By Dave Anderson:
Moving large groups of armed men from their base to a distant operating area is not an easy task. This is one of the biggest challenges of standing up new armed forces; their soldiers, non-commissioned officers and platoon and company level officers may want to fight, but the organizational structure needed to get them to a fight is far more difficult to build.
Borderland Beat bears more news that some of the Mexican cartels are able to move large bodies of armed men from their bases to operational areas where they are to engage in search and destroy missions. In this case, the offensive force had poor route security and was ambushed by another cartel, but this is an indicator of complexity and organizational capacity of the cartels:
unofficial death toll for Thursday morning�s battle between rival organized criminal groups has reached 29 according to reports coming out of the Nogales, Sonora area.
residents of the neighboring towns reported a high number of pickup trucks and SUV�s traveling on the roads leading to Tubutama. By some estimates close to 100 vehicles assembled in Tubutama Wednesday night where X�s were painted on the windows and red cloths were attached to car doors and rear bumpers for identification purposes.
There are rumors that several active and former members of the Nogales police force were present in the group of armed men.
In a stand-up fight, the cartels' gunmen will lose to the Mexican military, but they don't need a stand-up fight to create an atmosphere of pervasive insecurity that can only be alleviated by cooperation with the cartels.
Wow.
ReplyDeleteWhat first world country gets to experience this sort of state collapse of monopoly of violence first, I wonder.
At the risk of sounding like a shameless self-promoter, you maye be interested in reading a piece I wrote on this subject a week ago. This post was prompted by news of a recent La Familia assault and ambush of a federal police convoy - as I mentioned in the post, the amount of sophistication attacks like this showed rival the that of this world's most dangerous insurgents. The operational capacity of these cartels is stunning. And frightening.
ReplyDelete@ Greer --- I'm always up for a good, relevant and useful blog/link whoring, as your piece is definately that.
ReplyDeleteIf you look through the Mexico tag, you'll see I've been following the drug war in Mexico for a while, and it seems cartel capacity for targetted and large-scale violence has been improving as IEDs and large scale movements of gunmen between conflict zones have been increasing in the past year.