The Cult of the Persuasive: Organizational Determinants of US Influence in SFA

• In Event: Fighting with Friends: Alliances and Military Effectiveness

Abstract

Why does the United States struggle to build more effective militaries in recipient states? Despite the emergence of security force assistance (SFA) as a central pillar of U.S. foreign policy and a ubiquitous feature of international relations, there has been little academic research devoted to explaining its causes and consequences. A nascent body of scholarship examining the (in)effectiveness of SFA through the lens of the principal-agent (PA) problem attributes U.S. difficulties to inadequate bargaining power. I argue, conversely, that the U.S.’ nonuse of leverage does not reflect inadequate bargaining power, but a choice not to bargain, and preference instead for alternative strategies of influence. I demonstrate that the U.S. has historically employed three separate strategies of influence in SFA—facilitation, bargaining, and persuasion. Despite strong evidence that persuasion is ineffective, the vast enterprise of U.S. SFA remains locked in a “cult of the persuasive,” preferring relationship-building and argumentation to conditionality. I argue that variation in U.S. strategies of influence in SFA—the key determinant of SFA outcomes—are best explained by the interests of the organization responsible for designing and implementing SFA: the U.S. Army. Persuasion is a particularly advantageous approach to SFA for the Army because it creates a permission structure for failure, and because it reduces the risk of conflagrations with partners that could precipitate civilian intrusion into military doctrine. I test these arguments by examining within-case and cross-case variation in two deep-dive case studies: U.S. SFA in Iraq (2003-2014), and in South Korea (1949-1953). My research is informed by over 60 semi-structured interviews with subjects ranging from embedded U.S. military advisors to Iraqi general officers, over 300 oral histories given by U.S. military advisors in Iraq, and thousands of recently declassified archival documents. Drawing on these materials, I conduct congruence testing and process tracing to establish the causal pathway between U.S. Army organizational interests and choice of influence strategies in SFA.

Author

• Rachel Tecott, U.S. Naval War College