And then one last mission area, one that I’ll say that we work very deliberately, is disaster response. Because we know we will see the hurricane season every year, we work very closely with USAID, the lead federal agency for supporting disaster responses, to prepare to respond to the aftermath of a hurricane. The more we can communicate, the more we can work with one another, the better. And we learned from our experience in Haiti that we also need to work with the U.N. and other international agencies to really be able to support our activity. Now, that said, we at SOUTHCOM are very low cost and pretty effective in how we engage. And that’s a good thing.

 

Can you talk a little bit about the real-world successes you’ve had here at SOUTHCOM since 9/11, using this form of engagement with partner nations in Latin America?

Well, the engagement with Colombia over a long period of time has been, I think, very important. Oftentimes, their success is attributed to us. But I would argue that it’s a Colombian success that we helped support.

And here’s what I mean by that: Over the last 10 years, the United States has provided $8.5 billion worth of assistance. That ranges from training, some equipping, and really working day in and day out with the Colombian armed forces, along with other parts of our government. During that same time, the Colombian Ministry of Defense has put in over $100 billion of their own money, which is a pretty significant commitment on the part of the people and the government of Colombia to their own success. We have been supportive and helpful in that fight, and we have been working on a broader basis with other parts of the U.S. government to help foster that success. And so that effort continues.

As the Colombians’ military has changed their strategy against the FARC [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia] recently, we have been very involved in helping support them in that change and their establishment of additional joint task forces. But one other thing that we don’t always see is Colombians have a lot of combat experience now, and they’ve been losing people at about the same rate, in some cases, as we have since 9/11. They’ve been losing 500 to 700 soldiers a year for the last 10 years. They’ve had 2,000 to 4,000 soldiers injured every year for the last 10 years. They have a lot of combat experience, and, as a result of that, they’re willing to share that experience. They invite our partners to train in their schools and are right now training Mexican helicopter pilots to help support Mexican anti-TOC efforts.

Colombian forces are training both the police and military with many of the partner nations in Central America. That is because of the fact that the Colombian security situation has improved, they have very capable armed forces, and they’re willing to extend their reach. So, the Colombian engagement has been very favorable for us, and the region. The fight’s not over yet. The FARC are still active. And we need to continue to support that fight until the FARC are defeated.

 

How successful have foreign internal defense (FID) missions been for SOUTHCOM over the past decade? What I got from my briefings is that this has been a successful path for SOUTHCOM.

I’ll take it beyond just FID. Our special operations forces [SOF] units have been very beneficial and helpful across the region in helping build partner nation capacity. It varies country by country, based on their commitment to sustaining those capabilities, but there has been real success. There are varying degrees of that success, and Colombia’s probably the best example in our AOR.

But our continued engagement has created an important partnership relationship throughout the region. And that applies when we talk about disaster relief in Haiti. It’s not internal defense per se, but it is the fact that we have those relationships throughout the AOR. But it’s not just SOF units that build that capacity. It is all of our other components who are engaged, working with armies, with air forces, with navies throughout the region as well. And in a lot of cases, I particularly find our navies have a very close relationship. And that’s from 50 years-plus of continuous engagement.

 

So, am I correct in saying that your view of the potential for traditional nation-to-nation conflict, at least in this region, is a low-probability event versus the daily reality of the TOC threat that you’re fighting?

In the near term, yes. Can I say that that will always be the case? Now, I’m not going to tell you that the future means that this region will not face a traditional nation-to-nation conflict. Internally it has largely reduced the potential for conflict, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t external factors that can influence that future potential as well. If you go back to Cuba, the 1962 confrontation was based on an external influence. It wasn’t an internal influence. Today though, I still don’t see that kind of conventional military threat in a manner similar to what we saw with the Soviet Union in the early days of Cuban independence.

 

How bad has the TOC problem become, and could it become genuinely dangerous for U.S. citizens, particularly in the border regions in the southern United States?

It’s a concern because the capacities the TOC organizations have outweigh, in many cases, the capacities of the governments and the militaries where the TOCs operate. And you compound that with the environmental conditions – meaning poverty, corruption, low-revenue jobs, conviction rates that aren’t high, police forces that may be corrupt – there’s an environment of impunity. And as a result of that, the potential is there for influence – whether that be via bribery or other forms of corruption.