Later in May the Peruvian 3rd Special Forces Brigade and U.S. special operations forces cooperated in an exercise that would presage a major offensive conducted in December against 20 illicit landing strips in the Apurímac, Ene, and Mantaro river valley used by drug smugglers transporting cocaine over the borders to Bolivia and Brazil.

In July, Green Berets from the Army’s 20th Special Forces Group spent several weeks in Trinidad and Tobago, working with the local Special Naval Unit and the Special Forces Operation Detachment. That Joint Combined Exchange Training exercise, conducted as part of SOCSOUTH’s Theater Security Cooperation program, saw the Americans and their local counterparts take part in pistol and rifle instruction and small unit tactical exercises.

The training and mentoring of proxy forces across Central and Latin America in support of specialist units targeted against the narcotics cartels appears to be a never-ending campaign, but one that conforms to a minimalist, non-intrusive doctrine, with a high dependency on technology and UAVs. The objective, since the program was initiated in 1998 and escalated two years later into the $9 billion Plan Colombia military aid package, has been decapitation and disruption of the FARC guerrillas, and although the combat zone has been active for rather longer than its equivalents in Iraq and Afghanistan, the investment has begun to work. The clues were to be found in the peace talks with the FARC conducted in Havana, the announcement of a unilateral cease-fire over Christmas, and the flight of what remains of the narco-terrorist leadership to exile, mainly in Venezuela.

The conflict in Colombia, complicated by corruption and paramilitaries, has resulted in the establishment of some impressive special operations forces. Among them are the urban counterterrorist force Agrupación de Fuerzas Especiales Antiterroristas Urbanas (AFEUR), the anti-kidnapping specialists Grupos de Acción Unificada por la Libertad Personal (GAULA), and the Special Forces Brigade at the Lanceros headquarters at Tolemaida, which began to provide police academy instructor training and curriculum development to candidates from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama. In fact, more than 40 countries, not all of them in the Western Hemisphere, have received SOF “capacity-building” support from Bogotá. This policy resulted in the presence of Colombian SOF helicopter pilots at Peru’s Junin airbase, and reciprocal arrangements for Peruvian and Ecuadorian SOF at the Covenas naval facility on the Caribbean coast.

Plan Colombia may have taken rather longer to blossom than the planners envisaged, but the sheer potency of combining advanced electronic intelligence collection techniques, high-tech smart weapons, air mobility, and clandestine tactics refined in other theaters has turned dense rainforests, previously viewed as safe havens, into death-traps. What had once been the defining protection for the insurgents has been transformed into a killing ground.

Colombia remained one of the world’s largest recipients of foreign military aid, and the massive investment in the innocuously titled National Training and Police Operations Center at Los Pijaos is eloquent proof of the commitment. The 18-week Jungla commando course, often directed by U.S. or British cadres, has resulted in a large number of graduates dedicated to the destruction of concealed coca-base production plants and cocaine hydrochloride laboratories. The courses at Los Pijaos, for both local and foreign students, have created a generation of instructors with high-value target management skills, as well as the more conventional, tactical tradecraft that has finally reached critical mass and had a profound impact on the traffickers and narco-politics felt across the region.

Plan Colombia may have taken rather longer to blossom than the planners envisaged, but the sheer potency of combining advanced electronic intelligence collection techniques, high-tech smart weapons, air mobility, and clandestine tactics refined in other theaters has turned dense rainforests, previously viewed as safe havens, into death-traps. What had once been the defining protection for the insurgents has been transformed into a killing ground.

Such activity in Latin America has been coordinated from a couple of major sites in the continental United States, one of which is SOCOM’s new Wargame Center at its headquarters on MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., where in October 2013, Norwegian Forsvarets Spesialkommando troops undertook a hostage rescue exercise. MacDill hosts the International Special Operations Forces Coordination Center, which is staffed by a dozen representatives from 10 countries, a figure that was set to double.

Among allies, the greatest burden, after 10 years of continuous commitments in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, has fallen on the three British Special Air Service regiments and their associated SOF components. The casualty figures of nine during the year were a significant improvement on 44 the previous year, and 46 in 2011. But such attrition was considered unsustainable, bearing in mind the limited resources of U.K. special operations forces, and the fear was that standards would be reduced to attain the necessary replacements. Perhaps not coincidentally, the SAS’s weeklong, famously arduous selection process came under intense scrutiny in July 2013, when three territorial reserve candidates died of heat exhaustion while on an endurance march across the Brecon Beacons. Trooper Edward Maher, aged 31, and Lance Cpl. Craig John Roberts, 24, died during the march, which involved more than 90 soldiers. Cpl. James Dunsby, aged 31, died in hospital 17 days later.

The incident attracted the attention of the local coroner and the Health and Safety Executive, which required the Ministry of Defense to improve the safety of the grueling route over the notorious 2,900-foot Pen y Fan Mountain. Known as the “Fan Dance” and regarded as among the toughest in the world, those who passed were then assigned to tropical training, recently switched from Belize to Brunei.

The British experience, of taking heavy casualties combined with a marked reluctance to dilute the famously exacting standards required by the Director of Special Forces, has created a dilemma: whether to compromise capabilities in order to maintain end-strength. Few other countries have encountered the same problem, where budgetary considerations and a disproportionately large SF component within the overall military structure make the future uncertain. Either standards will drop, or deployments will diminish, thereby reducing Britain’s perceived contribution to the allied order-of-battle.

After more than a decade of unsustainable attrition, 2013 could be seen as a turning point, reflecting a reduction in front-line duties in the Middle East and a growing confidence in international SOF partnerships, especially in Africa, Latin America, and the Far East, where surrogates have gained the capacity and confidence to plan and direct relatively sophisticated counterinsurgency operations without a large scale presence of foreign advisers. Indeed, it may well be that in future years 2013, will be regarded as a milestone in the isolation of the scourges of international jihadism and jungle-based revolutionaries.

 

This article was first published in The Year in Special Operations: 2014-2015 Edition.