Now, I’m not going to tell you that that’s happening directly, but the potential is there. And from my standpoint, I’ll talk very directly: From the domestic standpoint inside the United States, we don’t think it’s presently a problem. There are approximately 37,000 drug-related deaths a year …in the United States. There is a $193 billion-a-year impact [in lost productivity] on our society, but I hear nobody talking about it. Gangs [and] TOC organizations are resident in many of our cities, and we tend to think it is a problem of Mexico and Colombia, and not a problem in the United States. And I’m here to tell you: It’s a problem for the entire Western Hemisphere.

 

SOUTHCOM has a really impressive record of humanitarian relief and engagement throughout the AOR. Can you please talk a little bit about this from a long-term point of view?

Well, it is one of those areas that we’ve paid attention to obviously, just as I’ve mentioned earlier, because of the natural disaster-prone nature of the region we work in. Haiti obviously, as you mentioned earlier, was the big crisis of my time here at SOUTHCOM. It frankly was not something we expected. The last time there’d been a major earthquake in Haiti was 150 years ago. And interestingly, the best thing for me in fast-breaking events in the AOR are my travels, and I always talk about the importance of travels, is that I had been to Haiti within a month to two months prior to the earthquake, so I understood Port-au-Prince. Not well, mind you, but I at least understood the environment. So a shallow earthquake in Haiti was a pretty significant event, obviously.

The Haitian earthquake response was really an international effort to support the relief effort, but our men and women responded in a magnificent manner. 22,000-plus military men and women, 33 ships from both the U.S. military and Coast Guard, lots of aircraft and helicopters, lots of capacity. And that’s where, if you go back to my PACOM experience, that’s where that experience came in, because I understood the capability and flexibility of Navy vessels, and during the response to Haiti, we used Navy vessels in a non-traditional manner.

Interestingly enough, the only ship on the East Coast at sea when the earthquake happened was the USS Carl Vinson [CVN 70], without an air wing embarked. So, U.S. Navy-South [NAVSOUTH] and Fleet Forces Command sent her south. She picked up helicopters on the way, since that was going to be the critical need for us. They actually picked them up from Naval Air Station [NAS] Mayport, Fla., because that’s a big U.S. Navy helicopter base. So they picked the helicopters up from there, and they were operating in Haiti within three days after the earthquake struck. And so it was fortuitous that the USS Carl Vinson happened to be in the right place at the right time, because it gave us a really clear capacity right when we needed it. I also need to compliment the U.S. Transportation Command [TRANSCOM]. I cannot say enough about them, if you look at their ability to respond, put contracting vehicles into place rapidly, and get the ports open, both the airfield as well as the seaport, with Expeditionary Response Groups in conjunction with SOF airfield opening units.

I can say the same about MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti] and our ability to work with them. And you know the relationship between Gen. Ken Keen, who was our Joint Task Force-Haiti commander, and the MINUSTAH commander [Brazilian Army Maj. Gen. Floriano Peixoto Vieira Neto], who had trained with one another in Brazil prior to this whole event, [was strong]. So, I mention this because it’s important and you never know when a crisis is going to happen, and it is all the routine training and engagement opportunity that happens before a crisis that makes a difference. Now, that’s Haiti.

With what we call “MEDRETEs” [Medical Readiness Training Exercises], we have gone out and done, and continue to do, a lot of different medical engagements around the region. There are small MEDRETEs in Central America, but they can also be large ones. We treat an average of 200,000 to 300,000 citizens within Latin America on an annual basis. We get training for U.S. military personnel, and they get some medical/dental care, so that’s been a significant benefit of our engagement activity as well.

And the last thing we’ve been doing is helping build emergency operations centers and disaster response warehouses where we could equip, or the host/partner nations can put disaster response capability there. And that’s been a pretty successful engagement. For example, last year, even though there were floods within Central America, the governments used some of these facilities to take care of their own disaster response needs and not call on the U.S. military. So we think that has been a positive outcome.

The SOUTHCOM command briefing talks about giving citizens of our regional partner nations in your AOR reason to want to choose the United States as their partner in this world. How effective is that message, and do you feel like your efforts and the efforts of the people before you have started to gain traction in post-Cold War Latin America?

Well, on a military-to-military basis, we have very good relationships, and pretty open and transparent relations. Now, there are some countries where we don’t have good relationships. In Cuba, we are restricted by U.S. policy and law from engaging with the armed forces of Cuba. Venezuela has chosen not to engage with us at all, and Nicaragua has diminished their engagement with us. That said, the Nicaraguan navy is still very responsive to the counter-drug mission.

In Ecuador and Bolivia, we’ve seen a downturn. In my impression, those have been from more of a political pushback than it has been from a military-to-military standpoint. Now, that said, we see that we have a very transparent and a very open approach to our engagements in the region. And we’ll tell our partners what we can do and what we can’t do. Our goal is to make sure that when we tell you we’re going to do something, that SOUTHCOM and the U.S. deliver. And we’re there, not just to support our needs, but also to support the overall security and stability within the region.

 

What would you want to address that I didn’t ask about?

To circle back around, our military-to-military engagement program at SOUTHCOM is important. And I think the other part we ought to remember is – and you talked about this – is the interagency role of our engagement. But this goes to every regional combatant commander, and our engagement opportunities do not rely only upon the DoD budget. For Foreign Military Finance programs, IMET [International Military Education and Training], and our Global Peace-Keeping Operations initiative, all these programs rely on State Department funding – foreign assistance funding. In addition, as we work in this region, especially, law enforcement budgets are important, because, for example, the Joint Interagency Task Force South gets support from Customs and Border Protection [and] other parts of our government to include the Drug Enforcement Agency and the International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs section of the State Department. So, we cannot divorce the defense budget from the State Department, Department of Justice, or Homeland Security as the Congress goes through budget deliberations.

This interview was first published in Defense: Summer 2012 Edition.