RESEARCH
Book Project
Building Militaries: The Organizational Drivers of Security Assistance (In)effectiveness
Security Force Assistance (SFA) has emerged a central pillar of U.S. defense strategy and a ubiquitous feature of international relations. The United States’ record building militaries in partner states is, however, decidedly mixed. My book project investigates why the United States struggles to build more effective militaries in partner states, and focuses in particular on the causes and consequences of U.S. advisory doctrines. I build from the premise that the central barrier to effective SFA is interest divergence, and the central strategic challenge of SFA is influence. Recipients of U.S. SFA may welcome vast infusions of U.S. cash and equipment while simultaneously ignoring U.S. advice and implementing policies that keep their militaries weak.
The prevailing explanation of SFA failure asserts that SFA fails when the U.S. lacks the monitoring capacity or the leverage necessary to coerce partners into complying with U.S. guidance. In contrast, I demonstrate that the United States almost always has both sufficient visibility and sufficient bargaining power to enforce compliance in SFA. The United States builds paper tigers that collapse on impact when the United States military organizations tasked with advisory missions refuse to bargain.
I conceptualize U.S. military organizations’ approach to influence in security assistance missions as advisory doctrines. Advisory doctrines vary across military organizations. While most U.S. military organizations rely entirely on teaching and persuasion to influence counterparts to take steps to improve their militaries, others combine teaching and persuasion with incentives and direct command.
I argue that when U.S. military organizations rely exclusively on teaching and persuasion, their counterparts tend to ignore their advice, continuing to implement policies that keep their militaries weak. In contrast, when U.S. military organizations combine teaching and persuasion with incentives and/or direct command, their counterparts more often follow their advice, implementing policies that improve their battlefield effectiveness.
I then move a step back in the causal chain to examine the drivers of advisory doctrines. I argue that when military organizations are tasked with missions they view as peripheral, or distractions from their core missions, they aim not to build stronger militaries in partner states, but rather to minimize threat to their core missions, minimize disruption of their own bureaucratic machinery, and minimize negative civilian attention. These bureaucratic aims lead them to rely on the more bureaucratically convenient teaching and persuasion. In contrast, when military organizations for which advising is a core mission are tasked with security assistance, they aim to build stronger partner militaries, and they combine teaching and persuasion with incentives and/or direct command.
Drawing on over 100 original interviews as well as oral histories and archival documents, I test these arguments through within- and across-case comparison of U.S. Army and U.S. Army Special Forces efforts to build more effective partner security forces in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Methods for Studying Military Operations
Understanding military operations is fundamental to understanding international relations. However, there is little methodological guidance available to scholars interested in studying military operations and leveraging analysis to inform international relations theory and practice. In an International Security article, Andrew Halterman and I address this omission, defining the method of campaign analysis for the study of military operations. We distinguish campaign analysis from the wider world of operations research and from related methods of military science such as net assessment, provide guidance for scholars interested in conducting campaign analysis, propose two methodological advancements, and illustrate the value of the method for theory and policy. Applying our approach, we replicate and extend Barry Posen’s 1991 analysis of NATO’s prospects for thwarting a Warsaw Pact armored breakthrough, and Wu Riqiang’s 2020 analysis of Chinese nuclear survivability. Beyond campaign analysis, I am interested in harnessing tabletop exercises, wargames, and modeling and simulations to study the development of military plans and decision-making in war, with special attention to emerging technologies.
Security Cooperation
Security assistance (the subject of my current book project) is just one facet of security cooperation. In other research, I examine other ways in which states help each other fight. In one project, I investigate how contingency access— state decisions to let other states fight wars from inside their borders— affects the military power of coalitions. Although contingency access has been overlooked in alliance politics and coalitions literatures focused exclusively on the pooling of military forces, contingency access has contributed more to coalition military power than force contributions, and by a wide margin. In another project, I turn contingency access into the dependent variable, investigating the drivers of state decisions to grant, restrict, or deny access.
photos (from top to bottom): Advisors from the 3rd Security Force Assistance Brigade don their brown berets at a ceremony standing up the unit (credit: 3rd SFAB’s official Facebook page); deployment and strength of NATO and Warsaw Pact forces in southern region in 1987 (credit: NATO Archives); Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan (credit: militarybases.com)