Incorporating Criminal Actors Into Army Training

The presence of crime in conflict is not a new phenomenon.  Nor is it going to cease.  It has been influential in recent conflicts, and will be in future conflicts.   However, this is not reflected in current Army training.  Criminal actors are rarely accurately incorporated into all levels of training, often only being incorporated into specialist training and in higher formation training.

From poppy crops in Afghanistan, to coca crops in Colombia.  From mafia groups in the Balkans, to criminal groups in Eastern Ukraine.  From human traffickers in the Sahel, to diamond smugglers in West Africa.  Contemporary conflicts are rife with examples of the coexistence of conflict and crime, where crime creates the conditions for conflict to initiate or escalate, and conflict creates the conditions in which crime can flourish.

Not only will crime be present in future conflicts, but profit-motivated criminal actors will be influential.  They have the capability to be violent, which they rely on to protect their operations, and they may have significant political and economic influence with the population.  In many conflict areas, criminal groups provide the main source of income and stability for large segments of the population, which can provide them legitimacy and support.

Terminology versus motivation

There are various terms used to describe these actors: organised criminal groups, mafia, cartels, crime syndicates, traffickers, and a variety of others.  The term used is less important than understanding their motivations.  Profit is the aim.  Not ideology, not politics, not religion, and not military success.  It is important to separate profit-motivated criminal actors from other criminals, such as those who commit war crimes.  Different types of criminals require different analyses, and this piece will focus only on profit-motivated criminal actors. 

The role criminal actors play in contemporary conflict is not a major theme in Army training.  The scenarios used in contemporary training include conventional forces, insurgent forces, and civilian populations, but rarely criminal actors.  Role players may play local leaders, aid workers, or religious leaders, but rarely criminals.  This is not to suggest it is entirely absent.  It does feature.  But often in an oversimplified and inaccurate way, and often only at the highest levels of command.  On the rare occasion there is a criminal actor in an exercise scenario, they are inevitably aligned with the adversary and share their ideological aims, often acting in an inaccurate way by sacrificing profit for ideology.

The Army relies on a strict categorisation of actors, where actors are classified as friendly, enemy, insurgent, and other categories.  This misses much of the complexity and nuance of actors, particularly criminal actors, in contemporary conflict.  One way to remedy this is to place criminal actors on a continuum.  This has been proposed by Makarenko as the Crime-Terror Continuum¹ and later adapted by Cornell as the Crime-Rebellion Continuum.²  At one end, you have purely criminal actors, and at the other end, purely terrorist or insurgent actors.

 

 

 

Most criminal actors in conflict areas fall somewhere along these continuums, not in the strictly criminal categorisation.  However, just because a criminal actor engages in an alliance with, or otherwise cooperates with, terrorist or insurgent actors, this does not mean they should be treated the same.  They still have different motivations, and need to be countered in different ways.  Although these continuums are useful for illustrating that a criminal group may, at different points along this continuum, be interacting with terrorist or insurgent actors, and still maintain their profit motivation, even these continuums will not cover all the complexity of criminal actors in contemporary conflict.  With different criminal markets, different political contexts, and even different individuals, the complexity presented by criminal actors is too vast to be represented in a simple diagram.

Current training does not incorporate meaningful criminal actor training.  The scenarios used in training often oversimplify the complexities of criminal actors, incorrectly assuming once a criminal group cooperates with a terrorist or insurgent group, they share aims.  This ignores the key differences between these groups, their motivations, their objectives, and the different ways to influence or interact with them.  Scenarios, such as the DATE³ scenario, have the potential to integrate criminal actors.  This scenario specifically notes the complexity that criminal actors can add to a conflict, and acknowledges they are motivated by profit.  The criminal actors developed for DATE could be incorporated into training in complex and nuanced ways.  But that doesn’t mean it is done, nor done at all levels.  The application of these scenarios often oversimplifies criminal groups, and reduces them to the margins of the scenario.

Reluctance, risk aversion, and the wrong centre of gravity

One possible reason the Army does not fully integrate this into training, is a reluctance to view itself as having a role in countering criminal actors.  In the UK, a clear separation exists between police and military roles.  However, this is not the case on some foreign operations.  This separation may not exist in many partner nations, who may view their police and military as having a similar role.  Furthermore, the Army can, and has, been tasked to assist in the training and mentoring of partner police forces in recent operations. 

Another possible reason it is not fully integrated into training, is the Army does not want to be seen to engage with criminal actors.  However, if they are influential actors in the conflict area, the Army may not have a choice.  This is not to suggest the Army should support them, or even be neutral towards them, only that the Army, at all levels, needs to understand criminal actors, and the impact they can have.

Finally, another possible reason it is not fully integrated into training is that the Army emphasises political actors, not profit-motivated actors, when analysing violence.  The often quoted ‘politics by other means’ line from Clausewitz best sums up this view.  However, in conflict areas, there may be violent criminal actors with no political motivation beyond profit.  To borrow another Clausewitz phrase, profit is their ‘centre of gravity’.  Viewing their actions and violence through a political framework is projecting frameworks onto them, and will lead to inaccurate assessments of the role they will have in the conflict. 

This is not to suggest that this is absent from all Army training.  Intelligence specialists in higher formations are subject matter experts on this.  However, in the contemporary operating environment, this understanding needs to be present at all levels.  Companies and Platoons will be operating at reach, engaging with the local population, and will be impacted by criminal actors.  They need to have the knowledge and skills to analyse these criminal actors, understand the risks they pose to their mission, and understand how to interact with them.  This needs to be incorporated into their training, not just the training of intelligence specialists. 

Useful scenarios

In contemporary conflict, it is easy to see possible scenarios where this understanding is essential at all levels.  Three hypothetical scenarios to illustrate this are:

• A Platoon Commander in a Security Force Assistance Battalion in the Middle East identifies their counterpart has family members involved in arms trafficking, and needs to understand the risks this poses to their mission. 
•  A junior officer working with the United Nations in Africa, who relies on a remote airfield for resupply and evacuation but knows the airfield is controlled or influenced by drug smugglers, needs to understand how to approach this. 
• A small team delivering humanitarian assistance identifies that criminal groups are stealing aid and selling it, and they need to know how to address this without the criminal groups becoming violent towards them, or aggravating the population that is buying the aid.

The Army does not have the luxury of being able to ignore criminal actors

The next conflicts the Army engages in will involve criminal actors.  The Army needs to be ready for this.  The inclusion of criminal actors in training at all levels is essential to making scenarios realistic, and preparing soldiers to conduct operations where criminal actors will be influential in determining the outcome.

There is a common adage that the Army is always ‘training for the last war’, rather than the next war.  Unfortunately, when it comes to incorporating the lessons learned about the role of criminal actors in recent conflicts, that is not the case.  The Army is not taking the lessons from recent conflicts where criminal actors have played an important part and incorporating these lessons into training at the lowest levels.  By ignoring criminal actors in training, the Army isn’t preparing for the next war, or the last war, it is preparing for a war that it will never fight. 

Criminal actors will be present and influential in future conflicts, the Army should train for it, at all levels.

 

 

Feature image credit: MOD

1. Makarenko, Tamara. “The crime-terror continuum: Tracing the interplay between transnational organised crime and terrorism.” Global Crime 6, no. 1 (2004).
2. Cornell, Svante E. “Narcotics and armed conflict: Interaction and implications.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 30, no. 3 (2007).
3. Decisive Action Training Environment, Training Circular 7-100.3 Irregular Opposing Forces, Chapter 4: Criminals. https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IrregularOPFOR.pdf