Lessons of Iraq Help U.S. Fight a Drug War in Honduras by Thom Shanker, New York Times.
The United States military has brought lessons from the past decade of conflict to the drug war being fought in the wilderness of Miskito Indian country, constructing this remote base camp with little public notice but with the support of the Honduran government.
Comments
When I read this I couldn't help but remember a commander in Afghanistan- one who continues to rise up through the ranks even now- respond to a pronouncement by our leadership that we would incorporate counterdrug efforts using DEA and others who had been engaged in the effort elsewhere- into our ops in Afghanistan. His comment, "Great, so now we're going to import our "hugely" successful (with much sarcasm) counterdrug strategy from South America to Afghanistan." Wonder if we could say the same with this article.
The article reads like a typical cheap public relations piece. I guess everything we do for the next 10-20 years will be based off lessons from OIF and OEF-A, although we have been doing remote base ops at a number of locations around the world as you stated for decades.
What the article didn't address, and PR article wouldn't, is if the operations are effective.
I do have to chuckle at some of the lessons we are now applying. Many of these techniques lived in doctrine long before Iraq and Afghanistan but I guess were rediscovered or relearned there. The article is describing a form of remote area operations of course appropriately adapted for the situation and conditions and drug threat in Honduras (as any good commander of Regular or Special Operations Forces will do!) This is an example from Foreign Internal Defense doctrine – the latest that it was in doctrine was in FM 3-05.202 Foreign Internal Defense 2007 (though I am not sure if it is in the latest Army or Joint FID manuals anymore.)
Remote Area Operations. Remote area operations are operations undertaken in insurgent-controlled or contested areas to establish islands of popular support for the HN government and deny support to the insurgents. They differ from consolidation operations in that they are not designed to establish permanent HN government control over the area. Remote areas may be populated by ethnic, religious, or other isolated minority groups. They may be in the interior of the HN or near border areas where major infiltration routes exist. Remote area operations normally involve the use of specially trained paramilitary or irregular forces. SF teams support remote area operations to interdict insurgent activity, destroy insurgent base areas in the remote area, and demonstrate that the HN government has not conceded control to the insurgents. They also collect and report information concerning insurgent intentions in more populated areas. In this case, SF teams advise and assist irregular HN forces operating in a manner similar to the insurgents themselves, but with access to superior CS and CSS resources.