Gary Hale

A strategy shift in Mexico’s drug war?

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The establishment of a paramilitary force could be the middle ground between using quasi-military forces instead of civilian police forces to confront heavily armed criminal gangs. Peña Nieto’s proposed paramilitary police force would be larger than the current federal police, numbering approximately 40,000 troops, would ostensibly increase intelligence gathering and patrols in conflict zones, and would be composed of soldiers who had already been tested during the Calderón administration. Continue Reading →

Drug cartel “Communications 101”

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Imagine a world without cell phones or the Internet and how difficult it would be to go about conducting the normal tasks of living without those devices. Now try and imagine that you are a multinational transport organization trying to move your product in a timely manner to a waiting customer and suddenly your communications are gone. How do you track your product, communicate with your drivers or know if your product was delivered? Are we describing a transport company hit by an Internet virus? Not in this case — although when it comes to communicating, the similarities are strikingly similar between a civilian shipper and a drug cartel.

Our global society has developed a deep reliance on communications devices of every kind, and that need to communicate translates into a critical dependency for the drug cartels trying to move drugs into the United States from Mexico. “Command, Communications and Control” are the three elements of a system that allows any enterprise to function effectively in a fluid environment. To remove any one of these components — especially communications — is to deny any enterprise the ability to coordinate and succeed in completing the critical aspects of their business cycle. Continue Reading →

The DEA’s unfinished business in Afghanistan

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On Friday, July 15, the first 650 U.S. troops of many more to follow began to withdraw from Afghanistan. The remaining troops are set to withdraw by 2014, according to a decision made during a NATO summit held in Lisbon in November 2010. As those uniformed troops begin heading home, approximately 75 or more analysts and agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) remain to serve as proxy war fighters in at least four forward operating bases in Konduz, Jalalabad, Kandahar and Herat. Their presence defines the “drug war” in an abstract form, given that the DEA mission is one of the relatively unknown facets of the war in Afghanistan, the battles of which are being fought in the opium fields of that country every day.

Why is the United States is investing so much in terms of DEA personnel, money and other resources into Afghanistan’s poppy fields? The answer is as simple as it is counterintuitive: terrorism. Continue Reading →