William W. Hartzog
There is a great philosopher some of you might know named Gary McCord. He titled a book, "A Range Ball in a Box of Titlist." I know, this afternoon, what he was feeling when he wrote that.
I am a mechanic. I am not a student. I am not a philosopher or strategist or anything else about this issue. But I have spent 9 years in the business of Latin America and counternarcotics in a variety of places. I was the operations officer in JUST CAUSE, and I replaced a fellow named Marc Cisneros, whom some of you might know, as the Commander of our forces in Latin America after that. Over the rest of my military career, I have had the chance to provide forces to the border in the Task Force 6 area, and the Mexican border. I was one of the chief planners for the Haiti Operation. And I spent the last 4 years trying to project what the U.S. Army would be like in the future.
I would like to spend about 5 minutes-and I promise you I will make it as short as I can-trying to emphasize some things regarding counternarcotics operations that have not been discussed. I will try to do it at a lower level, a mechanical level, and to focus on what the Army might give to this kind of operation-this type of campaign. I am reluctant to use the word "war," because I think that is a poor word and not analogous to what we are trying to do at all.
I would like to end with a minute's worth of something we have not touched on today: to try to forecast the future; to look at what might be 10, 15 years from now in this arena; and to bring all of our minds to bear on what the land forces' role might be in a scenario that we can only dream about. So you will need to suspend judgement a little bit and jump into the crystal ball with me.
I turned over command of the forces in Latin America in 1991. We had three huge problems. What if someone had asked me, "What is inhibiting our ability to make progress in counternarcotics operations from a U.S. perspective?" The military is not the lead, nor has ever been the lead, in this operation-we have been in a support role for the entire time. I would have told them three things. First, I would have said that we do not have a long-term commitment. We do not have a long-term view. Every plan I participated in writing; every plan, indeed, that I participated in executing, was 1, 2, or 3 years. This is not a 1-, 2-, or 3-year condition. Historically, it hasn't been, and likely won't be. The second thing I would have said is that it is not very well funded. At the time, I think we had something like 3 percent of the foreign military sales budget to spend in the region at all. That has been halved and almost eradicated since. Third, I would have said that we didn't have a way of measuring whether we are doing anything or not. We can pat ourselves on the back, we can look at prices, we can look at growing things, we can take pictures, we can use hectares, we can use numbers of deaths, we can use any number of things. But we had no consensus on whether or not we were making progress.
Since that time, we have established the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). They have published a number of 10-year strategies. I think that the number of organizations within the United States that understand what those strategies are about, and the confluence of different agencies that participate in them, is growing.
The budget has increased. In 1981, for example, if you lumped all of the dollars from our budget together from all of our agencies that had anything to do with this problem, they totaled about a billion-and-a-half dollars. In 1998, if you used the same contributors, you will have about $16 billion involved in this. Is it enough? I do not know if it is enough or not. We will come back to that in a moment.
In the last several years, we have produced two different documents that try to get at orders of measurement-things that we might try, things that we can grade ourselves on, things to tell us whether or not we are making any progress. Are we winning, are we helping, or are we part of the problem, as some have alluded to today?
Well, before I talk about the land force, let us review quickly what the goals of the United States-not the military, not the land force, but the goals of the United States-are in drug control: Drug control-all drugs.
We say that we are going to educate our youth. That brings some ideas to mind. This is a generational problem. Is educating our youth once enough? The answer, obviously, is no. You might educate a youth, but you might not educate the son, grandson, or granddaughter of that same youth.
We include alcohol and tobacco in those things that we are going to call illicit drugs, at least in our policy. Is that right or not? I do not know, but it certainly stretches the horizon of what we are trying to cover. We are trying to reduce drug-related crime and drug-related violence. Is there a role for the military in that? Maybe. I will come back to that.
We are trying to reduce health and social costs. There is a tremendous correlation between drug use and ill health and drug use and crime and violence.
The two things that are most traditionally associated with land forces are shielding our borders, and doing those things outside our borders to assist our friends and our allied nations who have these problems-both in the growing and interdiction areas. These efforts attempt to eradicate or to diminish the supply. This is a supply and demand problem.
Now, when I found I was going to come here, I went to the very best folks that I could find in ONDCP and other places and had them produce for me all of the statistics because I wanted to tell you-"This is how we are doing." There are a lot of protestations and a lot of discussions. You might find these numbers I am about to give you nauseating. You might find them false. Alternatively, you might find them encouraging. I do not know.
Since 1979, the number of current users of illicit drugs in this country has declined from 25.4 million to 13.9 million, a 45 percent decline. Do you believe it? If you do, in the same time frame, our budget has gone from 1 1/2 billion to 16 1/2 billion dollars.
Second, the nation is moving away from cocaine. Current use of cocaine in the household population is down from a peak in 1985 of 5.7 million users to 1 1/2 million in 1997. At the same time, I would tell you marijuana use is increasing dramatically among the younger part of our population.
At the same time that these things have been tradi-tionally our targets, as far as the United States is concerned, use rates are coming down. Overall, heroin, in a number of different forms, is on the rise. Methamphetamines are also on the rise. They are no longer emergent drugs. They are drugs that are with us, and with us in a very large way.
We have a strategy in our nation today. Our national priorities for how we are going to combat this and reduce supply is cocaine first, heroin second, methamphetamines third, and marijuana fourth. We have regional priorities about how we are going to help in the growing and interdiction areas. Colombia is the first priority, Mexico second, Peru and Bolivia, third and fourth.
We have Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs) that give us the reason for why we are doing this. And against that whole background, since 1989, and my personal experience, the military has had a role. It is a support role. We have statutory responsibilities. We have the lead in only one thing-the detection and monitoring in the transit area of the shipment of drugs between production and our borders.
We also have a primary assist role in integrating command and control apparatus-moving information about targets back and forth. We make information available when our policies say that we can do that for our allied and partner countries.
We have the responsibility to approve and fund certain National Guard programs. And we have the responsibility to provide support on an as-needed basis to other U.S. agencies. Now, there are problems with all that, and I will get very pragmatic and very practical about it all.
We are not the lead agency. We respond to other agencies, and do it rather well. But we are not there at many of the endgames, because the endgame requires the ability to arrest. The military is not in that, has not been in it, and I would say to you, in my personal opinion, should not be involved in it. So we are in assistance to a lot of different agencies. What effect does that have on the readiness of units?
Well, you have to work hard to make the support to counternarcotics operations compatible with training for larger, hot wars. It is possible. It can be done. But it is difficult. And it is something that you have to put a lot of time and planning effort in to make it occur. Those things that I jotted down here that I have personal knowledge of and that I have been involved with during the last 10 years are things like running radars, training people how to run radars, monitoring movement of transit business. Mostly, host nation support. Mostly allied force-to-force mobile training teams and training missions. We have also provided intelligence to countries who needed it. At the same time, we have provided planning, logistical training, and manpower support to countries who needed it. We have conducted exchange programs with a number of training institutions. And in the last job that I had, one of my 26 schools, proudly, was the School of the Americas.
We are also involved in the research, development, and acquisition of different kinds of hardware and technologies that you might use in working or eradicating the drug effort. So the role of the military is in the organizational, operational, and institutional modes.
Lastly, and here is where I am going to have you suspend judgement with me. There are two ways to think about the future, in my judgement. You stand rooted in the present, understand where you are, know the conditions around you, and move cautiously and reactively into a future that comes upon you. We talked this morning about threats that we were not in front of. There is another way to change and to move forward. That is with more courage, anticipate or walk mentally out into the future, and stand on a theoretical mountain top and describe what you think might be-and then look back to where you are today and pull yourself forward. I have always preferred to try to do that. So let us walk into the future and see where we might be 10, 15, 20 years from now in this business. I will paint some parameters here, because I am both optimistic and pessimistic, as many of us are.
I think it is a sure bet that illicit drugs and the use of illicit drugs are pandemic, they are worldwide. As far as I can see into the future, they will continue to be a broad societal problem. In my judgement, this is a generational problem. It is something that cannot be cured in a short time, or done once. It is something that requires, particularly on the demand side, continuing education throughout generations.
It seems to me that there is a trend in reduction in the use of chemical, biological, and natural agents; maybe an increase in the use of purely synthetic agents.
Now, you do not have to be a Star Trek reader to admire some of the things that are written in our science fiction. But if you do read those sorts of things, you know that there are assumptions and assertions of many kinds of addictive sonic devices and other things that may not even fit the notions that we call illicit drugs today-things that we have not begun to dream about yet, synthetics.
Many of the cartels in the large drug trafficking organizations were things we all fought, understood, and plotted to work against in the early 1990s. They have fractured and broken into smaller mom-and-pop organizations. Maybe it is fair to say that we are headed toward a future in which there is a fragmented and ill-defined structure. Perhaps an analogy to "the Berlin Wall" coming down.
You can understand a diagram of families and organizations. You can target a company that runs airfields. But, if it is 16 different countries and different places run by folks who do not normally or culturally do that sort of work, you have a much more difficult case.
There seems to be a reduction in tobacco use in older age citizens, but an increase in younger age. What does that tell us? There are increases in alcohol use at all ages across-the- board. What does that tell us? What does our future landscape tell us?
We know that information is a burgeoning thing. The ability to move information bits-the digitization of our world. We can see things today, instantly, that took a week or two to see before. It took 8 to 10 hours to send a horse message of five kilometers in 1865, 1864, at Gettysburg. It took about 6 hours to send the same sort of message in World War II by telegraph. Today, we can all look at the same thing on the same screen at the same time. What do satellites have to do with overhead view and 2015 in the counter-narcotics business? We should not be afraid of technology; it is with us.
One of the things that I firmly believe is that we can spend all of the energy in doing support operations, and we should do what we can afford, to help our allied countries deal with these problems. We can do it in the air, on land, and at sea. The land part of it is mostly, in my judgement, training, intelligence collection, analysis sharing and supporting, qualifications like linguistic training, and document exploitation. Those sorts of things that have long-term benefits. "Train the trainer" still comes to mind when I think about these things.
There are some technical breakthroughs that we have to commit ourselves to, both medically and otherwise. Maybe there is a chemical of some description that is the analog to Antabuse that will tell you it is a very lousy thing to use an illicit drug. I do not know. But those are things that we can work on.
I do not know if this is our future, but I do know that there is a role for the land force in it. It is not a straightforward one. It does impact on the readiness of forces to do other things. It has to be managed carefully and, in my judgement, it cannot be avoided.
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