Train, Advise, Assist: Mapping a Crowded Conceptual Field
Abstract
Several concepts pertain to the phenomenon of training, advising and assisting foreign armed forces or non-state actors. The plethora of terms incites confusion and ambiguity. To address this issue, this article outlines the conceptual field of train, advise and assist by taking the contemporary and popular concept of SFA as a reference.
Introduction
Training, advising, and assisting foreign armed forces to achieve national security objectives is an old phenomenon. Throughout history, Western countries have sent military trainers and advisors overseas who engaged with local soldiers or non-state actors through training and occasionally even fought alongside them. Overtime, multiple concepts emerged that encompassed this phenomenon such as Security Force Assistance (SFA), Military Assistance (MA), Security Assistance (SA), Security Cooperation (SC), Security Sector Reform (SSR), Building Partner Capacity (BPC), Foreign Internal Defense (FID), Unconventional Warfare (UW) and Proxy Warfare (PW). These concepts pertain to the same phenomenon although they diverge in goals, scope, use and funding. What exactly are their differences and how are they associated?
These concepts not only incite confusion and ambiguity, but they additionally create a disconnect in scholarship. For instance, Margulies and Metz rightfully state that “political science scholarship focused on ‘security assistance’ or ‘security force assistance’ has [..] been surprisingly disconnected from a separate literature on ‘security sector reform.’” Consequently, valuable theoretical insights are being overlooked. In addition, Wiltenburg notes that the plethora of terms complicates academic research on this phenomenon. To address this issue, this article outlines the conceptual field of train, advise and assist by taking the contemporary and popular concept of SFA as a reference. Before doing so, we first describe the process through which concepts such as SFA emerge as this contextualizes the following analysis.
The Rise and Fall of Concepts
Concepts carry abstract ideas and can be considered as “building blocks of thoughts.” In her research on fashionable concepts, Libiseller describes how concepts such as “hybrid warfare” are embraced and adopted by academics and practitioners. Although the above-mentioned concepts are not necessarily “fashionable concepts”, Libiseller’s research provides relevant insights into the emergence of concepts and the dynamics at play. For instance, concepts can emerge in response to a problem or “shock” with the function of providing a solution. They are chosen with a particular aim, and their diffusion depends on the actions of actors and organizations. When concepts become popular, they maintain power and are subjected to bandwagoning and vagueness. Finally, the idea behind a concept can resurface with a new label. As Libiseller writes, “the original idea is repackaged and offered as ‘old wine in new bottles.’”
The diffusion of a concept depends largely on institutionalization by authorities such as the defense organization and academia. According to Libiseller, institutionalization in the former means adopting an approach in defense planning and doctrine as well as funding specific programs. In academia, this is visible as research centers are established or when special journals are published. Concepts also show signs of discursive institutionalization when acronyms are used. Importantly, as Tripodi summarizes with regard to the concept of irregular warfare, there is an “instinctive tendency of western theorists and doctrine writers to reify, package and categorize what are often entirely abstract ideas, thus enabling their transformation into discrete concepts and doctrine.” This is directly related to an organizational and bureaucratic competition for relevance and resources.
Libiseller states that oftentimes concepts are adopted by academia after they have gained traction within defense establishments, although this process can be reciprocal and tracing the origins of concepts is difficult. However, the aim of concepts in militaries (explaining how to operate, which capabilities are required and how these should be deployed) is different from the aim of concepts in academia (understanding phenomena through analysis). Thus, when doctrinal terms are directly transferred to academia, they require additional clarification. According to Libiseller, “one effect of the pronounced policy focus [which may lead to a surge in research] has been the continuous introduction of ad-hoc concepts into the existing conceptual system of the field.”
The Origins of the SFA Concept
The concept of Security Force Assistance (SFA) was shaped during the counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan at the beginning of the current century. To transfer security responsibilities and enhance counterinsurgency, Western militaries were training, assisting, advising and equipping Afghan and Iraqi security forces. These activities were initially reserved for Special Forces (SF), however due to the high demand, they expanded to the conventional forces. Amid these efforts in 2006, the United States (US) established the Joint Centerfor International Security Force Assistance (JCISFA) to institutionalize lessons learned and advise the coalition forces on SFA activities. The JCISFA defined SFA as “unified action to generate, employ, sustain, and assist host nation or regional security forces in support of legitimate authority.” Although SFA was executed in practice, it was only recogniszd as a US policy tool in 2010. A few years later, SFA was fully integrated as the US established specialized assistance brigades and stimulated social science research through, for instance, the Minerva Research Initiative. Both are currently scaled down or abandoned.
European militaries were also conducting SFA at a large scale in the context of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Resolute Support Mission (RSM) in Afghanistan. These NATO-led missions focused on developing sustainable and independent Afghan security forces. The concept of SFA was institutionalized by NATO through the publication of the first NATO SFA doctrine in 2016 and the establishment of a Center of Excellence (CoE) one year later. Despite the widespread use of SFA as a military activity, smaller states such as the Netherlands still lack doctrinal clarity.
Although there is a growing body of scholarly work on SFA, there is no consensus on a definition. Academic contributions address issues of norm diffusion, the dynamics between providers and recipients through principal-agent theory, and the absorptive capacity and political contexts of host-nations. Some refer to the concept of SFA, and others use the term “security assistance” instead. In a recent academic contribution, Rolandsen et al. argue that SFA remains a “contextually and temporarily constricted operational concept closely related to the US-led interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan.” These scholars therefore use Security Assistance (SA) as an umbrella term to describe more broadly the activities encompassed by SFA: training, equipping, and supporting external security actors. This term is not “neutral.” In doctrinal terms, SA is “a group of programs by which the United States provides defense articles, military training, and other defense-related services to foreign nations by grant, loan, credit, or cash sales in furtherance of national policies and objectives.” The DoD has around 80 authorities or programs to assist foreign governments, militaries, security forces and populations, which shows the fuzziness of doctrinal concepts.
The Role of SOF and FID
When the SFA concept was introduced and recognized by the defense establishment, some US military officers noted a disconnect between SFA and the concept of Foreign Internal Defense (FID). Major Jenkins concludes that “these two can co-exist but require clarity in describing the operations in which they support.” The latter concept was much older than SFA and had been included in US doctrines of the Cold War. According to Wade, today’s FID concept was shaped during the Vietnam War when Nixon asserted that “we should assist but should not dictate [..] as far as our role is concerned, we must avoid the kind of policy that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged in conflicts such as the one we have in Vietnam.” The idea that foreign nations would oversee their own programs with US assistance was the basis for FID.
Both SFA and FID (as well as SA) are seen as part of Security Cooperation (SC) by the US, which is an overarching term for all activities and interactions with foreign defense institutions. Nevertheless, there are minor differences between SFA and FID as outlined by DePolo. The focus of FID programs is on supporting Internal Defense and Development (IDID) to counter internal threats such as internal lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism. Instead, SFA is focused on external and transnational threats. Another difference concerns the instruments of national power: FID uses all instruments (diplomatic, informational, military, and economic), whereas SFA solely focuses on the military instrument. In this regard, SFA can be seen as one of the activities through which FID can be accomplished. According to Matisek, the doctrines of FID and SFA address security threats in different ways. FID fits more closely with “rollback” in addressing “root causes of instability”, whereas SFA aligns favorably with “containment” and improving “security forces and their supporting institutions.”
Importantly, FID is defined as one of the core activities of the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) and the US Special Forces (USASF). In many European countries, including the Netherlands, the concept of FID is not institutionalized. Instead, the term Military Assistance (MA) is recognized as one of the core tasks of SOF alongside Special Reconnaissance (SR) and Direct Action (DA). In addition, the NATO doctrine on Special Operations institutionalized MA and defined it as “a broad category of measures and activities that support and influence critical friendly assets through organizing, training, advising, mentoring, or conducting combined operations.” Usually this means that MA is focused on enhancing foreign SOF units. As Wiltenburg and Kitzen notice, there is considerable overlap in the definitions of MA and SFA leading to doctrinal ambiguities.
The concepts of SFA and FID are focused on similar partners, namely state actors. SFA is focused on national security forces in support of a legitimate authority. This also applies to the concept of FID that supports “a friendly foreign government in its efforts to defeat an internal threat.” The opposite of SFA and FID in terms of the recipient partner is Unconventional Warfare (UW), which is focused on supporting non-state actors. The US doctrine FM 3-18 on SF also acknowledges these as conceptual opposites, defining UW as enabling “a resistance movement or insurgency by operating through or with an underground, auxiliary, or guerrilla force in denied areas to coerce, disrupt, or overthrow oppressive regimes.” Whilst UW is a traditional Special Operations Forces (SOF) domain, one of the latest IWI podcasts discusses UW as a supplement to conventional forces, “imposing costs, generating intelligence, and creating dilemmas for the enemy.” In addition, UW can substitute conventional forces in contexts where these are restricted. With the Russia-Ukraine war, there is renewed attention for support to resistance movements in occupied territories.
How has scholarship on these concepts developed? First, it is important to understand that these concepts are not as prominent in scholarship as the concept of SFA is. This does not mean that there is no academic literature or theoretical contribution at all. These topics are rather embedded in literature on Cold War proxy dynamics, SOF theory and irregular warfare in general, because the concepts are inherently linked to a niche domain. Unlike SFA, this makes it difficult to operationalize and adopt in academia. Importantly, UW is oftentimes discussed in relation to Proxy Warfare (PW). For instance, Maher defines PW as “external support from a state to enable a non-state actor to engage to engage in violence.” Nevertheless, this concept has also been applied to training efforts in support of state actors, raising debates about what constitutes proxy dynamics.
Processes of Reform
The concept of SFA is oftentimes compared to Security Sector Reform (SSR), which tends to be associated with multinational organizations such as the United Nations (UN) and European Union (EU). The Geneva Center for Security Sector Governance defines SSR as “the political and technical process of improving state and human security by applying the principles of good governance to the security sector.” SSR is focused on both state and non-state actors and includes processes of Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) and reform of the justice system. It used to be a key component of liberal peacebuilding interventions after the Cold War. Therefore, SSR is usually implemented in a post-conflict setting. Nevertheless, states such as the UK also conduct capacity building activities in fragile states as part of SSR before or during conflict.
There is a rich body of academic scholarship on SSR originating from various disciplines in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Nevertheless, according to some scholars “the study of SSR [..] is unevenly developed and in need of an intellectual marshalling of the theory, conceptual frameworks, research methodologies, and rigorous empirical accounts necessary to consolidate its status as a dynamic area of academic study, research, and policy practice.” One of the contestations on SSR concerns the concept of local ownership that is widely researched and addressed in SSR policy, although the concept is inherently ambiguous and fails to translate into practice. Local ownership generally entails that SSR is embedded in local conditions and host-nations oversee the design and implementation of reform plans. Interestingly, the critique that assistance is not tailored to local needs also resurfaces in academic literature on SFA.
Conclusion and a Way Forward
In this article, we attempted to untangle the conceptual field of train, advise, assist, thereby acknowledging that there are many more terms that can be linked to the phenomenon and therefore require clarification such as Building Partner Capacity (BPC), which was coined around the same time as SFA and has become a “catchall phrase” and “term of art.” Scholars, practitioners and policymakers must beware of this conceptual inflation and ensure that original ideas are not “repackaged” with different labels. In addition, when new concepts are more suitable for pressing issues, they must be clarified in relation to pre-existing terms. Was the intervention in Afghanistan, specifically the engagements with the Afghan national security forces, a form of SSR, SFA, SA, MA or BPC? Without clear definitions and boundaries, the co-existence of these various concepts is not helpful at all.
Several questions might help clarify which concept is applicable. First, it is important to distinguish the recipients of assistance. If the recipients are non-state actors, this would entail a form of UW. In addition, these activities are usually conducted by SOF units. Second, one can distinguish between providers of assistance and departmental oversight. For instance, the concept of SFA is usually applied to conventional forces, whilst FID and MA are positioned in the SOF domain. Furthermore, in the US, it is important to distinguish between programs that are overseen by Title 10 (Department of Defense) or Title 22 (State Department) authorities. For instance, SA is governed by both Department of State and DoD, whilst SC is embedded in the DoD. Third, one can focus on the scope of assistance. SFA refers to specific activities, whilst SSR entails an entire reform process. Although these questions do not address the ambiguity of the concepts, they add a bit more clarity to a crowded, fuzzy conceptual field.
