The Partner’s Partner: Exploring Proxy Security Cooperation Efforts
The ongoing transformation of the United States’ foreign policy has led to many of its supporting apparatuses to adapt, reorganize, evolve, or even cease operations. Security cooperation, which has been an institutionalized instrument of the United States’ foreign policy since the end of World War II, is one such capability that requires the adoption of new strategic concepts to better align with current executive direction and guidance. Specifically, the Department of Defense should integrate the core concepts of offshore balancing into the planning and execution of US security cooperation efforts by selecting and sponsoring key regional bilateral partnerships. Such a strategy overcomes ongoing service reorganizations, strengthens bilateral ties between the United States and key regional powers, advances US security interests at reduced costs, and improves the effectiveness of security cooperation efforts.
A Changing Environment
The United States’ foreign policy and its supporting apparatuses are undergoing a fundamental shift away from the multilateral foreign policy that guided America since the early 1940s. The Trump administration’s focus on homeland and hemispheric defense, bilateral engagement, and increased demands for burden sharing is a far departure from the liberal internationalist policy that guided America for the last seventy-five years. Under the current realist approach to foreign policy, the executive branch has instituted sweeping changes ranging from closing the country’s primary instrument of non-defense foreign assistance (USAID) to renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War. Concurrent to reimagining foreign policy, the administration is emphasizing increased government efficiency and is actively promoting cost-saving and dismantling of bureaucratic structures.
Internationally, the United States faces a complex series of challenges to the global order that underpins its hegemonic status. Both great powers and regional actors aggressively test the American power that serves as a guarantor of the order’s rules. Additionally, as the world shifts to multipolarity, interstate conflict is on a marked increase, destabilizing entire regions and the world’s economy. Within this hyper-competitive and volatile paradigm, intensifying Chinese and Russian security cooperation efforts increase those nations’ share of an increasingly competitive market in South America, Africa, the Indo-Pacific, and the Middle East, and all but eliminate the monopoly on security cooperation the United States and its allies once enjoyed.
Offshoring Security Cooperation—An Overview
Security cooperation is a hundreds-of-billion-dollar enterprise consisting of all Department of Defense interactions with foreign defense and security establishments to build defense relationships, promote US security interests, develop partner nations’ capabilities, and secure access for US forces. Security cooperation includes a wide range of operations, activities, and investments, including training, exchanges, capacity building, exercises, and foreign military sales. While security cooperation is a versatile tool at its base, it seeks one of two outcomes; the first is improving interoperability with higher-end foreign armed forces to conduct combined operations. The second, the primary focal point of this article, is building the capacity and capability of militaries in nations where the United States lacks the political will to deploy troops to deter external aggression or suppress internal threats from non-state actors. This article proposes that defense officials consider integrating the concept of offshore balancing to adapt security cooperation to current geopolitical and domestic conditions.
The United States should not perceive European training efforts as a challenge but rather a unique opportunity to leverage America’s asymmetric advantage—its network of allies and partners.
A theory occasionally attributed to US foreign policy is some variation of offshore balancing. While nuances of the theory vary, its goal remains avoiding mass military interventions and deployments through the operationalization and sponsorship of select regional powers. While there are excellent and well-articulated arguments for and against offshore balancing as a foundation of grand strategy, applying the theory to security cooperation efforts could benefit the United States. Specifically, creating regional proxies capable of exporting US training programs, doctrine, values, and even equipment to their neighbors. The United States would apply the principles of mass and economy of force by focusing security cooperation Operations, Activities, and Investments (OAIs) on a small number of partner nations within a geographic region. The objective would be to develop a partner military capable of training its neighbors in comparable programs that have the aim of creating regional security forces following similar standards, improving regional procedural and human interoperability, in a strategic version of a “train the trainer program.” The long-term goal of this program is to build states capable of deterring aggression from nefarious state actors and improving the ability of combined operations if deterrence fails and a military crisis occurs.
This approach would allow the United States to reduce its overall security cooperation efforts and commitments by hyper-focusing on a series of bilateral relationships and then enabling those nations to train regional militaries using programs that promote US interests, interoperability, and materiel. Integrating aspects of offshore balancing into the planning and execution of security cooperation efforts allows the Department of Defense to help achieve the administration’s objective of realigned foreign assistance and increased government efficiency.
Doing More with Less
While the current administration has not yet produced a publicly available national security or defense strategy, the 2022 National Defense Strategy demanded “ruthlessly prioritizing” of where, when, and how the United States competes, invests, and mitigates risk. This concept is concurrent with the current administration’s emphasis on finding efficiencies across government, holding allies accountable, and prioritizing a military designed and ready for conflict against the PLA above all other efforts. To support the administration’s policy, the Department of Defense has begun many joint and service reorganization efforts that reduce the means available to conduct global security cooperation. The efforts include deactivating multiple Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs), the Army’s dedicated conventional advising units, as well as removing nearly 3000 billets from United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), a primary security cooperation implementer across the globe.
By supporting and funding bilateral relationships to export training, capacity building, and operational support to neighboring countries, the Department of Defense can economize security cooperation efforts on a smaller set of partners for greater effects while avoiding overextension of limited personnel and resources. Furthermore, working through partners who have deep cultural and linguistic ties to their neighbors allows security cooperation programs to overcome some of the language and cultural challenges of training militaries outside the developed world. Offshoring security cooperation not only mitigates institutional reorganization but also improves the United States’ ability to compete in an increasingly crowded marketplace by forming proxies that reduce overall US commitments while concurrently enhancing regional stability.
An Increasingly Competitive Marketplace
The expanding scope of Russia and China’s global military aid programs is not the sole cause of an increasingly competitive security cooperation marketplace, as many US Allies conduct various training and support missions across the globe. The French, Germans, Italians, and British all have well-established training programs in Africa and the Middle East, and in 2018, NATO accredited a Security Force Assistance Center of Excellence. In addition, the European Union (EU) has also been increasingly practicing strategic autonomy, conducting 37 different advising, training, and equipping missions to Africa since 2003. The United States should not perceive European training efforts as a challenge but rather a unique opportunity to leverage America’s asymmetric advantage—its network of allies and partners. To realize this opportunity, the United States would need to advocate for its NATO allies to adopt two major changes.
Alliance-Wide Security Cooperation Standards
First, the alliance-wide adoption of NATO standards, such as AJP-3.16 (Security Force Assistance) or similar US joint doctrine, as the foundation for security cooperation programs improves interoperability and reduces contradicting efforts. Alliance-wide training standards improve US interoperability with potential partner forces regardless of the training overseen by American, French, German, or Spanish advisors. Standardized security cooperation also improves outcomes for recipient nations’ security forces. Training through common doctrine, tactics, and operating concepts enables a military to conduct joint and combined arms maneuver at various echelons. While partially driven by complex geopolitical factors, US, Turkey, and EU training programs in Somalia highlight how alliance partners using different standards can create company and battalion-sized formations that not only lack interoperability among one another but also have a wide divergence of operational capabilities.
Intra-Alliance Economy of Effort
Second, and even more important, is adopting an intra-alliance command economy to limit competition and redundant training efforts by members. This approach would assign lead geographic and functional responsibilities, preventing alliance partners from providing the same nation with concurrent and potentially unsynchronized training and development programs. Through unity of effort, alliance members would assign security cooperation responsibility to specific nations based on diplomatic relations, cultural ties, military capabilities, and national interest to build recipient nations into potential exporters. In addition to the bilateral partnership, regionally aligned alliance members will have functional oversight based on their aptitude in specific technical skills such as Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), airborne operations, or logistics.
US Army EOD specialist gears up a solider with the Royal Moroccan Armed Forces in an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) 9 Bomb Suit during African Lion 2025. Photo courtesy US Army.
For example, based on Senegal’s high military capability and historical association with France, the French armed forces would serve as the lead alliance member charged with planning and executing efforts to develop the Senegalese Armed Forces into a regional security cooperation exporter. Germany, well-regarded as a leading EOD trainer, could assume regional functional area responsibility to include support for French efforts in Senegal. Nevertheless, a flaw exists if any alliance member feels it is in their national interest to develop their own OAIs in Senegal, as there is little others can do to stop them. Despite this flaw, the current administration seems far more capable of handling this flaw as they have regularly pressured allies to act in US interests on a range of topics from energy imports to overall defense spending.
In addition to exporting and improving procedural and human interoperability, an offshore balancing model can improve technical interoperability, extend the reach of American-centric supply chains, and improve the US defense industry’s access to foreign markets. Through Foreign Military Sales and Financing (FMS / FMF), as well as §333 (Authority to Build Capacity), fully operationalized security cooperation proxies can train on and demonstrate US equipment throughout a region. Providing foreign security cooperation proxies a percentage of future FMS cases they facilitate not only incentivizes the overall process but builds enduring bilateral relationships and is easily integrated into existing administrative surcharge schedules that fund service training activities.
Managing Risk: Partner Selection and Principal-Agent Challenges
The focused investment inherent to Security Cooperation offshoring serves to significantly develop, strengthen, and leverage bilateral relations with key partners. An approach that the current administration has regularly championed over historic multilateral agreements. However, this focused approach is far from a “one size fits all” solution, largely due to regional rivalries between nations. Even after decades of US encouragement and the shared threat of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Japan and the Republic of Korea remain reluctant partners at best. Developing two or more proxies per geographic region partially overcomes this obstacle, as where one partner might be unwelcome, potentially the other is. An offshore approach also requires diplomatic and senior military engagement, as some countries might not want the perception of being subordinate or inferior to regional US proxies.
Offshoring portions of the United States’ large security cooperation enterprise conserves the critical manpower and readiness required to deter and compel great powers in competition…
Another challenge is first finding nations willing to enter a bilateral proxy relationship with the United States and then mitigating the myriad challenges associated with principal-agent associations. While there are risks inherent to any proxy relationship, the argument can be made that the Trump administration’s overall foreign policy approach appears better prepared to handle them than others. First, its emphasis on transactional and bilateral relationships places it in a far better position to overcome drift and exploit dependencies, as partnerships are viewed, made, or even abandoned with a strict zero-sum game perspective. Furthermore, while Leahy vetting remains in place to prevent the damage of association with human rights violators, the administration’s shift away from democracy promotion toward realism increases the potential pool of candidates to work with and through.
Additionally, many of our treaty allies have complex relationships with their former colonial holdings, as was recently on display with the French in Niger. A critical choice in adopting this concept is whether the United States wants to compete directly or indirectly with great powers. For example, China would be far more threatened by US attempts to foster South Africa as a regional proxy than Liberia due to the former’s co-membership in BRICS and the latter’s long-standing partnership with the United States. There are risks and opportunities with either approach. Thus, policymakers must be deliberate in deciding where and with whom to offshore security cooperation.
The Way Ahead—Expanding Existing Models
The United States has a long history of regional offshoring: some cases, successful like Japan, and others, like Iran, proving the limits of American power. Even today, the United States is funding NATO allies and European partners to train the Ukrainian Armed Forces on donated US equipment in an intra-alliance example of the concept. The Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI) authorizes the United States to strengthen the capacity of partner militaries to “prepare, deploy, and sustain peacekeepers” to United Nations and African Union missions that the United States normally does not have the political will or desire to deploy combat forces to. Additionally, since 2017, US special operations forces have extensive experience building counterterrorism proxies in dozens of countries through the use of 127e programs authorized by Congress.
Finally, the 2023 NDAA provided a framework to expand this concept to South America using Title 10, Chapter 16, §335 of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act. For instance, the provision allows the Department of Defense to fund friendly foreign forces to take part in training programs conducted by the armed forces of Colombia.
This new authority is particularly significant given the United States’ long-standing regional engagement with Colombia. Since the 1990s, US efforts under Plan Colombia have prioritized counter-narcotics and security cooperation. Emphasis on this initiative was reinforced by the Trump administration’s reassertion of hemispheric defense. The US also maintains longstanding relationships with Colombian special operations forces, and the nation was the first persistent post-GWOT training program by SFABs.
Conclusion
Facing challenges from an increasingly coordinated group of great powers, regional powers, and rogue states is inherently dangerous — but attempting to do so amid personnel and materiel shortfalls is especially perilous. Offshoring portions of the United States’ large security cooperation enterprise conserves the critical manpower and readiness required to deter and compel great powers in competition, and if required, address the threat of large-scale conflict. Furthermore, adopting an offshore strategy increases the return on investment of security cooperation efforts in an increasingly competitive market while concurrently strengthening and leveraging bilateral relations with key nations.
While not a perfect solution, offshoring security cooperation is one worth further examination from both policymakers and national security practitioners alike. The model offers a middle ground option that still operationalizes America’s allies and partners while meeting the transactional and cost-saving objectives of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy.
