Cole Herring
Founder and Managing Partner, Venezuela Field Support.
Experience Built in Complex Environments
Cole Herring is the founder and managing partner of Venezuela Field Support and brings more than 21 years of U.S. Army Special Forces experience, primarily with 7th Special Forces Group, with a career heavily focused on South America.
His service included three combat tours, receipt of the Purple Heart, and multiple training and operational missions throughout South America, giving him extensive experience working in complex environments where success depended on understanding local conditions, validating information, building trusted relationships, and turning incomplete information into actionable ground truth.
That experience now shapes the company’s approach to supporting U.S. businesses entering Venezuela: practical, field-driven, and focused on getting clients what they need to make decisions and operate effectively — anything, anywhere, anytime; lo que sea, cuando sea, donde sea.
Military experience is not oil and gas expertise. The operating principles do transfer.
Venezuela Field Support does not present a Special Forces background as technical competence in petroleum engineering, and it does not pretend that combat experience qualifies anyone to evaluate a reservoir. Technical conclusions come from appropriately qualified technical professionals.
What transfers is a method for operating where information is incomplete, conditions are unfamiliar, and the cost of a wrong assumption is high:
- Understand the environment. Not the country in general — the specific place, at the specific time, where the work will actually happen.
- Verify assumptions. Identify what the plan depends on, and check the items that would break it.
- Assess partners. Establish who you are actually working with, what they can genuinely do, and where their interests sit.
- Plan for contingencies. Decide in advance what happens when an element fails, because something will.
- Execute with discipline. Sequence the work, keep the plan honest as conditions change, and be accountable for what was done.
That is the same method a corporate decision requires. It is what Venezuela Field Support applies to commercial engagements in Venezuela.
Operating By, With, and Through Partners
Special Forces work is defined less by acting alone than by achieving an objective through people who do not work for you. The core skill is judging quickly and accurately who is capable, who is reliable, and who is representing themselves as more than they are — then building a working relationship fast enough to matter, in a language and a culture that are not your own.
Cole Herring spent more than two decades doing that, primarily in Latin America.
That is not a war story. It is the exact problem a company faces entering Venezuela. You will depend on people who are not your employees: a driver, a local contractor, a customs agent, an operating partner, a facility manager. Your schedule, your cost base, and your people’s safety will rest on whether you judged their capability correctly — usually on limited information and a short timeline.
It is also why Venezuela Field Support is built the way it is. Rather than deploying a corporate team for every question, the firm works through trusted in-country resources, with a principal who has spent a career assessing exactly that kind of relationship and knows how it fails.
Venezuela Field Support is a private commercial company. Nothing here implies endorsement by the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any government.
What South America experience actually means here
Familiarity with the region
Years of work across South America builds a working understanding of how things get done, how they fail, and how quickly conditions can change — the kind of context that is difficult to acquire from reporting.
Judgment about people
Assessing counterparties, capabilities, and motivations under uncertainty is a core skill of the work Cole Herring did for two decades. It is directly applicable to validating a commercial partner.
Comfort with incomplete information
Decisions rarely wait for complete data. The discipline is knowing what you actually know, what you have inferred, and what remains unknown — and saying so clearly.
Senior-led when it matters
Many advisory firms sell senior experience and staff engagements with someone else. Venezuela Field Support is structured so that when an engagement requires senior-level field leadership, Cole Herring can travel into Venezuela personally to lead assessments, coordinate field activity, and support client operations.
That is not the model for every engagement — many field tasks are best executed by trusted in-country resources. But where a client needs a principal on the ground, the firm can provide one, and the engagement scope says explicitly who will be doing the work.
Service
More than 21 years, U.S. Army Special Forces
Primary unit
7th Special Forces Group (Airborne)
Regional focus
Latin America / South America
Combat deployments
Three
Decoration
Purple Heart recipient
Current role
Founder & Managing Partner, Venezuela Field Support
Venezuela Field Support is a private commercial company. Nothing on this website implies endorsement, sponsorship, or approval by the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. Government, or any other government or organization.
Know what you are walking into before your people do.
Start with the decision. We will tell you what has to be established before you can make it.