We will have to rethink doctrine and force structure to address Venezuela threat

We Guyanese must accept that the threat from Venezuela has merely been put on “pause” and it will be reignited, even if Maduro were to be replaced after next year’s election by frontrunner opposition leader Maria Corina Machado who said she prefers their Essequibo claim to be settled by the ICJ. That Essequibo is part of their territory is enshrined in their constitution Art 7 & 8 and until at a minimum that is removed, Venezuelan politicians will always exploit the issue as a low hanging fruit to garner support.

One of the reasons Maduro was willing to raise the ante to a point of actually announcing that he was annexing Essequibo was his reading that the multilateral institutions which are supposed to enforce international norms are weak and preoccupied. Venezuela has more pertinently been contemptuous of our inability to dissuade them militarily ever since we allowed them to annex Ankoko Island since 1966. In light of this reality, we have suggested we establish a military base in Essequibo to which the US forces would have access, through a defence treaty between our countries.

But we cannot only shelter under the US wing by bandwagoning: the US will pursue its own interest and this might not align precisely with ours at various times. We had suggested that the Essequibo forward base be manned by specialised troops and today I would like to expand on this option. Inter alia, we noticed that the administration has already engaged US General (rtd) Wesley Clark who consults on security and energy issues and we expect that a force to act as a deterrent to

Venezuelan aggression is on the cards.

There are several types of competitive strategies available to small states facing coercion by their stronger neighbour: denial, cost imposition, attacking their strategy and political system. We are already doing a good job of attacking Venezuela’s strategy of annexation in the ICJ and the Americans are focusing on their political system. We can now pursue denial and cost imposition strategies. As a small nation – even though we now have oil revenues buttressing our Consolidated Funds, we need to deploy our defence budget in a manner that is best suited to the theatre in which we could be engaged – and not only from Venezuela.

Because of the overwhelming size of the Venezuelan land, air and sea forces, while we should maintain our present conventional forces enlarging them to counter Venezuela is not a viable option. We will have to think outside the box to cause them to think twice before attacking us:.In a phrase, we will have to rethink doctrine and force structure. We should formulate a strategy of denial and cost imposition with the limited aim of changing Venezuela’s decision-making calculus and thus their strategic behaviour. Our Essequibo terrain favours this denial strategy since unlike Venezuela, our goal is not to occupy their territory.

We wish to point out that in several theatres across the world, from the Mid East to Afghanistan, we have examples of irregular forces that have performed credibly against much larger conventional forces with superior weaponry. I am suggesting that we augment our present conventional forces with one that is specifically selected, organized, educated, trained, equipped, and supported for “irregular” operations such as against Venezuela in our jungle terrain. Closer to home we have the irregular FARC forces in the Venezuela-Colombia border bruising the conventional Venezuelan forces and holding them off.

Such a professional irregular defence force should be comprised of as many small units that we can muster and support without the traditional hierarchal structure of conventional militaries.

As such they should be able of conducting independent and also coordinated operations with other units. Each unit should have individuals trained in specific fields like cyber, intelligence, communication, demolition etc. With Venezuela buttressing their traditional military equipment such as tanks, artillery pieces, armoured vehicles and fighter jets from Russia, our irregular force should be equipped with hardware – especially drones and in the cyber domain - that enables them to neutralize Venezuela’s conventional weapons systems and even making them completely irrelevant in our Essequibo jungles.

These forces should employ swarms of unmanned and remote-controlled platforms, stockpile and pre-position thousands of shoulder-launched antitank and antiaircraft missiles. Since we will be creating these forces in peacetime to dissuade Venezuela from launching an attack on our territory, we have the advantage of using our intelligence on Venezuelan forces to equip and deploy them most effectively.