Q&A: Rear Adm. Thomas L. Brown II
Written by Dave Ahearn
SOTECH 2012 Volume: 10 Issue: 1 (February)
SOCSOUTH Thwarts Drug Cartels,
Fosters Ties with Latin America
Rear Admiral Thomas L. Brown II
Commander
Special Operations Command South
Rear Admiral Thomas L. Brown II assumed command of Special Operations Command South in September 2010. As commander, he is responsible to the commander of U.S. Southern Command for the planning, employment and command of special operations in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Brown was commissioned from the University of New Mexico Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps in 1983. He completed underwater demolition/SEAL Training and Army airborne school prior to his assignment to SEAL Team 5 in 1984. In 1987, he studied Spanish at the Defense Learning Institute, and then reported to SEAL Team 1 to serve as platoon commander and operations officer.
Brown’s assignments include SEAL Team 8 executive officer, where he deployed as Naval Special Warfare Task Unit (NSWTU) commander NSWTU-Wasp under commander Amphibious Task Group 185.2, and then as commander NSWTU-America under Commander Task Force 60. He commanded Naval Special Warfare Unit 4, Puerto Rico, under U.S. Southern Command from 1999- 2001.
His other assignments include the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict; United States Special Operations Command, and Navy section chief, U.S, Military Advisory Group, El Salvador. In 2002, Brown reported to the Directorate of Operations of the Joint Staff, Deputy Directorate Special Operations, serving as the Global War on Terrorism branch chief until September 2005. He was then assigned as assistant chief of staff for operations and plans at Naval Special Warfare Command until June 2007, when he took command of Naval Special Warfare Group 1. He most recently served as the deputy commander of Special Operations Command Europe.
Brown graduated Tau Beta Pi with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering, and is a distinguished graduate of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of John Hopkins University, where he earned a Master of Arts in international relations with a concentration in Latin American and strategic studies. He also holds a Master of Science degree in national resource strategy and the DoD Chief Information Officer Certificate from the National Defense University.
His awards include the Defense Superior Service medal; Legion of Merit (second award); Bronze Star medal (with V); Defense Meritorious Service medal (second award); Meritorious Service medal; Joint Service Commendation medal; Navy Commendation medal (second award); Joint Service Achievement medal; Navy Marine Corps Achievement medal; Combat Action ribbon; Joint Meritorious Unit award; Meritorious Unit Commendation; Navy E ribbon; Armed Forces Expeditionary medal; Southwest Asia Service medal; Armed Forces Expeditionary medal; Humanitarian Service medal; and the NATO medal.
Q: What changes have you made in Special Operations Command South since you assumed command in September 2010?
A: The most significant change has been the reconstitution of an organizational construct we call the Regional Engagement Division, with its four subordinate branches, regional engagement branches [REBs].
When I took command, the J3 [operations department] was organized into traditional stovepipes such as the J35 [Future Ops], J37 [Civil Affairs], J33 [Current Ops], etc., along discipline or traditional staff function. This stovepiped organization was weak in its ability to apply multiple disciplines in unison to service the needs of partner nations and U.S. country teams. This industrial-age stovepiped organization was even more unwieldy as we looked outside the operations department at intelligence, communications, logistics and other non-operation department staff functions. Those disciplines were needed in our partner nation capacity building, but it was difficult to bring them to bear in J3-led efforts under the old industrial-age, stovepiped J3. I implemented a managementscience innovation to improve our support to U.S. country teams and partner nations.
In addition to serving as the focal point for integrating staff functions and disciplines, inside and outside the operations department, the REB construct has helped SOCSOUTH institute another critical principle, ownership. These four REBs are commanded by a lieutenant colonel or major, and within each REB, there are country officers responsible for two or three countries. Outcomes in those regions and countries, irrespective of the disciplines involved in a given activity there—intelligence, small unit tactics, etc.—are owned by that officer or NCO.
Today, my head logistician, Lieutenant Colonel [P] Jose Muniz, C4 department head Lieutenant Colonel Jim Urbec and senior intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Dan Tobias are nested in our regional engagement branch construct. These disciplines are being widely applied and tailored to partner-nation needs by our REB country officers. Let me explain further. Pre-REB, we articulated our efforts principally in terms of small-unit tactics training by special warfare combatant-craft crewmen, special forces and SEALs, because that was the formula answer for our joint combined exchange training and other such programs. Today, in contrast, you see the staff working across J-Codes and SOUTHCOM service components to produce higher value-added outcomes, better tailored to the needs of our customers, the U.S. country teams.
The Central American REB, for example, is teamed with U.S. Army South to put a weapons maintenance team into Honduras, or deploying intelligence professionals to teach the latest version of software intended to improve a partner’s targeting capability. Also, we’re making strides in employing the fixed investment in our 112th Signal Battalion Detachment to train partner nation special ops units on the use of tactical radios, as well as evaluating their command-control-communications infrastructure and process, as we recently did in Suriname. The REB construct has served to break down the industrial age J-code stovepipes without abolishing them. Also, the country officers have the time, charter and longevity in their country or region; therefore, they know their environment and can build long-term relationships with the country team and partner-nation security forces required to tailor our activities to their needs. This construct is moving us away from the tendency to simply put dots on the map and assume activity equals success. The REBs have engendered ownership, horizontal integration across disciplines, and incentivized outcome versus activity-centric behavior.
Q: Is demand for special operations missions in the SOCSOUTH area of responsibility rising—for training, seminars, civil affairs and all your other types of missions—and if so, how are you meeting that demand?
A: The demand for U.S. special operations in General Douglas Fraser’s [commander of Southern Command] area of responsibility, Latin America and the Caribbean, continues to be high, driven by the struggle for power, control or influence between state and non-state actors, and the utility of special operations in helping states combat dangerous non-state actors. These challenges range from Los Zetas, Sinaloa Cartel, and other organized criminal organizations undermining stability in Central America, to the 40-plus year conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] and the government of Colombia. Solutions to these irregular-warfare security challenges naturally flow from the breadth of unique capabilities resident in U.S. Special Operations Command [SOCOM].
The demand for building partner nation capacity activity is high. However, given the concentration of special forces, Air Force CCT, SEAL, and other such commando forces in the Middle East, SOCSOUTH has become much more disciplined in the application of the limited commando forces at our disposal. We’ve aligned our special forces operation detachment alphas [SF ODAs] against the most important missions in CENTAM, Peru and Colombia. We simply have less ODAs and SEAL platoons than we had pre-9/11.
In getting to your question about other than SF and SEAL engagements, I’ll speak to the demand for our military information support [MISO] and civil affairs [CA] operators and how the decrease in SF ODAs available has, in some ways, had a positive impact on our enterprise. We’ve been incentivized to work harder on the application of civil military and information operations forces in our priority countries, not solely focused on employment of SF ODAs and SEAL squads. The emphasis in fourth-generation warfare is on population, opinion and information—circumstances that do not necessarily involve closing with to capture or kill an opponent—and that means our civil affairs and information operators play an increasingly prominent role in our campaigning.
MISO and CAO are two of the six lines of operation we articulate in our campaign plan, which also includes air-ground-maritime partner force capacity building, advice to partner nations and U.S. law enforcement agencies, special activities and intellectual capital, which I will discuss later in the article.
We are employing civil affairs teams to assist our partners in contesting control over their territory and sway over their population against powerful transnational criminal organizations and insurgents. Our MISO soldiers work discretely across a wide range of activities, from disrupting narco-terrorists using the DoD rewards program to employing Ph.D. expert reach-back to help us articulate themes and messages to undermine ideological support of insurgent groups.
You mentioned seminars, and this is a very active area at the command. We’re using the term intellectual capital to refer to learning activities as a line of operation. The Naval Post Graduate School [NPS] Center for Defense Analysis, the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies [CHDS] of the National Defense University, and Joint Special Operations University [JSOU] are key partners in this line of operation. We leverage their considerable body of learning to help our partners develop innovative concepts of operations, organizational constructs and campaigns against asymmetric threats, hopefully before throwing resources at a problem, to improve our partner’s cognitive capacity for dealing with complex security challenges such as insurgency.
NPS’s Center for Defense Analysis—led by Dr. John Arquilla, with its impressive faculty including Gordon McCormick, Gunner Sepp and Hy Rothstein—represents the best thinking in the world on combating dark networks and insurgencies. They have rolled up their sleeves to assist us and the government of Colombia in the development of a state-of-the-art description of the FARC system, intended for use in guiding the campaign to end this decades-long insurgency. We’re also taking advantage of the assignment of former SOCSOUTH J3, Colonel Greg Wilson at NPS. He’s helping us apply NPS’s sophisticated network analysis tools to assist the Colombian Special Operations Command. Also, my J5, Colonel Larry Torres, has worked with Dr. Brian Maher’s team at JSOU to plan several intellectual capital events in our theater in fiscal year 2012-13.
The Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, headed up by Richard D. Downie, functions as the academia component command for SOUTHCOM. We leverage CHDS and their considerable relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean to help us lead the senior leadership seminar portion of our annual regional SOF skills completion, Exercise Fuerzas Comando. This year the seminar will be a venue for SOUTHCOM dialogue with partner nations on combating transnational organized criminal networks. I had a conference call in December last year led by CHDS in which they gathered an impressive expert network on the topic. This ability of CHDS, JSOU, and NPS to assemble expert networks is of great value.
Q: What is your assessment of SOCSOUTH progress in assisting forces in area nations in their drug interdiction and defeat efforts? Would more detection capabilities such as improved radars to locate small planes help you to assist indigenous forces?
A: Drug interdiction and defeat is an expression that requires further exploration before I answer, but it’s central to our purpose. The flow of illegal narcotics as a central organizing principle of our activities is no longer a sufficient description of our efforts, although building capacity to counter the act of illicit trafficking is still important. General Fraser is leading our thinking about this problem—to approach it increasingly in terms of countering the corrosive influence on regional security of transnational organized criminal organizations. Los Zetas, the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels, their links with local gangs, traffickers and insurgents across the region, and the billions in earnings, are a threat that transcends the simple act of illicit trafficking.
With respect to our progress in assisting partner forces in the region, there is no doubt that the money, time and effort we’ve expended in Central America, the Andean Ridge and Caribbean have had a positive effect; its stickiness, to borrow a Malcolm Gladwell term, however, has been uneven. The causes and meaning of that is under constant examination in the SOCSOUTH enterprise.
In Colombia, our investment has stuck, principally because of the commitment and resources of the Colombian government. The clear link between our investment in Colombian SOF and their results against the FARC make for a relatively clear judgment on the return on our investment. Elsewhere, the results are less clear. Our partners are very dedicated, but many have fewer resources and face other challenges. Also, before the REB, we had very few owners of outcomes, so we lacked the structure and incentive system required to adjust our activities to achieve outcomes. The best we could do, in many cases, was simply to manage the activities. Therefore, we weren’t progressing as well as we might have in this area. For example, infrequent or episodic engagement of the DEA and other elements of the country team by SOCSOUTH staff had caused us to not always be on the same sheet of music with them on which partner security forces we should be invested in. Today, our REB country officers and distributed C2 node [an SF company headquarters] in Central America are in a sustained dialogue with country teams to secure their buyin to our efforts, and help influence what units we are partnered with. We are building on the strong foundation of distributed C2, OEF authorities and resources, REB construct first instituted by Major General Charles T. Cleveland and the warm relationships engendered with partner nations under retired Brigadier General Hector E. Pagan. The enterprise is connecting the dots to better secure commitments from U.S. embassies and host nations to achieve capacity building outcomes. We’re seeking more stickiness to effects of the millions we invest in training, to increase the reliability that the units we train are those most actively working to combat the narco-traffickers and other asymmetric threats—and the U.S. country team and partner nation are fully behind our investment.
In answer to your question on the value of more detection capabilities … improved radars to locate small planes, I will offer observations on ISR needs in the Andean Ridge in the case of our partner’s battle with rural-based narco-terrorist insurgents. A principal advantage that organizations like the FARC and Sendero Luminoso have over government security forces is their use of dense vegetation to mask their activities and location. Emerging ISR technologies show promise in eroding this advantage, which is why we are evaluating foliage penetrating radar and light detection and ranging [LiDAR] systems.
SOCOM has funded the pairing of an A160 Hummingbird with the Forester FOPEN radar; the operational evaluation of this system is a SOCSOUTH responsibility. We are also being advised by Nancy Ann Budden, director for special operations technology in the rapid reaction technology office of the secretary of defense, on DoD LiDAR systems that have the potential to be game changers here in our theater. My staff is challenged with crafting new paradigms for fielding and employment of such systems in partnership with SOUTHCOM, SOCOM, the services, industry and of course our partner nations.
Q: How do you work with the State Department in coordinating missions and overall objectives in the area of responsibility?
A: Our principal interface with the State Department is the ‘country teams’ led by the U.S. ambassador. The ambassador’s staff is made up of personnel from multiple U.S. departments and agencies, among them a senior defense official whose office is normally our door into the State Department in that country.
Other venues for working with the State Department are Ambassador Carmen Martinez, the civilian deputy commander of SOUTHCOM, and the SOCOM political adviser [POLAD], Ambassador Karen Williams, who can help me engage the State Department on issues of interest in D.C., or with country teams. Also, I have a POLAD billet at SOCSOUTH; filling the billet will greatly assist me and the staff in interfacing with DoS on a daily basis across the theater.
Q: Is your organization growing in end strength and in equipment and platforms used in missions?
A: My organization, an operational headquarters staff, is not growing at the moment. SOCOM has, however, begun a process to examine how the theater special operations commands [TSOCs] are resourced and in what areas they might be strengthened in the future. This may result in some growth of the headquarters in the out-years.
In terms of equipment and platforms, our theater is not a big consumer of MRAPs, UAVs and other such platforms as is the case in Central Command. Where we’ve had some growth is in deployed civil affairs teams. Also, we’re seeking to modestly increase the number of special warfare combatant craft crewmen aligned against riverine capacity building in the Amazonian Basin. Navy Captain Todd Veazie, commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group Four, has been a great supporter of Naval Special Warfare Unit Four and Special Boat Team 22s great work in getting NSW back into this arena, to assisting our partners in denying the use of rivers to narco-terrorists.
Q: What equipment and platforms would you most like to add to your current capabilities? Would you find unattended ground sensors or solar electrical generating systems to recharge communications equipment useful?
A: Given that most of our work is on the training, advice-and-assist side rather than actions we take ourselves, I’ll speak to what goods and services I see that our partner-nation troops are most in need of: communications, logistics and intelligence are key.
In Central America we work closely with land and maritime interdiction forces that operate in unison with U.S. or other partner-nation ISR assets and law enforcement to interdict illicit traffickers. Among our biggest challenges is the communications layer of this paradigm. It requires an enterprise approach. We’ve talked frequently, both inside and outside our lifelines, about how innovative software, hardware and training might improve the performance of the communication layer of the detect-to-interdict chain. Our partner-nation forces need simple solutions that allow for sharing of information securely, to communicate more readily across national and interagency stovepipes. Their sophisticated U.S. manufactured radios are challenging to maintain and operate, so as we train them to better employ the systems they have, we are also stimulating thinking on simpler enterprise solutions to this communication challenge.
Many countries have accumulated a number of systems or platforms that were not conceived of in an enterprise solution or approach. They often lack the appropriate tools to operate intelligence systems, maintain a fleet of riverine craft, or logistics processes and resources to establish safe forward operating sites for use by government security forces. Another observation: Protecting against attacks on infrastructure costs significant manpower to patrol and protect transportation, energy and resource extraction activities. High reliability, low maintenance systems that can increase their capacity to monitor and protect infrastructure can free up troops for other priorities.
Q: There has been extensive discussion in Washington of possible immense reductions in defense spending. What efficiency and cost reduction moves have you instituted in your command?
A: One of the principal efficiencies we’ve been working is reducing the amount of travel for routine conferences with the services and SOCOM. Although video teleconferencing [VTC] and bandwidth have been a large investment for DoD, the default answer for sharing information or collaboration continues to be a physical conference or meeting requiring significant expenditure on lodging, airfare and time lost from travel. SOCSOUTH leadership is scrutinizing travel, seeking to maximize use of VTCs in order to preserve travel dollars for our work down-range, where relationship-building, context and atmospherics can’t always be gained using VTC.
We are also better scrutinizing our infrastructure investment in those countries where we have a persistent presence. We want to be sure that construction and maintenance costs, as well as uncertainty about the future, are better factored into investment decisions on ranges, lodging, etc. Once we commit monies to a project in one place or another, you can almost be certain that circumstances and priorities will change, at times leaving us questioning why we committed resources to a particular place. We are better weighing such investments against both maintenance costs and uncertainty and generally being more frugal across the board.
Q: How comfortable are you with the level of language and cultural skills of SOCSOUTH personnel, skills crucial to interacting with local forces and populations?
A: We are fortunate to have a few old SOUTHCOM hands and native Spanish speakers, but the skill level is not what it should be. Human capital—how well equipped our action officers are to understand and interact with their environment—is without question the most important ingredient to our success. Therefore, we’ve instituted a course of instruction intended to provide the staff a baseline of knowledge and skills to do TSOC business in the Western Hemisphere. JSOU has put together a TSOC action officer course of instruction on SOF doctrine, combating networks, campaigning, funding and operational authorities, in addition to culture, regional issues and history. There has been recent discussion in [SOCOM headquarters in] Tampa about institutionalizing this course given the need of the other TSOC commanders for the same.
The language side is more challenging. If someone is assigned to the command without a foundation in Spanish or Portuguese, it’s hard to get them sufficiently fluent to be effective in the couple of years they are typically assigned at SOCSOUTH. We’ve episodically invested in basic and intermediate Spanish classes at the command, but it has been difficult to sustain because we are not resourced for a language program or program coordinator. We’ve got to rely on SOCOM’s continued investment in language and seeing improvement over time, as SOCSOUTH invests in those that show up with high school or college Spanish motivated to pick it back up, as well as leveraging the native speakers we are lucky to get assigned here.
Q: Do you have any final thoughts on the mission and personnel of SOCSOUTH?
A: The Western Hemisphere is a fascinating and rewarding place to work. Special operations is, perhaps, our commander’s most flexible and useful tool given the asymmetric threats we face here. The innovative work of the SOCSOUTH enterprise is illuminating the value of SOF, with its breadth of capabilities—from civil, military and information operations to commando skills training—to positively influence the environment outside of theaters of war or major combat operations.