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The United States has conducted what is euphemistically called "security assistance" for foreign soldiers since it standardized a training program in 1961 under the Foreign Assistance Act and later the Arms Control Export Act. Similarly, the International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, established in 1976, has trained over half a million foreign military personnel from more than 125 countries. The U.S. military offers more than 2,000 courses at 150 military schools throughout the U.S. and abroad, and the U.S. Army itself trains over half the total number of students. U.S. training of foreign military personnel has long been controversial. Liberals, for example, have long criticized installations such as the School of Americas for training Latin American military personnel, who use their newly learned skills to better repress the citizenry of their own countries, for example, Noriega in Panama, or the soldiers in El Salvador. For years, Amnesty International has documented human-rights abuses in countries that receive security assistance A recent Cato Institute analysis found the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program, under which Special Operations Forces (SOF) can be deployed anywhere without congressional oversight and debate, has become "a tool to advance sometimes dubious foreign policy goals. The authors said, "JCET missions are in effect teaching techniques that could be used for oppression in the name of spreading democracy -- all the while risking U.S. entanglement in innumerable petty conflicts." The good and the bad Still, the sheer global scope of U.S. training and the growth in the bureaucracy that administers it may not be well appreciated. Not having looked closely at the issue for a few years, I was overwhelmed when I came across a report the Pentagon released on CD-ROM. "Foreign Military Training & DoD Engagement Activities of Interest: A Report to Congress for Fiscal years 1998 and 1999" included data on the cost, number of foreign students trained, and their units of operation, foreign-policy justification and purpose, and the location of the training. The number of different training programs are broad. Sometimes the training is inarguably good, such as training humanitarian de-miners in mine-plagued countries such as Bosnia and Mozambique, but much of it is less clear-cut. For example, counter-narcotics training is provided to improve host nations' capabilities to interdict illegal drug trafficking along their borders, even though that means the United States works with countries with records of gross human-rights abuses such as Colombia. The Aviation Leadership Program provides pilot training to a small number of select international students from friendly, less-developed countries. The National Guard Bureau engages in training or related exercise activities through its National Interagency Civil-Military Institute and through the National Guard (NG) State Partnership Program. These activities are designed to promote NG and Reserve Component interoperability with the U.S. Active Component. The Defense Intelligence Agency offers a Combined Strategic Intelligence Training Program designed to prepare appropriately qualified students from closely allied countries to function in joint-intelligence environments. The National Imagery and Mapping Agency teaches mapping techniques promoting interoperability by ensuring that foreign personnel understand the terminology and techniques used by the United States and other modern countries. One can only hope they learn how to avoid targeting embassies in the future. Training the world In addition, we have established various regional centers in recent years. The George C. Marshall Center is designed to promote defense reform among our European and other regional partners through advancement of democratic institutions, improved civilian expertise in national defense matters and strengthening of civil-military relations. The Marshall Center seeks to facilitate the transformation and integration of former communist militaries into Western-style democracies. The Asia-Pacific Center is designed to enhance regional cooperation and security confidence. The A-P Center is a vehicle for lowering regional tension through improved understanding of intentions, doctrines and other security issues pertaining to countries in the region. The Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies is designed to promote civilian specialization in defense and military matters and to promote civil-military relations in Latin American states. In addition, up to 40 foreign students may attend each Service Academy at any one time as actual members of an academy class (i.e., as full-time, four-year degree candidates). Making friends ... or arming enemies I realize the Clinton administration has a policy of engagement and enlargement with the rest of the world, but one has to wonder at the foreign-policy benefit of spending $75,000 training one army major from the Pacific Island nation of Tonga. Or, similarly, why spend $76,000 to train one deputy commissioner of operations from the police department of the island nation of Vanuatu. Why spend $144,000 to train two army officers from the island archipelago nation of the Republic of the Maldives. As far as anyone knows, the biggest threat the nation faces is rising ocean levels if global warming occurs enough to melt the ice caps. Much of the training is justified on foreign-policy grounds, i.e. that the foreign military personnel will become future leaders of their countries and will be more likely to be friendly to the United States and support human rights, democratic values and institutions. This is a naive view, unsupported by historical evidence. In fact, a past RAND Corp. report found that "the little training that the United States performs cannot compete with the powerful historical, political, cultural, and economic influences on foreign militaries' behavior and development." One problem is that all this training undercuts legislative oversight by Congress. In that sense, the JCET is a microcosm of the larger security-assistance realm. Many foreign military personnel that receive training have been implicated in human-rights abuses either before or after they were trained. The primary problem is that we help make foreign militaries more efficient and deadly, but we do not make them more accountable, either to their own leaders or to the United States. At the very least, it often wastes the time of U.S. troops. And given the events of recent years, we may find that this training will be a foreign-policy boomerang in the future. David Isenberg is an analyst at DynMeridian. The views expressed here are his own. He is also a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com.
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