Security Cooperation With Our Partners: More Critical Than Ever

One of the mandates of my academic center, the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, is to help educate Latin American and Caribbean partner nations about the U.S. government – a massive organization with millions of employees, hundreds of organizations, and thousands of activities going on at any one time.

To do this, one of our major annual initiatives is hosting a week-long series of lectures and breakout groups called the Washington Security and Defense Seminar (WSDS) course. This year it was my privilege to organize the event, and I was excited to learn that we had broken a new attendance record: nearly 100 participants from 19 different countries. Among the participants were ambassadors, first secretaries, political officers, and senior military attaches, many of whom have recently arrived in Washington DC for their assignments and can benefit from the political orientation. These reps serve as our immediate points of contact to our partner nations in the Western Hemisphere.  

The course serves as a "U.S. Government 401," a deep-dive into the functioning and processes of our government, with firsthand insights from the highest levels. Over the course of the five days, 21 different speakers touched on important topics like U.S. foreign policy, U.S. military strategy, the budget process, security cooperation and foreign aid, and interagency coordination.

Our speaker lineup included Dr. Hal Brands, author of American Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump (2018) and lead writer for the Commission on the National Defense Strategy for the United States; Dr. Sarah Sewall, Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights from 2014 to 2017; and Dr. Patrick Cronin, formerly a senior official at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and former Director of Research at the U.S. Institute of Peace. We also had speakers from the Department of State, the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, the U.S. Southern Command, the National Security Council, and the Joint Staff, among others.

Perhaps most importantly, the course provides the U.S. government a chance to clarify policy issues with our important partners from around the Americas and the Caribbean – a critical opportunity during a period of political uncertainty in Washington. 

Colombia: Setting the example for hybrid use of force

Last week I traveled to Colombia to conduct research for my upcoming book. The book will address how contemporary warfare requires simultaneous application of the laws of armed conflict (LOAC), criminal law, and human rights (HR) law – complex concepts with which many governments are currently struggling, including our own.  

The purpose of my visit was to understand how the Colombian military conducts training for operations against irregular or guerrilla forces within their country, including the FARC, ELN, and BACRIM. The fight against cartels and gangs has forced many Latin American governments to deploy their militaries internally to support or entirely replace the police. These battles fall into a lower category of conflict in which the Geneva Conventions and LOAC no longer apply.

This situation is increasingly common. In fact, more than 80 percent of countries in the world are not engaged in nation-to-nation conflicts, but in conflicts that are between governments and irregular forces; as such, these conflicts are not covered by LOAC. Colombia, currently working to contain five internal organized armed groups (OAG), is handling this problem by applying a hybrid solution. This is a unique solution, and Colombia offers a helpful example as a possible way forward for other governments struggling to handle this new type of warfare.

During my trip, I conducted interviews with U.S. embassy security cooperation officials, US SOF personnel, senior Colombian military (COLMIL) officers, COLMIL lawyers, academics, and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation in Colombia. At the invitation of the Colombian military, I also visited their National Training Center in Tolemaida, about 3 hours south of the capital. The Centro de Entrenamiento Nacional in Tolemaida is the center of the Colombian armed forces’ tactical and operational training. It is home to Lanceros, Special Forces, Air Assault, and Paratrooper schools, among others. The visit permitted me to understand how the law of armed conflict (LOAC) and human rights tactics are taught through the military education and training programs.

While in Tolemaida, I had a chance to observe “pistas de entrenamiento,” training protocols in which young officers and soldiers are placed in scenario-based, real-world situations that provide a practical assessment of the classroom-based theoretical education they receive. I observed seven training scenarios during my visit there. In each case, a Colombian captain and his seven soldiers are put through roleplaying exercises in order to learn how to handle themselves – and their units – in the field, while protecting human rights and reducing abuse of power.

During the scenarios, the military units interact with actors – other students who have been briefed on the situation. The actors are given instructions to “inject” certain unexpected actions or behaviors at specific moments of the scenario. Similarly, some of the soldiers in the unit are also given “injections” to test the young captain’s decision-making and ethical choices (e.g., stealing valuables off of an insurgent who has been killed in action, trying to abuse or denigrate a detainee, loitering in protected areas, etc.).

The training program was very thorough and impressive; it is because of programs like this that Colombia has been able to transform itself from a relatively unprofessional military force in the 1990s – rife with corruption, human-rights violations, and operational inefficiency – to the most developed and effective use-of-force training and education program of any military in the Western Hemisphere. Colombia’s professionalized and human-rights focused military was one reason the nation was invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in May 2018, making it the only Latin American nation in the alliance.