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Correspondence: Debating U.S. Security Assistance

2024; The MIT Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/isec_c_00480

1531-4804

Christopher Darnton, Rachel Metz,

Global Peace and Security Dynamics

Rachel Tecott Metz's article on U.S. security assistance1 enriches the surprisingly belated scholarly literature on defense cooperation.2 It rightly identifies a chasm between U.S. military advisers' implacable optimism and their dubious record at building professional forces that defeat adversaries (pp. 96, 109). The Iraq case study employs interviews, oral histories, and military documents to identify U.S. advisers' worldviews. Metz argues that advisers' optimism and failure stem from the same sources: beliefs in the normative rightness, causal effectiveness, and organizational value of leading by example and instruction rather than by coercion or command, which she calls the "cult of the persuasive" (pp. 98, 110–111). I endorse the pessimistic description of Iraqi outcomes, I welcome the resulting interrogation of security assistance effectiveness, and I have made similar claims elsewhere about organizational politics' counterproductive impact on cooperation initiatives.3 This letter is therefore a sympathetic critique.I am not persuaded by the article's causal argument and Iraq evidence, and I disagree (for empirical and ethical reasons) that this case study's policy lessons are generalizable. Metz argues that a common culture drove advisers' consistent recourse to persuasion in Iraq (pp. 100–105, 128–129, 133). But this argument suggests that individual advisers might provide or withhold support (or promise or threaten to do so), and it dismisses limitations on U.S. bargaining leverage. In fact, institutional and material constraints likely outweigh organization-level ideational factors as causes of behavioral consistency within security assistance missions. Metz quotes U.S. officers' insistence that Iraqi sovereignty included full decision authority over Iraqi forces (p. 127) but misses the point: neither commanding nor abandoning partner forces are viable options, given institutional limitations. U.S. security assistance is authorized and appropriated by Congress, managed by the Defense Department bureaucracy, led by the State Department, and constrained by status-of-forces agreements. Moreover, U.S. ambassadors can veto security assistance. The idea that civilians delegate assistance missions wholesale to the military (pp. 97–98, 104–106) would surprise those security cooperation officers who are required to account for taxpayer dollars and partner units' human rights records. Advisers' options are further limited by their environment. The article faults U.S. advisers' inability or unwillingness to evict corrupt partner officers (pp. 118, 120, 129), but endemic national corruption and political violence, catalyzed by a U.S. invasion and reconstruction dollars, make this infeasible.Within the Iraq case, portraying persuasion culture as unique to and universal within the U.S. Army overemphasizes the role of Gen. David Petraeus and underestimates that of other military services. Metz lauds Petraeus's willingness to browbeat Iraqis into organizational reforms (pp. 117–119, 128). But relying on his communications with the author (p. 119n79) might bias the short-term outcomes assessment—leaders generally claim success. Longer-term evaluation of U.S. coercive assistance is counterfactual given that subsequent commanders returned to persuasion: Would sustained U.S. pressure really have yielded effective, professional Iraqi forces? Further, the article ascribes policy selection to individual "idiosyncrasies" (p. 130). Does this claim suggest that Petraeus is exceptional, or is it plausible that calculated decisions rather than cultishness guided other commanders to choose persuasion? Similarly, Metz's scope restriction (pp. 112n50, 134) to the U.S. Army (not including special forces) excludes key evidence. If the advisory missions in Iraq of the U.S. Air Force or of the British Army demonstrated more success by employing conditionality, such outcomes would support Metz's "cult of persuasion" argument. On the other hand, her argument would be undermined if other services also opted for persuasion, or if they achieved comparable or worse results from a coercive strategy. Metz is right that advisers are informed and clear-eyed about partner shortcomings (p. 100). Yet persistence is only cultlike if advisers neglect superior alternatives.The enormous amount of U.S. aid and resources committed to stabilize the country after overthrowing Saddam Hussein makes Iraq an outlier rather than a hard test or critical case of U.S. security assistance (pp. 99, 112–113, 131). Most assistance missions are alternatives to, not complements of, U.S. invasions. And the bulk of U.S. security assistance occurs in places that are peripheral to U.S. grand strategy. Other features of Iraq's political-military situation, treated as assumptions in Metz's article, also are not straightforwardly generalizable: (1) a host government fixated on coup-proofing and thereby undermining force modernization (p. 115), and (2) a civil war that should have pushed leaders to prioritize combat effectiveness (p. 133). In other countries, policy preferences and military roles vary widely. Governments frequently welcome limited great power security assistance to improve their armed forces for a range of internal and external missions without unduly worrying about politically emboldening the military. Iraq is best understood as a case of nation-building and not as a case of security assistance. The United States displayed whole-of-government policy failures, and its military shortcomings in Iraq included prewar plans, overall strategy, and counterinsurgency operations, not just advisory missions.4Finally, Metz's advocacy of coercive conditionality might be strategically counterproductive and ethically problematic. Specifically, I oppose Metz's normalization of coup threats when she asserts that U.S. advisers should have leveraged Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's fear of a U.S.-abetted overthrow rather than reassured him of continued U.S. support (p. 129). Moreover, I dispute the blithe general claim that "decisions … to replace the partner head of state are (appropriately) made in Washington" (p. 104) rather than in theater. Threatening partners with regime change, no matter where such messages originate, undermines local governments and elected leaders, destroys the civilian control essential to military professionalism, and weakens norms of sovereignty, of alliances, and of democracy. In Latin America, analysts argue, U.S. security assistance missions over the past century have proven powerful but nefarious, with aid fostering dependency, training indoctrinating pathological anti-communism, arms enabling human rights abuses, and conditionality and coups garnering short-term concessions but long-term blowback.5 These assessments often misinterpret U.S. efforts and overstate their impact against local agency, but the United States should learn from its darker episodes of intervention and regime change rather than reproduce them in Iraq or elsewhere.I conclude with two cheers for security assistance. First, persuasion is often the least bad policy instrument between neglect and intervention. Persuasion balances countries' constraints and interests and leverages interpersonal trust into international partnerships. Second, policymakers employ security assistance to achieve several goals: to export U.S. doctrine and equipment; to attract countries' foreign policy alignment toward Washington; to deter or degrade malicious actors; to acquire military access or intelligence; and to develop influential relationships.6 Metz's article treats relationships and trust as (ineffective) means to build partner capacity (pp. 95–96), but scholars need multifaceted assessments of security assistance effectiveness. Even with respect to capacity-building, the United States advises, trains, and equips effective units worldwide, from Afghan aviation to Somali special forces to Ukrainian artillery.7 What external support cannot do—by persuasion or conditionality—is legitimize governments, professionalize armed forces by cloning U.S. counterparts, or win civil or interstate wars, without extensive local buy-in from partner militaries and the governments and societies that they serve.—Christopher DarntonMonterey, CaliforniaI appreciate Christopher Darnton's thoughtful engagement with my article and the opportunity to elaborate elements of the argument in this correspondence. In the article, I argue that bureaucratic interests and organizational ideology help to explain why U.S. military advisers rely on persuasion in security assistance, and I present evidence from U.S. efforts to build security forces in Iraq. Darnton centers his critique on case selection and external validity, alternative explanations for the reliance on persuasion, and the ethics of conditionality. I address each in turn.Darnton suggests that it is impossible to learn much about security assistance from U.S. efforts to build an effective military in Iraq because Iraq is too special a case. I disagree. First, the largest and most consequential cases of U.S. security assistance are themselves an important subset of security assistance to study. Second, there is much to learn about U.S. security assistance from its most significant examples, particularly when analysis centers, as mine does, on explaining the approach of the United States, which is a common actor in each case. Moreover, differences between cases do not preclude useful comparison. The question for external validity is not whether a case is different from others (all cases are dissimilar to varying degrees), but how (if at all) differences affect the exportation of the specific causal story.1 Darnton and I agree that Iraq differs from other security assistance cases in many significant ways, but I explain why important differences can in fact aid cross-case inferences (p. 113).Darnton suggests that institutional and material constraints rather than bureaucratic interests and organizational ideology explain U.S. military advisers' reliance on persuasion. Darnton does not explain what he means by "material constraints." The cross-organizational institutional constraints that he describes did not in practice apply to the Iraq case (pp. 122–123). I agree with Darnton that security assistance in many other cases is a morass of cross-agency bureaucratic processes, but I maintain that military advisers have discretion. The roles and processes that he describes do not preclude military advisers from using the elements of security assistance under their authority as incentives. Moreover, one of the reasons that U.S. military advisers prefer not to use incentives is precisely because they want to avoid the headache of navigating the labyrinthine U.S. security assistance bureaucracy in order to do so.Darnton further argues that U.S. military advisers' reliance on persuasion is not "cultlike" because even if they had consistently wielded incentives, they could not have built effective, professional Iraqi forces. Darnton raises an important question here—how much more effective would incentives need to be to support my argument that exclusive reliance on persuasion is "cultlike"? He implies that incentives would need to achieve near-perfect results. I counter that incentives need only outperform persuasion. I present evidence to support the assessment that U.S. military advisers in Iraq who combined persuasion with incentives achieved more influence than those who did not.2 Darnton does not challenge this assessment, only the credibility of one piece of evidence on the grounds that it relies on self-reporting by Gen. David Petraeus. To clarify, the evidence is the product of multiple sources of data (referenced in footnote 79).3 Darnton also suggests that cross-organization comparison would provide a useful test for the theory. I agree. In fact, in other research that I plan to publish in a book, I find differences across military organizations in willingness to employ conditionality. As Darnton notes, this evidence strengthens the argument. Darnton also notes that the argument may not extend to the variety of goals that the United States uses security assistance to advance. My article explicitly focuses on explaining U.S. military advisers' strategies of influence in U.S. efforts to build more effective militaries in partner states (p. 97), and I agree that scholars who ask different questions are likely to find different answers.I share Darnton's commitment to careful consideration of the ethical implications of scholarship, and I welcome the opportunity to discuss the ethics of conditionality in the pages of International Security. Darnton criticizes the ethics of policies that I do not advocate, however, and I disagree, for ethical and practical reasons, with his call for the United States security assistance enterprise to eschew "coercive conditionality."Darnton's focus on coups and regime change is misplaced. In the security assistance context, the conditionality that I and others have defined is not regime change or threats of it. Rather, conditionality is usually a threat to give less assistance (e.g., fewer weapons, less money) in order to incentivize decision-making that aligns with U.S. goals (p. 105). Coercion is a standard tool of influence in alliance and partnership politics. Just because an action is coercive does not make it normatively bad; calling conditionality "browbeating" does not make it so.4 Indeed, ethical foreign policy may require coercion. U.S. law requires the Department of Defense and the Department of State to terminate military assistance to foreign security forces that violate human rights, in part to influence security recipients not to do so.5 Otherwise put, U.S. law requires coercive conditionality—for ethical reasons.With respect to Iraq, I present evidence that Prime Minister Maliki feared a U.S.-abetted coup. The purpose of this evidence is to counter an argument in the security assistance scholarship that the United States lacks bargaining power because recipient leaders consider the United States too invested to change course (p. 129). My comment that decisions to terminate assistance or withdraw support for a political leader are made by civilian actors is an empirical one, and it is indeed appropriate that foreign policy decisions of the highest moral and strategic magnitude are restricted to the presidential level rather than delegated to U.S. military officers. I suspect that Darnton and I agree that regime change, in the vast majority of cases, is both deeply unethical and strategically counterproductive (Iraq 2003 being a prime example). Darnton's focus on the ethics of threatening to remove Maliki from political power is perhaps a bit ironic, given that one of the most ethically controversial decisions that U.S. policymakers made in Iraq after 2003 was in fact to help Maliki remain in power after he lost the 2010 elections.Security assistance—dollars and weapons and training and advising—is intervention. Eschewing incentives does not make security assistance less meddlesome, just less effective, and in some cases, less ethical. Security assistance is hard precisely because recipients have agency. One of the policy implications of my research on security assistance is that the United States should probably do less of it (p. 134), reserving the tool for when interest divergence is low, or for when the United States has sufficiently important interests at stake to justify the intervention. Where it does attempt security assistance, it strikes me that the United States has a responsibility to the taxpayer to try to succeed. Darnton concludes with "two cheers for security assistance" (persuasion only). I conclude with two cheers for rigorous research on security assistance.—Rachel MetzWashington, DC