The news of Venezuelan tanks and troops massing along the border with Colombia must have old Latin revolutionaries sighing with nostalgia. It is as if the old days of idealistic dreams, when every bearded university student was a would-be Ché Guevara, had never left; as if someone had conjured back those old days filled with utopian possibilities. You have to hand it to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, a character straight out of a García Márquez novel. Chávez would not countenance a hundred years of revolutionary solitude. Instead, the man with the power to stop the clock and wind it back [...]
MIAMI — The specter of war looming over Colombia and Venezuelafollowing the recent killing of a Colombian rebel leader comes amid anongoing and significant increase in Venezuela’s military spending inrecent years. Venezuela’s military buildup and continuing concernsabout its government’s ties to left-wing rebels provide aworrying context for Venezuela’s recent troop mobilization, though mostanalysts still believe the chances are slim that the current crisiswill spark a military conflict.Colombia’s decision over the weekend to cross into Ecuador to kill rebel leader Raúl Reyes and 16 members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), who were reportedly camped just a mile from [...]
The Israeli experience in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 should warn Americans against having an Army that has become so focused on irregular and counterinsurgency warfare that it can no longer fight large battles against a conventional enemy. In an important essay in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Israeli scholar Avi Kober recently noted that years of policing by the Israeli Army in its territories had degraded its ability to fight the Hezbollah enemy that used conventional tactics. The result was a significant battlefield defeat for the Israeli Army. The American Army is in a similar condition today, and [...]
