From Pablo to Osama: Trafficking and Terrorist Networks, Government Bureaucracies, and Competitive Adaptation

4. Competitive Adaptation: Trafficking Networks Versus Law Enforcement Agencies

4Competitive Adaptation: Trafficking Networks Versus Law Enforcement Agencies Drug trafficking and counterdrug law enforcement resemble an endless game of narcs and narcos, in which law enforcers seek to identify, apprehend, and dismantle smuggling enterprises, while traffickers aim to elude or co-opt their sovereignty-bound competitors. These spirited dynamics feature adversarial yet interdependent players. Narcos rely on narcs, and the drug prohibition regime they enforce, to inflate prices artificially and hence boost profits for the illicit commodities they trade. Narcs rely on narcos to serve as targets for law enforcement operations and to validate their existence to external stakeholders, including Congress , the White House, and the American public. When law enforcers identify smuggling conspiracies for disruption, traffickers often react by changing their daily routines. When traffickers succeed in reducing the ‘‘heat’’ of drug enforcement by doing so, law enforcers must change their practices to keep up with their adversaries or seek new targets. While the preceding chapters showed how drug traffickers and law enforcers change practices in response to feedback and experience, this chapter highlights the interactive nature of narco-narc adaptation. Narcs and narcos learn not in isolation but from each other. Cops and criminals interact, acquire information about each other from these interactions, and alter their behavior accordingly. Such learning is problematic, not automatic. Narcs and narcos find it difficult to learn because of the secretive nature of their activities and the hostile nature of their environment. To protect their operations from competitors, trafficking enterprises and law enforcement agencies organize their participants into different ‘‘compartments’’ and restrict information sharing on a need-to-know basis. While such practices may enhance operational security, they make it harder to learn from feedback and experience. Trafficking networks are particularly vulnerable to learning disabilities associated with compartmentation and informal organizational memories. But they also enjoy a number of advantages over their state competitors—among them stronger incentives to adapt, smaller coordination costs, flatter organizational structures, and fewer institutional impediments to action. These advantages influence, but do not determine, outcomes in competitive adaptation. Narcs can and do beat 104 j From Pablo to Osama narcos, even as the larger trafficking system they populate proves relatively impervious to these ephemeral victories. Understanding Competitive Adaptation Information is the lifeblood of competitive adaptation. Narcs and narcos seek technical and experiential knowledge that allows them to accomplish organizational objectives while outmaneuvering their opponents . They gather intelligence from a variety of sources, including informants, physical and electronic surveillance, government documents , and news reports. As they acquire techne and mētis, players modify existing practices and create new ones. Traffickers use their adaptations to slacken, or better still sever, connections to law enforcers in hot pursuit, while law enforcers use theirs to strengthen links to identified traffickers, improving their ability to disrupt ongoing conspiracies . These interactions are fundamentally dynamic: tactics and strategies that work well during one period may perform poorly in others . This means that the ability to change practices quickly in response to feedback and unforeseen events is essential for success. Players who fail to think fast and outfox their adversaries do not perform well in hostile trafficking systems. Narcs and narcos are intentionally adaptive: they tend to select and retain practices and procedures that achieve satisfactory results, while (sometimes) disregarding those that do not. But in making their adaptations , players lack access to complete or perfect information. Decisions are often made in conditions of profound uncertainty. Given the clandestine nature of drug trafficking and criminal investigations, narco-narc interactions are shrouded in mystery, complicating players’ efforts to learn about their adversaries. While narcs and narcos may be aware of the broad strategies of their opponents, many particulars remain unknown, which inhibits their ability to respond to ongoing events. In competitive adaptation players seek to make better decisions by reducing uncertainty; yet the knowledge needed to do so is often difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.1 Law enforcers, for example, often possess strategic intelligence about general trafficking patterns but lack tactical intelligence—names, addresses, telephone numbers, dates—about specific conspiracies. This is problematic because police agents cannot identify, let alone disrupt, Competitive Adaptation j 105 trafficking operations without it. Traffickers may comprehend the standard tools of counterdrug law enforcement, including the use of confidential informants, undercover operations, and electronic...