By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON – The convergence of crime, terrorism and
insurgency and its threat to U.S. national security is a growing concern for
the Defense Department, whose role in the fight began in the 1980s and
continues to evolve, a senior defense official said today.
William F. Wechsler, deputy assistant
secretary of defense for counternarcotics and global threats, spoke during an
irregular warfare summit sponsored by the Institute for Defense and Government
Advancement.
“The Department of Defense’s role in
this effort goes back … to the 1980s,” Wechsler said, when America was flooded
with vast amounts of cocaine coming from Colombia and across the Caribbean into
Florida.
“This was a direct invasion of our
sovereignty, of … our borders. And before the Department of Defense was asked
to [intervene], this issue was only getting worse,” he added.
At the time, 75 percent of all the
cocaine that came into the country came directly into Florida in small boats
and planes and law enforcement could do little to prevent it, Wechsler said.
Today less than 1 percent of the
nation’s illegal drugs are arriving through Florida, he said.
Part of the solution involved
establishing the Interagency Task Force South, part of U.S. Southern Command,
based at Naval Air Station Key West in Florida to conduct counter-drug
trafficking operations and to link intelligence and operations.
“As part of that process we learned a
great deal that has helped us in the current war in Afghanistan, for instance,”
Wechsler said.
Since that time, he added, the problems
of transnational organized crime have changed radically, driven by
globalization. They operate on a worldwide scale with diversified commodities
for trafficking and have changed from top-down hierarchies to network-based organizations.
“There are also a lot of new methods for
doing business,” Wechsler said. “Information technology, penetration of illicit
markets, infiltrating companies and capturing governments have really put
[transnational crime] in a different zone than it was 15 years ago.”
In 2011, President Barack Obama issued
his strategy to combat transnational organized crime. “Most importantly for the
Department of Defense it declares that transnational organized crime is a
national security threat,” Wechsler added.
The strategy, he said, also noted the
complex and in some places opaque relationships developed among criminal
organizations, terrorist groups and insurgent movements.
This means that more terrorist
organizations are using criminal mechanisms to support themselves, Wechsler
said, and more criminal organizations are using the tactics of terrorist
organizations.
“The guys in Mexico didn’t come up by
themselves with the idea of beheading someone, videotaping it and posting it on
the Internet,” Wechsler said. “They watched terrorist organizations do this and
thought, ‘What a great idea. We can apply this for our own purposes.’”
In the globalized world, he said, such
ideas move rapidly from one group to another, even if there’s no contact
between them.
Connections can now be seen between
previously unrelated criminal and terrorist organizations. An example of this, Wechsler
said, is last year’s alleged attempt by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’
Quds Force to use members of Los Zetas, Mexico’s violent criminal syndicate, to
assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.
Wechsler said James Clapper, director of
National Intelligence, recently testified that “terrorists and insurgents will
increasingly turn to crime and criminal networks for funding and logistics, in
part because of U.S. and western success in attacking other sources of their
funding. Criminal connections and activities of Hezbollah and al-Qaida in the
Islamic Maghreb illustrate this trend.”
With the exception of Afghanistan,
Wechsler said, DOD’s role in fighting this escalating threat is nearly always
in support of law enforcement or partner countries.
In Afghanistan, he added, where there is
a blending of crime, terrorism and insurgency on the battlefield, “we’ve really
come a great long way on this.”
Wechsler said such work has required
military operations, special operations, and integration with law enforcement,
along with host country initiatives, and with the State and Justice
departments.
“If one assumes we’re going to confront
these kinds of adversaries, or other countries that we’re going to support are
going to confront these adversaries, it’s a model for our military planning in
the years to come,” he said.
Another Defense Department success, he
said, is its support of Colombia’s decade-long fight against the Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia,
called the FARC.
“Colombia was in really dire straits [in
the 1990s],” Wechsler said. “The war isn’t over but the bottom line is that the
FARC is a shadow of what it was and Colombia has taken back tremendous amounts
of territory.”
That country, he added, “has gone from
being an exporter of insecurity throughout the region to being an exporter of
security and a great partner for many of its neighbors on the lessons it’s
learned and in capacity building around the world.”
Today the Defense Department is learning
from these successes, “whether we support law enforcement, whether we support a
host nation or whether we are directly involved in the fight ourselves,”
Wechsler said.
The next steps, he added, are to build
lessons learned into planning and training processes, and to “make sure we have
the right mechanisms to work collaboratively with everyone in the interagency
because in many if not most of these efforts, the Department of Defense isn’t
in the lead, we’re in support.”
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