Advising War: US Security Assistance and Military Effectiveness in Ukraine

• In Event: International Influences on Security Forces

Abstract

Ukraine’s experience fighting Russia shows how a partner can greatly increase its military effectiveness while working with the United States. But the record of US security force assistance over the past two decades shows that it often fails to build capacity or further other objectives like the rule of law, anti-corruption, and human rights. For example, consider the Iraqi Army’s collapse during the Islamic State’s advance into Mosul, and the coups and human rights abuses committed by US-trained militaries. The literature argues that improving these outcomes requires security assistance providers to use carrots and sticks at the strategic level, conditioning aid provided to a partner military on its behavior (Ladwig 2017; Berman & Lake 2019).
However, instead of—or in addition to—using carrots and sticks, security-assistance providers often use very hands-on methods to engage with local militaries, like sending military advisors to embed with their counterparts at multiple levels, from the strategic to the tactical. Using carrots and sticks does not require embedding people within a local military, so states must hope to gain something else through this strategy. Why do states send military advisors to work with local militaries? What do they expect advisors to accomplish? How do advisors intersect with the bigger picture of managing local militaries?
Focusing on the deployment of advisors during conflict, I argue that while we often think about advisors as purely technical military experts, security assistance providers expect them to directly engage with the compliance issue. States send advisors to weak militaries with the expectation that they will lead to meaningful changes in the local military’s effectiveness and how the local military approaches issues like human rights, civil-military relations, and the foreign policy priorities of the great power patron. Advisors use their local embeddedness to influence and shape how a local military behaves – on a multiplicity of issues that depends on the conflict and can range from building defense institutions to the military’s treatment of the local population. They do this by developing and exploiting personal relationships with their counterparts. I examine US intervention in Ukraine (2014 – 2022), a case of low military effectiveness and high interest alignment between the intervener and proxy. The case study allows me to examine the logic of advisor deployment, how advisors work with local militaries on the ground and the (dis)connection between policy and local implementation, as well as provide some implications for the effectiveness of advisors as a means of influence. I show that despite Ukraine’s overall interest alignment with the United States, reforms at the strategic level were slow and often not implemented. Other useful reforms were made under US influence, though some of the reasons why Ukraine was so successful at repelling Russia’s invasion – like civil society – were not the result of US influence. The advising mission was perhaps most successful in nurturing young Ukrainian military talent, building up Ukrainian Special Operations Forces (UKRSOF), and opening channels of communication between US military officers and their counterparts – which then greatly facilitated the transfer of US aid after Russia invaded on February 24, 2022.
In sum, Ukraine shows the mechanisms of great power influence during conflict, the importance of personal relationships developed through people on the ground, but also the limits of influence in areas of interest misalignment between supporter and partner.

Author

• Alexandra Chinchilla, Texas A&M, Bush School of Govt and Public Service