Mission Creep: Security Assistance and Civil Military Relations Since 9/11
By Major Kevin Chapla, U.S. Army
With the war in Ukraine raging on, U.S. arms, materiel, and training are now flowing freely to aid the Ukrainians in repelling the Russian invasion. U.S. security assistance as a tool of defense and foreign policy has emerged at the forefront of national security discussions. The prevailing discourse surrounding security assistance typically analyzes effectiveness and efficacy, but rarely does scholarship or reporting address the nuances of how these programs affect intra-governmental relations. Historically, security assistance to foreign partners and allies has been the realm of the Department of State (DoS), controlling, overseeing, and managing the bulk of the programming in the security sector. However, as part of its herculean effort to fight terrorism across the globe in response to the September 11th attacks, the U.S. government rapidly expanded the authorities of the Department of Defense (DoD) to employ security cooperation to counter terrorism and mitigate threats to the homeland. This paper argues that the post-9/11 expansion of security assistance militarizes foreign policy and degrades oversight and accountability of U.S. security assistance programming. The U.S. must use the harsh lessons from the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to inform a reassessment of the government’s security assistance mechanisms.
Author's Note: Despite the clear distinction between security cooperation and security assistance nomenclature, this paper will use security assistance to mean both Titles 10 and 22 U.S. government foreign security aid.
Crisis Ignites Expansion in Title 10 Security Assistance Authorities
Al-Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks triggered a dramatic shift in many aspects of U.S. foreign policy and national security strategy, and security assistance is no exception. The GWOT’s launch in the hectic aftermath of the 2001 attacks spurred American invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq with numerous counterterrorism missions forming from the Philippines in Southeast Asia to Somalia in East Africa. Part of the general GWOT strategy emphasized the importance of fighting terrorism alongside allies and partners to defeat violent extremism. Training, arming, and equipping partner forces became a national security priority to share the costs of conflict and shift some burden onto regional partners in fighting terrorist groups overseas. The dynamic nature of fighting non-state organizations created an operational requirement of flexible security assistance programming that could be implemented rapidly and without the bureaucratic red tape lining the existing DoS security assistance model that Defense officials viewed as counterproductive and prohibitive.
This operational need gave way to real legislative and implementation reform beginning in the early 2000s, as the toolbox of security assistance authorities specific to DoD expanded to include the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund, Section 1206 Capacity Building, Commander’s Emergency Response Program, Combatant Commander Initiative Fund, and the Iraq Train and Equip Fund to name a few. Although most of these programs required some DoS concurrence or cooperation, these Title 10-specific programs expanded the geographic scope of DoD security assistance, increased its budgets, and empowered the department with a more powerful role in shaping U.S. relations with foreign countries than was the case in the years before 9/11. This massive transformation in U.S. security assistance is clearly demonstrated by examining the funding levels over time. Compared to the 86% DoS maintained in the year 2000, its share of the funding source decreased to 35% by 2007 as the DoD gained new authorities and created new programs across the world to fight terrorism. The proportion of funding from DoS decreased while new programs created post-9/11 were created largely under DoD management. Of the 50 programs created from 2001 to 2017, 48 were managed by DoD while only one program was managed exclusively by DoS.
In what was perhaps the most consequential security assistance reform since the September 11th attacks, several temporary National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)-authorized DoD programs were codified into Title 10 permanence with the creation of Section 333 capacity building and other distinct authorities for the DoD to carry out security assistance overseas. These new DoD-specific security assistance tools mandated DoS concurrence and Congressional notification, but questions remain as to whether concurrence here represents the spirit of the FAA declaring the Secretary of State to maintain “continuous supervision and general direction” mentioned here previously.
Trends for the Future
Much like the 9/11 attacks sparked a monumental shift in U.S. national security policy, the release of the 2017 National Security Strategy (NSS) ushered in foundational changes to American foreign policy priorities. The 2017 NSS and subsequent National Defense Strategy announced a strategic pivot from countering terrorism and violent extremism to preparing for conflict and competition with powerful state actors, namely Russia and China. This dramatic policy shift has not coincided with corresponding reforms to the Title 10 security assistance authorities that were expanded in the post-9/11 years with the deliberate purpose of fighting terrorism. As such, senior leaders are increasingly advocating for expanding or otherwise repurposing existing Title 10 security assistance authorities to better meet the challenges of an aggressive Russia and a more assertive China. In other words, the reforms and expansion of DoD authorities to meet the terror threat created an opportunity to further empower the DoD in security assistance matters that were long ago viewed as a responsibility fundamentally of DoS.
In pure dollars and cents, the security assistance portfolios on both sides of the Defense-State divide have exploded since 9/11. In the year 2000, the United States spent $7.34 billion on security assistance programming, and that number has more than doubled to $16.22 billion for the year 2020. The increased funding does not necessarily indicate a problem for the future, but the substantial increase in taxpayer dollars flowing to security assistance programming reveals that the U.S. government believes at some level that security assistance is a worthwhile investment that will contribute to favorable national security outcomes. The commitment to confronting great power rivals in the Biden Administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance comes with a corresponding mandate for the United States to cooperate with partner nations to “share costs” of counterterrorism, instability, and peripheral conflict. One of the primary mechanisms through which the national security apparatus will work towards this burden-sharing is the targeted use of security assistance programming to enhance U.S. partners’ military and security capabilities. The objective of security assistance in this context is that partners will fight on behalf of the United States to limit America’s own costs and simultaneously free up readiness, resources, and capabilities to fight the next great war. The strategic environment taken together with the firmly established U.S. government security assistance enterprise suggests that security assistance will remain a prominent feature of American national security policy in the future.
Civil Military Implications
The fact that security assistance will likely remain a salient feature of American national security policy for the near future is neither worrisome nor alarming on its own merits. However, the way the enterprise grew and the shifting intra-governmental power dynamics at play create friction and potentially problematic issues for civil military relations in the United States. The rapid expansion of Title 10 DoD security assistance authorities since 9/11 impacts civil military relations in two significant ways: it militarizes foreign policy and degrades oversight and accountability.
Militarizes foreign policy
The DoD security cooperation workforce numbers over 20,000 while the political-military staff at DoS numbers in the hundreds. Even in Title 10 cases where DoS concurrence or other buy-in is required, is it reasonable to expect the hundred DoS security assistance political-military officials to have the requisite capacity to examine the ancillary implications of large security assistance programs? For example, the DoD typically identifies a threat, a capability gap, and an opportunity to use military tools to achieve a strategic security objective. DoS is arguably better trained and better positioned to assess things like whether the partner nation’s governmental bureaucracy can sustain the new assistance package, whether a certain weapons system upsets a delicate balance between ethnic groups that will have violent ramifications, or whether the introduction of new capabilities will serve to escalate instability and conflict in a region.
Additionally, in the current dynamic, the military maintains the role of implementing agent for both Title 10 and 22 programming, and a certain level of autonomy in decision making and policymaking for its own proprietary Title 10 initiatives. When perspectives in the two departments diverge in a particular country, the military could conceivably choose to forego a Title 22 solution to a security gap and encourage a Title 10 solution where the DoD has far greater latitude to design and implement in ways that support their perspective. Although DoS reserves the right of concurrence for most Title 10 programs, non-concurrence would require the department to spend political capital that it increasingly does not have, especially in relation to the larger, more powerful DoD. This presents clear potential for DoD to circumvent the primary mechanism of U.S. foreign policy to further its own organizational objectives, serving to diminish the role of DoS in managing foreign relations. In the case of FMF, the flagship security assistance program of DoS, the department’s role in leading foreign policy is reduced. Based on data from the Security Assistance Monitor, Center for American Progress reported that 80% of $6 billion annual DoS FMF programming is heavily earmarked to Egypt, Jordan, and Israel, leaving less than $1 billion in FMF for DoS to use at its own discretion. Even in areas where DoS has deep pockets like FMF, its autonomy and flexibility in directing U.S. foreign policy is restricted by these earmarks and lack of available discretionary funds.
Degrades Oversight and Accountability
Without one overarching authoritative manager, creating coherent security assistance strategy supportive of broader U.S. national security goals becomes increasingly difficult. The complexity of different Congressional committees and jurisdictional issues do not allow for a cohesive, unified oversight mechanism of security assistance across the board, both Title 10 and Title 22. DoD does not have a stellar record of fiscal transparency and has yet to successfully pass a federal government audit. Although recent calls for additional monitoring and evaluation stipulations for Title 10 programming are undoubtedly a positive development, it remains to be seen whether there will be any recourse for failed or counterproductive programs.
There are numerous instances of failed security assistance in the post-9/11 years, including several high-profile cases where U.S.-furnished materiel and equipment was actively employed against American service members. In the case of equipment furnished to the Iraqi Army and security forces in the years following the 2003 U.S. invasion, DoD was overwhelmingly responsible for equipping and training the partner force. From 2003 to 2012, 86% (over $20 billion) of security assistance furnished to Iraq was funded by the DoD, around 85% of which originated from the NDAA-appropriated Iraq Security Forces Fund. When ISIS began to establish its caliphate and subsequently routed the U.S.-trained and equipped Iraqi Army, its fighters procured millions of dollars of U.S.-furnished aid that was later turned against counter-ISIS coalition forces years later. In a similar fashion, DoD was the primary funder of security assistance in Afghanistan, contributing 90% (over $84 billion) of the funding in that country from 2001 to 2020, 90% of which came from the NDAA-appropriated Afghanistan Security Forces Fund. Throughout the U.S. withdrawal through August of 2021, the Taliban gobbled up Afghan security forces’ abandoned equipment as it sped across the country seizing territory on its march to Kabul. As a result, the very enemy U.S. troops fought against for 20 years was now equipped with taxpayer-funded weapons, vehicles, and materiel. In both cases the DoD was by far the largest contributor in terms of security assistance (relative to the U.S. government), but difficult questions surrounding accountability and how to avoid these catastrophes in the future remain unanswered in the Pentagon.
Perhaps these losses and reversals of fortune are simply the costs of doing business – the price of entry for waging brutal wars overseas. Even if true, the American people deserve to be making that determination, and our democratic system only allows for that accountability through the peoples’ representatives in Congress. These two cases present lessons learned for effective employment of train and equip programming and raise questions about the need for investing in capacity building initiatives at the host-nation institutional level to ensure new training and equipment can be absorbed properly into an existing security force – this constitutes necessary future research. The key takeaway from these cases from a civil military perspective stem from the lack of accountability of failed DoD-led programs.
DoS is not without fault in these two cases either. Both Defense and State share the responsibility for the spectacular failures of security and stability in these countries resulting from U.S. military intervention. Additionally, DoD security assistance was not the only factor in the dramatic collapse of security forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan – NGOs, partner nations, and the host nations themselves all contributed to a disastrous situation. Yet both the ASSF and the ISSF were Title 10, NDAA-appropriated programs within which the DoD yielded immense power and influence as the primary decision maker and implementing agent.
The most important distinction from a civil military standpoint is that in the wake of such catastrophic failures, DoD has seen its security assistance funding and authorities increase while DoS has seen, at best, stagnated funding levels with its same limited authorities relative to DoD. The monitoring and evaluation requirements are a step in the right direction and provide an accountability mechanism on a case-by-case basis where ineffectual or counterproductive programs can simply be canceled. However, these examples demonstrate that accountability at the organizational level is not feasible in the current security assistance structure. Congress must serve as the stopgap.
Looking Ahead
Further research is required to determine how much power and authority the DoD has gained since the 9/11 expansion of security assistance as a distinct tool of the department. These expansions notwithstanding represent a broader militarization of U.S. foreign policy overseas as much as they represent the expansion of DoD influence and power inside the U.S. government at home. Intensifying the civil-military concerns of security assistance is the discussion about the effectiveness of these tools in U.S. national security and their effect on building good strategy. In 2020, the U.S. government delivered various types of security assistance to 143 countries worth over $16 billion. Although these programs are designed with the purposes of promoting U.S. security and safeguarding Americans’ safety from worldwide threats, there does not exist clear evidence that shows security assistance results in a safer world.
Exporting war and furnishing taxpayer-funded lethal weaponry and training to wide swaths of the globe have become mainstays of U.S. national security policy, but a more militarized world does not necessarily result in a safer world. To be clear, security assistance can be an extremely valuable tool. The case of Ukraine in 2022 is a clear-cut example of security assistance supporting a clearly defined and achievable objective in preventing a Russian takeover of a sovereign European nation. However, most security assistance cases are much more ambiguously defined and difficult to directly connect to legitimate U.S. national security interests. Security assistance can and should be used but must be measured in nature and methodically analyzed to assess risk versus reward.
The security assistance issue raised here represents just a small part of this broader dynamic, and one that civil military relations as well as security cooperation experts would be wise to keep a keen eye on. The nation’s ability to control its armed forces and limit its power in relation to civilians has been a topic of national discourse since its founding, and that debate has continued within the context of U.S. government security assistance. The U.S. military’s mission creep into historically nonmilitary spaces like security assistance inside the government represents just the next modern iteration of this same national discussion.
About the Author
Major Kevin Chapla is a U.S. Army Middle East and North Africa Foreign Area Officer He was formerly a Kiowa helicopter pilot and then a Civil Affairs officer, including short deployments to the Office of Security Cooperation in Libreville, Gabon and to the Office of Defense Cooperation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. He will soon depart for FAO In Region Training in Jordan. Major Chapla holds an M.A. in Security Studies from Georgetown University.