Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  I arrived at the sprawling military base in a suit and, in my rented car, drove up to the security gate. They checked my passport and inspected my car before waving me through and directing me to the building where the war game would be played. I didn’t know what to expect. After getting my name badge, I moved into a giant conference room, where big tables arranged into rectangles designated different groups: red cell, blue cell, gray cell. I was part of the gray cell; I was told that was an honor—it’s where the subject matter experts (SMEs, pronounced smees) are and is the cell with the most flexibility in the game; it can change roles.

  Dr. Lt. Col. Scott Crino, a Special Ops helicopter pilot with a PhD in systems engineering and movie-star good looks, explained the basics of asymmetric war gaming: identify your opponent’s center of gravity, its critical capabilities, its critical vulnerabilities, and exploit them.

  Then someone else stood up and explained the gray cell’s role: “We’re here to find less kinetic solutions.”

  Kinetic?

  “SEALs wanna kick down the door; Deltas wanna put a bullet in their brain; but CIA is telling us not to kill them until they can interrogate them—they can’t give us information if they’re dead. You’re to identify friendly tactics that are less kinetic.”

  In fact, there was nothing “friendly” about the tactics. I was a long way from teaching political theory; I was now neck-deep in the real tactics of dismantling networks of bad guys, taking away their sources of funding and community support. I stepped outside for a cigarette at the next break. By the end of the four-day game, I was scheming, disrupting, and interdicting with the best of them, and loving it. I took to asymmetric war gaming naturally: it turns out I am highly competitive and tend to think strategically to form coalitions and solutions that are not typical.

  I’d had another round of war gaming on another military base by the time I got my invitation to perfect and disseminate its practice in Latin America. The DC think tank Center for a Secure Free Society (where my friend Joe Humire works) was hosting a four-day forum led by Professor Max Manwaring, a guru in the techniques of asymmetric warfare. The intent was to fight fire with fire: gangs and drug traffickers in Guatemala use the techniques of asymmetric warfare, so the security services needed to do the same to counter them.

  FOURTH-GENERATION WARFARE: ASYMMETRIC OR “TOTAL WAR”

  In military theory, there are widely considered to be four generations of warfare. The first three generations are variations of tactics in state-on-state conflicts; the fourth is messier, encompassing state and nonstate actors, like those we observe in crime-terror pipelines and in insurgencies.

  The first generation is traditional column warfare, a gruesome affair of attrition: tightly ordered columns of soldiers face a similarly armed enemy. The one with the most survivors wins the battle. As military and weapons technology improved, this type of warfare was abandoned by the major world powers by the second half of the nineteenth century.

  Second-generation warfare still used an adherence to strict discipline in formation and uniform, but included some maneuverability and indirect fire to break stalemates. World War I is a classic example: long-range muskets with greater accuracy meant that face-to-face column-formation combat was too lethal, so it was abandoned in favor of trenches and snipers.

  Third-generation warfare seeks to bypass the enemy’s front lines, infiltrate, and attack the rear forward, cutting off supply and communications lines, disrupting command and control, and taking over cities and their surrounding territory one by one. The German blitzkrieg introduced the concept, but the Americans used similar tactics during their 2003 invasion of Iraq. Again, the tactics shifted alongside technological advancement: the cavalry morphed from an emphasis on heavy armor to one on greater speed. The development of the helicopter allowed insertions in hostile territory, and advanced missile technology allowed forces to bypass enemy defenses and strike at targets from great distances.

  This marked the turn to a new military organization that is a bit flatter (less hierarchical), with more adaptive cells. For third-generation warfare tactics to work, higher-ranking officers place greater trust in junior officers commanding subunits, who are entrusted to achieve their objectives without micromanagement from higher-ranking commanders in headquarters.

  Asymmetric warfare is the fourth generation of warfare: “4GW,” in military shorthand. It is the strategy of a successful insurgency: a smaller and militarily weaker group defeating a larger and better-equipped enemy by using alternate tools. The alternate tools include guerrilla warfare, terrorist attacks, and influence operations (IO: propaganda). The insurgents can use their smaller size to be nimble and stealthy and to hide among the people, making them difficult to target and eradicate. Influence operations include leaks, blogs, memes, fake news, social media, and using proxies to hold seminars and disseminate information that plays on people’s fears and prejudices—basically what we saw unfold in the 2016 US presidential election. When all the tools of 4GW are mobilized effectively simultaneously, the result is a superinsurgency—“total war.”

  Officially, 4GW is conflict where at least one of the participants is not a nation-state but a violent nonstate actor. The term “fourth-generation warfare” was coined by a team of American security analysts to signify the erosion of the state’s role in combat forces and the ability of the military to be the sole determinant of whether a war is won or lost: more guns will not win you the war. Fourth-generation war blurs the lines among combatants, civilians, and politics. Fourth-generation wars are typically low-intensity conflicts that are long term, involve actors across networks that are generally nonhierarchical, as they are in the networks of crime-terror pipelines, and use insurgent and guerrilla tactics, as well as terrorism and psychological warfare through media manipulation. The use of noncombatants greatly complicates tactical planning for the state’s armed forces, which is exactly one of the objectives, as 4GW is an attack on the enemy’s culture.

  The strategies and tactics of fourth-generation warfare are often used in unconventional warfare, which features battles involving terrorists, cartels, and gangs. These fights can play out as unconventional nonstate war or as unconventional intrastate war.1 In nonstate war, these various violent nonstate actors battle each other within countries and across borders, for control of what analysts like to term “ungoverned or weakly governed spaces.” Unconventional intrastate war features direct and indirect battles between the state apparatus and the violent nonstate actors: gangs, cartels, insurgents, paramilitaries, and terrorists. The enemy of the state’s goal in unconventional intrastate war (such as we see when governments battle cartels and insurgents) is to control or radically change the government, making it more compliant to the will and operations of the various nonstate actors. From a strategic level, these long conflicts are unconventional because the battle space is complicated. “[There are] no formal declarations or terminations of war; no easily identified human foe to attack and defeat; no specific geographical territory to attack and hold; no single credible government or political actor with which to deal; and no guarantee that any agreement between or among contending actors will be honored.”2 It is warfare where there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. “There are no front lines, no visible distinctions between civilian and irregular forces personnel, and no sanctuaries.”3

  The goal is to move the opponent’s “center of gravity” and force the opponent to make choices and react according to rules determined by the insurgents. The center of gravity is the core activity that gives an opponent its power. For a drug cartel, the center of gravity is the ability to make, move, and sell drugs. The critical capabilities for that center of gravity are: secure supply of raw materials, control of border crossings and transportation (including vessels), access to retail networks, means to move money, the retaining of loyal personnel, and a permissive environment with local support. Each of these capabilities has vulnerabilities that can be exploited to bring down the o
pponent—in this example, the cartel.

  Asymmetric warfare works. The mujahideen booted the Soviets out of Afghanistan; the US withdrew from Vietnam in disgrace. It took decades for both the Soviets and the Americans to heal the psychic wounds of their losses in those fourth-generation conflicts.

  Its application by terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and Daesh has modified the policy agenda and the politics themselves of Western countries. For example, up until the 2004 Madrid train bombings, perpetrated by Al Qaeda, Spain had been an ally of the US in operations in Iraq and the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Just three days after the Madrid train bombings, Spain held its regularly scheduled parliamentary elections. The conservative, pro-US government of Prime Minister José Maria Aznar was roundly defeated by the anti-US and anti–Iraq War socialists, and José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero became prime minister. Spain withdrew its thirteen hundred troops from Iraq and its security cooperation from the US.4 A well-timed terrorist attack had fractured an American-led coalition, weakening the US. Playing on the fears of citizens against their politicians is a classic asymmetric play.

  Guatemala is a hotbed of asymmetric warfare activity. It started with Central America’s pro-Communist revolutions and civil wars that started in the late 1970s and escalated through the 1980s. Guatemala borders Mexico; it is the northernmost country of Central America’s Northern Triangle: Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. The entire Northern Triangle is racked by a confluence of violence from gangs and drug traffickers, with whom the gangs sometimes collude and sometimes compete. Honduras is the main entry point for cocaine—from Colombia via Venezuela—into Central America. From there it goes overland into Mexico and across the border into the US. There are many routes, but that is one of the bigger ones, and the resulting money for violence overwhelms the security forces of those three small countries. These were also the countries of origin for the wave of unaccompanied children that swamped the US border in 2014, prompting the Obama administration to declare a humanitarian crisis.

  The gangs that are the Northern Triangle’s main nonstate violent actors grew out of civil wars that shook the region in the 1980s and that have developed into a major transnational threat. Dr. Max Manwaring has argued that the gangs have evolved across generations on an instability continuum. The first generation of gangs (basically gangsters and brigands) were focused on protecting and controlling markets through violent competition: the most violent gang won the local territory. The second generation continued using violence as an instrument of control, but branched out from local markets and linked with transnational criminal organizations. In that partnership, their violence turned toward a more ambitious target: the police and other law enforcement and security organizations they sought to incapacitate or corrupt. In the third generation, the gangs became involved in or encouraged “ethnic feuds and riots, genocide, population dislocations, and terrorism.”5 This was the environment into which Joe Humire and I and others landed in Guatemala City in late August 2012, to participate in a forum led by Dr. Max Manwaring.

  LANDING IN GUATEMALA

  From La Aurora International Airport, our little minibus drove the delegation through the streets of Guatemala City, winding amid the patchwork urban landscape that is so typical and familiar to those of us who have spent time in the poorer parts of the Western Hemisphere. We arrived at our American-style hotel: medium-sized and beige throughout.

  In the far corner of the lobby stood a man who easily betrayed himself as American Special Ops: blond, tall, preternaturally muscular, his arms crossed and his eyes obscured by black wraparound Oakley sunglasses. The corner is the preferred vantage point for special operators and spooks: no one can come up behind you and you can discreetly survey the room. I figured he was there as part of Operation Martillo, the fourteen-nation program against transnational organized crime that targets transshipment points, particularly through Central America and the Caribbean.6 As I walked past him, I resisted the urge to greet my fellow American with a warm hello. Nor did he flinch a single muscle, though his eyes undoubtedly tracked my movements.

  To board our minibus again the following morning, I had to hop over red rivulets spreading like fingers by the impulsion of the hose, the rivulets coalescing as they entered the gutter. The sidewalk was being rinsed of the blood from the previous night’s shooting. Around 1 a.m., there had been a shoot-out just outside the hotel’s front entrance—cause: unknown, but a fight over drug supplies and distribution territory was a good guess.

  Its proximity to Mexico makes Guatemala a major staging area for drugs (particularly cocaine, but also heroin), which concerns the CIA,7 as does money laundering, corruption, and the displacement of at least 258,500 people, first by internal ethnic conflict and now by cartel and gang violence. US law enforcement agencies estimate that about 84 percent of the cocaine entering the United States passes through Central America and Mexico.8

  As we rounded the corner, we saw one indication of the problem: lots of weapons, openly for sale, not just in the storefront of the gun shop but on the sidewalk. Our mood lightened as the gates opened to our venue: the libertarian Universidad Francisco Marroquín, where we would be discussing the best asymmetric strategies to counter the regional threats of gangs and cartels behaving like insurgencies.

  Central American states have been weakened by civil wars, poverty, gangs, and drug traffickers, and now an increasing number of terrorists are adding to the toxic mix of asymmetric threats in Central America’s Northern Triangle and Mexico. Major foreign terrorist organizations have come calling in Central America, renowned for its movements of migrants and drugs stretching back through a long history of brutal civil wars. Long-established drug trade networks have become very good at what they do, especially human smuggling, document forging, arms trafficking, and money laundering. Terrorists need all these skills.

  Because security has tightened at airports, with advanced screening of passenger lists provided before takeoff of a flight to the US, overland routes from Canada and Mexico are preferred. If you are a terrorist organization looking to move personnel and materials, such as weapons and bomb parts, what better option could there be than drug smuggling networks? They already hire talented people to create fake passports and fake bills of lading; they already have corrupt US customs agents on the payroll who will wave a load through. The all-important US customs agent can be corrupted with a difficult and clear choice: “plata o plomo”—silver or lead. He will either accept the bribe and provide a better life for his wife and kids, or the smuggler will find out where he lives, where his kids go to school, and threaten them.

  Experts now believe the Southwest border poses the greatest threat from terrorist networks. The strategic alliance between terrorist and criminal organizations in Central America, encompassed by an exchange of narcotics and weapons, and human smuggling operations that exist south of the US-Mexico border, increases the likelihood that terrorist operatives would be smuggled in through this route. A primary cause is the greatly heightened security for air travel post-9/11.

  As part of a strategy to constrain the international travel of terrorists, the 9/11 Commission recommended that a computer system be developed that would identify foreign travelers and check them against terrorist and criminal databases. This recommendation was realized in January 2004, when the United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US-VISIT) system began deployment at US ports of entry. US-VISIT scans the fingerprints of foreign visitors and checks them against numerous criminal and intelligence databases that include enemy combatants captured on the battlefield. Besides US-VISIT, there is also much greater scrutiny of individuals seeking a visa to travel to the United States.

  Now immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) special agents work side by side with State Department employees at strategic foreign posts, helping them screen these applicants to weed out criminals and terrorists before they board a plane to the US. This is known as “exporting the border.” Sophisticated terror
networks like Al Qaeda and Hezbollah are well aware of this practice and account for it in their operational plans; they are surely considering alternative methods of travel in order to increase their chances of success.

  Illicit human smuggling networks (so prevalent across the US-Mexico border) are of increasing importance to terrorists seeking to circumvent effective US homeland security programs. Many experts believe the same thing is happening with Al Qaeda. As both terrorist and drug trafficking organizations become more horizontally structured, they have begun to rely on each other and work together to create the crime-terror pipeline that poses such a major convergent threat to the national interest.

  The US-Mexico border is very porous; well-established human smuggling routes have brought thousands of people a year into the United States, and those running the operations have become highly skilled at what they do. A 2012 report by the United Nations titled The Globalization of Crime estimated that Mexican smugglers raked in $6.6 billion annually9 from the three million Latin Americans they took across the southern US border each year. According to Mexico’s National Institute of Migration, six out of ten migrants paid traffickers to help them cross the US border.

  Once inside the US border, the smuggled migrants sometimes become enslaved, as the criminal networks layer their profits. They not only charge the migrants for the passage, they then use them as slave labor in other businesses from which they derive profit: prostitution, sweatshops, massage parlors, karaoke bars—and construction. Many of the services we use are provided by people into whose eyes we rarely gaze, people whom the criminals see as commodities, paid for by our money. If one day we had to flee our countries or our brutal employer or spouse, we might end up like them: modern slaves. A third layer of criminal profit is added if those businesses are money-laundering operations: businesses that are fronts to disguise the illicit profits from the sales of narcotics, for example.