The Importance Of Mission Command Leadership In Colombia

Nowadays, the Colombian government is closing the agreements with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC. These agreements will take Colombia to a different environment where the security institutions will have to focus on problems that have a diverse nature. These challenges are going to be drug trafficking, corruption, illegal economies, criminal gangs, and Venezuelan instability, among others. The mission command philosophy, applied in all levels of planning, may have a valuable and positive input for the Colombian government, and its armed forces, to deal with these challenges. This paper will briefly describe the challenges Colombia needs to focus on, then, it will examine the goodness that the mission command leadership style has, and finally, will provide some recommendations on how this philosophy may be applied. These recommendations, will take into account some of the concepts inside the strategic thinking framework.
Today, there are three main security challenges in Colombia: drug trafficking, FARC dissent groups, and the Venezuelan crisis. This does not mean these are the only security issues. Illegal mining and criminal bands, among others, are big issues but they are all connected to drug
trafficking. Therefore, the next few paragraphs briefly describe the three main ones before analyzing the mission command.
For decades, drug trafficking has been among the top issues in Colombia and the region.
Agreements with FARC will not end the cartels and gangs that export drugs to the world. That guerrilla, had only part of this illegal business, and dissent FARC groups, which did not joined the agreements, still sustain their activities by drug trafficking. What is called by Colombian government as Criminal Bands, and other illegal organizations, base their actions on drug trafficking as well. Even when Colombia’s Army and National Police have experience on this war, the criminal organizations still smuggle drugs using sophisticated procedures. That means the war on drugs has not ended yet, and there is still much to do by Colombian armed forces to win
it.
Likewise, the dissent groups from FARC are trying to maintain their territorial control on some areas of the country. The counterinsurgency warfare adopted by the Colombian armed forces weakened FARC, and enabled the government to take this group to the table of negotiations. Nevertheless, a complete victory over the whole group was not achieved. General Ospina Ovalle, a former Colombian Army commander and current professor at The National Defense University in Washington D.C., states that “eventually the understanding of the fact that the war is unwinnable on martial terms shifts insurgent strategy to one of survival, normally peace talks.” Therefore, FARC strategy was pushed to change, and having an armed dissent group may be part of that strategy. Nevertheless, if that is not truth, it is a fact that armed FARC groups, dissent or not, are still in the country.
Furthermore, Venezuela’s situation is currently causing a crisis in the region which is affecting security in Colombia, and may become an external threat to its sovereignty as well. A large amount of refugees, smuggling, and a possible military aggression, are some of the problems the Venezuelan crisis bring to Colombia, and they are already affecting the country. The long border between Colombia and Venezuela, makes it difficult to control it, and becomes a challenge for the Colombian armed Forces to develop an effective strategy to fight all types of smuggling, illegal immigration, and other threats. Furthermore, the newly immigrants are becoming potential recruits to criminal bands in Colombia. Colombian Army knows the border, but needs to occupy this big extension of border line, which, currently, is not able to cover totally.