Counterinsurgency lessons from Colombia: an assessment of the Colombian Army transformation from 1998 to 2010

Abstract

This thesis offers an account of how the Colombian Army recovered from a series of humiliating defeats inflicted upon it by illegal armed groups led by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the 1990s. It explains how a combination of internally generated, bottom-up and top-down organizational innovations, U.S. security assistance, and dynamic management from President Alvaro Uribe and a civilianized Ministry of Defense was able to restore Colombian Army morale, and to restructure and reorganize the military into an offensive force able to gain battlefield dominance and restore government authority over a greater part of the national territory.