Irregular Warfare Podcast - Treating or Feeding the Disease? Elite Capture of the Security Sector

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

Be sure to visit the Irregular Warfare Initiative website to see all of the new articles, podcast episodes, and other content the IWI team is producing! What does it mean when a state’s security sector undergoes what scholars call “elite capture”—a form of corruption in which military and defense resources are leveraged to benefit a small, powerful segment of society? What problems contribute to elite capture and is it possible to disentangle them? From a US policy perspective, what can be done to limit the risk of elite capture when engaging with countries vulnerable to it? This episode addresses all of these questions as Ambassador Anne Patterson, retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, and Dr. Louis-Alexandre Berg join host Julia McClenon. They bring their combined experience and expertise to a wide-ranging discussion on a deeply challenging policy issue. Intro music: "Unsilenced" by Ketsa Outro music: "Launch" by Ketsa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

And using security forces for political ends is often very much the political culture in a given society. These are processes that are kind of deeply rooted and become rooted in the culture of security institutions. So we were, one, wasting money, and two, often having the effects of the opposite of what we wish to achieve. If you don't understand the disease, then you don't know how to treat it. In fact, you can make the disease worse by applying the wrong, what you think are the remedies to the problem. We've got to stay engaged. But at the same time, we've got to be clear to the American people. We've got to be clear to the political leadership that this is very, very difficult business. Welcome to episode 83 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. I am your host, Julia MacLennan. Today's episode concerns elite capture and corruption of security sectors abroad.

Our guests begin by describing the problem of elite capture of the security sector, and then discuss some of the confounding factors that make this problem set so challenging to address. Drawing on their official experiences, they then discuss peculiar challenges for disentangling trends in elite capture in Afghanistan and Mexico. Our guests conclude with brief thoughts on implications for great power competition. Anne Patterson was the Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern and North African Affairs at the Department of State. She was appointed to the Dow Jones Special Committee in April 2018. She served as ambassador to Egypt, to Pakistan, to Colombia, and to El Salvador. She retired in 2017 with the rank of career ambassador after

more than four decades in the Foreign Service. Carl Eikenberry is a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan and retired as a lieutenant general in the U.S. Army. He is a faculty member of Schwartzman College, Tsinghua University, Beijing. He previously taught at Stanford University. His 35 years of military service included command and senior staff positions in NATO, Afghanistan, and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, and as the U.S. Defense Attaché in the American Embassy in China. Louis Alexander Berg is Associate Professor of Political Science at Georgia State University and a senior expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. His research examines armed conflict, organized crime, and the effects of international peace

building, foreign aid, and security assistance programs. He is the author of Governing Security After War, The Politics of Institutional Change in the Security Sector, published by Oxford University Press. This is 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 is our conversation. Alex, Anne, Carl, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you, Julia. It's a pleasure to be here. It's an important topic to discuss.

Julia, good to be here. Thank you. Thanks very much. I'm really happy to be here. Alex, could you start by explaining what elite capture of the security sector is and why it matters in the context of irregular warfare? Sure. So elite capture refers to when elites, and elites are those individuals who are in positions of authority or considerable influence over state institutions. So when those elites who have influence over parts of the security sector, the armed forces, the police, other security forces, when they use that authority to shape

the rule systems and core processes that govern the security forces for their own benefit rather than for society as a whole, that's what we refer to as elite capture. And this is actually quite common. It occurs around the world. And it's common when you understand that security forces in many societies are really central to the way that elites to politicians stay in power. The security forces are useful in authoritarian societies in terms of oppressing opponents and manipulating elections, but they're also useful in all kinds of other ways to extract resources, to appoint politically important people, to top positions, allow them to recruit their supporters. Sometimes it's just a question of protecting the

regime from a threat from the security forces. And this is important. It matters because it means that in many places, security forces are not actually primarily oriented or primarily aimed at providing security for the public, right? They're aimed at protecting the power or the interests of those in power. So if you assume that what security forces are doing, what the army or the police or internal security forces are there to do is to provide security for the public, then you may be disappointed because in fact, they're there to protect the interests of the regime, right? So if officers are selected not because of merit or because of qualification, but because of their loyalty to certain individuals or affiliation to certain ethnic groups, it shouldn't be surprising that they're not going to necessarily

be the most effective or the most competent. If security forces are seen as threatening, oftentimes they'll be kept weak intentionally. And this matters for U.S. policy as the U.S. engages with countries, engages with partner security forces around the world. In many cases, we're trying to accomplish certain goals, but the people in power have other interests that they're actually focused on that they prioritize, right? And so if we start to understand what the interests are that it's driving this, we can start to understand how these security forces are actually being managed. Alex, that was a great lay down. This question of elite capture of the security sector, it's a do not have strong institutions. And without strong

institutions, then the risk of capture of the security forces by the elite is much greater. And for the United States, then, as we go into a particular country, that without understanding the nature of elite capture of the securities sector, that our resources will be misused, of the securities sector, that our resources will be misused and that will make the problem even worse without a firm understanding of the internal situation. And it's not just the military. In Afghanistan, the report case study was about a leak capture of the police force, which was also, of course, sustained by the United States. And in Ukraine, a leak capture of the judiciary. So it is a phenomenon that is seen across weak institutional structures and has the same debilitating effect, not only on the country's institutions, but on

U.S. interests. Carl, I actually want to return to something that you mentioned. You were talking about the dangers of not fully understanding the internal situation. To what extent do you think understanding the internal situation includes consideration of not just the political players, but the actual culture that's informing how people behave in the society that we're dealing with? Yeah, Julia, this is really the central question. And if you don't understand the disease, then you don't know how to treat it. In fact, you can make the disease worse by applying the wrong, what you think are the remedies to the problem. So having an understanding of what the goals are of elites when they move to capture the security forces, and there's several, and many times it's multiple. One is that there's a strong desire by the elite to coup-proof their government. So they're going to create dysfunctional security forces, competing power centers, or they're just going to try to co-opt them. Many times they're interested in political

mobilization. So taking their favorite groups, they might be ethnic groups, religious groups, and then using security force patronage and support in order to give those supportive groups even more influence. There's efforts that are underway by elites to capture wealth. There's a lot of money in security forces. And when security assistance programs start to roll in through weapons sales, through paying the salaries of security forces, There's a lot of revenue there, and they'll try to capture that. And then there's the desire also to counter their own asymmetric threats, which might be organized crime. It might be terrorist organizations, and there might be insurgent organizations. But then trying to get a better understanding as we intervene or start to participate in these

conflicts to discriminate between what we see as the threat on the ground and what the elites might determine to be the threat on the ground. Julia, this is a huge problem. And frankly, it's all over the world. Carl and others have written extensively about the problem in Afghanistan. It was a huge issue, our lack of understanding in Iraq, where we did not understand how quickly ISIS was going to recover. argue that one of the reasons that elite capture and violence has been such an issue in Mexico as opposed to Colombia is that we had a much weaker understanding of the interplay among the federal authorities, the provincial and local authorities, as well as local power brokers or elites. So our inability to get people on the ground who speak the language well enough to have contact with all kinds of people and then to instrumentalize it to actually carry out policies is very difficult and leads to problems not only of elite capture of our assistance, but other, in some respects, more fundamental problems. but other, in some respects, more fundamental problems. I would also add that the way elite capture works is often very deeply rooted historically and culturally, right? So you mentioned culture and using security forces for political ends is

often very much of the political culture in a given society. Carl talked about interest, the kinds of interests that drive the use of security forces for political ends or for narrow ends. And that's often what's driving it. But because those interests have long existed, or the way that those interests are pursued is long standing in the kind of political culture of a society. These are processes that are kind of deeply rooted and become rooted in the culture of security institutions, right? And that's what makes it often difficult to deal with. But it also, as both Carl and Anne were saying, makes it so important to understand how things work,

right? And to recognize that if things aren't working the way we expect, it's not because there's one or two people who have nefarious intent. Often they're doing their jobs in a culture of an institution that is geared for other interests. So it's important to understand both the political interests, but also how that plays out in the broader culture. I mean, like nepotism is a totally alien concept in the Middle East. And I remember when I first discovered that 35 years ago, when I told somebody he couldn't give a contract to his brother, and he looked at me like I was crazy. And who else would I give the contract to? So Alex is right. These are very, And who else would I agree the contract to? So Alex is right.

These are very, very ingrained habits, cultural trends. It's what they've done for literally millennia. Right. So we're talking about both culture anthropologically, but we're also talking about institutional culture, and we're also talking about institutionalized culture. What are some of the factors that make elite capture so difficult to address successfully? Well, in my experience, and particularly on security assistance, it almost invariably, U.S. security assistance funding is funded basically to keep the regime in power. Most militaries in the world, or certainly a good

number in the parts of the world where I serve, are not really interested in defending the country, or that's not their main goal, to be fair. Their main goal is to keep either themselves or the existing regime in power. And actually, sort of a non-politicized military is fairly unusual in my experience. So it's very hard to break that nexus because both the military and the civilian power structure, if there is one, sees it as a matter of survival. And this is where you have to sort of evaluate U.S. interests versus the interest of the recipients. And the problem fundamentally in my experience with elite capture is it makes for very poor militaries because it stifles innovation. People are promoted without regard to competence, as Carl was saying. Officers refuse to retire because retirement would expose them to

retaliation. So you have very, very old people in charge of some of these militaries. So you have a lot of perverse effects that in some cases, many cases, is enabled by U.S. security assistance. There's also a couple of aspects of the way that U.S. policy and U.S. security assistance is done that also makes it difficult to deal with. And one thing that I would say, I mean, the extent of elite capture and the way it plays out really varies a lot, right? So you have places where an entire institution or all the security forces are really, you know, driven by elite interests, and you have places where you've got one institution among others or, you know, parts of it. So there's really a lot of variation. And part of the problem is it

requires some local knowledge, right? Some efforts to really understand how things work, what the interests are, how that's playing out in different security forces. And that knowledge is there. And there are people within the U.S. government that have that understanding, but that understanding is not always informing policy decisions. So I think one of the challenges is one, understanding how things work, but also bringing that to bear. The other challenge is that there are often not any easy answers when you find these problems, right? If there is a country in which the U.S. has strong strategic interests in partnering with that country or dealing with security issues, and you find that their security forces are

captured to an extent that it's really undermining your interests in the long term, it's not clear what you do about that. You know, do you just stop working with them entirely is often not really an option or not a desirable option. And so what sort of tools the U.S. has at its disposal to either influence what's going on or navigate those challenges to achieve policy goals in that kind of environment is not obvious. I think the challenge that we face and I think our partners face when we're working in these environments where you have elite capture of the security sector, it's what Alex is talking about. It's the information asymmetry and our lack of understanding of the people that we're dealing with and their backgrounds and their own interests, our lack of focus on transparency and process. So elite capture works in different ways. One is that the corrupt leaders of a government, then they will make sure that those who get promoted into positions within the security

sector, the army and the police, that they're going to be allies of them and it's not going to be merit-based. So for the United States, which traditionally will have people serving in a country for maybe at the most one year, sometimes as little as six months, our ability to get an understanding of who these people are. And we tend to fool ourselves and think it's a merit-based process where it's an individual who outlasts the presence of any American serving there for a year or less. And we find out over time that this individual is actually quite corrupt. And the second problem that we have is in the area of procurement and financing. So a lot of big contracts are being written with our security assistance efforts. And on the one hand, our own Defense Department may not be as transparent as it needs to be as we're letting these contracts out. They have their own arguments about why they should not be as transparent in their own processes. And sometimes we will accept those.

And then a third problem is that as this process continues, the elite then entrench and are able to sustain their gains by militarizing domestic security and militarizing domestic politics. And Americans who are serving in that particular country aligned against a particular threat that we're dealing with. We're defining the threat entirely in terms of insurgents fighting a good government. And then we allow ourselves unwittingly to allow that process of over-militarization of domestic politics to occur. I think that's what happened. I think that's actually well described in the Mexico case study, which was the over-militarization of counter-drug policy, which of course is, and what's flowing through Mexico now is fentanyl comes into the U.S. and the enormous number of casualties, record casualties and deaths from fentanyl. I think we didn't, again, truly understand the impact of the militarization of drug policy when it would interact with these provincial and regional elites and existing

security forces. But in too many countries, we accept this as essentially the price of doing business. And it was particularly dramatic, I think, during the past 20 years, during the war on terror, when overcoming terrorism was our highest priority. And we were willing to pay a pretty high price for that in terms of militarization of security. I'd like to go ahead and dive in a little bit more to the meat of the report. But before I do, I'm wondering if one of you could share just a little bit about how this report came about. So I think it generally in terms of context is increasing understanding that security assistance or U.S. engagement with security forces hasn't really produced the kinds of results that

U.S. policy would want and that we'd want to see. And that there have been kind of a number of reports sort of looking at the way kind of the security systems is managed or planned, but that this is a broader issue. And I think the other piece of it is an increasing interest and engagement looking beyond kind of the operational capabilities of security forces to the governance and context in which they're operating. And I think that second one in particular was what drove some conversations between some people at USAID and the U.S. Institute of Peace, where they decided to tackle into this problem, essentially asking, well, why isn't engagement with security forces working? How can we understand these broader drivers? Also looking at it really within the context of violence. And so I think that also sparked the question of, well, what's going on here? How can we understand how security forces are working?

How can we understand how U.S. engagement is either reinforcing or alleviating that kind of driver? And that, I think, led into this topic of, well, let's understand the context and let's understand the lead capture. So, Julia, why I wanted to be involved in this, I've been involved over years in big security assistance programs in several different hemispheres, several different parts of the world. And most of the security, everyone knows the whole system is broken. And it mostly focuses on improving the process, shooting the times to do contracting or to brief the Hill or things like that. And to be clear, I totally support security assistance. It is an enormously valuable tool for American security, but it wasn't promoting American

security. So we were, one, wasting money, and two, often having the effects of the opposite of what we wish to achieve. So that's why I was very interested in getting at the more fundamental question. But to get at some of the more fundamental questions about why American security assistance doesn't produce better military partners for the U.S. I was drawn into this study, of course, by my own experience in Afghanistan, three tours of duty, five years living in the country, such a tremendous commitment of resources for so many years by the United States

and the failure of our effort there. And worried that as we looked at our failures in not only Afghanistan, but in many ways in Iraq, that the conclusion of our political leaders, our government leaders and the American people is that security assistance cannot work. So let's just turn away from these kinds of efforts. What we learned, I think, from Afghanistan and Iraq, that we were overly ambitious and that we got things quite wrong there. But the options that we're going to face in the future is not between trying to replicate the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, or on the other hand, doing nothing, that there's shades of gray out there. And as we return now to this era, we call it the great power competition, where the United States and our partners are

increasingly concerned with China, with Russia. and as that competition now spreads around the globe, then indeed, I think security assistance may be even more important than it's been in the past. So we have to learn the right lessons and figure out how to get our act together. I'd like to dive in to two of the case studies from the report, Afghanistan and Mexico. So for Afghanistan, can you explain why it's important to understand elite capture from the perspective of the U.S.'s time in Afghanistan? And what role did these problems play in how things unfolded there? Of course, it's important to understand what went wrong, to have a degree of accountability for decision-making, and to make sure that the next generation doesn't go down the same path. Important in looking then at the Afghanistan effort to ask questions about how did we get

things so wrong? So you had the Central Intelligence Agency, which was leading the effort to dismember al-Qaeda and find bin Laden. That was their primary effort. That's what brought us to Afghanistan. But as the mission evolved over time, then we had the military in bigger numbers and its primary role as defeating Taliban in the field and building an Afghan army and a police force that could eventually step in to the front line and allow us to leave. And then you had a third effort from the Department of State and USAID, other government agencies that worked together in the United States Embassy. And what were they there for? They weren't there to defeat al-Qaeda. They weren't there to build an Afghan national army to take the field and add stability to the country. They were there for the long term to build institutions,

politically institutions, to build economic institutions. And there was great tension between those missions. And then in that kind of environment, the corrupt elite, whether in Kabul or out in the provinces, were extremely adept at understanding then the different priorities that the U.S. had in its mission and work through the seams. So as the United States ambassador would go in and talk to President Karzai about the need to strengthen the political institutions of the country and would leave that meeting to be followed by the U.S. military commander who would say, really, President Karzai, your priority is to support the Afghan National Army, to be followed by the CIA chief walking into President Karzai separately and saying, no, the real problem that we are facing here, we understand, President Karzai, your point, that the real problem is terrorism and that this problem is coming from Pakistan. And so the elites of Afghanistan would see where those different interests were, and they'd be able to play very effectively our own bureaucracies off against one another. And it's important to

remember that not everything that was done there was done poorly. There were actually some things that were done quite well, and we need to capture those as well. One of the things that this report tried to do was talk about not only kind of how these things work generally, but how they play out in practice really concretely and specifically in specific security forces and in the kinds of core processes and procedures that make security forces work. And so each of the case studies actually focus not on an entire country, but on one specific security force. So in Afghanistan, we focused on a body called the Afghan Local Police, which was a really kind of interesting experiment in which this was around 2008, 2009 or so. Carl was there, so he can jump in if I make any mistakes on this, but there was a decision to partner with local militias, basically local security actors with the counterinsurgency goal, right? So this was at a time where it seemed like the counterinsurgency effort was not going as well as it could. And so they decided to partner and build these security units, working with local militias and kind of

integrating them in a sense into the Afghan security apparatus. But it had this compelling logic in that these would be kind of locally known forces. They would be more legitimate. They would have kind of their ears to the ground and be more effective in counterinsurgency. And so, in a sense, this is kind of an experiment. It's a lead capture. Well, you know, can you work with a local institution that's not, you know, a little bit more tractable and build something effective? And what happened was that in some cases, it actually worked quite well as intended.

But at the same time as they were doing this, there was a lot of pressure to ramp up the program very quickly. And as they did so, were not able to place all of the kinds of checks and knowledge in order to prevent bad things from happening. And so in many cases, not all, but in many cases, some of these local militias really served local political interests much more than counterinsurgency efforts and to the detriment of security and safety of the public. Right. So you had militias kind of involved in local ethnic conflicts between warlords. You had militias perpetrating human rights abuses and you had cases where they were actually partnering with the insurgency, with the Taliban instead of countering them. And again, these were local forces. So there were dozens of them all over

the country. And the experience and the report actually documents this in quite some detail, how the experience varied substantially. But what it showed is really the challenge of operating at that level, even with the large footprint that the U.S. government had in Afghanistan to be able to manage and prevent elite capture, in part just because the forces that are of local interests are overwhelming, in part because the U.S. had competing objectives. And the result was a mix. And so the report really documents that. Julia, I spent all last year teaching a course in Afghanistan, American experience in Afghanistan. And here's my summation of what happened there. No one in Washington ever tried to resolve these conflicting objectives. So there was

massive confusion and conflict for most of the 20 years. The second thing that happened was there weren't enough people on the ground to understand the complexities which both Carl and Alex have described. And not only people on the ground for long enough, but people who spoke the language. So people were always dependent on Afghan interpreters. And then three, there was just an astonishing amount of money that flowed into the country. Astonishing in terms of the economy,

in terms of the government budget. And that was, as we saw when we pulled out and pulled out 75% of the government revenue, the opportunities for corruption and self-dealing were simply enormous. As I look back on it, probably the biggest lesson learned is one of the need for humility. When you think of Afghanistan, at that time, a country of 35 million people, very diverse ethnic groups with their own traditions, geographically dispersed, 30,000 local communities around that country. And to think that with this long history of conflict

that exists in Afghanistan, to think, as Anne had said, that we didn't have language skills, we didn't understand the culture, that we would be able to send special operations forces, again, not speaking the language, working through interpreters, whose tours of duty were six months on the ground, and that they would somehow be able to figure all of this out and understand behind the facade of a Shura meeting, where were the real sources of power. And then the elite very quickly, as they learned about the Afghan local police force initiative, they saw money was to be had. And so everywhere around the country, there were local elites that were working as sure as we thought, representing community interests democratically,

we thought, that would then convince us that this community too needed an Afghan local police force. We had a sense of urgency, so we would move forward and establish a police force with going through the motions of a vetting process, but really not understanding. And vetting processes sometimes being done in one or two weeks. So the fact then that we had this dismal results, and Alex was fair, there were some good results, but in the main, they were dismal results that ended up exacerbating the problem. We shouldn't be surprised by that. The second point would be that the theory of the case was that Afghan local police forces,

when they were up and running and being supervised by special forces, that they would eventually then lead to community security and you'd get this kind of grassroots effect bubbling up. So we were working hard to build security institutions in the capital, but we weren't penetrating down to the local level. And so this was a concept which would get things going to the local level and then somehow we'd meet in the middle. And it proved to be a failed endeavor that this idea about grassroots approach and somehow you're going to build security around the country and change the conditions, that turned out to be a rather flawed concept. There's one thing that sort of comes through the report and is sort of what I call a secondary theme, and that's the U.S. affection for specialized units. And this is something that

also has been around for decades, but got a new lease on life. During the war on terrorists, we went out and trained counterterrorism units, vetted, specialized, the cream of the crop, et cetera, et cetera. What I think comes across from the report, this is sort of worthy of its own analysis, separate analysis, I think, is that some of these units did really well and survived. I think people would say that when we finally had to go back into Iraq, that the one unit that did survive in any sort of functional way was an Iraqi Special Forces unit. In other places, they became the worst of elite capture and became basically units that were called upon to defend the leadership, sort of a praetorian guard. So that's, again,

sort of a mixed picture, but across several regions of the world and many countries, that's a real issue we need to look at because there's great affection for specialized units because mostly special forces, but other units of our military train closely with them, get to know them, develop expertise, et cetera. But that's worth a harder look. Adding to what you're saying, and I'd be interested in your views on this and Alex's as well, that I think one of the many problems that we face with our security assistance program is that externally, as we look at a particular country, we see from a distance a particular threat. And we then develop the programatics, in this case, an Afghan local police program that we're talking about, we develop a program to address that particular threat defined by us. So the threat that we saw in Afghanistan at a distance was initially al-Qaeda and then the return of the Taliban threatening the regime of Afghanistan, which if it collapsed would then, so the theory of the case,

would become then a new haven for terrorism as it existed before 2001 and 9-11. But the fact is that in many of these instances where we intervene, the security environment and the threats that the people face are much more complex and much more diverse than we define them at a distance. So the Afghan local police program, then, that was designed to deal with Taliban. But if you're living in one of these communities, Taliban might not be a threat at all. In fact, it may be a provider of security. Your real threat is from corrupt local elites. It's from a predatory police force. It's from drug traffickers. So I think that as we look at our security assistance programs today globally, we need to be very

sensitive to that. So Anne, turning to you and looking at Mexico, can you share some of the peculiarities in that country and including some of the particular challenges. So Mexico, of course, is a critically important country to the U.S., which gets almost no attention from the broader foreign policy establishment. Immigration, narcotics, enormous trade flows. But what the two case studies show, I think, is that the militarization did not basically control narcotics trafficking. And it very much enhanced the role of sort of local power brokers who could then manipulate prosecutors, police, and other players in the system and often collude with other criminal gangs. That was fundamentally what happened. often collude with other criminal gangs. That was fundamentally what happened. And when you talk to people who were involved in the Mexico experience, the amount of money we put into Mexico was vastly

less than the amounts we put into Colombia. It was much more haphazard, was less sustained, was less focused, and was based on sort of a less complete understanding, I would argue, of the Mexican dynamic that we had in Colombia. And this goes back to one of the points that I think is fundamental to this conversation. We had had, over many years, rocky relations with Mexico. It really wasn't until the last 25 years that they had improved and we had been in cooperation. In Colombia, the U.S. had worked with the Colombian military since the Korean War and literally been co-located in the Colombian Ministry of Defense since 1952 and understood the situation vastly better. Not that certainly until Plan Colombia there were lots of successes, but had a

much better understanding of the Colombian dynamic than the Mexican one. So I think that's key. I think, again, the sort of sustained attention so you can self-correct, we did not have in Mexico. But I think the real point is over-militarization of the drug war and less emphasis on local institutions. Perhaps to speak a little bit to how that played out in the case study, and I think that in summary kind of hits the nail on the head in terms of the overall dynamics. One of the case studies documents how a specific governor of a state, and Anne mentioned earlier, Mexico's high level of decentralization, right? So you have federal forces, you have state forces, you have municipal police forces. And in one particular case, you had a governor who later was actually

indicted in U.S. courts, but there was evidence of colluding with organized criminal groups and actually building kind of a special police unit in order to bring about security. And there was sort of an effective public safety logic in which he developed this public safety force, used some of the resources from the Mexican government. I don't think the U.S. was directly involved in this, but the Mexican government to build up the security force. And it later came out that he was using that security force on behalf of one organized criminal group against others, and then profiting from that, right? So the state government directly colluding with organized criminal groups. And actually, and interestingly enough, reduced homicides for a period,

in part because there was only one criminal group that was dominant at that point, until that situation changed and then homicides spiked once again. And what's interesting about it is often you see these kind of short-term successes where you see, hey, look, it's working. These special police units seem to be working, but in the broader scheme, it's actually a short-term gain, and it may actually be having adverse consequences in this case in terms of actually empowering a criminal organization. One thing that was interesting about the Mexico report, which goes back to the point we were making before, is that Americans tended to distinguish, particularly American law enforcement agencies, between narco-corrupt and regular corrupt, and sort of give the regular corruption a pass. In other words,

extortion, kidnapping, all the other things that affected security of the population, because our goal was counter-narcotics. I think even in Colombia, which had a lot more positive elements, you would see that as well. But it sounded and seemed to me pretty dramatic in the Mexico case. And so elites get this, you know, and they play to our interests. And as long as we're going to ignore kidnapping and extortion, that's cool. You know, the report makes clear the need for the U.S. government and our allies and partners to take a much more holistic approach towards this question. I think, Julie, on a previous podcast session, I heard my friend, Lieutenant General Retired Mark Hertling, talking about Clausewitz and dusting off Clausewitz,

who, as he talks about military effectiveness, reminds the reader that that's one component of military effectiveness is the military itself. But another component is the effectiveness of the government, where the military is grounded within. And the third component is the support of the people. And for us, with the security assistance approach, where we go into a very narrow programmatic approach, as Anne defined, as Alex defined. I think that's where we can often fall short. Carl, you mentioned briefly, just briefly, about great power competition. I wonder if any of the three of you have any further thoughts on how great power competition is affected by or is affecting elite capture of security sectors? And are there areas

of this fight, whether geographically or functionally, that we're missing out on right now? Well, let me say that I think the recent events in Ukraine have shown that a lot of these large security assistance programs don't exactly buy support for U.S. interests, quite apart from what they do to local military. So I think because of great power competition, this entire process needs a hard look because the militaries aren't necessarily, one, cooperating with us, and secondly, aren't necessarily able to cooperate with us because they're not really very effective militaries. And we're going to have to spend a whole lot of money, I suspect, in security assistance programs for our Asian allies.

And we need to be very mindful of how this is going to work as it goes forward. We just have to do a better job of it because there's a huge amount of money that's going into both security assistance programs. And then I might add regular sales of American training and equipment, which also are subjects of the same elite capture, but are justified on coming back to U.S. companies. Julie, I think for the United States to compete going forward, where we are concerned with challenges being posed by China and by Russia, that first, we're going to have to discriminate in the world about what countries matter the most. We don't have the resources to try to spread security assistance and build democratic

institutions and responsible, accountable militaries everywhere. So what matters the most in the competition? We've got to think about countries that matter in terms of critical resources that are produced in that country, lithium, cobalt, rare minerals. We have to think about countries that sit astride important lines of communications, landlines of communication, sea lines of communication. We have to be thinking in terms of countries that should we have conflict or in our efforts to deter conflict, access to those particular countries is going to be absolutely critical. Or we have to think about countries that if they collapse, then will other powers move in to fill vacuums, or can the countries implode and then become sources, once again, of international terrorism?

But all of that said, that you can't forget about the importance of values where we have our security assistance programs that are in operation. And if you need reminders of that, again, go back to the Cold War examples. And you had the fall of the Shah of Iran. You had the collapse of the Marcos government. So how do we balance between values and the hard national security interests? I think that's our challenge in this era of great power competition. interests. I think that's our challenge in this era of great power competition. Another important aspect of this question, thinking about strategic competition, is how the U.S. maintains relationships with core allies and also with other countries around the world. When I think about relationships, not just individual relationships, I think there's a lot

of talk in the security assistance kind of enterprise itself and building these kinds of individual relationships, but how those relationships extend to the country and society with the U.S. What happens with elite capture is that there's often a lot of tension in the relationship because of elites are using security forces in such a way that is actually harmful to parts of their societies or harmful to U.S. interests. And that introduces or amplifies tension. There's also just, it's not clear. I mean, there's not a lot of evidence in terms of how these kinds of engagements and security assistance in particular is affecting long-term relationships, right? Do we know that by providing security assistance to certain countries in Africa, for example, is that improving our relationships with those countries relative to

strategic competitors like Russia and China? Do we know what effect that's having? So I think it's important to think about that and important to look at the relationship in a more holistic way. What piece of advice would you give to irregular warfare practitioners and thinkers who are currently facing these issues of elite capture of the security sector abroad? So the first thing they need to know is what's actually going on. And that's really one of the first problems with elite capture. No one has a good picture of what's really in these security assistance programs, either in the U.S., where there's all kinds of legislation on transparency, which is totally ignored, or in the recipient countryS., where there's all kinds of legislation on transparency, which is totally

ignored, or in the recipient country, where the average citizen or an NGO worker or a businessman can't find out what's going on because there's so many spigots that are purposely obfuscated. So the first thing a regular warfare participant needs to know is actually what the story is and what we're providing. And if we're providing the wrong thing, can it be moved? Can it be transferred to something that is more helpful to him or her in her efforts overseas in the irregular warfare arena? Four pieces here. The first is for practitioners working in the security assistance domain to start with what is the national interest to the United States? Why are we in this particular country? What outcomes do we hope to achieve?

And getting clarity there. We cannot do everything, so we have to choose. And what do we want to do? What choices do we want to make? The second is on the question of humility. do? What choices do we want to make? The second is on the question of humility. And we have to be clear on how difficult this work is, how much patience will be required, how many surprises we're going to get, and we're going to have to be agile as well. The former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown's famous quote as he was talking about the extended English Civil War,

the quote that when it comes to establishing the rule of law, the first 400 years are the most difficult. And it's not to say that we're engaged in places in the world where it's going to take us 400 years to help establish a rule of law. But on the other hand, we shouldn't be delusional and believe that with a five-year intervention and just more money being spent, that we're going to be able to achieve rapid results. The third is to take stock of where America's comparative advantages are in the security assistance world. And we have two big advantages. First of all, our equipment is the best in the world. And if anybody needed a reminder, look at the outcomes with the Russian application of their military equipment in Ukraine. And that lesson is clear to the entire world.

The second is just in terms of the image of the United States Armed Forces with the professionalism that we offer. Anne had just said earlier, we've got a lot of good people around the world in security forces that are trying to do the right thing. They want a good security force that can defend their people. And then as we engage with these forces, yes, there might be corrupt elites at the top, but you've got a lot of people who come to the table and they want to be like us in terms of professionalism. So that's a source of leverage as well. And the final piece of advice I would give for the practitioners is be realistic in the case that you're making to Congress for funds. Be realistic and truthful when you go back to the executive branch and you talk about how your

program is proceeding. We need to have a much more open debate in this country because if we walk away from security assistance, we will then harm U.S. long-term security interest around the world. We've got to stay engaged, but at the same time, we've got to be clear to the American people, we've got to be clear to the political leadership that this is very, very difficult business. Don't overpromise with your programs. What I would add is to be really sensitive to the variation and the incredible variation and differences we have across countries. And I think that's one of the things the report really tries to do is to show how these issues of elite capture play out differently, how they vary, right?

So the fact that there are places in which elite capture is driving the whole system, there are places in which it's minimal. And there are also ways in which U.S. engagement has varied levels of effectiveness and impact as well. Right. And I think the key point is to really be sensitive to the way in which these issues play out differently across contexts and the way in which our assistance plays out differently across contexts. And part of that is really engaging. There are people who really genuinely want to do the right thing, want to work with us, want to improve the effectiveness of their force of security forces and promote public safety in all societies. There are also other actors, media, civil society, organizations that are monitoring the security forces or that could do so if given the chance. And so part of, I think, what we need to think about is thinking about the diversity and variation, but also thinking about the security sector as an actor within a broader context more generally is to be sensitive to the other actors and how our engagement might be making their life either easier or more difficult. who are focusing on security should be going around working with the media or civil society,

but they should at the very least be engaging with other parts of the U.S. government and colleagues who are doing that. In many cases, what's driving a leak capture has nothing to do with the security forces, but has to do with economic issues, right, and local development issues. And there are other parts of the U.S. government that do that. So I think what this report tries to do is to encourage people to take a step back, to think about their policy objectives in the broader context of U.S. interests, as Carl has eloquently said, of the context of a specific country, and to understand the variety of actors and their interests that are involved, and be clear on how to engage with those. Ultimately, I think there's also some policy changes, and there's a bunch of recommendations

in the report itself that we should take a look at. But being sensitive to that diversity and to how security forces fit into the broader context, I think, is a key takeaway. You know, Alex, if I could pile on to what you said about the importance of differentiating between the different cases, that's critical that Washington, D.C. will, with great intentions, create programs to improve security assistance globally, but they won't differentiate between countries. So it's one size fits all. But as you had well articulated, when you get inside of these countries, you find that every case is unique and they are quite different. They're different in terms of historical factors, culture, what's the real cause of instability and insecurity, how are the elites functioning within that particular country. And so what we need is delegations of authorities then to deal with these problems.

And we need the ability for our country teams, our embassies that are in these unique environments to be given the right intelligence, to be given the right prioritization, but importantly, the right authorities locally then to take these programs that are coming from Washington, D.C. and to adapt them to fit the circumstances of the particular country that they're working within, which was another recommendation in the report. Thank you so much. This was a fantastic conversation. And in particular, thank you for the concise advice that you each just gave. It was great having you each on today on the Irregular Warfare podcast. And great to be with you again. Alex, good to see you. I hope next time it's face to face. And Julia, thanks for hosting this session. You did

a wonderful job. Yeah, thanks very much, Julia. And great to see you, Alex and Carl, again, and to have worked with you on this report. Thank you, Julia, for the really excellent conversation. And it's always a pleasure and privilege to be able to listen to Carl and Anne with their vast experience. Thank you both. Thanks, Julia, for listening. Thanks again for listening to Episode 83 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We release episodes every two weeks. Our next episode is on the rise of techno-authoritarianism, followed by a 20-year retrospective on Irregular Warfare. Be sure to subscribe to the Irregular Warfare podcast so

you don't miss an episode. You can also connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Feel free to provide feedback on this episode or ideas for future topics. One last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not reflect the views of West Point, the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. government. This wraps up episode 83 of the Irregular Warfare podcast. We'll see you next time.