Building partner armies : US lessons for an era of strategic competition

Why has the United States struggled to build effective militaries in partner states? Current research delineates two predominant strategies employed by the United States when developing foreign security forces: the Rapport Building Approach and the Pressure-Based Approach. Both camps reveal important insights about security force assistance (SFA), yet they are largely influenced by the post-9/11 era’s dominant security challenges: terrorism and insurgency. This research seeks to take SFA studies in a new direction by examining US programs to build partner armies for external defense. The central question motivating this study is, “Under what conditions have US efforts succeeded in building partner militaries for external defense?” This is a qualitative, multi-method research project, combining historical case studies, archival research, and original interviews to generate and test a novel theory of SFA effectiveness. The empirical foundation is a controlled comparison of three cases of American SFA in a previous era of strategic competition: South Korea before and during the Korean War, Turkey in the aftermath of World War II, and Iran under the Shah. This study hypothesizes that two factors are primarily responsible for shaping the recipient's battlefield effectiveness: the type of US support and the nature of partner state leadership. If US support is thick and partner state leadership is performance-driven, then the recipient’s battlefield effectiveness will increase, thereby likely establishing effective external defense. In South Korea and Turkey, thick US support combined with performance-driven leadership led to increased battlefield effectiveness during the Korean War. Conversely, in Iran, the mix of thinning US support with power-consolidating leadership in the Shah failed to achieve positive outcomes. These findings offer actionable insights for improving future US SFA in an era of strategic competition.

Author dc:creator

• Rosenberg, Sam Joseph

Contributors dc:contributor

• Suri, Jeremi
• Zoltan Barany
• Barany, Zoltan D.
• Sankaran, Jaganath

• Security force assistance
• U.S. foreign military training
• SFA
• Strategic competition
• External defense
• U.S. security policy
• Military effectiveness
• Case studies in security assistance
• Cold War era security strategies
• Military leadership and performance
• Military advising
• Security cooperation
• Military advisors

Identifier

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/52697

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:tdl-ir.tdl.org:2152/126160