StrategyUnit

Introduction
Back in November, StrategyUnit wrote on the “War on Drugs” escalation in Mexico and the great danger it poses for US security:

The U.S. and its “War on Drugs” is partially the cause of the escalation of the drug war. The US and other states have escalated the war, only to encourage the development and spread of fourth generation gangs, increasing the corruption of governments - and the growing nexus of gangs and corrupt officials leading to a narco-state.
…
If Mexico slides towards Colombization, two threats will gather strength: 1) the number and strength of potential gangs that could work with groups Al-Qaida will increase; and 2) the spill over of violence and nacro-trafficking from Mexico to the southwestern U.S. states.

While Mexico isn’t Colombia yet, these major threats are more than sufficient enough for the U.S. to strongly reconsider its approach to the War on Drugs and its own domestic drug policies.

The US-Mexican Borderlands
Source: http://www.epa.gov

Follow-Up Since November 2005 Posting: Yes, things are pretty bad

Fast forward to February 2006, the headlines on what’s going on in the US-Mexican border are not encouraging:

Guns and money: U.S.-Mexico border besieged by crime, terror:

Following separate raids on Jan. 12, 26 and 27, U.S. authorities announced they had seized two homemade bombs, materials for making 33 more, military-style grenades, 26 grenade triggers, large quantities of AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles, 1,280 rounds of ammunition, silencers, machine gun assembly kits, 300 primers, bulletproof vests, police scanners, sniper scopes, narcotics and cash.

Differing views on Texas/Mexico border incursion:

The chief of the Border Patrol today urged U-S House members not to lose sight of the danger agents face each day along the Mexican border.

The situation has drawn more attention after last month’s confrontation between officers in West Texas and military-uniformed drug smugglers along the Rio Grande.

Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar says agents regularly encounter individuals hurling rocks at them from across the border, ramming their vehicles and sometimes firing at them. (Empahsis mine)

New York Times: US Cites Rise in Violence Along Border With Mexico P

Mexican criminal syndicates are stepping up their attacks on American agents patrolling the border as officials of the Homeland Security Department intensify efforts to stem the flow of immigrants and drugs into the United States, American officials said this week.

In recent months, scores of Border Patrol agents have been fired upon or pelted with large stones as well as with cloth-covered stones that have been doused with flammable liquid and set ablaze. Since October, agents have been attacked in more than 190 cases, officials said on Thursday.

ON THE BORDER: Within hours, violence claims 2 Mexican lawmen:

The police chief of a wealthy suburb of this bustling industrial city was gunned down Monday, shortly after the top police official of another northern Mexican community was kidnapped and shot dead.

Hector Ayala, chief of police for the town of San Pedro Garza Garcia, was driving in nearby Monterrey, whose sprawling metro area is Mexico’s third-largest, when a car overtook his vehicle and opened fire.

Times Online UK: Huge tunnel undermines border

Mexican officials have discovered the deepest tunnel ever gouged under the US border, equipped with electricity and ventilation and concealing two tonnes of cannabis.
The scale of the tunnel — the 21st discovered in more than four years — stunned authorities, who said that the passageway revealed the lengths to which smugglers would go to evade detection.

The underground smuggling route began near the airport in Tijuana, Mexico, and ended 2,400ft (720m) away in a warehouse in San Diego in the US, Michael Unzueta, special agent in charge of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego, said. It was unclear how long the tunnel had been in operation, he added.

The 60ft-deep (18m) tunnel had a concrete floor, electric lights that ran down one of the hard soil walls and air piped from the surface. An adult could nearly stand in the 5ft-high (1.5m) shaft. “It was like being in a cavern or a cave,” Mr Unzueta said. “It’s just huge, absolutely incredible.”

Conclusion
The instability along the US-Mexican border areas demonstrate the increasing vulnerability of a US that is no longer protected by its vast oceans nor its once-calm borders. If the narcot-gangs continue its viral infection of the US-Mexico borderlands, intertwining with terrorism and corruption, the US will have a soft and vulnerable underbelly threatened by modern, globally connected and resourceful gangs. Nation-states have difficulty adapting fighting such organizations.

Unlike other countries, such as Russia, the US is not accustomed with border instability issues, it will be challenging for the US to understand how to control it borders - a very basic act for a nation-state. Before it was simply about illegal immigration, but now the stakes are higher: narco-fueled terrorism, narco-fueled corruption, nexus between narco-gangs and Islamic terrorism and so on.

But the situation has not reached the tipping point yet, the US must act boldly and strongly reconsider its “War on Drugs” program as the only effective method to de-escalate the narco-gangs driven violence and the instability it brings.

QuickPost on QDR

Via Oxblog, comes a harsh but truthful critque of the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review) by two MIT grad students:

The Pentagon’s guide to military spending for the next four years will disappoint anyone who believes the U.S. military must adapt to a world where threats come from insurgents and terrorists rather than nation-states.
…
The Navy still gets to build seven DD(X) destroyers, at $2.5 billion apiece, even though the war on terror is not fought on the high seas. The Army keeps its Future Combat System, a $145 billion network of unproven technologies largely irrelevant to defeating insurgents.

Worse, the review recommends building 183 of the Air Force’s F-22A fighters at $165 million each. Designed to counter Soviet fighters in the 1980s, the F-22A is virtually useless in a world where countries prefer surface-to-air missiles over expensive air forces of their own. Moreover, the United States already has a large arsenal of F-15 and F-16 fighters and is building more than 2,000 new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters.

The QDR does nothing to shift funding to the services most relevant to today’s threats.

In a $440 billion budget (excluding war costs), the Army gets about 25 percent, the Air Force 33 percent, and the Navy and Marines another 33 percent. The rest goes to departmentwide operations.

If the QDR took its own analysis of threats seriously, it would reduce the Navy and Air Force’s budgets to fund the Army and Marines. Ground forces fight insurgencies and stabilize broken states like Bosnia and Haiti. If the United States ever occupied Iran, North Korea or Pakistan, these would be the forces needed to keep order.

The QDR does bless the Army’s decision to increase the number of its combat brigades from 33 to 42, but this is sleight of hand. The new brigades take soldiers from the old ones, meaning the same forces are simply spread into more units. The QDR preserves a military built to fight China or Russia, not the wars we are fighting.

While saying nothing groundbreakingly new, it succintly sums up what’s wrong with the QDR (Quadrennial Defense Review). Read it all here.

More all around QDR bashing found at Christian Science Monitor and the Council on Foreign Relations. Does anyone support the QDR?

Note: Apologies for the light posting…we’ll resume back to normal soon!

Update 01: Max Boot Joins the QDR Bashing

In today’s Christian Science Monitor, Max Boot throws in his two-cents regarding the QDR: “Needed: more troops, not high-tech gadgets“. Excerpt below:

What gives? Why is the Pentagon still throwing money into high-tech gadgets of dubious utility while ignoring the glaring imperative for more boots on the ground? Part of the answer may be politics: Big-ticket weapons have more champions on Capitol Hill than do ordinary grunts. But there also appears to be a large element of strategic miscalculation here.

For all the QDR’s genuflections toward irregular warfare, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld still seems to think that Iraq and Afghanistan are the exceptions, not the norm - that in the future we won’t need so many ground troops. The US has already paid a high price for the misguided decisions not to send enough troops to secure Iraq or to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Now, it appears, we are fated to make the same mistake on future battlefields, simply because we won’t have enough troops available.