What other COCOMS might do with conventional military forces and fairly heavy materiel support SOUTHCOM has been doing instead with programs, dialogue, and partnerships, as you were just pointing out. Is that how you want SOUTHCOM to work? And is that how you conceive it working both now and in the future?

Yeah. I mean, if I was given unlimited military resources, I wouldn’t take them. I don’t need them. I would like to have more of certain types of forces, but even then we’re only talking about a few [Navy] ships or Coast Guard cutters. I would only need a few of those – 10 or so … less. But I don’t need [Army] brigades. I don’t need Marine Expeditionary Units. I still have enough Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines that come down here in smaller detachments. You know, it’s not unusual for us to have the equivalent of a 10-man training team that might go down to Peru, and teach them – over a course of a few days or a couple of weeks – how to do sensitive site exploitation, as an example.

If I had a Christmas wish, it would be that I had more surface ships. And, by the way, I don’t need destroyers. I can do this with oilers or any kind of ship that I can realistically position to intercept drug smugglers.

And, by the way, it may be more important here than anywhere in the world, but our interagency partners, [cover] every branch of the U.S. government. I have, here at headquarters, liaison officers from the FBI, DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], and the departments of Homeland Security, Treasury, and Justice. And I talk to my Treasury guy about money laundering and how we can understand and get our arms around that as often as I talk to the military guys. So, the name of the game here is small, temporary detachments to go and work with people.

You know, we’re still assisting Colombia, but we don’t need to teach Colombia how to fight in the jungle. They’re the masters at it. They’ve been doing it for 50 years. But what they’re looking [for] now is maybe better communications and ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance], airborne ISR … [things] like that. So it’s all different [now]. But if I had a Christmas wish, it would be that I had more surface ships. And, by the way, I don’t need destroyers. I can do this with oilers or any kind of ship that I can realistically position to intercept drug smugglers.

 

You also have a very strong relationship with the State Department. What kind of State Department personnel do you have here at SOUTHCOM?

I do. I think all of the COCOMs have what’s called a POLAD, or political adviser, on their staffs. Many of them are former ambassadors. [Until recently my POLAD was] Carmen Martinez, who just retired from the State Department. She was, for sure, a strong, powerful woman who was a former ambassador with a great deal of experience down here. And they’re invaluable. Just because of my [personal] baggage of being in the Marine Corps and the military, I look at an issue differently because of where I come from intellectually. Of course the POLADs look at it from a State Department point of view. At the end of the day, those are recommendations that come to me, but they are invaluable to [help me] consider the other points of view.

 

How has the combination of the Budget Control Act and  sequestration affected your day-to-day operations at SOUTHCOM? And as a follow-up to that, what have you already had to cancel in fiscal year 2013?

I’d reference back to the issue, as far as the COCOMs go, we were getting the least because we needed the least. We were doing a great deal with very little. But, you know, you can’t do anything unless you have something. So we have had to cancel a lot of smaller events. As an example, a training exercise that we may have normally done with ships and aircraft and things like that we’re now doing as a tabletop exercise to save money. As an example, going down to teach the Paraguayan air force better maintenance procedures. Our contact team from the Air Force goes down for two weeks, or maybe a small contact team from the U.S. Marines goes to Guatemala to teach them about riverine operations and security. You see what I’m saying? I think we had something in the order of about a thousand of those [events], and we’ve cut that back to about five or six hundred. It definitely had an effect, but we’re doing all right.

 

And what does 2014 hold for you if  sequestration continues?

It’s worse. Significantly worse.

 

Someone told me yesterday, down at my Joint Task Force that deals with drugs exclusively, that it only takes about a billion dollars a year to keep the drugs flowing to the United States. So, let’s take the low number – $65 billion a year – that means $64 billion a year used for other illegal things like sex slave trafficking into our country, which is epidemic. So it’s the profits that buy off entire countries – entire governments – in some cases.

How would you describe the challenges of the narcotics threat SOUTHCOM is charged with prosecuting?

The thing is that most of the countries want us in their lives. That’s even when it comes to the militaries. Some of the places down here that maybe we don’t work so closely with, because their countries’ governments don’t want to, we still have pretty good relationships with their militaries. And that’s all a good thing. As I say, I don’t want to be in anyone’s life unless he or she wants me in their life. I’d love to travel to some of these countries, but it’s unlikely until there’s a change in, frankly, their political attitudes. But, in the meantime, we still have people go into some of these countries, and they work with us on the narcotics and things like that.

I mean, there’s only one country down here that is not that cooperative when it comes to drug interdiction. But, you know, drugs [have] such a terrible effect on much of society. And while the drugs are very, very hurtful to a society, the profits generated by drug sales in the United States are astronomical. They even affect [us] more adversely, because in the United States about 40,000 people die of drugs every year, and it costs the U.S. government something on the order of $200 billion a year in everything from health care to lost production. America has a big drug problem. It’s not going away, and I believe people who think it is are kidding themselves.

But the point is that the profits that are generated and coming out of our country are just absolutely astronomical: $65 to $80 billion a year. Someone told me yesterday, down at my Joint Task Force that deals with drugs exclusively, that it only takes about a billion dollars a year to keep the drugs flowing to the United States. So, let’s take the low number – $65 billion a year – that means $64 billion a year used for other illegal things like sex slave trafficking into our country, which is epidemic. So it’s the profits that buy off entire countries – entire governments – in some cases.

 

Talk a little about the real world successes that have happened on your watch since you took command last year. You used the example earlier of the Colombia FARC situation. That one is finally coming to a resolution.

First of all, I individually have done very little [since arriving in 2012]. Commanders come and go. They all stand on each other’s shoulders. As I always put it, if you’re smart and you are coming in, it’s kind of like a relay race. You get on the track next to the guy that has the baton and you run alongside him and you get his pace. Then he hands you the baton and he peels off. And, if you’re smart, you’ll continue running his race if it was in any way successful. And then you start to make your own adjustments as you either have successes or things aren’t going so well.

I would say since I’ve been here, I have continued, I think, virtually everything that my predecessor, Gen. Doug Fraser, started or at least passed off to me. And I suspect Doug continued most of the programs that his predecessor, Adm. Jim Stavridis, passed off to him. So, if you’re smart and you’re a commander, you make your mark, I think, by building on the successes of your predecessor, not by immediately changing direction so that everyone will remember that you were the commander and that you started this or that.

A good news story down here? You’ve got overall democracy increasing. [For example,] Colombia, where I think a lot of people in our government [believe] that we did a lot more for Colombia than we [actually] did. If you look at the charts and graphs about Colombia, they did all of the fighting by themselves. The second biggest IED [improvised explosive device] threat [area] in the world, by the way, is Colombia. When I’ve been down there, I’ve gone to their Army rehabilitation center, to their hospitals, and seen the same young kids as I saw so many times in Bethesda Naval with a missing leg – two missing legs – a missing leg and a face – young kids. And their government is doing great things, as our government is, to help their wounded warriors.

But a lot of people in the American government think we did a lot more than we did. And we did very little, even on the money side. I think that in the funding of things to deal with the FARC and the crime in Colombia, we chipped in 7 percent. They chipped in, or they paid, 93 percent. I think an awful lot of Americans, myself included before I got down here, thought that we had basically funded this thing for them.

So, Colombia’s a good-news story. Panama’s a good-news story. Peru is increasingly a good-news story, but still dealing with the SL [Sendero Luminoso]. And as I said, they’ve had some great successes [recently] out in the field against SL.

Look at Brazil. Brazil has done virtually everything on their own, but they’re the fifth- or sixth-largest economy in the world. You know, there’re no dictatorships down here to speak of anymore, with maybe the exception of the “dictatorships” of incompetence in a few countries. And let’s hope that they “look at the memo” again, and sign off on it. So, I think those are all good things. I will say that Gen. Doug Fraser started an operation to inhibit the drug flow, Operation Martillo, and that has been wildly successful, passed off to me. It will be, I think, [less] successful this year because of our lack of naval assets. But overall, it’s a continuing process of partnership and improvement.