Does international security assistance make an impact? Evaluating the strategic effectiveness of military aid
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The United States is the leading donor of international security assistance worldwide, providing over $15 billion annually in various forms of grant assistance to over 150 recipient states, in addition to myriad direct military-to-military training engagements. However, very little security assistance is quantitatively evaluated, which creates a large gap in the academic and policy literatures. This dissertation contributes to filling the gap by proposing theoretical frameworks and leveraging empirical methods to measure the strategic outcomes of security assistance programs at the national and subnational levels. I evaluate two types of programs: security force assistance to local defense forces (LDFs) and conventional military grant assistance. I find that the establishment of LDFs through the Afghan Local Police (ALP) program was associated with decreased insurgent attacks and increased state control in strategically important Afghan districts during 2010-2016. However, it was also correlated with an increase in both IED attacks in treated districts and overall attacks in neighboring districts lacking LDFs. Additionally, the troop drawdown corresponding with the 2014 ISAF dissolution reduced external oversight and local expectations of central government survival to a degree which appears to have erased the gains associated with LDFs and possibly facilitated insurgent control. Lastly, I investigate the relationship between U.S. military grant assistance and recipient state "military effort, " proxied by national military expenditures. I find that the Foreign Military Financing (FMF), Excess Defense Articles (EDA), and International Military Education & Training (IMET) programs are associated with increased military spending. However, the positive EDA correlation holds only for non-allies, suggesting a substitution effect due to more robust allied security commitments.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bate, Jonathan David |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Schultz, Kenneth A |
| Thesis advisor | Schultz, Kenneth A |
| Thesis advisor | Fearon, James D |
| Thesis advisor | Laitin, David D |
| Thesis advisor | Weinstein, Jeremy M |
| Degree committee member | Fearon, James D |
| Degree committee member | Laitin, David D |
| Degree committee member | Weinstein, Jeremy M |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Political Science |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Jonathan D. Bate. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Political Science. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/cy257fm4083 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Jonathan David Bate
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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