The Importance Of Mission Command Leadership In Colombia

Nowadays, the Colombian government is closing the agreements with Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC. These agreements will take Colombia to a different environment where the security institutions will have to focus on problems that have a diverse nature. These challenges are going to be drug trafficking, corruption, illegal economies, criminal gangs, and Venezuelan instability, among others. The mission command philosophy, applied in all levels of planning, may have a valuable and positive input for the Colombian government, and its armed forces, to deal with these challenges. This paper will briefly describe the challenges Colombia needs to focus on, then, it will examine the goodness that the mission command leadership style has, and finally, will provide some recommendations on how this philosophy may be applied. These recommendations, will take into account some of the concepts inside the strategic thinking framework.
Today, there are three main security challenges in Colombia: drug trafficking, FARC dissent groups, and the Venezuelan crisis. This does not mean these are the only security issues. Illegal mining and criminal bands, among others, are big issues but they are all connected to drug
Agreements with FARC will not end the cartels and gangs that export drugs to the world. That guerrilla, had only part of this illegal business, and dissent FARC groups, which did not joined the agreements, still sustain their activities by drug trafficking. What is called by Colombian government as Criminal Bands, and other illegal organizations, base their actions on drug trafficking as well. Even when Colombia’s Army and National Police have experience on this war, the criminal organizations still smuggle drugs using sophisticated procedures. That means the war on drugs has not ended yet, and there is still much to do by Colombian armed forces to win