“In the economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a
law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these
effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with
its cause—it is seen. The others unfold in succession—they are not seen: it is
well for us if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this
constitutes the whole difference—the one takes account of the visible effect;
the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those
which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it
almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the
ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the
bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great
evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the
risk of a small present evil.”
Frederic
Bastiat, That Which Is Seen, And That
Which Is Not Seen (1850)
The timeless wisdom contained within
Bastiat’s famous essay can be summarized neatly and applied across nearly any
aspect of decision making: because of our human fallibility we continually
favor choices whose effects are seen over choices whose effects are hidden. One
could substitute military strategist for economist in Bastiat’s famous essay
and the ideas contained within would hold remarkably true. Good military
strategists understand the tradeoffs between a set of decisions and look for
effects that do not manifest themselves until a later period. Economists
eventually named this idea “opportunity cost”.
In traditional cost-benefit analysis
one subtracts the expected cost from the expected benefit in order to come to a
decision. If the difference is positive then that action is taken. However, analysis
of opportunity cost does not stop there: instead, Bastiat’s model asks how the
net benefit of one decision compares to all other possible options. The
difference between the net benefit of the decision taken (the seen) and the
benefits of decisions not taken (the unseen) is the opportunity cost. While a
particular choice may produce a small advantage the opportunity cost would be
enormous if another choice would have yielded an even greater advantage.
With the understanding that national
security resources are limited and expected to become more restrictive in the
future it is especially important to be introspective and thoughtful about what
we request of American citizens. Questions such as “Would more Unmanned Aerial
Vehicles, more Littoral Combat Ships, or more direct-action Special Operations
Forces make us safer?” are not helpful. The answer to those types of questions
is undoubtedly in the affirmative and could be used to justify any amount of
defense spending. This ignores reality. The more germane question is “Given a
fixed and possibly shrinking budget, what is the opportunity cost of purchasing
those military forces?” or, in other words, “What else could be done with our
limited resources that would be more beneficial to our national security?”
Bastiat urges us to look not only at the seen but to look for the unseen as
well.
Security assistance, broadly
understood, is aid to a partner nation targeted toward increasing its national
defense capabilities in a manner that advances our US national security
interests. Practically speaking, this could be anything from helping an allied
military integrate itself into a coalition war to aiding a country threatened
by a jingoistic neighbor or a subversive internal threat. There are a plethora
of security assistance programs, scattered between different agencies, that
serve different aspects of this mission. The Department of State’s Foreign
Military Financing (FMF) program strengthens our partner nation’s defenses
through grants of money used to purchase weapons, equipment and training. The
Department of Defense trains and equips friendly national counter-narcotics
efforts with Section 1033 and Section 1004 authority and likewise does so with
counter-terrorism forces through Section 1206 authority. The Justice
Department’s International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program
helps to strengthen the law enforcement functions of foreign governments in
order to promote more professional and transparent institutions. These are just
a few of the tools available to promote national security by strengthening the
capability of foreign governments to protect its people from harm.
When applied consistently and over a
long period, security assistance produces positive and lasting effects. When
done poorly and haphazardly the effects are often negated or adverse. We must overcome
the cognitive bias that prevents us from fully exploiting the potential of
long-term security assistance efforts. As called for in the President’s 2010
National Security Strategy, a robust, consistent and active security assistance
policy promotes America’s interests in having a peaceful and stable
international order.
Security Assistance is a
Vaccine: The Unseen Effects
As the United States approaches some
difficult choices to be made with respect to how and how much we should spend
on national defense this is an opportune moment to discuss the overlooked
benefits of helping partner nations help themselves. Bastiat’s seen and unseen model
is an excellent concept we can use to think about the national defense budget. Security
assistance produces unseen effects because the benefits of these engagements do
not accrue immediately but over time. In unseen ways they can prevent us from
being pulled into non-existential wars. When applied properly and over a long
period, security assistance inoculates the United States against the use of our
own force. The commonly understood aphorism in the irregular warfare community
to send fifteen advisors now in order to prevent having to send 15,000
conventional troops later.
Almost all of the effect of security
assistance is preventative in nature. Like a vaccine, which strengthens an
immune system and provides an invisible barrier of protection against certain
diseases, security assistance works in much the same way. By increasing the
capabilities of partner nation security forces the US tries to prevent an
insurgency, a cross-border war or violent criminal organizations from taking
hold in a country. The disease in this case is violence. We greatly desire the
prevention of devastating violence from occurring instead of having to confront
it with our own forces. However, there is a deep epistemological conundrum with
respect to security assistance.
One of the justifications for
mandatory vaccination is that many people who cannot visibly see hepatitis,
measles, and polio and the consequences of those diseases will fail to get the
proper vaccinations. Their inaction will thereby endanger themselves and others.
When the needle penetrates our skin we feel the small upfront cost of pain but
cannot see, and will never fully know, the unseen effects of the vaccine. The
knowledge that a painful vaccination indeed prevented a much larger amount of
suffering is unattainable except in a probabilistic sense. Without the
immunization it is possible that we would never have fallen ill. However, we
will know that the inoculation did not work if the disease appears afterwards.
On an individual level we cannot know if the vaccine prevented contraction of
the disease but we can know if it did not. Only by looking at disease
contraction rates in the aggregate, across treated and untreated populations,
can we know if a vaccination is effective.
The conceptual disadvantage for
national security is that like vaccinations we will only know if security
assistance failed to prevent a catastrophe. For example, a decade long security
assistance engagement with a vulnerable partner nation will be successful if a
large US military intervention is never required. However, there could be many
reasons why the country did not implode other than American advisors and
equipment. It could be that the threat was overestimated or the government was already
adept enough to deal with it. One cannot separate the effect of security
assistance from all other factors. Yet if the country does fall prey to
violence then we will have learned that the security assistance effort was
unsuccessful. We can never fully measure the impact of a security assistance
mission but we will know if it was insufficient. Security assistance creates
capabilities which can be measured and evaluated but the effect and impact of
those capabilities towards promoting peace and deterring violence is difficult
to isolate.
For instance, the 1998-2012 security
assistance effort in Colombia known as Plan Colombia coincided with a dramatic
drop in violence. While not resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, the fact that
Colombia is a safer place to live is indisputable. During this period Colombia
received several billion dollars in security assistance from the United States
to include helicopters, training, advisors and more. Had the violence failed to
decline precipitously or had increased it would have been understood by
everyone that the mission either had no effect or a negative effect—a failure
either way. However the positive trends in security over the last decade are
difficult to attribute. We badly want to know how much the US’s support of
Colombia during this period affected the outcome. Was it indispensible? Was it
small and insignificant? Unfortunately we cannot quantitatively untangle the
effect of the US’s assistance from everything else that took place in Colombia
during this time. This represents the core of the security assistance knowledge
problem.
In addition to inoculating the US
against violent confrontation there are two other benefits that go unseen until
the moment they are needed and found unavailable—access and intelligence.
Reading information reports on numbers and types of foreign forces is only
marginally useful and only partially reveals the truth. For example, knowing
that a partner nation has assault helicopters and a counter-terrorism unit is a
good fact to have. But, what the US truly wants to know is if our ally could
plan and conduct an operation on its own or as part of a broader coalition. We
need to know how the aircraft are maintained, if the pilots are trained, and if
the ground forces are organized and able to shoot straight. The best way to
understand the effectiveness of a partner nation’s security forces is to spend
time training and advising them in the environment in which they are most
likely to fight. Virtually no nation will simply invite us to assess their
capabilities. However, a safety and capability assessment is usually a
prerequisite for security assistance training. In that case it is in the host
nation’s interest to share information. The benefits of this access and
intelligence go mostly unseen and unrealized because we do not know when it will
be needed. Much foresight is imperative to acquire that information because it
cannot be delivered on demand.
The epistemological problem creates
a profusion of difficulties for security assistance advocates. When weighing
security assistance investment dollars against other defense programs we are
arguing for effects that are unobservable versus capabilities that are
observable. In the competition for defense funding a conventional forces
advocate can point to a tangible soldier, tank, or airplane and persuasively
champion the benefits of having more. Without concrete evidence the security
assistance and irregular warfare community is forced to use hand-waving and
storytelling. It is not difficult to imagine whose argument carries the day.
Security Assistance Spending
How do we evaluate our security
assistance efforts? Is it possible to know if we are spending enough money and
resources protecting ourselves against direct involvement in messy conflicts? Unfortunately
it is difficult to answer in the definitive. No model exists that can tell us
the right amount of spending. History and the case-study method are the only
tools available. Instead of attempting a voluminous study of US security
assistance efforts a review of our historical spending can serve as an
effective proxy.
The best way to understand our
commitments and efforts towards security assistance is to study the levels and
trends of investment in this mission. Some stylized facts about security
assistance spending can explain part of our deficiencies in this area. Because
there is no absolute criteria to measure spending we cannot definitively know
if we commit enough resources on security assistance by looking only at
spending levels. However, by comparing security assistance spending to other
activities we can at least gain an indication of relative priorities and how
they have changed over time.
Simply comparing security assistance
funding to DoD funding is problematic. Included in the DoD budget are
compensation costs such as pay, healthcare, and other benefits for both
military and DoD civilians. Also included in the DoD budget are research and
development costs. Almost without exception US military advisors and trainers
do not pay the salaries of foreign soldiers nor do our scientists develop new
weapons technology exclusively for partner nations. It is not useful to compare
lines of spending for activities that are nearly completely distinct. Instead
the most appropriate comparisons to security assistance spending are the DoD Operations and Maintenance and Procurement budgets. Those two areas of
spending best approximate security assistance “train and equip” activities and
employment of the force. A cursory review of security assistance, Operations and Maintenance and Procurement spending illustrates several
problems with our strategy of strengthening the capabilities of allies and
partner nations.
From 1981-2010, spending on security
assistance was 3.61% of what was spent on US military Operations and Maintenance and Procurement
combined (Table 1). To some that number may seem too high and to others it may be
insufficient. There are several explanations as to why this number could be
considered reasonable. Obviously, our own nation’s military capability should
be the first budgetary priority with respect to national security. Installing
smoke detectors and fire extinguishers in everyone’s home is great but we still
need a fire department to be prepared for the worst. Second, our weapon systems
are more expensive to purchase and operate. We have big-ticket items like F-22
fighters and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles in our Procurement budget that are not usually
purchased for partner nations. Third, the scope of our war preparations is
world-wide and not restricted to a defined geographical area like most
countries. Despite the interconnectedness of the globe the security threats of
most nations lie within their own borders or just across.
Nevertheless, the question as to
whether 3.61% is too high, too low, or just right is not relevant. The question
is whether security assistance investment has kept pace with the rhetoric about
this mission’s importance. The answer is unequivocally negative. When we
consider that in 1981 the spending ratio between security assistance and Operations and Maintenance and Procurement was 5.85%, rose slightly in
the 1980s and then declined to 2.42% in 2010 it is undeniable that security
assistance became a significantly lower priority in our national security
strategy. When national defense budgets were slashed in the 1990s, security
assistance took a disproportionally large hit and never recovered even after
9/11.
In real dollar terms defense
spending on Operations and Maintenance
and Procurement has roughly doubled
since 1981. However, despite a massive thirty year economic expansion, US
investment in security assistance has actually decreased significantly. In the
first five years of this period, 1981-1985, the US spent nearly 74.7 billion
dollars on security assistance. From 2006-2010 security assistance cumulative
spending was 44.1 billion. That contraction of investment represents a net decline
of 36%. Security assistance investment decreased both in real terms and
relative to Operations and Maintenance
and Procurement spending. Aside from
Iraq and Afghanistan we are doing a lot less training and equipping of partner
nations.
Not only did security assistance funding
decrease relative to Operations and
Maintenance and Procurement
budgets the year-to-year changes were far more variable. Excluding 1990, the
year after the fall of the Berlin Wall when security assistance dollars flooded
Eastern Europe, the year-to-year changes in security assistance spending were
14.2 times more volatile over this period compared to the changes in the
combined Operations and Maintenance
and Procurement budgets. The volatility
in the security assistance budget would be 170 times greater compared to the Operations and Maintenance and Procurement budgets if the data for 1990
were included.
This means that when the combined Operations and Maintenance and Procurement budget changed slightly the security
assistance budget increased or decreased by a much larger percentage. These
behaviors essentially mimic the investment philosophies of people saving for
retirement versus day traders. A steady and consistent investment in our nation’s
military allowed the Pentagon to build and sustain a well-trained force with
high human capital and permitted it to take the long view with respect to
procurement of new weapon systems. We know that the time required for an
American unit to acquire a new capability is lengthy. Imagine how much longer
it takes for a developing nation’s military to learn the same skill. In
contrast to spending on our armed forces, the lack of focus and commitment to security
assistance means many of our partner nations received inconsistent and
therefore ineffective help. Investments
in security assistance oscillate between the feast of Christmas and the fast of
Good Friday.
While not all events are within our
control we should at least wonder if a more vigorous approach to security
assistance over the last 30 years could have kept us out of trouble. With which
countries in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America could we have
cultivated strong relationships to the extent that terrorists and violent gangs
would not be present and active? It is not believable that all of our security
problems would be solved by now had we invested modestly in security assistance
from 1981-2011 but it is plausible that there would be fewer of them. Over the
long run, the cost of security assistance today is less expensive than direct
intervention tomorrow.
In sum, security assistance declined
significantly as a budget priority over the last thirty years and therefore as
part of the national security strategy. In this period, year-to-year changes in
security assistance allocations swung wildly, experiencing both large increases
and decreases. Our nation’s approach to security assistance is inconsistent.
For all the talk about security assistance, partnerships, and international
cooperation in our National Security Strategy documents the money has not
followed the rhetoric. Relative to other DoD activities the US significantly
deemphasized development of our partner nation’s military capability. This reading
of our historical spending on security assistance leads to the conclusion that
the United States does not extract the full benefits of these programs because
it does not exploit them efficiently.
What Does Our Security Assistance
Budget Buy Us Now?
The next question pertains to what
specifically we are purchasing. Coupled with erratically decreasing investments
in security assistance programs the added disadvantage is that what we spend is
concentrated in a few countries. According to research by Gordon Adams and
Rebecca Williams of the Henry L. Stimson Center, 21.9 billion in Foreign
Military Financing (FMF) and Section 1206 “train and equip” programs was
concentrated in Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan during the period 2006-2010.
Without a doubt those four countries are of immense strategic importance to the
United States but why would almost half of our security assistance budget be
dedicated to such a small subset of our partner nations? In the same
publication, Gordon and Williams show that Latin America and the Caribbean
combined receive 4.2% of what Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, and Jordan received in
FMF and 1206 training and equipment. Similarly, the remaining African countries
combined received only 1% of the FMF and 1206 investments made in the
aforementioned four countries.
Aside from simple dollar expenditure
we need only look at the International Military Education and Training (IMET)
program administered by the Department of State to see a more tangible example.
IMET is the largest of all education and training exchange programs and is
described in the Joint Report to Congress on Foreign Military Training of
FY2010 and FY2011 as a “low-cost, highly effective component of U.S. security
assistance”. The goals are to enhance military-to-military relations, increase
interoperability, and reinforce democratic values and respect for human rights.
A typical example is enrollment of foreign military officers in US professional
military education programs such as the Army’s Command and General Staff
College.
The organization charged with
tracking security assistance spending on IMET and other programs is the Defense
Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA). Table 2 shows the cost versus the number of
students trained each year from published DSCA data. Indicative of security
assistance spending as a whole, IMET spending is lower today than thirty years
ago. From 1981-1985, 97.7 million dollars was spent on the program while only
92.5 million dollars was spent from 2006-2010. Again, despite 30 years of massive
economic growth our investment in a low-cost, highly effective security
assistance program decreased.
And not only did IMET investment
decline, the program reached 6,163 fewer students in 2006-2010 compared to
1981-1985. Mirroring security assistance funding as a whole, the changes in
IMET student production varied wildly from year-to-year reaching a low of 2,597
in 1994 and a high of 11,818 in 2004. Assuming that the variation in student
production was due to funding and not to capacity, that would mean that there
was a deficit of tens of thousands of IMET students that could have been
trained from 1981-2010. The opportunity was lost to demonstrate our values,
create peer contacts and gain future access to partner nation militaries.
The narrowness in which our security
assistance money is distributed coupled with the erratic delivery of
international military training and education are concrete demonstrations of
the weakness of our strategy. The preponderance of what we invest in security
assistance goes to four countries and year-to-year education enrollment is
unpredictable. The variability and lack of resources makes it difficult to plan
and build partner nation defense capabilities effectively.
Adverse Effects
At the risk of overextending the
vaccination analogy too far the side effects of security assistance should be
acknowledged. There are real risks involved that range from ineffective
engagements, which waste resources, to a recipient of our military aid turning
its capability on us tomorrow. We need to keep at least three things in mind.
First, the actions of helping
partner nations develop more capability to defend their borders and repel
insurgencies and terrorism need to be divorced from unrealistic expectations about
transforming countries into democratic free-market paradises. There is a slowly
growing consensus, summarized in Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s book Why Nation’s Fail, that economic
and political institutions are the cause of poverty. While security certainly
has its place in development it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. We
should continue to promote and champion freedom and democracy but understand
that at best, security assistance can only indirectly help this development. We
cannot expect that teaching allied commandos to fast-rope from a helicopter
will transfer our values for property rights and law.
Second, are we helping countries
that truly are our allies? Or is our security assistance mission merely a Machiavellian
calculation? It is worth remembering that we helped Saddam Hussein fight Iran
and aided Manuel Noriega in Panama before having to send massive conventional
forces to dispose of them. Indiscriminate support of some useful-but-bad actors
in the past makes it difficult to trumpet the virtues of the security
assistance mission set to the American public. They are justifiably skeptical
of us.
Finally, the mission cannot create
dependency. It should create capabilities that can be sustained with limited or
no further US assistance. Transferring tactical airlift aircraft without
developing an ability to maintain and sustain them is a guarantee of failure.
Training foreign special operators to conduct direct action missions without
creating a cadre of instructors will ensure no end to the security assistance
mission. Within a reasonable amount of time the capability created must be able
to stand on its own.
Conclusion
In his 2010 Foreign Affairs op-ed piece,
then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made an eloquent case for security
assistance to take a larger role in the years to come. Among the challenges he
cited, Secretary Gates noted the lack of career path for military officers as a
major obstacle towards getting the services more involved in helping our allies
defend themselves. US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) is the only major
organization of the armed forces that maintains a focus on foreign internal
defense, a subset of the security assistance mission. However, not every talented
officer who is capable of being a foreign advisor has the ability or desire to
be an Army Green Beret, a Navy SEAL or an Air Force Combat Aviation Advisor.
The skill sets of those types of forces are operationally essential in places
like Yemen and Pakistan but might be overkill in other parts of the world.
Also, special operations forces are extremely scarce and cannot be everywhere
at once. Even if Congress were to expand and sustain security assistance
spending the military has a very limited capacity to deliver more. Furthermore,
officers outside of USSOCOM have little incentive to sign on for those duties.
There are too few conventional units and organizations focused on delivering
military skills and capabilities to foreign allies and virtually no rewards in
terms of promotion and professional development for young officers. The
military must reform itself to increase its capacity to produce military aid.
This requires creating and incentivizing foreign advisor opportunities for
talented officers as well as reshaping some units and organizations such as
outlined by Dr. John Nagl of the Center for a New American Security in his
publication Institutionalizing
Adaptation: It’s Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps.
Security assistance is a unique blend
of our economic, military and diplomatic instruments of power and it was
neglected as a tool of national defense strategy over the last thirty years in
favor of other defense spending priorities. In order for us to more fully
exploit security assistance effects the US government must commit to less
variable, broader and slightly larger funding streams even if that commitment comes at the expense of our own conventional military force.
In my opinion one of the most
pressing needs is for advocates of foreign military aid to develop better methods
of evaluation. Foresight, as Bastiat would agree, is always and everywhere in
short supply. Instead of hoping that foresight will come along the more
plausible strategy is to try and make the unseen effects seen. Blind faith is
not sufficient justification to the American people as to why we send money and
military assistance abroad. Military and civilian leaders who are skeptical of
security assistance effectiveness and prefer to focus on the US armed forces
need to be persuaded and educated with stronger evidence. We have to be able to
show how our investments in partner nation capacity five, ten and twenty years
ago made a difference and prevented the deployment of American troops into a
foreign country. The great epistemological problem of security assistance must
be overcome otherwise this national security tool will remain underutilized. The
opportunity cost of not using security assistance is too large to ignore. Helping
our allies to stop local terrorist groups, dismantle criminal networks, and
deter cross-border aggression with zero or minimal US support is the goal and
will allow us to commit our finite resources elsewhere. This attainment of this
goal is absolutely paramount to our national security. The will and appetite of
the American people to commit US forces abroad or to continue to write blank
checks for us has been exhausted.
TABLE 1
TABLE 2
