Americas Command: Promoting Regional Stability in the Western Hemisphere
Abstract
The United States is becoming more economically integrated with countries in the Western Hemisphere, which means greater commercial movement of people and materiel across its borders. The U.S. Government is currently negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement with Canada and Latin American for implementation by 2005. This policy seeks to create a Western Hemisphere economic community. Accordingly, the Nation should adopt a unified hemispheric approach for military cooperative security to achieve coherent and synchronized economic, homeland defense, and homeland security policies and strategies. Current DoD homeland defense strategy is no longer balanced to protect the homeland and promote economic security, because the strategy of partitioning the Western Hemisphere no longer accounts for the new operating environment. Because transnational threats and natural disasters do not recognize geographic or political boundaries, the Nation must question the efficacy of a military strategy that narrowly focuses on geographic borders in an era of globalization and interdependence. The responsibility for conducting military security cooperation, promoting an economically stable environment, and providing for homeland defense has been divided between two unified commands. This division of responsibility unnecessarily increases the risk of uncoordinated and confusing implementation of policy. Instead, the United States needs to improve cooperative security and obtain cooperation with its neighbors to support effective homeland defense and security strategies as a whole throughout the hemisphere. The Western Hemisphere should be viewed as a single theater of operation to ensure the effective defense of the homeland, since current threats do not recognize or honor boundaries. Establishing a companion cooperative security framework to the FTAA economic framework would rebalance the U.S. strategy to promote regional stability and protect the homeland.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 15, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA434471
Entities
People
- John E. Angevine
Organizations
- United States Army War College