Threats and Warnings
Given my recent series of JFK related posts, newer readers of this blog may not be aware that I tend to research and write more broadly than on the political assassinations of the 1960’s. It’s true that I am involved in some pretty focused and intense JFK related work at the moment but my overall interests are in the areas of the intelligence communities (primarily American and Russian), national security issues, and what is broadly described in the military as command and control (C3 / communications, command and control) – if you want to be really contemporary it’s now C4 / communications, command, control and intelligence. Never can have too many acronyms…
You will find those interests, and my work on them, in my books Shadow Warfare, Surprise Attack and most recently Creating Chaos – which focuses on American and Russian political warfare, including information and social media warfare. Given high degree of strangeness in current events, and the mix of hybrid and political warfare that had become very real, I’ve moved into paying more attention to the present – essentially wrestling with an attempt to put today’s events into some sort of historical perspective. If nothing else, to evaluate how bad things really are at the moment. I’m also pondering a fourth book in the national security series, which would deal with the pitfalls of military assistance – but sales of these types of titles are not great, publishers want something more sensational and penetrating the media world with a new history book, unless it’s a tell-all of some sort or a memoir of a Washington figure (lots of people writing those books at present, heavy competition) it’s a very hard to convince a publisher that it’s even a break even investment.
So, for the moment I’m going to do a few posts on contemporary issues. One of the most obvious of those relates to the subject of national security – “threats and warnings” and how they are being handled in Washington D.C. That is now quite different than how they are being handled in NATO, which is generally elevating its game, while Washington has largely retired to the dugout (I want it to be an early spring, hence the baseball metaphor).
Over the decades of the Cold War, the American intelligence community developed some very refined modeling, statistical and pattern analysis techniques to estimate and report on potential national threats. Arguably the best summary of those practices are fond in Anticipating Surprise; Analysis for Strategic Warning, by Cynthia Grabo. To make a long story short, those techniques are accurate enough so that most real national security threats – from Pearl Harbor, to Korea, on to the abortive Millennium terror attacks of 2000 and the successful attack on America in 2001 have been detected and profiled by the intelligence community. Threats identified, specific warnings given and the chain of command briefed at the level of the National Security Council and President (for Pearl Harbor that would be the Departments of the Army and Navy and the War Department). In most instances specific warnings were also given to field commands…as with Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, the Korean theatre and in later years the respective domestic agencies such as the FBI.
The reasons why many of those warnings failed are summarized by Grabo in her work and I’ve expanded on them in Surprise Attack, taking them beyond the Cold War into more contemporary examples. And it turns out the failures to respond to the warnings are not “conspiratorial” but rather involve very basic human factors and systems failures. Often failures of basic command and control. There have been some successes but unfortunately the tendency – from administration to administration and president to president, has been to duck the blame and as an alternative to expand the overall system (the most far reaching example of that following 9/11) to put in more layers, a bigger bureaucracy and in doing so produce more room to ignore or at least not take focused action on real threats.
The reason I seem to be obsessed with this problem at the moment is because the current state of threat and warning intelligence in America is literally worse than it has been since before World War II. And the problem is not in the intelligence collections, analysis or warnings – it is now better than it ever has been, technologically verging on the spectacular. In contrast American national security in terms of command and control is dismal, perhaps not at its worst but comparable to 2001. In one respect it may even be worse than it’s ever been.
Those are clearly some very strong claims, in the next post I’ll work on giving some factual and historical support for my opinions.
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First off, thank you very much for the expanded comment, it really helps me organize some of my early thoughts on the subject! One of the big problems tackling the military assistance is separating outright military intervention (something common in Latin America prior to World War I) from post WWII military assistance, largely directed towards Europe and the Middle East - intended to quickly rearm and support nations facing a very probably move by Stalin to expand westwards and into Iran/Iraq. It would be relatively easy to write about those sorts of programs - but then what were essentially were programs designed to defend nations against outside attack turned into regime maintenance and regime building, something quite different. It would be hard to characterize American military assistance in contemporary times as anything other then the creation and sustaining of "cooperative"/friendly governments - especially when it comes to military equipment sales, as with Saudi Arabia or Jordan. Even the use of JSOC and national guard forces across Africa, to sustain anti jihadist regimes, is directed towards internal threats. I'm still pondering how to approach the subject but I'm also interested in what would be a much more well defined book dealing with how American political campaign rhetoric can actually undermine both our intelligence community and in some instances overall national security. That has been a major issue in the past and certainly has some contemporary implications. I'll have to see if a publisher thinks its as important as I do - and has enough market reach to make it viable. I'm not leaving military assistance behind but as you highlight, dealing with it in a comprehensive manner is a real structural challenge.
Thank you for your answer. I understand it was easy to write about post-World War Two military assistance programs designed to deter Soviet invasion. Those only appear to be rather simple straightforward programs of conventional military assistance, but were not always: - In Greece U.S. military equipment and advisors were directly involved in fighting against communist supported groups in the Greek Civil War.
- U.S. military assistance to France in funds, equipment and later personnel was put to use in the fighting against the Vietminh in Vietnam.
Rather than to understand assistance efforts according to the threat, one might as well understand them according to the operationalization of the mission. If the stated mission of a military assistance organization was to support a foreign government in maintaining the political alignment and territorial integrity of its country this overall mission may be operationalized according to the threat analysis:
- If the partner country is threatened by external conventional forces – strengthen conventional combat power (e.g. Germany, Iran, Vietnam)
- If the partner country is threatened by internal insurgents – strengthen the security forces’ capabilities in COIN (e.g. Greece, France, Vietnam, Philippines)
- If the partner country’s national integrity and security is threatened by organized criminal groups – support security forces in suppressing the threat (e.g. Columbia)
- If the partner country’s internal security and international security is threatened by terrorist groups – support security forces in suppressing the threat (e.g. Mali, Senegal, Kenya)
Thus in my view military assistance programs were always tasked to sustain friendly governments and then designed to be effective against whatever threatened this friendly government. If that was an outside threat, they were designed to defend against outside threats, but that was just one operationalization of the mission statement.
In “Shadow Warfare” you described the evolution of covert action from direct CIA involvement via civilian proxies via host nation proxies to contractors and back to direct CIA and military involvement. The different kinds of military assistance programs noted above are not so much evolutionary steps as parallel activities. U.S. advisors have trained foreign forces engaged in COIN since the 40s but also trained foreign forces in conventional tactics and using U.S. equipment since the 40s. MAAGV and MACV trained the ARVN with conventional equipment and tactics to deter against a conventional outside threat, the NVA, while advising in an ongoing internal struggle against the NLF. In Afghanistan U.S. trainers conducted very basic military training for conventional forces as well as COIN and SpecOps training. There are gradual shifts in the number and focus of programs and the involvement of other agencies and contractors, but I do think this all fits under the big umbrella of military assistance, which is everything and nothing you want to put into that phrase.
Concerning your interest in campaign rhetoric affecting intelligence organizations and national security, I am quite sure this had an impact but could not operationalize how to quantify or proof it. Most democratic politicians in the West will know how to regard a campaign speech and distinguish between campaign rhetoric, official speeches and unofficial discussions. E.g. during the height of the NSA scandal European politicians, meaning of the EU as well as national governments and parliaments, were officially outraged over NSA surveillance of European citizens and even government devices, demanded explanations, investigations and what not. These same outraged government officials apparently never ordered their intelligence services to decrease or stop cooperation with U.S. services. On the other hand of course one ill-advised sentence may cause a diplomatic incident or even blow the cover of an intelligence operation. Determining whether a campaign speech from a candidate without public office actually had any effect or whether a foreign reaction was unique or a tactical exploit to put pressure on the U.S. in a completely different discussion was hard to do in my opinion.
I think you've structured it very well:- If the partner country is threatened by external conventional forces – strengthen conventional combat power (e.g. Germany, Iran, Vietnam)
- If the partner country is threatened by internal insurgents – strengthen the security forces’ capabilities in COIN (e.g. Greece, France, Vietnam, Philippines)
- If the partner country’s national integrity and security is threatened by organized criminal groups – support security forces in suppressing the threat (e.g. Columbia)
- If the partner country’s internal security and international security is threatened by terrorist groups – support security forces in suppressing the threat (e.g. Mali, Senegal, Kenya)
....the real challenge would be taking it down two more levels. First evaluating the politics of the decision of which countries were designated as "friendly" and how that relates to the funding and manpower committed to the assistance. Does "friendly" mean a truly democratic nation sharing American values, at risk from any of the above threats or does it mean a nation which is strictly of strategic value from a military standpoint? Or does it simply represent a nation whose leadership expresses friendliness and "anti-whatever is in vogue" in order to gain support.
In itself the politics and metrics of those decisions would be an interesting study - on a side note I've been stuck by the fact that on occasion we have gone so far as getting behind regimes/leaders which relied on hired paramilitary forces to protect a leader. That's probably bad sign (Afghanistan being a contemporary example and South Vietnam under Diem an earlier one).
Digging even deeper (especially in regard to military assistance targeting internal resistance movements) would take me into some interesting areas related to cultural anthropology - especially in regard to the social biology arguments for what is called the "territorial imperative", a concept which offers an explanation as to why first Britain, then Russia and now the the U.S. failed at regime building in Afghanistan and why a superpower could be defeated in Vietnam.
In regard to the difficulty in dealing with the potential impact of campaign rhetoric, that does seem challenging but I've developed some very specific and detailed examples relating to the Nixon/Kennedy campaign, Regan's campaign, and the campaigns of G. H. W. Bush and Donald Trump that show very concrete and frightening patters for how campaign rhetoric complained with the transition between administrations can have disastrous consequences. Fundamentally it deals with how new administrations deal with the intelligence community, the national security agencies and threat and warnings intelligence. It would be a derivative of some of the things I learned in writing Surprise Attack. In any event, both subjects have potential, both are interesting - the next step would be seeing if any publishers feel the same way.
I am glad you like the structuring. Concerning the evaluation of allies I guess the levels of funding and manpower would not only be affected by the grade of political alignemtn of the host nation with the U.S., but mainly by other factors, such as military necessity, operational possibilities, the political situation at home. If we just compare Laos, Vietnam and Thailand during the 60s, the deployment of troops apparently does not follow political alignment. The U.S. would have liked to deploy more troops to Laos, but lacking infrastructure, logistics and later the political framework of the operation would not allow that. On the other hand Vietnam allowed for large troop deployments and they were deemed necessary, although hardly any of the responsible politicians had great confidence in Diem, Thieu or any other president of the country. Thailand also allowed for large deployments and the U.S. would likely have fought for it, but luckily troop deployments were never necessary. It would be very interesting to see, whether there was internal communication indicating the democratic values of allies were considered in the strategic planning but my uninformed assumptions based on anecdotal historical evidence is, strategic importance and a common enemy were deemed sufficient to be eligible for U.S. support. The U.S. actively destabilized democratically elected governments, because they acted in their nations best interests, which were pitted against US corporations (e.g. Iran 1952 and Guatemala 1954). One of NATO's founding members was Portugal, which at the time had a very anti-communist, if not to say quite fascist government. Although officially anti-colonialistic, the U.S. actively supported France in its war against the communist/nationalist/anti-colonialist Vietminh. So I think these data points do point in a distinct direction.
I am not familiar enough with the concept of the territorial imperative to discuss it, but there are ahost of overlapping reasons for failures to secure Afghanistan or Vietnam. Concerning regime building I would just like to say, I doubt they ever tried. The Imperial British approach to territorial control was overawe the local with military power and then to put their power behind some local power brokers to conduct population control and administration. This worked out well overall but in Afghanistan they lacked the local knowledge to chose the right people and balance out the system to make it work. The Soviets never had an interest in territorial control of Afghanistan but only held the ring road as to threaten Iran and Pakistan. They installed and supported a local regime but largely left it to its own devices to implement a socialist society, which did not work out. The U.S. did not mind at all about government. Coming from the historical experience of successful reconstruction of Germany and Japan, it was thought, allied troops would only need to provide security and some advisors and the Afghans would figure out everything else themselves in time (same approach in Iraq). If there had been as many political and administrative advisors as there were military trainers, it would have been a whole new ball game. Sadly the experiences from Germany and Japan did not apply as both countries had populations used to being centrally governed and organizations, administrators and processes still in place, which never ceased to work. None of this was the case in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Which leads me back to paramilitary contractors as presidential security details. When living in a country with a volatile security environment, no established tradition of the esprit de corps or adherence to law or duty, but loyalty to people and networks. it does appear wise not to utilize unreliable loacal security guards. In many developing countires such guards have extended families and loyalties and interests and a politician acting against them may suddenly find some of his guards opposed to him and well armed. Or even worse the leader of his presidential guard thinking he was better at the job. Utilizing trained and experienced ex-military personnel from a foreign country does look bad and is an indicator of an instable situation, but the president likely sleeps better that way.
As best I can tell from comparing the State Department's Foreign Relations documents with actual military support operations there are quite commonly strong differences among a) regime assessments as made by State Department staff (who obviously look at the political dynamics and exposures), b) the military staff (who are tightly focused on combat tactics and leadership) without political concerns other than how forceful and forward acting the regime leaders are and c) whatever representatives the President sends out to reconcile the two views and report back. I give a number of examples of how that plays out in my most recent book on political warfare, Creating Chaos. An interesting aspect of those examples is that during much of the early Cold War CIA station chiefs tended to reflect the military viewpoint rather than the political assessments of the State department.
I just finished a good study by Seth Jacobs which included the evolution of military assistance in South Vietnam - from MAAG to what was its essential replacement by MACV...I would recommend it, the title is Cold War Mandarin and its a rather unique view into the Diem regime.
The implications of territorial imperative studies are far too deep for me to pursue here but they suggest that unless foreign powers are willing to rule lightly (something like the Roman empire) or to engage in something equivalent to genocide (intentionally or not) imposing long term foreign control over historically/culturally independent regions is problematic, regardless of the force applied.
In that regard your point on foreign security forces making regime leaders sleep more safely is no doubt true...but it tends to be a short security from a historical perspective. It may preserve an individual for a time, but translating it to preserving a regime is something else entirely.
Within the overall organization of the executive. I would say the representative of the Department of State and the military did what they were tasked to do: provide an assessment within the scope of their expertise. Also I would assume the military at the time was much more practically oriented and ignored political and sociological factors of host nations, partly because they were not trained to look at them. Did or would a Foreign Service Officer recommend not to support a foreign government of anti-communist or worse neural alignment, because it did represent democratic values or did not respect human rights? I would assume such an officer might share the fate of the “China hands” in the era of McCarthy, whose whole crime was to actually do their job and understand their target country.Thank you for the recommendation. I will try to look into it, but there is so much to read.
As far as I know the Roman Empire ruled anything but lightly. The standard reaction to any revolt during the first two centuries AD was to immediately respond with overwhelming force. Crush the sparks of revolt before they light a fire. Roman rule overall had many benefits, but insubordination was not tolerated until the Empire became too weak to exercise effective control. But I see your point. The rule of the British Empire may be a better example here.
Imagine a territory divided between groups of different ethnics, beliefs and languages, which again were divided by clans. There is neither a tradition of national unity, nor central control or good administration. Organizations and positions are divided between self-serving networks of power brokers. Having survived in an environment of constant civil war, low education and economic austerity for 40 years, the population has learned for several generations to survive in a world straight from Thomas Hobbes. Everybody is looking out for himself and his immediate clan only and everybody who has achieved a position of power has some blood on his hands and thus a blood feud with somebody else. How could anybody turn this environment into a barely functioning community and where should you recruit the people to actually pursue everybody’s welfare? And whom would you recruit to ensure the safety of the major decision maker?
Appearance stage left: the CIA, the U.S. Army and the State Department Chorus:”Let’s find some allies to fight off communism / fight terrorism / build a state.” And when all the drama played out to act 5, the critics will scandalize the cooperation with undemocratic and criminal elements as if there had been any others.
A very good question on the role of the foreign service officer, as it turns out in many instances field officers were either more sensitive (or more pragmatic) than I might have supposed - seeing their role as very realistically evaluating the viability/sustainability of friendly regimes. Of course the high up the chain and the closer to the appointee level the more cautious they became in their statements. Its at the very top of the pyramid that you find individuals become so attached to their positions that they want to see only reports that appear to support them. The book I mentioned did a particularly good job of illustrating that for the Diem regime. Of course you are correct in regard to Roman political rule however I was thinking more of their ability to cope with multi-religious and multi-ethnic environments around the Mediterranean. But of course when they tried to enforce diversity in aggressively monotheistic cultures they to faced ongoing revolts.
I should also say that your last remarks are quite similar to actual exchanges I've seen in State Department and CIA Chief of Station communications - "so who do we back in order to keep the commies out and ensure our economic and military access - pick somebody, anybody" I cite several documents with exchanges quite close to that exact dialog in exploring the U.S. activities in Iran during the 1950's.
At least parts of the systems worked well then. Makes you think whether it was better the junior officers made mistakes or bad assessments in the field or the senior officers make bad assessments further up the chain of command. If the junior officers make mistakes you may change something in the selection and training program, but but if the seniors, assumably chosen for their experience, make the mistakes, what are you supposed to do?Concerning the Roman Empire I had the conquest of Germania in mind, where the Roman technique of conquering and assimilating over time met its limits. But the technique described was also used in Gallia, Hispania or Illyrium.
People run into the same problems over and over again and think their problem is unique and they will be the first to find a good solution.
The core problem appears to be twofold, first the candidate has to commit to some national security issues and if successful those can become either blinders or traps...depending on the reality which emerges once they actually take office and get the in depth security briefings. Second, there is always work in progress - often important and confidential work - launched in the last administration. The people doing it want to keep their jobs, so they are tempted to oversell it. New people coming in want to make a name for themselves pushing the issues from the campaign and that sometimes blinds them to what is in progress, if it differs from their priorities.
When things go really bad it appears to be a combination of the two, a new president which strong campaign commitments facing operations in progress and threats that don't get fully briefed to them until after they take office. Wrong decisions at that point in time can lead to really serious consequences.
I see the problem and the attached risk for strategic developments. A politician campaigning on ending troop deployments or like Kennedy closing the missile gap, will have a hard time detaching himself from that promise without taking damage, eventhough he has been convinced it was best to.Also I do get programs from the previous administration may be endangered and thus may be oversold. Nevertheless I am perplexed the intelligence community does not have enough authority to react to tactical threats on their own, considering how many operations are conducted on a daily basis without informing the head of the executive.
Good catch, there are indeed three separate areas of exposure and you would hope the tactical threats would be dealt with much as the FBI and Homeland security deal with individual terror threats. The problem is that larger threats, especially those originating outside the US, can occur at levels that get agencies tangled up amongst their jurisdictions and unless you have somebody above them to intervene ...well you get 9/11. In that instance Richard Clarke tried to bring about an executive intervention and failed, earlier with the prior administration he had succeeded twice, once by going to Clintons national security advisor during the Bojinka airline bombing plot where a Federal intervention via the FAA had to be done in real time.
In the second, he managed to the senior FBI people to literally tour field offices with him and make counter-terror their number one priority for the last couple of months of 2000, a key element in averting the Millennium plots. If that had not had the blessing of the FBI Director and President it might not have worked - the thing is everybody has more work than they can handle, sometimes you have to break through that to get attention - something else that did not happen in the fall of 2000.
I cover all of that in some detail in Surprise Attack and it exposes what can happen when a new administration has different priorities and/or is not fully staffed with all senior members able to share on a level of personal trust.
Since 9/11 there have been numerous organizational attempts to better share information and create task forces to cover possible attack angles with routine measures. Thus it was interesting to know, whether this worked out, although I doubt this could be proven with open source material.Secondly I do understand that in the cases mentioned leads had to be followed up to develop better intelligence to prevent something from happening. As there are at any time more possible leads than resources to follow up, selecting threatening oones and putting resources on them as part of an interagency process can be difficult.
The worrying thing about this situation is the apparent inability of the intelligence community, the military and the homeland security apparatus to react on auto pilot to identified threats. Also the notion the system might not function at all, if positions were not staffed or the people staffing them did not get along well sounds dangerous.
The available information suggests that things have improved in terms of "tactical" threats, especially domestic ones. In terms of larger scale threats (not individual attacks) the picture seems grim.I've been blogging on that recently so I will leave it to those posts for a bit of additional detail but when both the President and National Security Advisor openly reject the findings of the entire intelligence community - going so far as to individual show disdain for its leadership, you would have to be in some type of denial not to conclude there is a significant problem....the intelligence community has improved (and for that matter was sounding the alarm in 2000), that does little good without engagement at the highest levels of decision making.
My hope and assumption was, that in terms of actual threats of imminent action the IC and security forces were alert enough to provide adequate warning and act in time to deter or prevent attacks.Concerning advise on policy activities which might escalate crises the IC is can only try to provide support and recommendations, but can not make the decision maker believe it. If they do not want to listen, I would just hope the IC to stick to their analysis, monitor events and repeat the message at every turn.
We would all hope that, but the reality is that when the most senior people receive aggressive criticism for their reports, when some are released or forced into early departures - its human nature for the career professionals downstream to become more tentative in regard to assessments and restrained in reports. She herself was being restrained in her writing when stating that even in normal times (which is not the current case) intelligence professionals still function within a bureaucracy and the nature of any bureaucracy is to foster career preservation - even good analysts become hesitant to "stick their necks out on problems which are either new or controversial".
At a minimum there is a shift is towards holding judgements and even warnings until "unambiguous data" becomes available...which in threat and warnings work can leave little to no time to actually respond.
I understand your assessment, but would not want to subscribe to the notion bureaucracy fostered career preservation. This depends on the organization, the people recruited and their personal motivation. I do think there a lot of people who put the mission first aand themselves second. Also there are always some people who are aware not to have a career anymore but will nevertheless be around for years to come and have no reason to back down anymore.Waiting for unambiguous data is of course a good way out for an intelligence manager as not to aggravate his customer. In my opinion shutting out divergent views form the IC will always lead to uninformed decisions and may also not end well for the decision maker.
having read your books on covert action and political warfare with much enthusiasm, I have to say the idea of a comprehensive treatise on United States military assistance programs sounds better the longer I think about it.
Military assistance programs have been a tool of U.S. influence and support since the Second World War and continue to this day. Although some of these endeavors have gained much publicity like MAAG Vietnam and MACV, military assistance programs are not well known and are not sexy topics to write about. As long as everything is quiet in the receiving country, military assistance is a boring, bureaucratic training establishment nobody is interested in (e.g. United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia since 1977) and when things turn rough, writing about the violent end of the struggle is more interesting than the military assistance endeavor (e.g. Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq 2004-2010). Nevertheless such support operations can effectively contain crises and thus preclude the deployment of combat forces, as in El Salvador during the civil war, in the Philippines during the Huk rebellion, effectively support host nations during major combat operations, as the Korean Military Advisory Group did during the Korean War, or be sidelined by major combat commands until somebody recognizes it would have been nice to have effective host nation units, as happened in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Especially if the United States were to retire to the dugout as you say, conducting effective assistance programs was politically easier and cheaper than deploying major combat units around the globe. Thus comparing and analyzing when, how and why military assistance was effective or not was a good way to start, because the U.S. might want to get it right next time. As Iraq and Afghanistan show there appears to be room for improvement and a lot of lessons to learn from the nuts and bolts of training and advise on the ground to the military and political framework the program is set in (What is the mission profile and training objective for the host nation? Are personnel, training and equipment aligned with this profile? Has the advisory effort priority or command attention? Is a training assignment good for your career or ending it? What leverage over host nation counterparts do the advisors need to be effective? Is the advisory effort embraced or are they just taking the money?...). Therefore the topic is politically and strategically more relevant than ever.
Also military assistance programs have been at the nexus of different outside interferences and have developed in character over time. From supporting fragile states and containing communism in Europe, Asia and South America via rolling back communism in Africa and Asia in the 80s to fighting the War on Drugs and later the War on Terror, the character and objectives of military assistance has changed. With this change the interaction of military assistance personnel with other agencies has changed. The military trained regular host nation military in Greece, counterintelligence officers in the School of the Americas, supported irregular forces and the CIA in Laos, deployed Special Forces as advisors to Africa and worked with defense contractors in Saudi-Arabia.
The material aspect of military assistance also changed over time. From providing World War military surplus equipment in the 50s, the U.S. provided allies with used equipment in the 60s, while balancing the loss with new equipment for its one forces, and in the 70s and 80s started to sell foreign partners brand new equipment, while providing trainers and advisors to integrate the systems with the foreign forces. Thus defense manufacturers began to take more interest in foreign assistance programs and more and more defense contractors began to deploy to foreign countries to train, maintain and advise on complex weapon systems.
Finally there is the political aspect of military assistance teams. They may be deployed to improve the combat effectiveness of foreign forces, support them in fighting insurgents, terrorists or deter neighboring forces, try to improve the democratic values in the foreign force or to build up unofficial communication channels to foreign military forces. Thus there may be conflicting objectives between the White House, DoD, State Department and other agencies concerning the assistance strategy for a certain country. And with increasing budgets and manpower the role of military assistance teams and regional combatant commands has clashed with the role of the state department and its diplomats. The strategy alignment process here is already looking like a bureaucratic nightmare on paper, let alone in reality with people’s egos, convictions and careers at stake.
So why am I writing you all of these things you already know about? Because I think this to be a great idea for a book! There are so many angles from which to look at the topic and there are so many relations to your previous work on covert action. From a historian’s point of view, I doubt there is a good, comprehensive book on the development of military assistance missions, although there are good works on the more prominent endeavors. From a military and political point of view a comparison of the different examples might lead to insights to improve the current and future practice of military assistance, politically as well as practically on the ground.
Although the topic is so versatile, it might as well be too huge to research, there should be enough sensational bits to convince a publisher. Military assistance teams fought against drugs in South America, trained people who went on to torture for dictatorial regimes, worked with the CIA in Asia, fought guerillas and terrorists in Africa, supported defense manufacturers in the Gulf and counterbalanced Russian influence in Ukraine. And that’s not even mentioning the actual wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan with all their hidden successes and tragic failures. If that is not sensational, I do not know, what is.
Be that as it may, thank you very much for the work you have already done with your previous books and if you ever have the chance to write a book on military assistance programs, I’ll take a copy.
Best regards