Irregular Warfare Podcast - Lessons from the Eastern Front: Security Force Assistance in Ukraine

Episode Date: May 17, 2024

Episode 105 of the Irregular Warfare Podcast contrasts security force assistance (SFA) efforts in Ukraine and Afghanistan.   Our guests begin by outlining the significance of security force assistance and its pivotal role in Washington’s wider national security strategy. From there, they delve into a detailed analysis of SFA in both Afghanistan and Ukraine, extracting valuable lessons for policymakers and practitioners to inform future SFA policies. Finally, they end with a deep dive into SFA activities in Eastern Europe, shedding light on the socialization and transactional approaches needed to align incentives and enhance the combat capabilities of the United States’ international partners. 

So the point here is that you cannot expect security force assistance to completely save a bad situation because that is not going to happen. What you can expect it to do is improve and enhance a situation where you already have shared goals, not necessarily completely shared, but shared enough goals and a high enough starting level of capacity. Not necessarily completely shared, but shared enough goals and a high enough starting level of capacity. I would also offer a challenge for us, understandably, was access. You know, as our team worked along the Ukrainians, providing them the needs-based training to go send them back out to the east to fight. As we helped them build a Q course that was appropriate for them. As we helped them organizationally kind of advise them through the standing up of their new organization. They brought with them all the experience of fighting a near-peer adversary. We did not have a first-person view. We had to rely entirely on their experience and kind of this vicarious sort of perspective. Welcome to the Irregular Warfare podcast.

I'm your host, Ben Jebb, and my co-host today is Nathan Kaczynski. In today's episode, we do a deep dive into security force assistance efforts in Ukraine. Our guests begin by outlining the significance of security force assistance and its pivotal role in U.S. national security. From there, they delve into a detailed analysis of SFA in both Afghanistan and Ukraine, extracting valuable lessons to inform future SFA policies. Finally, they end with a deep dive into SFA activities in Eastern Europe, shedding light on the socialization and transactional approaches needed to align incentives and enhance the combat capabilities of Washington's international partners. Professor Alex Chinchilla is an assistant professor at Texas A&M's Bush School of Government and Public Service and a non-resident fellow with the Irregular Warfare Initiative.

Professor Chinchilla received her Ph.D. from Chicago University, and her research focuses on the politics of security cooperation. In September of 2023, she authored a Lawfare article entitled Lessons from Ukraine for Security Force Assistance, which serves as the anchor for today's episode. Colonel Justin Huffnagle currently serves as the commander of 10th Special Forces Group. Over the course of his 24-year career, he has led special operations forces at various echelons, deploying to multiple theaters across the globe in support of U.S. national security objectives.

Colonel Huffnagle holds a B.A. from Gonzaga University and an M.S. in defense analysis. Colonel Huffnagle holds a BA from Gonzaga University and an MS in defense analysis from the Naval Postgraduate School. You are listening to the Irregular Warfare Podcast, a joint production of the Princeton Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. Here's our conversation with Colonel Justin Huffnagle and Professor Alex Chinchilla. Justin, Alex, thanks for joining us today on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. It's great to have you. Thanks for the opportunity to be here.

Great to be here. I'm a longtime listener, so it's great to finally be on the show. Fantastic. Yeah. So, Alex, we're going to start off with you. We found your Lawfare article entitled Lessons from Ukraine for Security Force Assistance to be highly relevant given the salient ongoing debate about U.S. support for Ukraine and other partners around the world. We also really like the comparative aspect you did by discussing lessons from the U.S. experience in Afghanistan as well. So to start, could you just explain what motivated you to publish this piece? Yeah, certainly. So when I wrote the piece, I had actually just come back from about two months of field work. I went to Warsaw, I went to Ukraine, I spent some time in

Germany going to the different locations where training and aid was being coordinated for Ukraine. And one thing that I took away was that we just didn't really know all that much about what had been done before 2022 to prepare Ukraine for the position it was in now. So that's why I wanted to write this piece. I had been working on Ukraine for a while. It's part of a larger book project that I'm doing. And one thing that I would hear a lot when people talk about Ukraine is that it's a really unusual case of security force assistance. And that's absolutely true. If you look at the volume of USAID that's been flowing since 2022, it's an insane amount, $45 billion over the last two years. It was like $600 million in the lead up to the full-scale invasion. But what a lot of people

didn't realize is that there was an extensive training and advising program with all aspects of Ukraine's military and with their Ministry of Defense and people in the government working on Euro-Atlantic integration. And all of this had happened before the full-scale invasion. So it's really important, I think, to understand how much of an effect Western security force assistance had on how Ukraine did in the first year of the war. security force assistance had on how Ukraine did in the first year of the war. And I think that what we sort of took away from Afghanistan in 2021, which was just a few months before Russia invaded Ukraine, is just that security force assistance never works. We're never going to do this again. Let's pivot to great power competition. And then the first thing we're involved in when it comes to great power competition is essentially a security force assistance effort with a local military. So I think that shows us

that there's a lot of lessons that we can draw from looking at this past history. And maybe what we don't want to take away is that security force assistance never works. And what we want to do is understand when it works and why. Before we dig into the specifics of Alex's article, I'd like to first just define terms. Security force assistance means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Justin, could you please discuss the concept of security force assistance and why SFA is a pillar of America's national security strategy and what utility does that serve? Yeah, so I think probably it's important to point out that security force assistance is really a piece of a larger umbrella for the government captured under security cooperation. And security cooperation is this function that is run by

the Department of State, but cooperatively with the Department of Defense, aiming to promote the U.S. security interests to build allied and partner capability, and then provide the U.S. with peacetime security access and contingency access. So that's kind of the big scope of it. And security force assistance is just a piece of that kind of broader effort. And so folks will be familiar with the idea of foreign military sales, with providing defense articles and things like that. Security force assistance itself is the Department of Defense's activity where we go out into specific nations and help develop capability and capacity with a specific partner and help develop their own institutions. And the goal typically is a

couple of parts. One is develop their ability to defend against an internal or an external threat to contribute to or enable international or multinational operations and or assist other nations provide for their own security. So broadly speaking, that's kind of what we're talking about with the security force assistance. And I think the key thing is there, it's one piece of a kind of a broader U.S. government effort. In terms of why it's a pillar of national security strategy, I suppose there's probably a few things that sort of inform that.

My sense of this is kind of looking back historically, you would probably point to a point in time that follows World War II, maybe even the Cold War, where the U.S. bore a pretty heavy burden in terms of assisting and providing security for the world, right, and trying to provide stability to facilitate commerce, diplomacy. And there is a recognition that in working with partners around the world, be they in underdeveloped nations and or with allies and partners, we could do two things, really reduce that cost just a little bit and simultaneously build a network of folks who could help us understand where emergent threats were over time. And I think those are probably pretty important ideas, big picture, in terms of what informs where we go out in the world to do security cooperation writ large, but really security force assistance in particular? So I think the doctrine and the authorities are really important for thinking about how security force assistance fits into that bigger picture. So I really like that summary, Justin. I just wanted to highlight kind of two things that I think about when I'm doing my research. And one, I'm really interested in the variety of different ways, regardless of how it's funded or who's doing it, that basically create these touch points between

the U.S. military and the militaries of allies or partners. So things that put them in close proximity. This is a variety of like training, advising efforts. And the second piece is I'm really interested in the strategic effects of that kind of cooperation. So all of these things are designed to sort of move together and influencing what a local military will do in a particular situation. If the local military is actively fighting an internal external threat, or it could be shaping the environment before they're in that position. Or it could also be working on sometimes these grander set of goals, more amorphous goals, like creating transformation of a security sector. And that could achieve a lot of different things like getting a security sector in a local partner that's more aligned with things that the United States has prioritized,

like civil military relations and democratic governance, or it could be something like strategic alignment. And I think that's what you see a lot of in Ukraine is kind of trying to do all these forms of cooperation with the goal of let's put people on the ground, and we're going to figure out how we're going to sort of support Ukraine's overall movement towards the West. Yeah, Alex, that's fascinating, right? It's not just capacity building, like Justin said, but there's an element of strategic messaging, of interest alignment, all those things that come into play. So let's take a moment and actually dig into your article, Alex, because you started by addressing the rapid collapse of Kabul after the U.S. withdrew in 2021, and then you contrast that with Ukraine's initial success in defending itself from a Russian

invasion. So could you start by walking us through a timeline of events regarding SFA in Afghanistan? When did the U.S. begin SFA efforts and how did we approach military assistance there? Yeah, so I feel like Justin, given his operational experience, is the real expert here when it comes to Afghanistan. And I'll start with that disclaimer. But I think that working with the partners is key from the beginning. If you look at how the United States got into that intervention in the first place, it's like, let's put people on the ground to link up with the Northern Lions, to link up with Hamid Karzai and actually think about developing this alternative to the Taliban.

And at some point, you sort of switch for, you know, it takes the Taliban a while to kind of figure out what it's going to do and to actually launch a full-scale insurgency. And then that's sort of when you see U.S. goals begin to shift immediately to thinking about, well, we have this problem where we're not providing, the government of Afghanistan is not providing very good security for the local population. So if we're going to get to the point where the situation stabilizes and where the United States could exit at some point, and again, this is all given where the insurgency really gets hot is in 2005. So this is informed by the experience in Iraq. And it's immediately recognized that there's going to have to be this plethora of security force assistance activities to get to a point where you can

actually achieve those expanding U.S. goals for what the intervention in Afghanistan looks like. So you have a variety of different security sector participants on the Afghan side. You have the National Defense and Security Forces, the Ministry of Defense, which is involved in thinking about training and equipping these forces, and the Ministry of Interior Forces. And these are all important when you're fighting the insurgency. So you eventually get to a point where security forces distance is, if the military isn't explicitly recognizing it, is kind of becoming the main effort. Because to be able to get to a point where you could actually stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and

potentially eventually leave, you really have to build those local security forces to a point where they can take on the defense of their country for themselves. So I think it ends up being really important, even if what U.S. military resources are being spent on, given the large U.S. combat presence in country, is on actually doing combat operations. So there's kind of this tension there from the beginning where working with partners was key from day one. It was sort of sidelined for a little bit as the U.S. attention focused elsewhere. Then it's recognized as basically the way to get to a stable end state, but never sort of prioritized given the large U.S. presence in country. A couple of thoughts there as she kind of sketched out that scope, which was in some cases just by virtue of sort of where I fit into that really kind of a big picture story. Interesting, because there's some things that I didn't even see at a tactical kind of practitioner level. And, you know, as you look back retrospectively, I think you see where, as we think about security force assistance, I think some of the holes in our swing are as a U.S. government or maybe at the DOD level. But as a member of special operations, you know, our focus is partnering

with and building special operations capability. And so the story of building Afghan National Army special operations capability starts around, depending on which particular force you're talking about, starts around 2005, 2007, as she said, and then kind of grows into 2009 with a bunch of different forces that span both the Ministry of Defense and then into the Ministry of Interior in 2009. And I just want to highlight within the timeline that she highlighted there that we don't start putting in at the ministry level advisors until 2010. And I think that highlights an important observation, which is there's a lot of effort put in by a whole host of different advisors at a tactical level long before we start kind of thinking about, or at least working at the institutional level that's otherwise really, really important in terms of providing executive direction and guidance.

And I think certainly as you watch their performance throughout the rest of the conflict, sustainment and support, you're thinking about the logistics that it takes to support these institutions. And this is just on the soft side. I'm sure it's equally true on the conventional side. They're trying to execute operations over a country as complex and really terrain as difficult as Afghanistan's presented itself. And so I think, you know, looking back at the scope of kind of what we were trying to do when we were putting advisors in place and where we were putting them, I think is an important kind of a highlight there. Justin, rarely do we get the chance to talk to individuals with practical experience training with Ukrainians at multiple echelons. So to the extent that you can discuss some more contemporary SFA efforts, would you mind sharing some of your experiences with us? And more specifically, it'd be great to hear a timeline of events about what institutions you've worked with and some of the challenges your organization has faced over the past decade or so.

Yeah, great question. So people tend to forget that our relationship with the Ukrainians actually began back in 2015 after the original incursion. So this is a long-duration relationship for us. And even ahead of this most recent conflict, this is a long duration relationship for us. And even ahead of this most recent conflict, it was a seven-year relationship then. And that's really important when you think about SFA and what it means to us as a soft, in our case, special forces element. We had an opportunity to invest in a partner for seven years, in their case, during conflict,

but ultimately ahead of kind of another turn in their conflict. And so that's a really interesting look. And when you look at Ukrainian soft performance, you know, at that most recent evolution of the conflict, that's in February 22, you know, it really is a product of that seven-year investment beginning in 2015. And so two different missions emerged at that time. The first was to assist the Ukrainian SOF build a new training institution, and that was ultimately going to feed this larger organization. The second was going to provide needs-based training for those elements that were fighting the fight that was going on out in the east. And so their existing SOF regiments that were

assigned out in the geographic sectors would rotate back and provide our soft advisors lessons learned from what it was they were encountering as they tangled with the Russians. And then our advisors would take that and figure out what skills they would need to go back and become more efficient, more effective, and ultimately more lethal. So those were the two things that were ultimately emerged most immediately. Longer term, as the Ukrainians built their training institution that would eventually build out a qualification course, an advanced skills set of courses, pre-mission training for deployments, they also began to develop and stand up a whole new command structure and organization that became UKR SOCOM under the general staff. So all these things are happening, you know, under the pressure of combat.

And, you know, ultimately a huge lift, certainly at the tactical level, but all the way up into the institutional level, as we'd been discussing earlier. And, you know, with the assistance and the advisement of a relatively small number of U.S. and, as I mentioned earlier, allied partners who were contributing to this, the establishment of that school, the establishment of UCRSOCOM, all occurred in less than five years. So if you think, you know, this relationship starts around 2015. By the time they get all this into place, really it's in place and running in about five years or less, depending on, you know, kind of how you measure it, which is

really pretty phenomenal when you think about them being in sustained combat operations in the East. And so as you think about trying to measure success and then think forward into their current conflict and how they arrive in a combat in 2022 and how successful they were in that in terms of a professional force, really pretty astounding accomplishments for a relatively small contribution from our side and then even from the allied side who are helping this out. That doesn't come without challenges. And I think this is attended to any time you're trying to change an organization is the internal culture. Western organization and Western alliance structure. And yet they still had, certainly at the MOD and then down into the lower level organizations, just a ton of senior leadership that had grown up inside of the legacy Soviet organizations. And most importantly, and I think this has been mentioned earlier, it's not just growing up in it, but they had succeeded inside

the Soviet model. And so with that perspective, you have a certain amount of resistance that's going to be attendant to us trying to help them evolve, even if it's something that they ultimately understand is something necessary to them progressing forward. And so I think as you think about the success of building, again, the schoolhouse that we talked about, helping them evolve and build the Uker Socom and so on and so forth, there's still this culture clash within this soft structure, but even the MOD in fits and starts in terms of getting the buy-in that was needed to get there. And so it wasn't necessarily a smooth road the whole time. As they got success though, and as UcreSoCom and the training institution

were built, I think another key challenge that remained for quite a while was recruitment and retention. And so some of this was imposed internally. I think, you know, as they embraced a new model for the organization, it was this idea about from within Uker SOCOM, how difficult they wanted their own standards to be as they brought in candidates into the new organization. So one is how do we attract the right people? And then how do we make a demanding enough training progression, but not so demanding that we're washing out everybody, right? And I think this is something that anytime you're making the lead organization, getting that right calibration is always tough. I think the harder part of this is then retention, right? When you're in a country who is fundamentally reshaping the larger institution, you're now competing when you think about recruitment pools amongst the many other services and agencies and departments that are otherwise also reforming themselves. And so now having selected and trained a pretty already narrow pool, now potentially you're losing, and we were, or they were, losing trained folks away to other services and agencies

who were able to offer in some cases more money or maybe by perception jobs that were more prestigious, right? And so this was another challenge that our advisors really had to help coach them through to kind of get over that so they could retain a professional force for the future. That would become very necessary, right, as we couldn't see it then, but knew that rather ended up having to come around to 2022 in the fight. You know, retaining qualified candidates was going to be critical. I would also offer a challenge for us, understandably, was access. As our team worked along the Ukrainians, providing them the needs-based training to go send them back out to the east to fight, as we helped them build a Q course that was appropriate for them, as we helped them organizationally advise them through the

standing up of their new organization, they brought with them all the experience of fighting a near-peer adversary. We did not have a first-person view. We had to rely entirely on their experience and this vicarious perspective. again, that's something we do a lot, but that was absolutely a challenge by virtue of the policy that otherwise prevented us from going and seeing and living alongside them in the places where they were kind of garnering all their experiences. And so that's attended to a lot of the places we work in the world, but is a challenge nonetheless. And I think that's just going to be a familiar challenge wherever we go around the world. We're going to bump up against the restrictions and the prohibitions that as our policymakers assess what should we be doing,

that's going to put a balance between the opportunities that are out there that we see at the tactical and operational level versus the political and the strategic risk that's involved. In this case, in Ukraine, there's always the discussion about potential escalation and so on. Justin, that was a great overview of what your organization's been doing in Eastern Europe and some of the successes and trials you all have faced. And I think it really sets the stage for a more academic analysis of SFA writ large. So Alex, you cite kind of three major takeaways for security force assistance in your article. And this includes the idea that one, training is easier than building. Two, shared goals does not necessarily imply shared strategies. And three, you claim that SFA might not always be decisive. But I was hoping we could start by talking about

your first big idea. What do you mean when you say training is easier than building? Yeah, absolutely. So just one quick thing about the training here. So we have the soft training that Justin did a great job explaining. We also had the establishment of a combat training center for Ukraine that was to train the conventional forces. The idea was basically, let's create a combat training center similar to what NATO allies get to go through at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center, which is in Hohenfels, Germany, where basically NATO allies get to come through, they work with one another, they get to do this collective training, and do NATO-style combined arms maneuver, practice how to do that.

And so the idea is Ukrainians don't know how to do this. Let's create a combat training center for them. Let's train the trainers so they know how to do this, and they can see the value of starting to think about fighting in a way that a NATO country would. So these two efforts, I think the building of the Combat Training Center for the Ukrainian ground forces, the conventional forces, as well as the training and establishment of Ukrainian special operations forces was very successful. And basically, by the time if Russia hadn't invaded in 2022, Ukraine was basically ready to run the combat training center completely on their own. So the initial mission of the Joint Multinational Training Group Ukraine was essentially fulfilled, because that was their mission to set up and show Ukrainians the value of this combat training center and prepare them to run it on their own where they could produce quality training products from that. And so those efforts were very successful. And why I say that training is easier than building is really for two reasons, I think. And one is the scale of the problem. It's so much easier

to teach someone what you know, than to think about changing an entire system. So what both of those efforts were successful, I think, is because they were based on, let's create something new, instead of completely reforming existing systems, and demonstrate proof of concept, like show how it works. But it's not the same as trying to go into, for example, like the Ukrainian G7 and completely change how they do training. Like that never happened. Because that's an institution that move away from the operating force. Like, what do people actually know today? And think about how do we actually train and equip forces for the long run? And think about these force quality and force sustainment issues.

And that's the part where you would have to really change large pieces of a way a military operates. And that's a piece that was never done. So why was it not done? I think it's because it tells us something. So my second reason, the theory of change. Like, how do we actually do this? Institutions are really sticky because of what they represent. They are the manifestation of existing power and interests. So essentially, in order to change them, you have to convince a bunch of people that are just either due to inertia, used to doing something a certain way way or actively benefit from the status quo and you have to convince them to change. And the problem is we

don't really know how to do that all that well. It's very challenging, even countries that really want to change their institutions. So if you look at all the states that joined NATO basically in the waves of NATO enlargement in the 90s, states like Poland, it was a long and painful process that had to be driven by local elites. So that was exactly what Ukraine was trying to do. But it's just really difficult. It takes time. It requires things like not only from like the US government side, aligning whole of government incentives and ways that the US government would work with a government like Ukraine. But then it requires all these things that actually were like training and advising ends up being really helpful. And this is like empowering people in the local military

and government that want to change, then this constant like individual level pushing and pulling, as well as teaching and technical advice about things like how do we set up a program of instruction for a course that would fit with what people are learning in a NATO military? And like, how do we actually roll all of this out so we don't have some people learning one thing and other people learning other things? So it's a lot to align. And advising, I think, can help with these individual mechanisms, the things like teaching, technical advice, like that individual pushing and pulling and empowering locals. But it can't really substitute for a whole of government incentive alignment to kind of push towards the creation of new institutions. And so there's a lot of

reasons that we could get into about like why it's hard on the U.S. side to do that. And there's a lot of great colleagues I have that are doing great work on different aspects of that, things like civil-military relations or things like U.S. government priorities. The fact that senior attention tends to be very limited, and things like, I'm going to completely change how a military operates over a 10-year period isn't really exactly something that sells very well compared to like, let me build a small and manageable capacity through something like training. So that's why I think what we did well in Ukraine is we really did hit for some of this lower hanging fruit that ended up being very

successful. But its success was sort of confined to demonstrating proof of concept for NATO ways of warfare, as well as injecting a lot of capability in young, dynamic junior officers and senior NCOs in the Ukrainian military. And then they ended up, a lot of people were trained, but it just like the scale was just too small. It wasn't a full transformation of a military because you can't really do that in eight years. I think just a lot of great insights there. And so, well, I agree. I would characterize, as I hear training is easier, again, as a practitioner, I come in and I come at it maybe from a different perspective and say, I don't know that it's easier. The way I would say it is that we build within, certainly within DOD and then within the Army, we've got units that are specially selected, trained, and prepared to go do it. And to the

extent that this is the job for which we are purposed, it could have the appearance of being easy. And not just that we're prepared to do it, but we've gone around the world and done it a bunch. And so we've built, we've accrued all this experience. And I think it's still hard work. It requires patience and resilience and so on and so forth. And so I'm not pushing back on easier, but I think that we do it routinely and that we're purposed towards it can give it an appearance of easier. I do agree that changing institutions is really tough. And I guess back to my original point, I would ask rhetorically, what part of the department and or the army is purposed towards going in and engaging at the institutional level?

We were talking about Afghanistan here just a minute ago. It wasn't until about halfway through our engagement there that we started thinking about and then putting advisors. It was just advisors. I don't know how you compare and contrast applied effort, but if you look at on a given day, take a look at the SFA effort that was being applied at the tactical level in terms of man hours, resources, what have you, and then find some way to comparatively analyze that which was being applied at the ministry level. And I would ask, was that commensurate? Was it the same to get to change? And then again, in the Ukraine context, was it the same? I can't answer that question, but I think it's worth asking. And then I ask again,

organizationally, do we have that structure that engages at that level to foment change in a way that we can do at the tactical level? And I think that then starts to answer the question of what's easier and what's not. I do, yeah, the Ukraine experience exactly as Alex described. Ultimately, you're changing not just structure, and in this case, doctrine, you're changing culture. And as she noted, that's really, really hard to do. And ultimately, in this experience, but I think it's true in some of the past experiences we've had, what ultimately ends up happening to the extent that you are changing institutions, that was true in Ukraine, certainly within the soft context, because they were not just

improving the tactical formations, but they were building institutionally a new school. And then eventually, Ukrsocom stood up, right? So now you're building the executive function for that. That was folks that were otherwise tactical echelon folks having to step up. So now you're bleeding resourcing, that's people, time and money away from otherwise tactical echelon folks having to step up. So now you're bleeding resourcing. That's people, time, and money away from the tactical echelon in order to do that. And I think that points to the gap that exists right now in terms of the way we think about how we engage in SFA, maybe as a department and or as a government, just as a thought. Alex, you also write, just because two countries might have shared interests, goals, values, they don't always agree on how best to achieve those aims. Could you expound on that idea?

are sort of all in lockstep. They all want exactly the same things. And this is why security force assistance worked effortlessly and flawlessly in Ukraine. And that's just not the case. It's not the case at the strategic level in terms of what the US and NATO allies wanted and what Ukraine wanted. And it's not the case at sort of the working level. And so two things on that. What Ukraine wanted more than anything was to become a member of NATO. And that was the one thing that regardless of what people are sort of saying about that at this point, was never seriously on the table for Ukraine. So there was this kind of disjuncture from the beginning, where if you look at kind of like the big picture, where the US and NATO allies really supported Ukraine's overall self-determination, Ukraine's ability to decide

for itself what kinds of institutions it wanted to join, to integrate into the West, was willing to support that with economic aid, with political support. But once you've sort of looked at those big picture alignment and then looked at specific things like, okay, how are we going to do that? Ukraine's like, great, we joined NATO, we joined the EU, we'll solve our problems there. And NATO and the EU are like, well, we can give you additional forms of cooperation, but a path to membership is not on the table at this time. And so then you can see how that begins to immediately make this difficult. Because what Ukrainians would often complain about is that

they're being asked to make all of these very costly reforms, some of which have absolutely nothing to do with improving their ability to fight in the east against Russia. So things like, let's take the security service of Ukraine, SBU, and let's gut it. Let's take away their very unique functions that they have that Ukrainians would completely agree are not really useful for a peacetime democracy. But they weren't in peacetime. From 2014 to 2022, they were fighting a war in the east that was actually sometimes fairly intense and led to casualties and required a lot of equipment. So they were being asked to make all these reforms that didn't necessarily translate into things that they really needed to achieve now, while not giving the firm promise of membership in these institutions. So you can see right there how there's a disjuncture.

And then kind of at the working level, then they're trying to figure out, okay, even if we agree that we should sort of make these reforms to align ourselves with NATO, which a lot of really dedicated people in the Ukrainian government were working really hard on, they still had to figure out how to actually do that. And one thing you hear repeatedly from the Ukrainian military is just that what they wanted were the guns and the training so that they could better fight Russians. The one thing that the U.S. was not willing to provide was the guns and the training so that they could better fight Russians, because that is not what we were doing. We were supporting Ukraine's overall movement towards the West. We were deliberately not trying to build an offensive capability that would help Ukraine in any way become more threatening to Russia. So all of these things are not fully aligned there. And so I think what happens is that you end up seeing a lot of people in Ukraine that kind of

see their future as being with the West. They see a future for themselves in NATO, even if they have to wait decades to get there, which they're willing to do. But in order to sort of get to the point where they can make some of the reforms that they would need to make, they have to have something better to offer a bunch of people that are still educated in the Soviet system that don't understand why adopting like a NATO way of war is useful, especially if that NATO way of war doesn't come with the equipment that they actually need to continue fighting what they're actually fighting right now. So there was a lot of disjuncture there at kind of all levels in terms of what Ukraine wanted, what the West wanted, even if the very big picture of this overall support for Ukraine's self-determination and their sense of alignment

with the West was always there. Justin, I guess as someone who's worked extensively with partners and allies from around the world, could you discuss how you bridge the gap when two parties each have different perspectives on tactics, training, and strategy? Yeah, I mean, I think this is a challenging experience everywhere you go. And I don't know that there's an answer that really spans all these different contexts that you work in. But I do think it comes down to a balance between the ability to build rapport through influence and then this play of incentives between the two parties that are involved. And somewhere, as you're working towards, hopefully, a clear strategic goal, which,

if we're being candid, isn't always out there. To the extent that policy, for us, can sometimes shift as you're in stride in conflict. Certainly, if the conflict extends over, let's just say, a couple of decades, you are trying to, first of all, work through influence to get alignment and or at least get to a mutually acceptable place where you can both work together towards your goal or somewhere that meets between your two goals. But at the end of the day, I think we have to acknowledge that there's a transactional aspect to what it is we do. They have expectations. And again, you can just pick a partner in a specific context. And so I think we've got an obligation to sort of work with them to kind of meet those.

And oftentimes, especially when we're in a combat context, we've got an interest in making sure that they get those things too, because we've got people in harm's way. And so there's a sweet spot between building influence and then meeting their need through the incentive piece of this, whether it's the provision of equipment, whether we are helping them with the assets that we provide in stride, any of these different things. And so again, I think that can be a tough road to walk. I mean, it's not always easy recognizing that there's a balance, right, between a socialization strategy, one built on relationships, and also maybe a more kind of principal-agent transactional relationship as well. So I guess just a follow-up question.

In the past, has it been easy to implement kind of US or NATO-centric style of warfighting on a non-NATO course? Or do you essentially just have to find creative ways to work within pre-existing kind of indigenous constraints? First, it's contingent on conditions. Are we partnering inside of conflict conditions? How fragmented is the society, the cultures, or the politics? How much time do you have? Are we talking about a government that is well-financed, or at least better off than other? Are we're talking about in Afghanistan where they are absolutely dependent on externally, right? Like all these variables matter in terms of, you know, how easy it's going to be to help impart. But I think probably a more important question is, is it necessary and appropriate for us to impart a

US or NATO style of war fighting? You know, as we step into any one of these partnerships, I think as we kind of look from a strategic perspective at our different engagements around the world, certainly there's going to be those engagements that absolutely, as we think into the future, as we think about future adversaries, absolutely in the interest of interoperability, we want to work towards kind of building their ability to interoperate with us and other allies and partners. And so again, these factors come into play. I can think of other places in the world where our interest is probably more about improving their own internal security, their ability to provide for their own internal security, and or work regionally among their own

nations around them. And in those contexts, I would say probably not as important. So that probably becomes the more important question up front. And so, you know, satisfying that first. I just wanted to circle back to something you said, Ben, if I can, about sort of these two models of influence about more pressure or rapport or aligning strategic incentives and then individual level. I think it's both and. These are all nested together. What we do have to pay attention to, though, I think, as Justin pointed out, is the strategic incentives, the conditions under when we actually try to do these kinds of efforts, as well as I just love the framing of is this necessary or appropriate? In a lot of cases, it's not. In Ukraine's case,

starting to act like and to think like and fight like a NATO-style military was important because Ukraine had as its strategic goal after 2019 to become a member of NATO. In order to become a member of NATO, there's a very clear pathway for what has to happen. And so you do actually have to look NATO-like. But in a lot of other places, as Justin pointed out, the partnership is ultimately transactional. It's around a specific security goal that we're trying to achieve. And in that case, it may not be necessary to do that wholesale transformation. I think this is even the case when you kind of think about the training efforts that took place over the first six months of 2023 to prepare Ukraine for the counter

offensive. These were things where I think a lot more could have been done to sort of tailor the training to local priorities that maybe it was unrealistic or unnecessary to expect Ukraine to be able to fight using combined arms in the same sort of way that a NATO-style military would. Because I think that's in general difficult to achieve in six months and perhaps unnecessary in this particular context. It might have been better to work with what actually worked for the local context. So that's something we can think about is trying to figure out when we have conflicts of interest, what pieces do we actually need to fix in order to make the relationship productive? And where are there things where we're just pushing on something that they're never going

to change? Like think about any relationship. If you go into a relationship thinking you're going to make your spouse change over time, good luck, not going to happen. Better to focus on areas of productivity where you actually have aligned interests and push hard on that. And if it doesn't work, then maybe that's not the right partner for you. And I think it's the same sort of thing when we're doing security force assistance is you have to think about, are we actually able to get to what we want, where our interests are aligned

enough and areas where the interests are unaligned, where it's actually realistic to expect change to happen. So Alex, you talk about the limitations of SFA, and you write that it might not be quite as decisive as we think. Could you discuss why that might be? And given your point, is SFA still a worthwhile endeavor as an American policy? Yeah, so just up front, I think it is a worthwhile endeavor. But how we often employ it, I think, is too ambitiously. We expect it to change the scenario when the deck is completely stacked against us. So we sort of select, and this is kind of what I look at in some of my other work, we look at places where it's going to be hard to achieve what we want to achieve. And then we think, well, how are we

going to get that? Well, we're going to have these ambitious projects of change, and we're going to throw a lot of security force assistance on it. And then that will be enough to get to a level of capacity and a level of alignment that will then help us achieve our goals. And I think for reasons we've already been talking about, that can be extremely difficult. And it's not really the case that security force assistance, in my opinion, doesn't work. It's just that it could work, in fact, a lot. But if we're applying it to these partners where there's already pretty serious conflicts of interest to begin with, even if you improve substantially in terms of getting

much more aligned and the local partner becomes much more capable, that may not be enough to really move the needle into a level of strategic success that you want. Now, if you look at a partner, I think where Ukraine ends up being very effective is there was already a high level of starting capacity compared to what we see in a lot of places where we do security force assistance. And Ukraine completely of their own volition, like invested in a whole set of things that were really useful. Like when the initial Russian invasion happened in 2014, you essentially have a Ukrainian military that had been gutted due to years of pro-Russian politicians in power. And President Yanukovych was there from 2010 to 2014. And so a lot of what they did was just sort of rebuilding

their military back to where it was before this stint of bad governance. So there's a lot of things that were happening there that are kind of local initiative that are pushing Ukraine over the point where they need to be to successfully defend themselves against a full-scale invasion. And Western help here, I think, ends up being important. All of the training and advising, I think, really empowered low-level and, you know, more junior officers with the training that they receive and this exposure to NATO ways of fighting, as well as substantial progress had been done to kind of move Ukraine at the strategic level in line with the West, which then set them up to be able to get that support after they successfully defended against Russia's initial invasion. So all these things are really mattering. But if Ukraine had been starting at a bad place, and then we had just provided that same level of

security force assistance on top of that, I don't think that would have been enough to move the needle. So the point here is that you cannot expect security force assistance to completely save a bad situation because that is not going to happen. What you can expect it to do is improve and enhance a situation where you already have shared goals, not necessarily completely shared, but shared enough goals and a high enough starting level of capacity. And Justin, from your perspective, what are the limitations of SFA? Yeah, so I think you've got a lot of great points by Alex there. I mean, I think what's clear is you look, again, retrospectively at our many engagements

and in different contexts, in conflict, out of conflict, or pre-conflict, time matters. different contexts, in conflict, out of conflict, or pre-conflict, time matters. Again, we're talking about either shaping or, in some cases, fundamentally rebuilding organizations. That just takes time. And whether you're doing that under the pressure and ultimately, in some cases, losses of combat, that matters. And so I think time becomes a real critical one. I think setting, and we've talked about this in terms of from a government and a departmental perspective, in terms of how we and what levels we engage, I think a key limitation is if we're not setting at the executive level, the conditions that are otherwise going to provide, we're talking kind of at the tactical formation, we're not setting the conditions that will provide the direction and the sustainment for those tactical formations,

we're probably missing it, right? That is a key limitation. And when I talk to the teams here, ultimately, those tactical formations have to land in fertile soil. And so I talk a lot about an institution that is able and capable of replicating itself, right? That's a training institution, but then an executive level of functioning, right, that provides direction, guidance, and is working coherently within a government structure that is aligned and otherwise is invested in this tool that's otherwise either being shaped and built. I think those are important. And if we're not engaged in that, then ultimately, again, we're not setting the conditions for it and otherwise becomes a limitation,

right, in the long-term durability of the project, of the force. And so I think those become really important. And then the last piece of this, and it was kind of mentioned, I think, a couple of times in our conversation, this is an ugly side of the business. And so I think those become really important. And then the last piece of this, and it was kind of mentioned, I think a couple of times in our conversation, this is an ugly side of the business. Maybe we don't like to talk about it, certainly on my side, but it's the resources. And in many cases, it's the money, both from a national perspective, that that nation is not in a position to sustain what it is we're building, then it's going to be over the long term. Afghanistan obviously serves as a pretty obvious example, but there's certainly other ones relative to what's going on in Ukraine right now. So just a couple of thoughts there.

Yeah, we've covered a ton of ground. So we're going to finish up here by essentially asking the same question to both of you, and I'll direct it at Alex first. But based on today's conversation, what are the major considerations for policymakers, academics, and practitioners who are interested in security force assistance? Yeah, great question. So thinking first about what we've sort of pulled out of best practices for security force assistance or how to know if it's going to go well and what we can do to sort of set it up for success. I think one thing that Justin talked about is really important, which is how much time do we have for this? Are we thinking about big picture, long-term strategic realignment, or do we want to coordinate on a specific shorter-term security task that we have to accomplish now? That really tells us

something about the scale of the ambitions that we can have in that case. The second factor that we should look at, and I think it's directly related to that, and I kind of talk about this in the article, is do you need to train or do you need to build in order to get that level of desired strategic effects? Because if you just need to provide an infusement of capability at the tactical level, that might be more achievable. We have organizations in the U.S. Army that can do that. It is a discrete task that you can measure in terms of months rather than years. But if we need to be able to change institutions in order to get the strategic effects that we want, that is going to be very hard. And we need to have a lot of time for it.

And I still don't think we really have the organizations or the knowledge to really know how to do that at scale whenever we want in places where we have relatively limited local knowledge. So I think the jury is still out on how much this can be done. There are some success stories for that. I didn't mention we were talking about NATO enlargement earlier, where you see a bunch of countries that essentially left this communist-style military and they integrated with the West, basically completely changed force structure doctrine, just the entire way they think about their security sector. So there is some precedent for this happening. But if we think about those cases, they're very unique. They took decades, the process is still ongoing. As you can see, even in very active NATO members like Poland, there are still things that they're working on, like we all are. So I think building institutions, it's possible, but it takes a long time. And it's just a very specific set of conditions to make that happen. So we need clarity on whether we need to be able to build in order to get what we want to know if it's going to work.

field. I think doing things like this is always really helpful because it's nice to get out there and actually learn from people that have to do this for a job. And it's a very hard problem if a lot of smart people spend a lot of time working on this in their day jobs. And I think they get a lot done and they're very motivated. And it really shows us that the source, I think, of the problems is not necessarily from the people doing the training and advising, but rather from these strategic conditions that make it really challenging. Justin, and then same question to you. Based on today's conversation, what are the major considerations for policymakers, academics, and practitioners interested in SFA? Yeah, again, great conversation. I think the first thing that remains true is anytime you're going to take a project, you know, you're

going to try to build or work with partners. If you're doing it in crisis, that inherently is going to come with limitations. And so, you know, as we think about future security force assistance projects, I think that's got to be the opening part of the conversation. You know, hey, what limitation comes with having to do this, you know, in crisis or in combat, what have you. I think clear objectives, you know, a clear-eyed strategy on, you know, what the end state is. And we talked about distinguishing when we are trying to work with partners that we view as, you know, potential alliance partners or already are in some cases versus those we just want to work within their own context in other places. I think that's really important, right? So we can measure, you know, our output appropriately. Again, from an

organizational level, thinking about we've got a lot of instruments, as we discussed, that kind of focus at the tactical level. And are we equipped and organized in a way that we can set the conditions for those tactical organizational successes by engaging at the right appropriate levels institutionally and at the executive levels, ministry, governmental, otherwise? And last, and this one, you know, I think spans both from a policymaker, but also in the scholar. I don't know that we do a great job measuring what it is we do. And we talk about this here inside of our group a lot. You know, I think to the extent this is human business, you know, this is about relationships. And, you know,

I think there are aspects of what we do that you can measure, but in the end, you know, when we're talking about effectiveness, that's actually a pretty tricky subject. You know, you can measure. But in the end, when we're talking about effectiveness, that's actually a pretty tricky subject. You can measure performance, but measuring the effectiveness of what we do or rather what we have accomplished over time can sometimes be pretty tricky. And I think there's never enough effort spilled on that to get to a better product or a better effort in the future. And so I think that's just an area we've got to continue to work hard at. I'm sorry, this might be a sidebar, but Justin, have you hit upon any ways, I guess, internally of actually trying to measure effectiveness? Yeah, that's a pet project for me. I wrote a really poor paper about that while I was at NPS, not specifically on SFA in general, but just on our business in general. And the short

answer to your question is no. So from my joint staff time, this is something that we had to march up to Congress quarterly and talk about, hey, here's how we're investing around the world right now, and here's why we think it matters. And I don't know that we ever presented a very compelling argument on any of that. And often we were relying on measures of performance, hey, here are the things we did. I don't know that we ever got to a great or compelling way in describing, okay, here's the effect.

We were trying to do it in the way, we were trying to describe what the partners were doing. I think the end goal, right, is to be able to describe what the partners are doing without you. I think if we can get to that place, and I think it's based on time, you know, the sooner the partners are doing it without you in a competent way that respects rule of law, you know, all those things, right? Like that is the sign of Qanon, but sometimes that's hard. And, you know, Ukraine's a great example, right? Ukrainians, for a lot of reasons that I know you'll appreciate personally, they really, even with us, we've been in a nine-year relationship with them in this conflict, are very, very sensitive about OPSEC. And there's a lot they won't share, right? And so then that becomes very tough for us to then

articulate, whether it's to Congress, to our seniors, what have you, what effect this looks like if you believe that at least a big part of that is what they're doing without you in terms of the effectiveness inside the scope of rule law and what have you. So anyway, no, that's a long way to circle back and say, no, we're still chipping away at it. Well, I can't say that I have a concrete answer either. I think it looks a lot like yours that, you know, what can they do when you're not there? But there are many, many factors that contribute to that. So trying to isolate, I guess this is kind of what I was hitting out with security assistance is not the be all end all, like it's just one piece, it contributes x amount of the overall effect that

we see and figuring out what piece that is, like it could even be a large piece, but is it the decisive piece that if we pulled that out, that everything would be great? Not necessarily. And like, in most cases, probably no. But like, it's generally good to have that there because when you're dealing with a partner, you know, Ukraine, Taiwan, going up against a great power competitor, you want them to kind of bring all their knives to the fight. Like you want them to have everything that they can possibly have to go up against that kind of a competitor. Yeah, fundamentally agree. So Alex, Justin, those were some truly insightful considerations regarding an incredibly important but fairly understood aspect of national security. So thank you for your expertise and for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast today.

Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Really appreciate the time. It was really a pleasure. Thanks again for joining us on the Irregular Warfare podcast. It was really a pleasure. listeners. And one last note, what you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those of Princeton, West Point, or any agency of the U.S. government. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. The podcast is a product of the Irregular Warfare Initiative. We are a team of all volunteer practitioners and researchers dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can follow and engage with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn. You can also subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter for access to our content and upcoming community events. The newsletter signup is found at

irregularwarfare.org. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you.