AIDING COLOMBIA’S COUNTERINSURGENCY FIGHT
to the PCHP as distinct from Colom- bia’s other counterinsurgent capabilities, including the baseline helicopter capabil- ity that it had as of 1997?
In fact, the success could be traced exclu- sively to the full augmentation of the PCHP capability: De-escalation of
the
SHARING INFORMATION COL James Barkley, left, commander of the 59th Aviation Troop Command and the South Carolina Army National Guard (ARNG) state aviation officer, explains the electronic technical manual system for the UH-60 Black Hawk to a delegation of Colombian Air Force experts during their State Partnership Program visit to McEntire Joint National Guard Base, SC, in February 19. (Air National Guard photo by SMSgt Edward Snyder, 169th Fighter Wing)
insurgency started and then produced major gains only when the Colombian military achieved asymmetric domi- nance over the insurgents. Te PCHP gave the Colombian military a sustained, world-class capability to reach any point in its country, regardless of the terrain, within an hour, on a massive scale, and then to sustain operations at that point for an unlimited period of time.
PCHP specifically to Colombia’s require- ments and future modernization plans and strategy, and based its scope on the maturity of the country’s armed forces, the existing infrastructure and the antici- pated availability of Colombian pilots and maintenance personnel.
Te PCHP was fully implemented by 2003. By the end of 2004, in the context of a new counterinsurgency strategy, the plan facilitated the achievement of asym- metric dominance by the Colombian military over an escalating insurgency by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Te Colombian gov- ernment’s capacity to govern, exercise force within the rule of law, consolidate internal sovereignty and establish control over sovereign territory grew consistently stronger from 1994 to the present. Specif- ically, the government was able to return government services to all but 10 per- cent of the country’s municipalities over
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which it had lost control because of the unabated insurgency.
Colombia’s remarkable progress over a frustrating insurgency is, in part, a case study of success in the U.S. Army’s FMS program as part of a greater, mul- tilayered recipe of progressive and incremental reforms, a transformed counterinsurgency strategy, investments, taxes to pay for additional troops and materiel, capability developments, acqui- sitions, visions and, most importantly, the Colombian people’s desire to succeed over the span of multiple presidencies.
CALCULATING FMS PAYBACK Examining the return on investment for the aid provided by the United States and the use of military assets procured by Colombia calls for a detailed look at the PCHP in the context of the political and security landscape over that period. How were these gains traceable specifically
Trough 2002, without the modernized counterinsurgency capabilities enabled by the fully implemented and resourced PCHP, the insurgency continued to esca- late unabated, to the point that Colombia lost control of more than 50 percent of its municipalities. Once the transformed and resourced counterinsurgency strat- egy came online beginning in 2002, but still absent the full force of the PCHP, Colombia halted the escalation but was not able to make any substantial gains in bringing the lost municipalities back under its control.
Te government had the legacy counter- insurgency
rotary aviation capability
from 1998 to 2004, but that alone failed to make any decisive difference on the battlefield; between 1998 and 2003, the Colombian Armed Forces had many vic- tories over the insurgents, only to lose the gains achieved once the military left the area, often remote and rugged terrain not easily traversed. It was only in 2004, with the addition of a fully developed rotary-aviation capability in the form of the PCHP, that the Colombian military achieved asymmetric dominance—the
Army AL&T Magazine October-December 2015
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