From today until Thursday, military leaders from South America and the United States will assess the main threats to the region, within the framework of the 24th South American Defense Conference organized and sponsored by the Southern Command of the United States Army in Santiago, Chile.
"The Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JEMCO) of the Argentine Armed Forces, Brigadier General Xavier Isaac, will participate in the Conference, a meeting of senior officers that broadly proposes sharing experiences, identifying better solutions to common threats and strengthening cooperation between States," reported the Mendoza On Line (mdz) portal.
The conference, which will be held at the Marriott Hotel in Santiago, will be attended by the head of the Southern Command, Laura Richardson, and General Charles Brown, Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force.
The proposed agenda includes "a review of the conclusions reached at last year's meeting and then a debate on the topics of the current cycle," the mdz portal noted.
The agenda discussed by military leaders last year focused on regional threats, cyber defense, climate change, environmental protection and preparing forces to respond to crises arising from global climate change.
“Prior to the deliberations, Jana Nelson (Pentagon Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs) will provide a defense policy update for South America ,” mdz noted, adding that the “official is the senior advisor on security and defense policy for the thirty-four-nation region that encompasses Canada, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and South America.”
The Yankees' objective is to limit the military projection of China and other powers that rival and challenge the interests of the United States in the hemisphere , such as in the cases of Russia and Iran .
In this vision that the US imposes, Maduro's Venezuela is considered a threat because it is linked to the presence on Venezuelan soil of terrorist groups related to the Ayatollahs' regime with the capacity for asymmetric attacks: terrorism, malicious digital intervention (cyber attack), guerrillas, incitement to civil disobedience, and others.
The conference will focus on cyber defense with a focus on artificial intelligence, threats in the digital domain and back doors that put the information of states and citizens at risk with destabilizing effects.
As we reported last week, Argentina signed a cybersecurity agreement with the United States last March , between the Minister of Defense Luis Petri and the Yankee Ambassador to Argentina, Marc Stanley . This resulted in the appointment, by Stanley's instructions, of the American cybersecurity specialist, Gustavo Victor Santiago , who for two years will train and cooperate as required in the development of the cybersecurity capacity focused on the Ministry of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Joint Cyberdefense Command and the Cyberdefense Institute of the Armed Forces.
Other points of interest to be discussed at the conference include machine learning, the advantages of analyzing large volumes of data to gather valuable information for military applications, for the intelligence cycle and for decision-making in complex scenarios, identifying risk and threat patterns in digital communications, emails, text messages, social networks, digital platforms, media, etc. “A resource that is deemed necessary by the National Directorate of Military Strategic Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense,” said the mdz portal.
As we reported in Agenda Malvinas , in 2018 the Argentine government decided to equip the country with a cyberdefense capability, for that reason they appointed Engineer Alfredo Raúl Parodi , current Undersecretary of Cyberdefense, with the aim of neutralizing threats that could attack the integrity of the information and alter it, to make it unavailable or to violate its confidentiality. In addition, the Argentine State acquired during the Macri government, from the firm Rafael Systems, a technological solution composed of a Computer Emergency Response Team and one or more Security Operations Centers, under the Government to Government format between Argentina and Israel.
As we can see, this occurs in the context of the policy of automatic alignment that Javier Milei's government maintains with the western axis but which was also practiced by his predecessor Mauricio Macri.
It is truly shameful and shocking that JEMCO and our Armed Forces are discussing these issues with the United States and Chile, two of the main allies that the United Kingdom had during the conflict with our country in 1982 over the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands.
Sources:
