LegiStorm

Summary:

Since 2001, successive U.S. administrations have increasingly prioritized efforts to build foreign security forces—particularly in weak and failing states—arguing that doing so advances U.S. national security objectives. In turn, the Department of Defense (DOD) has invested billions of dollars in "Building Partner Capacity," a term that refers to a broad set of missions, programs, activities, and authorities intended to improve the ability of other nations to achieve those security-oriented goals they share with the United States. As a consequence, these efforts and programs have been a growing focus of Congressional attention. Many partner capacity building programs and activities have their roots in the post-World War II period, if not well before, yet today they are implemented more widely, and often with greater resourcing, than efforts prior to September 11, 2001. Indeed, building partner capacity was a central feature of the 2003-2010 Iraq campaign, and is a core component of the ongoing current campaigns both in Afghanistan to counter Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and in Iraq/Syria to counter the Islamic State. Recent events, particularly the battle between the Afghan government and the Taliban over Konduz, the inability of DOD-led efforts to produce more than a "handful" of anti-Assad, anti-Islamic State (IS) forces in Syria, and the collapse of U.S.-trained forces in Iraq in the face of the Islamic State, have called into question—including in Congress—whether these BPC programs can ever achieve their desired effects. CRS surveyed the publicly available literature on the subject, and found the debate on the strategic effectiveness of BPC and related programs nascent, at best. While a variety of studies explore programmatic effectiveness, very few explore what the United States sought to achieve when engaging in a BPC effort, and whether or not doing so led to desirable outcomes. The increasing emphasis that the U.S. government is placing on BPC as a means to achieve strategic goals, combined with the paucity of the literature on this subject, prompted CRS to explore the historical track record of BPC efforts to help determine whether they produced outcomes consistent with U.S. strategic objectives. Twenty case studies since World War II were explored; each was grouped according to one of seven strategic goals that U.S. sought to accomplish. These goals included victory in war/war termination, managing regional security challenges, indirectly supporting a party to a conflict, conflict mitigation, enhancing coalition participation, building institutional and interpersonal linkages, and alliance building. Given that U.S. leaders often argue that a BPC effort could help accomplish more than one of the above goals, determining what constitutes the "primary" strategic objective for a given BPC effort required analytic judgment. CRS organized the cases according to public statements at the time, with particular attention paid to how leaders described the purpose of the BPC effort. Effectiveness was judged based on two criteria: whether the strategic goal was achieved, and whether the effort produced unintended consequences that were obviously and meaningfully damaging to U.S. national interests. Within the case studies explored, BPC was least effective as a tool for allowing the United States to extract itself from conflict (victory in war/war termination). However, it was most effective as a tool for building interpersonal and institutional linkages, and for alliance building.