More on a defence doctrine to dissuade Venezuela

If anyone needed convincing that Maduro’s tactic is to browbeat us in bilateral engagements rather than engaging us through international institutional mechanisms in his drive to annex Essequibo, his reaction to the visiting British patrol vessel HMS Trent should suffice. Denouncing Britain as a “decadent, rotten, exempire”, he warned them “not to mess” with Venezuelans who are “warriors”. He then deployed 5682 soldiers; 3 ocean patrol vessels; 7 missile boats; 12 Sukhoi fighter jets and Amphibious vehicles in manoeuvres off their Caribbean coast. He further demanded that Guyana rescind permission for the Trent to conduct its open sea defence training exercises with our coastguard. Maduro’s intemperate action reinforces our conviction that we have to strategically rejig our military response to make him think twice before rattling his sabres at his whims and fancies. Presently, he obviously feels there is no cost to his over the top reactions.

Last week, we suggested one option in rethinking our military doctrine and force structure: creating a professional irregular force to augment our present conventional forces with one that is specifically selected, organized, educated, trained, equipped, and supported for asymmetrical operations against Venezuela in our jungle terrain. Note that, unlike what some read into my statement, we are not suggesting our present forces be disbanded – but augmented. Coming out of WWII into the Cold War, military doctrine stressed “total defence” against a superior enemy in which conventional military activities were buttressed by civilian resilience and resistance against external aggression. In Guyana, the PNC of Forbes Burnham purported to implement a “total defence” strategy after Venezuela annexed our half of Ankoko Island in 1966 and later supported insurrectionists in the Rupununi in 1969. He expanded the GDF and GPF, launched the GNS and People’s Militia to a point where we had a military-civilian ratio of 1:35. Unfortunately, he exploited the strategy to prop up his illegal rule and further expanded the ethnic divide when he disbanded the ethnically balanced SSU formed in 1962 by the British Governor as the nucleus of the independent army. As detailed by Prof Ken Danns, he skewed recruitment in favour of African Guyanese.

To its credit, the GDF remained in the barracks after 1992, even though Burnham had explicitly announced that their support for any government other than the PNC – to which officers had to swear fealty – was up to them. The total defence strategy lapsed after 1992 even though the conventional capabilities of the GDF was maintained even as its numbers dwindled. It was revived by David Granger in 2012 in his, “National Defence: A small state in the subordinate system”, after he was elected the leader of the PNC in 2011. But even though he wrote, “Defence policy in the new century must be driven by new thinking and serious planning by competent people who recognize the changes taking place on our frontiers, he merely reiterated the old doctrine and force structure he had grown up with under Burnham’s PNC.

As president after 2015, he immediately and explicitly reiterated his vision of “total national defence” at the GDF Annual Officers Conference. He stressed “reorganization and strengthening of the GDF on five pillars: personnel, readiness, infrastructure, morale and equipment with emphasis on the Air Corps, the Coast Guard and the Engineer Corps.” In terms of personnel, while reintroducing the People’s Militia as a reserve for the GDF with 50% of its manpower, he spoke of “vertical augmentation and horizontal amalgamation” – but no change in strategy. The problem with this approach is that with our small population, even though we now have the wherewithal, we would never be able to match, and so deter, Venezuela with conventional forces. However, in the meantime, the rest of the world has also rejigged the notion of “total defence”, especially in Europe where neutral states such as Switzerland and the Baltics felt threatened by Russia after it annexed Crimea. They are already being trained by US Special Operations Forces in competitive strategies one of which I described for our circumstance, last week. This was to create an irregular force to change Venezuela’s decisionmaking calculus and consequently, their strategic behaviour. Some of the necessary infrastructural preparations would also benefit conventional forces which might even be trained to go underground when an unfavourable outcome is clear.

Finally, the new irregular force should be ethnically representative of our society, if for no other reason than we have to be as one to face the existential Venezuelan threat.