The liberation of Mosul and recapture of Raqqa from the Islamic State were two of the most costly and fiercely contested battles of the 21st century so far. The Mosul operation took 90,000 troops nine months to complete,Footnote1 with some formations suffering casualty rates of over 40%.Footnote2 The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) meanwhile suffered over 11,000 dead in ensuring the territorial defeat of the Islamic State in Syria, including retaking Raqqa.Footnote3 These operations were top priorities for Western governments. But following a prolonged defeat in Afghanistan, and the controversy surrounding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there was little confidence in Western capitals of political support for these operations without offloading much of the risk onto partner forces.Footnote4 Although the US, UK, France and other allies had a significant troop presence providing training, advice and niche support, compared with the heavy toll on local partners Western casualties in these operations can be measured in the tens.Footnote5 This has cemented partner force capacity building as a favoured policy option to achieve military objectives.
The contrast between the failure of recent large, expeditionary counterinsurgency operations and the apparent success of a number of low-profile operations carried out by, with and through local partners has sparked a renewed interest in a wide range of indirect military strategies. Whether framed as proxy warfare,Footnote6 partner force capacity building,Footnote7 train, advise, assist missions,Footnote8 or any of the other myriad frameworks that have been developed,Footnote9 in practice these operations amount to the deployment of small, specialist liaison teams tasked with sharing skills, knowledge and capabilities to encourage non-sovereign forces to risk their lives to support the patron’s interests.
In the UK, this indirect approach is becoming the foremost priority in defence. In 2020, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) published the Integrated Operating Concept (IOpC),Footnote10 which seeks to provide a framework for coordinating the activities of all the services across the continuum from competition to conflict. The IOpC calls for UK forces to: protect UK interests; engage with partners and allies to enable them to deal with challenges as they arise; deploy to constrain adversaries by deterring and denying them access to the operating environment; and fighting if necessary to defeat enemies in war. This places the bulk of operations below the threshold of armed conflict and signals the prioritisation of defence engagement and partner force capacity building as the foundational activities of UK defence. To this end, the services are developing new concepts of operation and creating new force structures to enable these operations – from the Future Commando Force,Footnote11 to the new Army Operating Concept and the formation of 6 (UK) Division,Footnote12 which incorporates the Specialised Infantry Group (Spec Inf Gp), tasked with generating long-term training missions.
Partner force capacity building has an extremely variable track record. Total failures include Allied support to Russian forces fighting the Bolsheviks in 1919,Footnote13 or American attempts to develop a South Vietnamese Army able to stand alone.Footnote14 Examples of limited success include US support to Afghan forces opposing the Soviet invasion of 1979; whereas the UK’s support to Oman during the Dhofar Rebellion was highly successful.Footnote15 However, errors from the Russian Civil War were repeated in Vietnam, which also bear an uncomfortable familiarity with problems of the post-2001 Afghan campaign. As a senior US official responsible for designing training to the Afghan military noted in an interview, ‘although we had successful prior experience of these operations in South America we seemed to forget all that and repeat all our mistakes in Afghanistan’.Footnote16
In short, despite a recognition that partner force capacity building is an increasingly important strategy for Western militaries, there is limited institutional understanding of what has historically determined success or failure. This is the question that this paper seeks to ultimately address: how can militaries effectively build the capacity of partner forces?
There is a considerable body of literature on partnered operations. These broadly fit into four categories: personal accounts of delivering partnered operations; detailed studies of individual clandestine or discreet campaigns; comparative studies of a country’s campaigns; and development literature. The personal accounts, of which T E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom arguably stands as the archetype,Footnote17 are often uniquely detailed and engaging. However, the personal investment of the authors in the causes they describe often leads to overly sympathetic or bitterly hostile assessments of the campaign. They also tend to lack the distance of analytical studies that can appropriately contextualise partnered operations. More detached studies suffer less often from this deficiency, and as Steve Coll’s chronicling of US operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan demonstrate, can provide invaluable levels of detail and perspective on individual campaigns.Footnote18 It is in the nature of these accounts, however, to focus on the distinctive character of a given campaign, which limits the comparative lessons that might be learned from operations. Since 2001, there has been a burgeoning number of comparative studies surveying contemporary partner force capacity building operations carried out by a particular state, comparing and contrasting successes and failures. RAND has produced several such studies for the US government.Footnote19 However, such studies – partly as a consequence of the terms of reference underpinning the work – tend to judge the effectiveness of efforts in relation to an ideal as framed by US doctrine. This limits the applicability of the lessons to other states with different structures to the US, and which lack the US’s capacity. Since they are grounded in US doctrine they also struggle to challenge the assumptions underpinning other states’ doctrines and frameworks.
The literature on development studies, by contrast, is perhaps the richest and most provocative. Capacity building is often an endeavour to deliver education under conditions of conflict or significant instability, which has been widely studied by the development community.Footnote20 Extrapolating conclusions from development literature to a military context is difficult, but where it has been done it is invaluable. In his extensive study of capacity building and military development in Arab states, Kenneth Pollack identifies civilian education and early development as being critical to a society’s capacity to field effective military forces.Footnote21 Pollack’s work also demonstrates the limited practical guidance of the development literature for military capacity building efforts. The literature suggests that the effectiveness of such efforts is bounded by aspects of a culture and society that are not within the power of a military to change, and cannot be changed within the timeframe in which trainers are ever likely to be deployed. Keith Mines, a veteran practitioner of capacity building operations, argues that where there is a will in partner governments to tackle corruption, ensure economic development and uphold the rule of law, partner force capacity building will be more effective and enduring.Footnote22 But given that partner force capacity building is almost always resorted to because of a scarcity of resources for a given mission, and that militaries will continue to be asked to engage in these operations with partners of dubious quality, and in politically complex environments, militaries will continue to need to succeed in spite of these prevailing conditions. Andrew Radin makes a significant contribution to linking wider strategic ambitions with the practicalities of implementation in politically complex environments by bringing into focus specific issues of domestic buy-in to foreign assistance, the underappreciated value of incrementalism and the need to align expectations with partner standards. However, he does less to address the distinct outputs that drive and distort military capacity building.Footnote23 Defense Engagement Since 1900: Global Lessons in Soft Power, edited by Greg Kennedy, presents a collection of case studies which explore the sort of intelligence and influence activities that nominal capacity building missions may provide cover for. It underscores that capacity building can fail and still serve a purpose.Footnote24 The constraints on change cited by the development literature may be correct, but militaries still need a guide for the tasks that governments have and will continue to assign them.
This paper seeks to fill the gap between strategic aspirations and the challenges faced by militaries seeking to implement partner force capacity building. By examining multiple train-and-assist missions, conducted by numerous actors, and often in competition with one another, it seeks to establish what conditions and methods best lead to ends that align with the pronounced policy objectives of patron states. The paper aims to help policymakers understand where training resources can achieve the greatest effects, where partnered operations should be avoided, and how to understand the limits of what can be achieved by these means. It also unpacks how the structure, longevity and placement of training teams impact their effectiveness.
The study spans the strategic, operational and tactical. The strategic question is when and with whom partner force capacity building is likely to be able to achieve policy objectives. The operational questions relate to the process of selecting partners, designing the framework for engagement, the amount of resources required and the length of training. The tactical questions relate to the structure and skills of training teams, and the permissions they need to operate effectively. This is a lot of ground to cover. This paper does not intend to be comprehensive. But by pulling together a number of critical questions, and examining the empirical evidence across a wide historical record, it aims to spark a discussion about the future of how militaries are employed and operate. While the conclusions may be open to challenge, the conversation those challenges represent is one that needs to be had.
To answer these questions, this paper draws on empirical research of past and ongoing partner force capacity building operations, with a consideration of how trainers, trainees and policymakers judged the success or failure of their efforts against the objectives for the campaign set by patron states. Research was conducted between August 2015 and March 2020. The evidence base drawn upon is diverse, spanning case studies of partner force capacity building operations between 1916 to the present. The paper's intent is to cast the net as widely as possible. The criteria for the inclusion of a case was whether a mission comprised the use of a patron’s military (or paramilitary) forces to train partner forces to implement a patron’s defence and security objectives. No operation was excluded from consideration because of the doctrine, ethical conduct, political orientation, or international recognition of the patron or partner. This led to far more operations being considered than could be analysed in detail. In terms of the UK alone, the authors considered cases of training in 58 countries that were active during the course of the research. The available information about these activities, however, was highly uneven, which was also the case with many historical operations that were considered.
From the list of identified cases, the authors chose ones for which they could gain a sufficiently multifaceted body of evidence to make judgements with confidence. These included: British support to the 1916 Arab Revolt; Allied intervention in Russia 1918–20; Special Operations Executive (SOE) operations in France during the Second World War; American training to South Vietnam; Soviet training to the Egyptian military between 1967 and 1973; British training to Omani forces; American operations in support of the Afghan Mujahideen; British training and assistance to Yemeni forces since 2004; Coalition training to Iraqi and Afghan forces since 2001; Iranian training to the Houthis in Yemen and Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) in Iraq since 2015; and international training to the armed forces of Mali since 2012.
The specific research methodology differs by case. For historical cases that have attracted extensive attention, the authors draw on the secondary academic literature. For the cases of Oman and Vietnam, this was supplemented by author interviews with participants, and in other cases – such as the Arab revolt – consideration of a limited selection of primary documentation. For those historical instances where there is a dearth of secondary literature – such as Allied intervention in Russia – extensive use was made of primary archival material. For the more recent cases, the authors rely heavily on interviews with participants in training operations. Interviewees range from ministers and general officers from the patron and partner forces, to junior trainers, diplomats and trainees.
Additionally, the authors consider evidence from several dozen additional partner force capacity building efforts for which comparably detailed evidence could not be found. For example, records in the UK National Archives detail attempts to provide training to the police forces of the Yemen Arab Republic in the 1980s, but the authors’ attempts to find participants in this case were unsuccessful and so they were limited to official UK government records. Nevertheless, cases where the authors could not establish a satisfactory evidence base to reach firm conclusions were still useful. These cases were used to test the conclusions arising from the primary evidence set by examining available records for information that might invalidate conclusions derived from other cases. Far from being a weakness, the volume and diversity of approaches considered makes the points of consistency in determining success and failure more rather than less significant.
Presenting the conclusions to such a wide-ranging study in a clear and accessible format is challenging. Quantitative measurement is undermined by the uneven evidence base. Furthermore, many ongoing training missions about which evidence was gathered would have to be excluded on ethical grounds, since for small deployed teams of trainers their security is partially enabled by a lack of awareness of their presence. The exclusion of these operations would skew any quantitative presentation of results. At the same time, the number of cases considered is unsuited to presenting a narrative for each operation.
Because this paper is primarily aimed at providing practitioners and policymakers with an analysis of what appears to work or not in partner force capacity building operations, the analysis is structured in a series of chapters corresponding to the questions that the authors set out to answer. These are:
Why do patrons embark upon capacity building?
How should patrons find their partners?
What training should patrons provide?
Who should deliver training?
How should patrons provide equipment to their partners?
When should training end?
Each chapter analyses the approaches that have been tried, which approaches have proven successful and to what extent. This provides the practitioner or policymaker with conclusions on how partner force capacity building can succeed in achieving its stated aims.
There is a diverse terminology surrounding partner force capacity building. Almost all terms have doctrinal or conceptual connotations. This paper intentionally avoids fixing itself to a doctrinal typology. This is for several reasons.
First, military concepts, doctrine and nomenclature change over time. Since some of the operations within the evidence considered involved relationships spanning decades, trying to historicise language becomes exceptionally confusing for the reader. Even within one force, different terms are used to describe the same thing, or the same terms to describe different things, over the period under consideration. In fact, in one operation studied, the funding for the activity expired, but an official overseeing the operation pulled, as he described it, ‘the Bourne manoeuvre’Footnote25 and carried on the operation under a different name and framework. In official documentation, the source of the funding for the operation changed, its rationale was subtly altered and in theory the activity would have fallen under a separate doctrine with a different nomenclature. In practice, the new operation saw the same personnel continue the same activity.
Second, nomenclature varies across states, and may vary between different services of the same state. Reproducing this variety of terms would make any comparisons linguistically incomprehensible. Where attention must be drawn to a particular conceptualisation of training, the authors italicise words with specific doctrinal meanings. However, for the general convenience of the reader, this paper refers to a common set of terms. It refers to ‘partner forces’ because this could comprise allies or not, and could refer to state forces or not. ‘Capacity building’ straddles training, mentoring and equipping. At the tactical level, this paper refers to ‘trainers’ and ‘trainees’. At the operational and strategic level, it refers to ‘patrons’ and ‘partners’. This should not be taken to reflect the power relationships between the parties concerned, but rather that at the strategic level the decision to provide training is taken because it fulfils the patron’s interests, and so in considering strategic calculations, this nomenclature allows for clarity.
Notes
1 Dominic Nicholls, ‘Will Britain Win a Future War’, Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2020.
2 Office of the Secretary of Defense, ‘Department of Defense Budget Fiscal Year (FY) 2018: Justification for FY 2018 Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO): Counter-Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) Train and Equip Fund (CTEF)’, May 2017, p. 5.
3 Jeff Schogol, ‘US-Backed Group in Syria Says it Suffered More Than 11,000 Killed and 21,000 Wounded Fighting ISIS’, Task and Purpose, 25 March 2019.
4 Hew Strachan and Ruth Harris, ‘The Utility of Military Force and Public Understanding in Today's Britain’, Research Report, RAND Europe, 2020.
5 For UK figures, see Ministry of Defence (MoD), ‘Biannual UK Armed Forces and UK Entitled Civilians Operational Casualty and Fatality Statistics 1 June 2011 to 31 March 2020’, 21 May 2020, p. 4.
6 Andrew Mumford, Proxy Warfare: War and Conflict in the Modern World (Oxford: Polity, 2013); Amos Fox, ‘Conflict and the Need for a Theory of Proxy Warfare’, Journal of Strategic Studies (Vol. 12, No. 1, 2019), pp. 44–71.
7 Jim Garamone, ‘Building Capabilities, Nurturing Alliances at Heart of U.S. Strategy’, Department of Defense news, 27 June 2019, <https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/1890082/building-capabilities-nurturing-alliances-at-heart-of-us-strategy/>, accessed 9 June 2020.
8 Matthew Fontaine, ‘1st SFAB Uncases Colors, Begins Train, Advise, Assist Mission in Afghanistan’, US Army Training and Doctrine Command news, 22 March 2018, <https://www.tradoc.army.mil/Publications-and-Resources/Article-Display/Article/1473131/1st-sfab-uncases-colors-begins-train-advise-assist-mission-in-afghanistan/>, accessed 9 June 2020.
9 Including ‘Remote Warfare’. See Oxford Research Group, ‘The Remote Warfare Programme’, <https://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/pages/category/remote-warfare>, accessed 9 June 2020.
10 Development, Concepts, and Doctrine Centre, MoD, ‘Defence Integrated Operating Concept’, September 2020, <https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/922969/20200930_-_Introducing_the_Integrated_Operating_Concept.pdf>, accessed 20 October 2020.
11 Sidharth Kaushal and Jack Watling, ‘Requirements for the UK’s Amphibious Forces in the Future Operating Environment’, RUSI Occasional Papers (November 2019).
12 Nick Reynolds, ‘Performing Information Manoeuvre Through Persistent Engagement’, RUSI Occasional Papers (June 2020).
13 Clifford Kinvig, Churchill’s Crusade: The British Invasion of Russia, 1918–1920 (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006).
14 James Willbanks, Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost its War (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
15 Tony Jeapes, SAS Secret War: Operation Storm in the Middle East (London: Greenhill, 2005).
16 Interview by Jack Watling with a senior US official formerly responsible for training South American, Afghan and Iraqi forces, February 2018.
17 T E Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 1997); John Akehurst, We Won a War: The Campaign in Oman, 1965–1975 (Salisbury: Michael Russell, 1982); Mike Hoare, Congo Mercenary (London: Paladin Press, 2008).
18 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden (London: Penguin, 2005); Max Boot, The Road Not Taken: Robert Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam (London: Liveright, 2018). For an example of a work that points directly to wider applicability, see Tarak Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: Indian and British Armies in World War II (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
19 Jefferson Marquis et al., Developing an Army Strategy for Building Partner Capacity for Stability Operations (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2010); Christopher Paul et al., What Works Best When Building Partner Capacity and Under What Circumstances? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2012); Stephen Watts et al., Reforming Security Sector Assistance for Africa (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2018). For examples beyond the US, see Tom Frame (ed.), The Long Road: Australia’s Train, Advise, Assist Missions (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2017).
20 Susan Nicolai et al., ‘Strengthening Coordinated Education Planning and Response in Crisis Contexts’, Overseas Development Institute, May 2020.
21 Kenneth Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019).
22 Keith W Mines, Why Nation-Building Matters: Political Consolidation, Building Security Forces, and Economic Development in Failed and Fragile States (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2020).
23 Andrew Radin, Institution Building in Weak States: The Primacy of Local Politics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2020).
24 Greg Kennedy (ed.), Defense Engagement Since 1900: Global Lessons in Soft Power (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2020).
25 Interview by Jack Watling with former officer overseeing counterterrorism missions, January 2017. The reference is to the 2002 fiction film The Bourne Identity, at the end of which the risk of public embarrassment concerning the CIA’s ‘Project Treadstone’ leads to its termination, with all of the operational activity transferred to a new but identical ‘Project Blackbriar’.