com-
mandos, helicopters, and “armor.”61 Such efforts result
in a commitment that demands sustained effort and
fighting skills beyond the delivery capacity of many
weaker states. It is particularly expensive in manpow-
er, most obviously Army manpower, and all the evi-
dence suggests that, without a sustained effort, crop
eradication often has limited and temporary effects.
Moreover, a cutback in production in a year increases
subsequent costs for the consumer and so provides
extra incentives to the grower in the following season.
Nonetheless, and for all the costs and difficulties, such
large-scale military campaigns can be successful, if
properly supported and sustained.62
Setting up a sustainable agricultural alternative
infrastructure to the production of drugs, which clear-
ly needs to be part of the package, becomes difficult,
however, when insurgents or terrorists are strong in
the growing area and can attack governmental efforts
to invest in alternate livelihoods for the growers—as
in Afghanistan. For this reason, the military may well
be needed for long-term defense of the social and
physical infrastructure required for the development
of rural economies that do not depend on the growing
of drug-related crops.
26
illegal cargoes is essentially a policing function outside
the military’s normal sphere of competence.63 More-
over, the checking of containers is invariably done in
port rather than on the high seas.
Law Enforcement.
27
tributing to the professionalization of the local army
and paramilitary force which, in fact, have to assume
responsibility for the attack on illicit drug production
within their own countries. Many armies in Africa and
Central and South America have been penetrated and
contaminated by the drug cartels and their anti-drug
efforts correspondingly undermined. Mexico provides
a particularly sad example and, in fact, shows how
very necessary is this aspect of security sector reform.
The hidden bonus of such capacity building is that the
professionalization of local armies will also provide
greater security against local social and political insta-
bility, assure optimum trading conditions, and pro-
vide protection against other forms of international
crime, particularly terrorism. It therefore constitutes
a significant, if indirect, contribution to security pro-
vided by the United States.
28
overland—and to an extent, of course, within particu-
lar countries, as well as between them. It is here that
the military comes particularly to the forefront.
The transportation of cocaine-based products from
Central and South America to their markets in the
United States and Europe is intermodal. It goes by
land, air, and sea through both the Caribbean Sea, the
Eastern Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans. About 20-30 tons
of cocaine are transported across the Caribbean every
day, for example. An alternate route comes across
the Atlantic either going straight for Spain, Ireland,
and the UK or, more recently, across on the so-called
Highway 10 to West Africa, and either overland or up
to the coast of North Africa and across the Mediter-
ranean to southern Europe.
Similarly, in Southeast Asia, illegal trafficking in
the precursor chemicals for the manufacture of meth
and other ATS is both large scale and primarily moved
by sea.68 Again, opium-based products from Afghani-
stan and elsewhere usually travel overland through
Iran to the Gulf, or to Pakistan, where they are deliv-
ered often by small dhows to Yemen, the Horn of
Africa, and the United Arab Emirates, from where it is
delivered to wider markets in the Gulf and Europe.69
This transportation system is surprisingly sophisticat-
ed, with myriads of transhipments and prearranged
pickup points designed to reduce the prospects for
successful interception by the authorities.
The sea-borne aspect of this truly global and inter-
modal transportation system is where navies and
coastguards come into their own, but they face many
difficulties in taking on this function. Nonetheless, the
length of its southern border constitutes a major prob-
lem for the United States and provides a major incen-
tive to seek the interception of illicit drugs before they
get close, and to do so at sea.
29
Challenges at Sea.
30
Third, a significant proportion of drugs are not
transported by sea at all, they go by air or by land. It
is very difficult, even for experts, to arrive at accurate
and reliable indications of the relative share of these
three modes of transportation, partly because the
DTOs vary it all the time in response to the relative
successes and failures of interception by the authori-
ties. Nonetheless, so large and so global has the trans-
port of drugs and illegal precursor chemicals become
that a large proportion of it must necessarily always
go by sea.
Fourth, even when it does go by sea, the small
physical size of the product makes detection difficult
in many cases. The amount of heroin consumed in a
year in the United States, for example, would easily fit
into one standard container, and 20 million containers
enter the country annually.
Fifth, the DTOs devote considerable ingenuity to
the task of concealing the cargoes in ships so that they
become extremely difficult to find even when inter-
cepted. Small drug-running dhows operating in the
Indian Ocean, for example, often have to be nearly
dismantled to locate their heroin or hashish. A par-
ticularly nasty device is to conceal illicit cargoes in
the primitive, hot, below-deck facilities that serve as
their toilets, and which require investigating officers
to operate in truly disgusting conditions. Dealing
with the ingenious and ever-changing concealment
of cargoes requires high levels of training and spe-
cial resources. It also depends on the extent to which
search parties are provided with rules of engagement
(ROEs) that allow “destructive search.”70
Sixth, law enforcement at sea faces a variety of spe-
cial legal constraints, even though the UN Convention
of 1988 on the Illegal Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs
31
and Psychotropic Substances provides a universal
legal framework for dealing with the illicit trade in
drugs.71 European navies are limited by the effects of
the European Convention on Human Rights, which
significantly constrain their capacities and means that
suspected drug traffickers cannot simply be handed
over for prosecution to other less constrained coun-
tries. The level of evidence required for a successful
prosecution is the same as it would be for a crime
on land, although the conditions for gathering such
evidence are often much harder. Such problems are
particularly difficult to resolve in sea areas, such as
the South and East China Seas, where jurisdiction
between coastal countries remains both disputed and
strategically sensitive.
Navies operate, moreover, under varying ROEs—
the U.S. Navy, for example, is limited by consider-
ations of posse comitatus, and so the lead is actually
taken by the U.S. Coast Guard, which will also need
to place ship-riding legal detachments on Navy war-
ships in order to arrest suspected malefactors. Other
navies have to train their generalist personnel simply
to do the best job they can. These differences in opera-
tion and rules of engagement complicate the prospects
for multinational naval cooperation.
Last, law enforcers have to be agile to keep up with
the challenges posed by the traffickers. The introduc-
tion of self-propelled semisubmersibles (SPSS), for
example, is not in itself illegal, although in some cases
these may be regarded as “ships without national-
ity”—and hence open to interception on the high seas.
For that reason, the United States has enacted a law
making the operation of submersibles a felony and is
trying to push this through the Organization of Amer-
ican States (OAS) as well—but so far, only Colombia
has followed suit.72
32
How Navies Can Help.73
Intelligence.
33
all, the aim is to gain intelligence about the controllers
of these rolling, continuous transportation systems,
rather than the poorly paid and often low grade peo-
ple actually conducting them. In all these ways, long-
term strategic intelligence is much more important
than short-term tactical intelligence about particular
shipments, and it may be well worthwhile to sacrifice
the latter in order to gain the former.
Intelligence-gathering is closely associated with
the maritime domain awareness that can be generated
through the use of MPAs, unmanned aerial vehicles
(UAVs), and surface ships.75 Submarines, perhaps
unexpectedly, are particularly valuable, as they pro-
vide special advantages in covert intelligence. For
example, in 2007, the USS Annapolis (SSN760) oper-
ating out of Cape Verde provided invaluable intel-
ligence on drugs and people smuggling activities in
the area.76 The number of overall patrol assets, their
range, and endurance are critical to success. The
resulting data needs to be processed and made avail-
able as operational intelligence to those that need it.
Navies, with their special and developing experience
in the network-central approach, have a great deal to
offer, especially when working with others. This is
partly a matter of shared technical proficiency, which
is ultimately “fixable,” and also of protocols and stan-
dard operating procedures,77 matters in which the
American tendency to over-classify everything does
not help.78 Policy divergences with coalition partners
may be rather more intractable, especially if the Unit-
ed States (or, indeed, any other external power) is sus-
pected of pursuing a unilateralist or national agenda.
The United States has, nonetheless, made impor-
tant progress in creating the Office of Global Mari-
time Situational Awareness (GMSA) to encourage
34
interagency information sharing domestically and,
to some extent, internationally. The U.S. Department
of Transportation has also set up the Maritime Safety
and Security Information System (MSSIS) to obtain
shipping intelligence, mainly through the Automatic
Identification System (AIS). This also sensitizes gov-
ernments around the world to the existence and scale
of the problem. The European Maritime Analysis and
Operations Centre-Narcotics (MOAC-N) set up in Lis-
bon, Portugal, in 2007 is another example of the same
kind of thing. It emphasizes the need to share infor-
mation, seeks to establish links with the authorities
in West Africa, and provides a command and coor-
dinating role for interdictions. The electronic track-
ing and interception in 2007 of the sloop, Dances with
Wolves, with 1,875 kg of cocaine (worth some 675 mil-
lion euros) in an operation coordinated by MAOC-N,
the UK’s Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA),
Ireland’s Joint Drugs Task Force, and the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration (DEA) are good exam-
ples of what can be achieved by this means.
Such coordination is not easy, however. Language,
the tendency to over-classify data, differing national
standard operating procedures, and institutional rival-
ries, especially over budgets, all impede the process.
Making the need to share information, rather than the
need to know it, the default setting in combined anti-
drug operations sometimes seems to threaten national
protocols and may, in some cases, compromise intel-
ligence sources and so is far from easy. Nor, given the
sad fact that some navies, coastguards, and marine
police forces are themselves vulnerable to criminal
penetration, should information sharing be automatic.
Nonetheless, most experts agree that it should be the
direction of travel.
35
Interception Assets.
36
each such submersible will normally carry at least five
tons of cocaine.
It is important to note the deterrent and disruptive
effect on the traffickers’ business model of interdiction
operations. Not infrequently, the mere appearance of
a UAV or a helicopter causes the crew of a go-fast boat
to jettison their cargo and abandon their mission at
considerable cost to the organization—a clear win for
the enforcement authorities, even if no cargoes or per-
petrators were seized, and no expensive, difficult, and
time-consuming trials are possible.80 In such circum-
stances, the number and the quality of at-sea assets
are key variables in the equation. Hence, the consider-
able efforts made by the more advanced navies and
coastguards to build capacity among smaller states
struggling with major gaps between their commit-
ments and the resources with which they have to try
to meet them. For this reason, Australia and New Zea-
land have provided patrol craft for the hard-pressed
micro-states of Oceania, and Japan and the United
States provided patrol boats to Indonesia in 2007
and 2008.81
Organization.
37
and its response to that disaster apparently reflected
that fact.82 Most other coastguards are much less well
placed. Navies, in short, are often required to act as
the main facilitator in developing and helping imple-
ment such a strategy.
What has become known as “strategic communi-
cations” are clearly an important, though often over-
looked, part of such a strategy. Sophisticated navies
first have the capacity through their electronic war-
fare capabilities to take down the communication sys-
tems of the DTOs, as the Mexican Navy has recently
demonstrated by dismantling the system on which
the Zeta cartel relied to coordinate its operations.83 In
general, much of the drug trade relies increasingly on
the Internet, so there is a clear and important counter-
narcotics strand to the battle for the cyber-commons.
All this requires an effective command and control
system and efficient data exchange between a variety
of civil and military agencies, armies, coastguards,
and navies. This, in turn, requires frequently updated
and detailed protocols to ensure effective data trans-
fer, which can be secured either by large-scale mul-
tilateral agreement or by a complementary series of
bilateral arrangements. The latter are particularly
necessary, not just in order to authorize rights of hot
pursuit and to reconcile judicial legal procedures, but
also because of the different operational priorities of
individual countries. The United States, for example,
is chiefly concerned with the Eastern Pacific routes by
which the great majority of the U.S.-bound cocaine
is transported. In the Caribbean, the U.S. focus is on
the north/south vector of the shipping routes, while
its European partners are much more concerned
about the east/west vector. The allocation of national
maritime enforcement assets naturally reflects
these priorities.
38
Despite these differences, it has proved possible
to set up the Caribbean Regional Maritime Agree-
ment (CRMA) of 2001, which, in effect, is an overarch-
ing framework for a series of bilateral relationships
between the United States and other regional actors,
drafted within the auspices of the UN Drugs Conven-
tion of 1988. The operational success of such endeavors
leans heavily on and hopes to encourage cooperation
between maritime enforcement agencies of one sort
or another. This facilitates intelligence sharing in the
region through the Regional Security System (RSS), the
Caribbean Information Sharing Network (CISN), the
U.S. Coast Guard’s Caribbean Support Tender (CST),
and Southern Command’s annual Tradewinds exer-
cise.84 The “West Coast Initiative,” launched in 2009,
is an attempt to replicate this approach in Africa.85
Combined action with other navies and coast-
guards will also depend on the spread of exper-
tise from the more experienced agencies to the less.
Hence, the need for navies/coastguards to participate
in capacity-building operations, in the provision of
equipment, or in the development of operating skills
where standards need to be raised. This may be a deli-
cate business, especially where local states are sensi-
tive about their own sovereignty or where they are
seduced by technology and decide they want sophis-
ticated information fusion centers and Command
and Control hubs rather than the workaday boarding
capabilities they more immediately need. Geography
makes capacity building especially important in some
cases. Cape Verde, at the end of Highway 10 across
the Atlantic, for example, is critical to Europe’s inter-
diction efforts and so attracts a good deal of help.86
39
Facilitative Defense Diplomacy.
40
It, and the maritime security scene generally, is an
important part of the U.S. Navy’s focused engage-
ment in the Gulf, in the Caribbean, around Africa, and
in Southeast Asia. But its success depends on political
issues much wider than a common concern about the
security implications of the illicit trade in drugs.
Putting into effect its ideas of military collabora-
tion in general, and the global maritime partnership
in particular, has become a major focus of the current
operations of the U.S. Navy. This is intended to serve
two complementary post-modern purposes. First,
it facilitates the kind of multilateral naval coopera-
tion required to defend the system against the whole
range of nontraditional threats such as drug traffick-
ing, terrorism, and piracy. Second, it offers a medium
by which the relationship between the naval powers,
both with each other and with the United States itself,
can be improved.
In this, the U.S. Navy recognizes that the range of
requirements also calls for the strongest possible inte-
gration of the naval effort with other forces of mari-
time order, particularly the U.S. Coast Guard. Often,
indeed, as both the Japanese and the Americans dis-
covered in the Straits of Malacca, coastguard forces
will provide a far more appropriate response to devel-
oping situations and thus may well be able to head off
the need for more forceful interventions later on. The
U.S. Coast Guard is a unique organization unlikely to
be replicated anywhere else; nonetheless, it has much
to offer in advice on many aspects of maritime secu-
rity that can be adopted or adapted by anyone else,
and it can make that advice available in a manner that
represents little threat to the sovereignty of others.90
By doing so, it indirectly defends the system, while
at the same time serving U.S. national interests and
contributing to the U.S. maritime outreach.
41
The U.S. Navy recognizes that the positive encour-
agement of allied participation in all manner of mari-
time operations calls for a focused, deliberate, and
intelligent maritime assault on all the things that make
this difficult at the moment. But against all this, skep-
tics point to the strategic utility that the United States
itself may derive from this kind of focused engage-
ment. Regional allies—once trained up through col-
laborative exercises, the International Military Educa-
tion and Training program (IMET), and so forth—may
act as force-multipliers, perhaps especially in an era
of relative naval decline, by eventually providing
additional resources, skill sets, and basing facilities of
various kinds. The apparently very collaborative con-
cept of a global maritime partnership may therefore
be suspected to serve the more narrow national U.S.
interests as well.
This tends to reinforce the argument that coast-
guard forces, when they are available, can be more
suitable for capacity-building and the establishment of
working cooperation than naval forces. They are gen-
erally regarded as less sensitive politically and more
focused on nontraditional security tasks.91 But with
the exception of the U.S. and Japanese Coast Guards,
few of them are as yet capable of substantial capacity-
building activities elsewhere, and most concentrate
on the policing of their own waters. Moreover, many
less developed and smaller countries cannot afford to
operate both navies and coastguards, and so the lat-
ter’s duties are usually carried out by the former.
The focus on interception at sea should not lead to
the conclusion that the attack on the delivery of illicit
drugs is a matter merely for navies and coastguards.
Just as navies (such as the Mexican and the Brazilian)
participate in the attack on the production of drugs,
42
so do armies share in the attack on their delivery.
The primary reason for this is that DTO transporta-
tion systems are intermodal. For this reason alone,
armies and air forces are necessarily also heavily, if
not as conspicuously, engaged in the mission. To
make an obvious, though often over-looked point, the
transportation of illicit drugs invariably includes
a phase in which they have been moved within
producer countries.
Moreover, DTO “go-fast” boats and submersibles
are usually built on land and operated from land bas-
es and, as such, have been shown to be vulnerable to
attack on land. Given the sheer size of the ocean space,
it indeed makes much more sense to disrupt drug
deliveries at the production end of the supply chain
on land rather than to seek to intercept them later by
sea. This also reinforces the importance of levels of
political agreement about how to deal with the prob-
lem between the U.S. Government and the countries
where drugs are produced and from which they are
exported; as well as the importance of the capacity-
building activities of all the U.S. military services, the
Army most definitely included.
Perhaps less obviously, the military generally may
be the only means of providing a counterpoint in situ-
ations where the DTOs get their message across by the
systematic intimidation of journalists, the murder of
identified bloggers, and the hanging of blood-stained
and headless corpses from freeway bridges. Over the
past decade, it is estimated that 70-80 journalists have
been killed by the cartels in Mexico alone.92 A success-
ful counternarcotics campaign depends on getting
the counternarcotics message across, and the military
may well provide a major way of doing this through a
coherent effort in strategic communications.93
43
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
FOR THE U.S. MILITARY
Supply Supply
Demand
(Production) (Transportation)
44
If they are not, particular eradication campaigns will
most likely fail, and the military contribution to them
will have been shown to be ineffective. The same kind
of consideration needs to inform assessments of the
contribution of the military to the campaigns against
the delivery of drugs.
The fact that only the most generalized and con-
ditional of verdicts can be arrived at about the impor-
tance of the military contribution to the war on drugs
simply underlines the essential point that this war is
an international and interagency one of many actors,
any of which can be crucial in particular circumstanc-
es. Even so, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, in
most circumstances, the military is likely to play a key
role in the campaign against the production and deliv-
ery of illicit drugs.
The fact that it is impossible more exactly to quan-
tify the relative importance of the military contribu-
tion to the war on drugs, either when compared to
other nonmilitary contributions to the same war or
to the relative importance of the other things that the
military could be doing with the same resources, is, of
course, a major political difficulty for those advocat-
ing a greater military focus on the problem. But this
difficulty should be alleviated if the real nature of the
war on drugs is properly understood.
Some more detailed conclusions also suggest
themselves.
A War to be Won?
45
“war” and, if for that reason alone, to justify a sub-
stantial military role in the response. The importance
of the need to address the issue of demand, however,
and the extent to which there is need to attack the trade
economically, socially, and legally perhaps justifies a
wider conception of what “war” means than we have
become used to.
46
Horses for Courses.
47
drugs becomes more manageable, for example, when
the need to do so anyway for other smuggled goods,
terrorist material, and even illegal immigrants is fac-
tored into the equation. Similarly, maritime domain
awareness (MDA) for counternarcotics also helps in
the struggle against other forms of maritime crime,
not the least piracy. British ships deployed to the
Caribbean for counternarcotics work have to be there
anyway for purposes of hurricane relief and usually
perform both roles.97 In short, actions against the trade
in illicit drugs need not and should not be disaggre-
gated from the necessity to deal with other forms of
nontraditional threats to peace and prosperity and its
costs artificially heightened thereby.
48
pins in the game was critical, since cartels without
strong leadership proved vulnerable to collapse.99
But it is important to note that this did not end the
problem; the destruction of the main cartels needed
to be exploited with a wide variety of further follow-
up activities, on a continuing and probably permanent
operational basis.100
49
military services need to accommodate themselves,
alongside their preoccupation with regional challeng-
ers in the Western Pacific and the Middle East. The
resultant choices may be particularly painful at a time
of budgetary constraint, but they cannot be avoided.
Although many of the qualities that navies can
contribute come as a kind of “free good” through
their preparations for more traditional state-centered
functions and so may partly defray the cost of setting
up or expanding specialist coastguard forces, they
nonetheless come at a cost. Counternarcotics opera-
tions imply the commitment of resources, especially
warships, that, by definition, cannot at the same time
be somewhere else doing something else. At a time
when many navies, especially in the Western world,
are facing severe resource constraints, this is a very
serious consideration.
Accordingly, and given the widening range of tra-
ditional and nontraditional requirements that navies
have to fulfill, choices have to be made and priorities
struck between counternarcotics and other roles, and
between the main geographic areas on which to con-
centrate. At a time when most Western navies are fac-
ing falling numbers of assets, in terms both of people
and platforms and, in consequence, a serious widen-
ing of the general gap between resources and commit-
ments, these will not be easy choices to make when it
comes to spending and acquisition programs. Perhaps
the real and fundamental question that navies face
and deal with is that of the extent to which counter-
narcotics operations are considered a distraction from
their real job.
The same point could be extended from warships
and other platform assets to the equipment and skill
sets needed on board. Counternarcotics operations,
50
for example, require specialist night-vision capabili-
ties, boarding capabilities, training in the search and
judicial procedures, and so forth; these, too, come at
a cost in lost investment in conventional capabilities.
These considerations apply to the Army, too, only
in greater force. The difficulty in imagining a justify-
ing scenario for full-scale high-intensity warfighting
on land in the current political and international con-
text would seem to strengthen the U.S. Army’s need to
rethink its mission priorities, given the demonstrable
dangers for U.S. security of continuing to lose the war
on drugs and an increasing expectation that an expen-
sive army ought to be able to make a material contri-
bution to success in this war. The fact that the drug
trade often flourishes in situations of conflict reinforc-
es the conclusion that military forces generally, and
navies in particular, seem increasingly likely to have
to integrate nontraditional counternarcotics strate-
gies within their more traditional range of activities,
whether they like it or not.103
If this is indeed the case, then certain obvious close-
ly related issues arise for the U.S. Army. They include:
• The need to identify the special requirements
for the conduct of the war against drugs that
are not met through existing warfighting roles
and capabilities. Intelligent investment in these
special requirements should reduce the pros-
pect of undercutting warfighting capabilities,
even at a time of budgetary constraint.
• The Army should make a virtue of necessity by
embracing the anti-drug challenge rather than
regarding it as an unwelcome distraction from
its real job, not least because at a time of strate-
gic uncertainty, there remains a debate about
what is that real job.
51
• This monograph has stressed the need for a
holistic approach to the drug problem that
goes well beyond the making of declaratory
statements. The Army’s contributions to the
war on drugs have to be sufficiently and effi-
ciently coordinated with the other services and
governmental agencies.
• The case against the militarization of the war on
drugs often implicitly assumes that the United
States is fighting this war on its own,104 but that
is far from the case. Accordingly, the U.S. Army
needs to be able to interoperate with crucial
international partners tactically and operation-
ally. The Army’s capacity-building capabilities
should be enhanced in order to narrow the gaps
with those partners and thus between resources
and commitments.
• Bearing in mind such matters as the known
deficiencies of the Mexican Army’s drug effort
and the particular interest of the cartels in
recruiting into their ranks ex-military person-
nel such as the kabiles or Special Forces of Gua-
temala,105 there is a strong case for more effort to
be devoted toward the building of sustainable
military capacity in such areas of concern.106
• The Army will need to ensure that in the after-
math of the prospective withdrawal from
Afghanistan, its institutions and doctrine are
fit for the purpose of the counternarcotics cam-
paign. The U.S. Army will need to review its
contribution to Joint Doctrine107 in these new
and developing circumstances.
• A final related issue is a conceptual one. The
“war on drugs” will be a long one, and the
notion that it will conclude in clear-cut victory
52
seems highly problematic. Instead of expect-
ing decisive victory on one axis of advance, the
Army should habituate itself to a slow attri-
tional victory on multiple fronts. For an Army
accustomed to aspire to short wars ending in
decisive victory, these may be particularly
uncomfortable thoughts. The prospect raises
the need for some fundamental consideration
about military ethos and expectation.
ENDNOTES
53
7. Steven Dudley, Walking Ghosts, New York: Routledge, 2004,
is the best analysis of FARC’s activities in Colombia. See also “Ja-
maican Premier Defies US in Battle over Drug Lord,” The Guard-
ian, May 17, 2010; “Gangster Who Sparked Jamaican Riots Tells
US Court: ‘I’m Pleading Guilty Because I Am’,” The Guardian,
September 2, 2011.
54
15. “Terror and Foreboding as Mexico’s Bloody Narcowars
Spread South,” The Guardian, June 29, 2011.
19. Dudley.
23. “US and Britain Fear Drugs Are Destabilizing West Afri-
ca,” The Guardian, December 15, 2010. The release of the Wikileaks
cables has shown the damagingly low opinion held by these two
countries of the enforcements agencies in countries such as Ghana
and Sierra Leone.
55
25. “West Africa’s ‘Cocaine Coast’,” IISS Strategic Comments,
Vol. 17, May 2011.
32. Peter Andreas and Kelly M. Greenhill, eds., Sex, Drugs and
Body Counts: The Politics of Numbers in Global Crime and Conflict,
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010.
36. UNODC, 2010 World Drug Report, New York: UN, p. 132.
56
37. BBC News, “Afghan Opium Production ‘Rises by 61%’
Compared with 2010,” CNB Drug Situation report available from
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-15254788; “Biggest Haul of
Ice Seized in Two Day Crackdown,” The StraitsTimes, November
15, 2011.
57
45. See, for example, his Jeffrey A. Miron, “The Budgetary
Implications of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States,” June
2005, available from www.prohibitioncosts.org/mironreport/.
58
tion on the grounds that the evidence has been obtained through
illegal telephone tapping.“Jamaica’s Beleaguered Leader to step
Down,” New York Times, September 25, 2011.
59
within the country. Luiz Hernandez Navarro, “A War on Drugs?
No, It Is a War on the Mexican People,” The Guardian, August 13,
2010.
70. Search parties without such rights have to repair any dam-
age or disruption their searches may have caused. This can be
extraordinarily time and resource consuming. Interview of Com-
mander K. Wynstanley, RN, August 2010.
60
75. “Brazil Unmanned Aircraft Hunt Drug Gangs,” London,
UK: UPI, July 13, 2011.
79. DEA release March 7, 2010. The expertise came from Asia.
This submarine could carry up to 10 tons of cargo and probably
cost less than a million dollars to build. “DEA: Seized Subma-
rine a Quantum Leap for Narcos,” Seatlle PI, Associated Press,
July 4, 2010.
80. The Dutch warship HMNLS Van Speik reported one such
incident. Among the drug cargo dumped was $500,000 in dollar
bills. A “go-fast” boat will normally carry 1-1.5 tons of cocaine.
Confidential interviews, 2010.
61
85. UN Press Release, July 8, 2009.
91. For instance, the time on task of U.S. Coast Guard ves-
sels in the Caribbean is typically twice as long as U.S. Navy
warships rotated there from other duties for the purpose. USCG
Intelligence.
62
by the ethnic Chinese reduces such conflict and rivalry here, too,
but the intrusion of other DTOs and more market pressure may
change this. Interviews at JIATF-W, October 2011.
63
106. Here it might well be worth investigating why some na-
vies have a consistently better anti-drug record than some armies.
“Mexican Navy Shoots Dead Brutal Drug Cartel Leader—But
Body Goes Missing,” The Guardian, October 10, 2012.
64
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE
*****
Director
Professor Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr.
Director of Research
Dr. Steven K. Metz
Author
Professor Geoffrey Till
Publications Assistant
Ms. Rita A. Rummel
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Composition
Mrs. Jennifer E. Nevil