Over the past two decades, the United States has increasingly turned to security assistance as a solution to a wide range of problems in weak and conflict-affected states. It has provided security assistance as a strategy for peacebuilding, counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, stabilization, and countering violent extremism. Yet, as Mara Karlin, assistant secretary of defense for strategies, plans, and capabilities, observes, “History shows that building militaries in weak states is not the panacea the U.S. national security community imagines it to be.” And new research on post-conflict countries adds to growing evidence that strengthening security forces in fragile states can exacerbate the underlying causes of extremism and violence.
Post-conflict countries face numerous challenges, including political instability and pervasive insecurity. Even after an armed conflict has officially ended, portions of the state’s territory may remain outside the central government’s authority, political violence can persist, and the socioeconomic toll of war can result in high rates of violent crime. At the same time, the security sector may be in disarray, depleted from the war effort, and under a mandate to reform under the terms of a peace agreement.
All of these conditions seem to suggest that security assistance—funding, weapons, equipment, and training provided to a state’s security sector by external actors—could be critical to building enduring peace and security in post-conflict countries. This assumption is particularly attractive given the conviction shared by many policymakers that fragile states are a threat to US national security. Former US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, for example, has warned that “in the decades to come, the most lethal threats to the United States’ safety and security—a city poisoned or reduced to rubble by a terrorist attack—are likely to emanate from states that cannot adequately govern themselves or secure their own territory.” The solution, he argues, is greater investment in building the capacity of the security sector in fragile states.
The logic behind support for fragile states is compelling, but it is based on largely untested assumptions about the ability of security assistance to reduce security deficits in weak states. While the United States has invested heavily in building the capacity of security forces in conflict-affected states over the past two decades, it has dedicated few resources to evaluating whether these efforts actually work, or whether providing this assistance has had unintended consequences that could undermine US security in the long term. One unintended consequence that deserves particular attention is the potential for increased state repression. Changes in the quality of governance in a state should always be included as critical measures of security assistance effectiveness because poor governance, and abusive state security forces, in particular, can cripple US efforts to contain threats from violent nonstate actors and stabilize conflict-affected regions over the long term. Heavy-handed state responses to domestic threats may yield temporary security gains but are ultimately detrimental to US interests.
What Can US Security Assistance Achieve?
Since 9/11, the US government has dramatically increased its efforts to build the capacity of foreign security forces, particularly in weak and conflict-affected states. According to data collected by the Security Assistance Monitor, funding to train and equip foreign security forces increased more than 300 percent between 2001 and 2011, from $5.7 billion to over $24 billion per year. In fiscal year 2020, the United States provided security assistance to at least 133 countries—almost 70 percent of the independent countries in the world. Seventy-one of those countries received at least $1 million each in military aid from the United States. At the same time, there has been a significant shift in authorities for security assistance programs from the State Department to the Pentagon, with a particular emphasis on a set of missions broadly labeled “Building Partner Capacity (BPC)”—“training, mentoring, advising, equipping, exercising, educating and planning with foreign security forces, primarily in fragile and weak states.”
The steep climb in funding is indicative of the growing role of security cooperation in US national security strategy. Security assistance has become an all-purpose multi-tool. As Andrew Miller and Daniel R. Mahanty observe, “It is no exaggeration to say that security sector assistance has become part of the default U.S. response to any and all foreign policy challenges and opportunities.” And yet analysts know surprisingly little about the impacts of BPC programs in weak states. As a 2015 report from the Congressional Research Service observes, “The assumptions that BPC is actually effective—and that the unintended consequences of BPC efforts are manageable—appear to have remained relatively untested.”
Security Assistance and Human Security
In a recent article in Defence And Peace Economics, my coauthors and I use rigorous empirical methods to explore how security assistance affects governance in fragile states. Using data from the Stockholm Institute for Peace Research Institute and the Cline Center for Advanced Social Research, we analyze the impact of both foreign military aid and arms transfers on human rights violations after 171 internal armed conflicts that ended between 1956 and 2012.
The results of our analyses provide strong evidence that both military aid and arms transfers to post-conflict governments increase state repression.
Why would military aid increase human rights abuses? The answer may lie in political leaders’ incentives in the post-conflict environment. In theory, military assistance provided to a post-conflict country could contribute to greater security for citizens by enabling the government to establish a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within the state. But building the capacity of the security sector does not necessarily increase citizen security in fragile states.
Like all transitional governments, post-conflict regimes must choose the extent to which they will emphasize two opposing strategies for maintaining power. On one end of the spectrum, regimes can choose a good governance strategy—using state resources to provide goods and services to the broader population to facilitate economic growth and legitimize their rule. At the other end of the spectrum, leaders can choose a restricting and repressing strategy—minimizing the number of supporters the regime needs to stay in power, directing state resources to the members of that small coalition, and forcefully repressing potential challengers.
Both strategies have costs in addition to benefits for leaders. Pursuing a good governance strategy reduces the share of state wealth and power leaders can claim for themselves; providing citizens with civil liberties makes it easier for opposition movements to organize and press their demands. On the flip side, repression stifles economic growth, requires substantial investment in a repressive apparatus, and can trigger a backlash, increasing violent domestic dissent. In Kenya, for example, harsh counterterrorism measures targeting Somali immigrants and Kenyans of Somali descent have propelled Muslim youth to join violent extremist groups like al-Shabaab.
Military Aid Can Incentivize Repression and Discourage Good Governance
Foreign military aid can unintentionally tip a post-conflict regime’s cost-benefit calculus away from a good governance strategy in favor of a restricting and repressing strategy by lowering the costs, and increasing the expected benefits, of repression.
Like other types of foreign aid, military aid can shield political leaders from the consequences of governing poorly. Governments that rely on taxing domestic production to raise revenue have greater incentives to provide the public goods and services, including citizen security, that enable economic growth. And dependence on taxing citizens forces governments to prioritize the population’s perceptions of the government’s legitimacy. If the government can fund and equip state security forces with external resources, making it less dependent on taxation, citizens have less leverage to demand government accountability. Moreover, unlike development or humanitarian aid, military aid and arms transfers directly increase the capacity of state security forces to defend the regime against domestic threats to their survival—removing another means by which the public could hold the regime accountable.
In addition to lowering the costs and increasing the regime’s capacity for repression, foreign military aid can entrench interests hostile to political liberalization in recipient countries. Leaders can use foreign military aid and weapons transfers to buy the allegiance of a military elite, ensuring their loyalty in the face of challenges from the wider citizenry. Aid thus reinforces the privileged position of the military, empowering it relative to other state institutions and giving it an incentive to work with the ruling regime to repress liberalization efforts that would redistribute power and resources away from the military. In Uganda, for instance, $2 billion a year in economic and military aid from the United States and other Western donors has enabled President Yoweri Museveni to buy the loyalty of military generals with big budgets and high-tech military equipment. In return, the country’s security forces help the leader intimidate his political opposition with tactics including extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, and torture.
What Do These Findings Mean for US Policy?
Our study provides strong empirical evidence that supplying weapons and military aid to post-conflict governments can increase government repression. But that does not mean that every government that receives foreign military aid or arms transfers uses that capacity to abuse its citizens, or that the United States should never provide security assistance to post-conflict governments. The receipt of lethal aid from foreign governments is neither a necessary, nor a sufficient, mechanism for turning post-conflict countries into repressive states.
We need additional research to determine whether conditioning aid on good governance or greater emphasis on security sector reforms can counteract the general tendency of states to use aid for the purpose of enhanced repressive capacity against civilian populations.
We also need more research on the effectiveness of US efforts to professionalize partner security forces. Title 10 of the US Code grants the Department of Defense authorization to train and equip foreign security forces and requires that every assistance program include training “on the law of armed conflict, human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law.” Furthermore, the fiscal year 2017 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the Pentagon evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of all its security cooperation activities. However, as of 2019, officials acknowledged they had not evaluated the effects of human rights training on the behavior, practices, or policies of recipients.
Traditional arguments for continuing to provide aid to abusive regimes often assume that even a corrupt, inept, and repressive government is better than the alternatives—political instability, state security forces too weak to deter or contain violent nonstate actors, or even violent seizure of the government by an extremist organization. This perspective is shortsighted. There is mounting evidence state repression actually fuels violent extremism. An increase in state violence against civilians can also be an indicator that military equipment and training are being diverted from their intended purpose to suppress domestic political opposition to the regime.
Recent events in Afghanistan provide stark evidence that even massive investments in building the capacity of weak state security forces can be undermined by governance failures. Policymakers should recognize that providing military aid and arms transfers to fragile states could undermine long-term stability and good governance—and ultimately harm US foreign policy objectives.
Patricia Lynne Sullivan is an associate professor in the Department of Public Policy and the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Tech. Sgt. Kelly White, US Air Force
With regard to such things as the failure of our security force assistance programs, the "underlying causes of extremism and violence" (see the first paragraph of our article above), these must be better understood. In this regard, consider the following:
First, from Samuel P. Huntington's famous book "Political Order in Changing Societies" (therein, see Page 41):
“The apparent relationship between poverty and backwardness, on the one hand, and instability and violence, on the other, is a spurious one. It is not the absence of modernity but the efforts to achieve it which produce political disorder. If poor countries appear to be unstable, it is not because they are poor, but because they are trying to become rich. A purely traditional society would be ignorant, poor, and stable.”
Next, from our own Joint Publication 3-22 Foreign Internal Defense; therein, see Chapter II "Internal Defense and Development Program, and Paragraph 2 "Construct:"
a. "An IDAD (Internal Defense and Development) program integrates security force and civilian actions into a coherent, comprehensive effort. Security force actions provide a level of internal security that permits and supports growth through balanced development. This development requires change to meet the needs of vulnerable groups of people. This change may, in turn, promote unrest in the society. The strategy, therefore, includes measures to maintain conditions under which orderly development can take place." (Item in parenthesis above is mine.)
As we can see from the above, problems such as extremism and violence, these are both:
a. "Normal" and "expected" and, this,
b. As relates to our and our partner governments' efforts to both "modernization" and "develop" the poorer states and societies of the world (in all such cases, such transformations must occur more along modern/western political, economic, social and value lines).
Thus:
If one has determined, as did the U.S./the West post-the Old Cold War, to transform the outlying states and societies of the world more along (in many cases, both alien and profane) U.S./Western political, economic, social and value lines,
Then one should have expected — and, thus, should have both planned and prepared for — violence and extremism on a ever-increasing and indeed global scale. (This, after all, is the "norm.")
Bottom Line Thought — Based on the Above:
Want to know what are the "underlying causes of extremism and violence" today?
Then look no further than to:
a. The Samuel P. Huntington and JP 3-22 explanations above and to:
b. The U.S./the West's post-Cold War initiatives to transform the outlying states and societies of the world more along modern western political, economic, social and value lines.
This issue is more political than discussions about military involvement. The Western goal is that the "weak and conflict-affected" states would not collapse under a coup, or stronger foreign power, or COIN, or Extremism, or worse.
However, the truth is that the loyalties of the trained "weak state" military can and sometimes do turn upon the central government in a bloody coup…and the West trained these foreign nation soldiers. Then, would the U.S. race to the rescue to a beleaguered nation and its people? Most of the time, the U.S. will not and the citizens feel betrayed by the Western involvement that may have started the sparks of rebellion and revolution within its own military. So the political aspect of "chopping off the head of the government snake" comes into play because without a central government, the military of these weak states are leaderless.
Mission Creep also comes into play. The problem with U.S. SOF involvement is that SOFs have a limited inventory and arsenal at their disposal. If the poop hits the fan, then SOFs call upon conventional forces to deal with it to "level up" the firepower and the armed response. Minus conventional military support, the U.S. SOFs do not have tanks, armor, warplanes, artillery, or large missiles to deal with situations that "Go South." Foreign peer nations might with IFVs, APCs, tank destroyers, and artillery embedded into their SOFs, but often not the U.S. (although the U.S. is adapting to longer-range heavier-hitting ordnance for SOFs). If things get worse, then the U.S. SOFs often retreat or call for air support. The French Foreign Legion and the U.K. SOFs may be a bit different in that they do have wheeled Tank Destroyers and light tanks and IFVs like the Scimitar to call upon for help because they're not truly SOFs on foot. The U.S. SOFs have no light armor except MRAPs and JLTV trucks (although light unmanned ground robots and armor might change that).
Absent U.S. Air Power and conventional armed forces, the U.S. cannot respond effectively to quell many uprisings or save failed states, and that was evident in Benghazi, Libya. Syria brought forth U.S. Marines M777 155mm artillery and U.S. Navy air cover to push back further aggression because the U.S. was and is willing to commit more resources to prevent a collapse and territory seizure of those areas.
The U.S. DoD does not have a separate branch to export military arms…what the rebels get are (older) stock of U.S. arms, not specific "Export-Only" U.S. weapons (except the Stingray II 105mm light tank for example). At best, the rebels might get TOW ATGMs, armored HMMWVs, carbines, machine guns, and some explosives, but the fear that the rebels will sell or use the U.S. weapons against Western forces prevents the rebels from obtaining the fancier weapons such as Stinger SHORADs, 155mm artillery, Javelins, tanks, IFVs, Apache attack helicopters, and armaments that make the West a Superpower.
Furthermore, many Western SOFs might turn a blind eye to Human Rights abuses and torture. At best, SOFs may report these atrocities, but what is the West going to do to prevent the cry of help from citizens? Military involvement will not change the political aspect of these governments in their treatment of their citizens and the Western Media and the PRESS will be all over scoops about U.S. involvement that tarnishes the State Department and foreign relations.
The main problem with COIN and Security Assistance is that the U.S. and the "weak state" are trying to defend the entire nation, its government, its people, and all the territory. The enemy just has attack anytime, anyplace, anywhere, and direct the ultimate goal towards the capital government and the VIPs (such as in Afghanistan). As the Counter-Terrorism motto is, "Anti-Terrorism has to be ready 24/7/365 whereas the enemy only has to succeed a few times at critical strikes and hits." This security costs lots of time, effort, and money and loyalty is paramount–hard to achieve if the "weak state" allied soldiers are hungry, unpaid, unfit, demoralized, unsupported, untrained, and subject to terror of themselves, their colleagues, their families, and their lifestyles. The U.S. SOFs are too thinly spread to deter all forms of repercussions against the conflict-affected soldiers, and U.S. DoD and State Department history has showed that this is a reoccurring problem without the involvement of a peacekeeping force like the United Nations and Aid Response Teams like medical and Relief Workers (the entire Aid Package). Therefore, a pacifying Army is required, but does that achieve political change or stability if foreign military powers are involved with U.N. white armored tanks, IFVs, and APCs? Again, U.S. military commitment may come in Air Support, and can the U.S. afford that, especially in pandemic times?
What is the goal of U.S. involvement in these "weak states?" HUMINT and SIGINT surely, but the U.S. can also achieve the best of relations by taking the best-of-the-best people from these nations and establishing relations with them for a future that the U.S. and NATO hopes for. For foreign governments that repress educators, scholars, the Righteous, the Thinkers, the Freedom-Fighters, the doctors, the care givers, the good, the peaceful, the enlightened, the moral, and the best, the West can step in and evacuate these people (not implying "Snatch and grab" because these are not enemies) and truly screen and vet them to see if they are true to Western culture, morals, values, beliefs, ways, and strive for a better world (bearing in mind spies, double-crossing agents, fakers, impersonators, Extremists, and so forth). And that, perhaps, the the greatest fear amongst other nations regarding Western involvement.
And don't forget the Western Aid Workers who do good work "behind the scenes" of the SOFs. Without the Aid and Relief Workers, then foreign militaries and the people will only see uniforms and guns, not the level of care from free medical, dental, and food aid. Yes, peer nations might be able to offer free dental and medical care to win hearts and minds too, but one important aspect to consider is…the West has more people that speak the "weak state" languages than peer nations, and THAT is the most critical aid that the U.S. and NATO can offer to stabilize these nations' government from "going over the fence" to the other sides. The West has decades of experience helping other nations with free Aid Workers and philanthropy, making the West the Superpower that should be respected and maintained.
Too much of this assumes "security" equals defense spending. Some of it surely is, but a big chunk of the issue in many of these states seems to be inability to provide civil or human security. That is a job for better police, not for SOF or other troops.
Much of it might be better targeted and police reforms and supplies, not on big-ticket, Western-style weapons systems, with their long logistics tails and massive support contracts that end up overburdening weak states further.
We always seem to default to the expensive, so-it-like-we-do model instead of something cheaper, less militarized, and more appropriate (perhaps) to the situation on the ground.