The military high command yesterday warned officers that the year ahead would be tough and challenging, and that there needed to be a paradigm shift in the army’s approach to security and a revolution in its culture and professionalism.
The Guyana Defence Force (GDF) yesterday held its first news conference since a new high command was installed in October, promising to interact more with the media and provide updates on important events. Over the years, the media has had difficulty accessing information from the military.
Colonel General Staff Bruce Lovell, who along with Chief of Staff, Gary Best and Col Mark Phillips shared the conference, said that during the year the army creditably acquitted itself in mission accomplishment. He said it has continued to have troops deployed at strategic locations on the national borders, while continuing to engage in patrols and other tasks that define and identify acts of territorial aggression, the most recent being the incursion into the Cuyuni River by the Venezuelan military.
According to Lovell, who was one of four officers promoted by President Bharrat Jagdeo back in October to take up the army top posts, a key plank in ensuring territorial integrity is the concept of having the operational agility to bolster deployed troops from main bases for exigencies. He pointed to the recent discovery of an illegal airstrip in the Corentyne area and the response of the army’s forces within 24 hours as proof positive of this agility. Security experts have criticised what they described as a slow response to the incident. The GDF had said that the airstrip was discovered one day before it was actually seized and destroyed.
Lovell said the military’s support to the police has helped it to restrain crime. He said significant successes have been achieved but noted that the fear of crime in the nation’s psyche has not been totally eliminated. “Public confidence is a critical component in ensuring a secure environment and the public can therefore remain assured that the excellent collaborative relationship that exists between the GDF and the GPF will continue as the GDF provides aid to the civil powers in the maintenance of law and order,” Lovell declared. However, he said there had been failures on the army’s part, mentioning the recent loss of another AK-47 rifle from its main base and the fact that it had not recovered all of the weapons that went missing last year. Thirty of the weapons were spirited away from Camp Ayanganna last year March. To date, 14 have been recovered.
Indiscipline
Lovell said too that acts of indiscipline by several ranks resulting in them being prosecuted in the civil courts had blighted the army’s progress. “What these failures signal to the new administration is the need for change. Indeed the command climate will change, as it often does in any change of command, but there is a need for more profound changes that impact on our culture and enhance our professionalism.”
Lovell said that to effect the profound changes the new administration has recognised that there has to be a process of re-engineering. “We have to radically redesign our processes to be true to our mandate and this therefore impels us to critically examine issues such as our roles, our doctrine and our force structure and organization,” Lovell told the media.
He asserted that re-engineering of the army became necessary to cope with exogenous and endogenous realities that have conspired to change the nature of security concerns in Guyana. Lovell added that there may be new and evolving roles that the military would have to undertake, in collaboration with the lead agencies, such as environmental protection tasks to prevent degradation of river banks by uncontrolled mining; or assistance in the forestry sector. He added that to staunch the flow of illicit arms trafficking, “we have to establish additional locations along our borders or even abandon some existing locations. There has to be a paradigmatic shift in our approach to security provision,” Lovell said, stressing that the short to medium term focus of the new administration will be geared towards effecting this re-engineering.
The Col General Staff further stated that the army has already started the new process and was currently conducting an organisational analysis, which will lead to a strategic defence review. Moreover, noting that a pre-eminent facet of the re-engineering process will be redesigning the army’s approach to training, Lovell said that for the GDF to become truly professional, it has to re-examine its training regimen so that the appropriate knowledge, skills and attitudes are inculcated. “The year will be a tough and challenging one for all who wear our uniform, but the nation can rest assured that the GDF will provide for them the level of security they deserve so that national development can continue unimpeded,” Col Lovell declared.
