Assisting Host Country Militaries Conference
11.12.2013 at 02:11pm
Assisting Host Country Militaries: Assessing Lessons from NATO, EU and Member State Experience – Wilton Park (UK) Conference, 4-6 December 2013.
What are the lessons from NATO, EU and member state training, advising, mentoring and operational support missions over the past ten years in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries? How can they apply to future military capacity building efforts?
This conference will focus on capacity building and operational support to host country militaries rather than to security forces in their entirety.
Its objectives are to assess:
- the policy opportunities and risks involved in providing assistance to host country militaries as well as the conditions under which capacity building missions can succeed;
- lessons for effective delivery from NATO, EU and member state training, advising, mentoring and operational support missions over the past ten years;
- how Western militaries should organise and prepare themselves for delivering assistance to host country militaries;
- how the effectiveness of military assistance missions can be measured and monitored;
- the added value that NATO and EU can bring to host country military assistance missions.
I hope one lesson is not doing things just for the sake of doing them.
Oh, sorry. That’s pretty much the entire basis for most Western militaries these days, eh?
A Wilton Park conference is an amazing time, one and half days discussion and superbly hosted / chaired. They are however expensive! A report is published later, using a rapporteur and that is free via their website.
Invariably providing such assistance is about sustaining the status quo of the current system of governance. This is a carry-over TTP from lessons learned on how to sustain a colonial government, or a government created/adopted as part of larger containment operation during the Cold War.
Strategically, the real question should be: “In the current strategic environment, is it still a viable approach to adavancing ones national interests, to provide security force capacity building that by and large serves to enable the recipient host nation to sustain the very status quo of governance that is being challenged”?
I would argue that no, it is not. Such approaches are far more expensive and difficult to put in place, and far less durable to sustain. Equally, when one intervenes to thwart the efforts of a populace-based revolutionary challenge to coerce change on their own government, one creates a powerful motivational vector for acts of transnational terrorism against the intervening party and their interests.
This is particularly true if ones intervention is of such a nature that it is perceived as exceeding the sovereign rights of the intervening party to conduct, and is seen as a compromise of the legitmacy of the host nation government. Certainly Afghanistan and Iraq are poster children for this effect.
In cases like the US recent involvement in Colombia and the Philippines there were critical strategic differences. The scope of the goals and the effort applied were narrowly constrained within the parameters of the host nation’s sovereginty, so were not perceived widely as being a compromise of the legitmacy of those governments. This in turn ensured that the actions we took as intervening parties were perceived as being within the scope of our own sovereignty and therefore widely seen as legitimate by the people they affected.
For me, the #1 metric of if some place has natural or artifical stability is determined by where the bulk of the focus of the host nation security forces lies. If it is to protect the government from the people, it is an artifical system, and as such needs to evolve to become relevant in the eyes of segment of the population revolting against them. Often small, reasonable changes can swing a population away from supporting illegal action against the government. This does not mean answering the often outrageous demands or ideological dogma of the insurgent, but rather seeking to equitablly serve the reasonable concerns of the people. An example of this is in Saudi Arabia where they people would like to have a judiciary that is not controlled by the King, and small advances in women’s rights, such as the right drive a car legally.
Casting these conflicts into the context of the ideology applied by the challenger, or in zero defects terms of sustaining the current government as is, blinds us to the reasonable, and often small and inexpensive to implement changes, needed to address the people.