Charles Hooper, director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, speaks on the benefits of American alliances as part of the Aspen Security Forum in Aspen, Colorado, July 20, 2019.
Transcript
Ready? Hello, everybody. My name is Julian Barnes. I’m national security reporter with The New York Times. Thanks for joining us here. When confronted with almost any national security problem in the world, whether it’s an Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, the solution proposed by the United States and its allies has often been to build up local forces. Supporting partner forces have been the cornerstone of American national security strategy for decades. Training, equipping, defense cooperation is what is the foundation of many of America’s partnerships and alliances around the world. Today, we’re gonna talk about those partnerships. We’re gonna talk about if the oft repeated saying by, within, through, actually works. We’re gonna talk about where defense cooperation has worked and where it’s failed. This is not just relevant, I think we’ll see today to counterinsurgency and counterterrorism, but also perhaps to the great power competition we’ve talked about a lot here this week. We have two great panelists. Lieutenant General Charles Hooper is the Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. I encourage you to read his full bio, where you’ll learn he’s a mandarin speaker, a Kennedy School graduate and a most senior Army Foreign Area Officer. But to this discussion today, I wanna highlight just a couple things. He’s been the defense attache in Beijing, he was the Director of Strategy and Plans for Africa Command and Chief of the Military Cooperation Office in Egypt. Dr. Mara Karlin, is a professor and director of Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she earned her PhD. She served no fewer than five Secretaries of Defense, including and served in a variety of roles, including Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development. This means she knows what the Pentagon can do well, and what it can’t do so well. (audience laughing) Most important for this discussion here today, she is author of Building Militaries in Fragile States, a book that stands as one of the most insightful critiques of the American strategy of building partner forces. And that’s where we wanna start today. Professor, what’s been flawed about the American approach here to building local forces, why has this not worked when we’ve in some cases, put millions, in some case billions into these projects?
You know, it’s not the panacea we want it to be, and that’s really crucial to acknowledge. And it’s not the panacea, because we often take a technical approach to how we work with partner militaries. We ignore that building a military is a political exercise. It is inherently political and we need to treat it as such. And getting this right, matters. All of you remember five years ago when ISIS was running across Iraq, as $20 billion in US assistance melted, and large squats of the Iraqi military ran away. I’ll give you another example, though, that I think hits pretty deeply. The US military spent five years trying to build South Vietnam’s military, spent about a half a billion dollars, hundreds of people working on it, it didn’t work. And so what did we buy for that failure? We bought 58,000 Americans dead, right? We bought some serious baggage coming out of that conflict. So we have to recognize that our approach has been flawed, and it needs to be changed.
General, I wanna, you to react to that. (audience and panelists laughing) Is she right has her approach been flawed? What are you doing, what are your colleagues doing to improve it?
Okay, well, first of all, just to introduce myself, again, I am Lieutenant General Charles Hooper. I’m the Director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the agency that does more and is known by fewer people in Washington than any other agency in the Beltway.
That is true.
Thank you, thank you. I work directly for the Under Secretary of Defense for policy, Mr. John Rood, who many of you just heard just before lunch. And I will tell you, and let me start off with the optimistic piece. Now, I do this for a living, I was trained by the army to be a Security Cooperations Officer. And in my 20 years doing this, I have never seen a better time and better alignment within the inter-agency to do this. So an answer to the question, we have learned from the lessons of history. Right now we have a national defense and national security strategy that prioritize strengthening alliances and attracting new partners. The administration has put forward a conventional arms transfer policy that is allowing us to streamline and reform our processes, that has facilitated better alignment and better cooperation between the Department of Defense, the State Department, our industry partners, the Department of Commerce, the White House, the National Security Council, and has provided clear guidance that is, it is a priority to provide our partners not only with the best military equipment in the world, and make no mistake, the United States produces the best military equipment in the world, but has also prioritized the building of institutions in these countries, allowing them to better manage their resources, training and educating their officers and non-commissioned officers, allowing them to have better logistics, maintenance, supply institutions that will allow them to use utilize the equipment that we provide them. And from the Congress, we have a mandate in the Fiscal Year 17, National Defense Authorization Act, to reform the Security Cooperation Enterprise, realign it to make it more agile, and to ensure that we increase the probability of success in our endeavors. So we have learned from history, and we have all the tools we need to move forward successfully.
Professor, you look at this very closely, you’re familiar with the reforms that Congress tried to push through, you’re familiar with what the general is trying to do. What do you think, is it enough? What more do we need to do to prevent another Iraq in 2014?
There are some really good steps being taken, and to make it clear, I’m a big believer in reform, not rejecting this process whatsoever. It is important that we work with partner militaries that we work by, within and through others. It is in our interest to do so, this is not merely altruistic. I think increasingly, the Pentagon and thanks, in particular to pressure from Capitol Hill, has focused on measures of effectiveness, has increasingly gotten comfortable to step back and say, “So, how is this going? “How are we doing?” Are we willing to ask those hard questions? Why are we building these militaries? What is it we want them to be able to do? Sometimes we want them to be able to fight. Sometimes we actually just want them to not be difficult in other circumstances, sometimes we want them to vote with us in the United Nations. There’s a panoply of reasons why you might do this, but it’s important that inside the family, you have those honest conversations about why that is the case.
Because the kind of security cooperation you’re gonna do with the country is gonna depend on what that outcome is?
Absolutely, how we work with those partners. And it really seems to me, we have to be willing to recognize that these are not Excel spreadsheet efforts, right? That this is inherently political, which means we have to be willing to use our leverage and articulate to our partners the kinds of changes we would like to see. Whether that being clear about what their military’s mission should be, how its organized, and their leadership. All of which are key components of any successful force. We have to put our most capable people in, people like General Hooper, for example. People who no kidding, know how to work with partners, understand the Security Cooperation Enterprise. There’s a lot of evidence, unfortunately, that, that hasn’t always been the case. If you read the latest report out of the Special Investigator for Afghanistan Reconstruction, he says that has overwhelmingly not been the case in Afghanistan. The Government Accountability Office said, “We didn’t assess most of these efforts “and how well they’ve gone to train and equip partners “over the last few decades.” That’s really problematic. And then, you know, just among ourselves, we have to be willing to say, what’s our role, and under what circumstances do we need to change that role? Sometimes we work by, within, through others, sometimes we gotta do it ourselves.
You mentioned that SIGAR report on Afghanistan, $84 billion have gone into training and equipping the Afghan security forces. That report saw a little coordination between the US and NATO. It saw that the US did not involve Afghans in decision making. It pointed out that casualty rates among Afghan soldiers are incredibly high, perhaps unsustainable, and the SIGAR report suggested that this system was not sustainable after the United States and NATO left. We have a piece discussions’ that are talking about removal of US advisors from Afghanistan. General, what is the future? How can this cooperation, well, what went wrong in Afghanistan in your mind in the past? And can this, the Afghan security forces survive without substantial numbers of NATO trainers working with them on a daily basis?
Well, first of all, let me begin by saying I’m not gonna pass judgment on our efforts in Afghanistan, everybody knows how complex this effort has been. First of all, it ain’t, as we used to say back in Jersey, it ain’t over, okay? So I’m not gonna pass judgment on our efforts in Afghanistan, what I can tell you about is how we switched some of our emphasis in working with the Afghan National Forces in terms of helping to prepare them to meet the challenges of the future. And let me start off by saying that, yes, do we still continue the material support to the Afghan National Forces? Absolutely, do we still have advisors in the field assisting them, are their challenges? Of course, there are. But I’ll tell you where my focus is, as the Executive Agent in Washington for Security Cooperation, I focus on a program that many of you have probably not ever heard of before, it’s called a Ministry of Defense Advisory Program, the MoDA Program. So when I got to DSCA, and I started asking around specifically about our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, they started to brief me on the MoDA Program, okay? Now, the Ministry of Defense Advisory Program places civilian volunteers from across the inter-agency. That is, we have volunteers from commerce, from state, from any of our cabinet departments. And it places them in the Afghan Ministry of Defense, to assist the Afghan Ministry of Defense in strengthening those capabilities, those institutional capabilities within the Afghan Ministry of Defense that will help them hopefully, to manage the resources that we provide them, and they provide themselves, better. And I made it a personal crusade to get directly involved in this. So, I review every volunteer that goes to the Ministry, to the Afghan MoDA Program. I speak to every class that goes. I go to their, they have their final exercise, we have a wonderful training facility out in Muscatatuck, Indiana, out on a National Guard facility out there. We have a whole village built, we bring in Afghan role players from all over the world, and we put them through this. And so why do I paid this so much attention, because to your point, it is the strengthening of the institutions within the Afghan government that will help us to move forward and learn from the mistakes that we’ve made. Teaching them resource development, teaching them proper financial management, teaching them that corruption is bad for business, and that the extent to which you reduce corruption increases your efficiency and effectiveness and creates value. So that’s where we’ve placed a lot of our emphasis. Now, every time I talk to these classes of volunteers say, you know, we’ve been here for eight, you know, almost 18 years, what can I do, that’s going to make a difference? And I tell I tell them the same thing. Go in and find the one thing you think you can be impactful on. It may just be teaching them effective financial management, or the value in that. You concentrate on that one thing, and if you can accomplish that, before you go and leave that for your successor, you have accomplished something. This is an enormously complex process. But you know what, in the old days, we used to say? The only thing you know, for certain, the only thing that’s certain in life is if you don’t try, nothing will change. If you do try, you have anywhere between zero and 100% of being successful. So, that’s the emphasis that we’re placing now in security cooperation in Afghanistan.
Professor. (audience applauds) What kind of individual can do that task the general is talking about? It’s enormously difficult to go into Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior in a country that has different traditions, different cultures than the United States, and essentially impose best practices. What is the person? What is the personality? What are the attributes that can make that work?
Absolutely, and institution building is exactly the right approach, we should not be focused on how much training we’re giving them, or how much equipment we’re giving them. That’s important to be sure. But at the end of the day, if you wanna transform these militaries, which is often the case, right? We want them to go deal with problems so that the US military doesn’t have to, that is our goal. And so if you wanna do that, the sorts of people collaborating with them matter a lot. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of evidence, that SIGAR report is just one great example, that says we haven’t always sent the right folks. We haven’t always sent folks who know how to work with partners, who understand the security cooperation enterprise, who actually no kidding understand defense planning and force development, right? How do you build a military? How do you think about the future wars this military may be worried about? And based on that where should they bet and hedge where they’re putting their money? That is all crucial to do, and it’s why kind of the institution piece is important. If we don’t send those people, we’re not going to have the effect we want. And unfortunately, there are so many examples where we haven’t. I mentioned that example of the just before the Vietnam war breaks out, right? Where the US tries for five years to build the South Vietnamese military. Well, the guy running that program had been demoted, right? He didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t care about what his instructions were from Washington, there’s example after example, he didn’t get along with the US ambassador. When you have that kind of clash, you are not gonna have success.
So, this is a strategy the US doesn’t just pursue with more developing countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, we have had a security cooperation with allies like and partners like Saudi Arabia, right? So we have put, Saudi Arabia has purchased incredible amount of the United States arms, there’s military officers who’ve spent a good chunk of their career training the Saudi Arabian military. Recent events do not suggest that the Saudi Arabian military is an effective force to bring stability to the region. Yemen does not look so good right now. They are not necessarily a provider of stability sometimes. What do you think, went right or wrong professor in that scenario?
So some folks will say to you, it’s the Saudis’ money, right? They’re using their own money, and so there’s nothing we can do. And I will just tell you, I think that is flat out wrong. At the end of the day, they are trying to get US equipment, and they’re trying to get US training. And it’s all well and good to make money, but we would wanna do it from a strategic perspective. I should also note for a long time, folks didn’t actually expect the Saudi military to do anything, right? And so there’s been this kind of open question, up until recently, what happens if they try to fight? Unfortunately, if you look at Yemen, you’ve seen, and it’s pretty darn ugly what has happened. So they have not had the capabilities that one would have expected. They have rather disparate efforts throughout their military, in terms of how they’ve been equipped, in terms of their training. One would like to think that they’re learning from it. One would also like to think that they’re watching the conversation in Washington, particularly on Capitol Hill, highlighting just the horrific civilian casualties and their missteps left and right. I don’t know that one should be sanguine that that’s happening, though.
General to put you on the spot, do you wanna react to that?
Okay, first of all, well, obviously, there’s a lot to unpack there. I wanna take issue with one of the words you used, you used the word impose, okay. So I’m a big fan of john Kenneth Galbraith, and one of my favorite books he wrote was a book called the Anatomy of Power. And Galbraith says, essentially, and it was an epiphany for me, Galbraith says, there’s three ways to get people to do what you want them to do, okay? You got the money, you can pay them to do it. If you have the power, you can force them to do it, or you can convince them it’s in their interest, not yours, their interest to do what you want them to do, okay? There isn’t a professional soldier on this planet that wants to be told he doesn’t know what he’s doing, even if he doesn’t, okay? Now, imposition is a very interesting word, because going back to Mara’s, and we talked about this her historical examples, okay? We’ve studied in my agency, we studied the Vietnam build up from the beginning to the end, in fact we had Max Boot come in, the author, to talk about his latest book about Edwin Lansdale, he was surprised we actually have an Edwin Lansdale conference room, okay. And he talked about some of the strong points and the mistakes that Edwin Lansdale made both in the Philippines and in Vietnam, and we talked through that. Part of it was the imposition piece, when you impose yourself, you are subject to the law of unintended consequences, okay. Now, what we’ve done in some cases, and in the case of some of our allies and partners is we’ve taken an approach we call strategy to capabilities, where we go into our partners, and we say, okay, what is it, don’t tell me what you want, what do you want to accomplish, okay? And we start with that, and then from that, we derive the capabilities that are necessary, and from that we derive the systems, the weapons systems and systems that they might be able to use. And we take a values-based approach to this, and Mr. Rood talked a little bit about the values-based approach to this. Our partners understand that if you receive the best equipment in the world, here are the parameters within which you would use it. And oh, by the way, they also understand that the underlying premise of this equipment is that it is maintained and used by functioning institutions. We have the blessing to wish that away, okay? When I put my hand back, somebody either puts a paycheck, a magazine or a ration into it, I don’t even think about it. most of our partners don’t have that. So that’s the approach we’re taking to be more efficient and effective, and we’re taking that approach with all of our allies, those in the Middle East and those around the world. And we’re finding, they’re very receptive to that. So instead of going in and saying, you need to do this, I go in and say, so you did that how’s that working for you? Know?
If I could just add. You don’t need to be blustery and you don’t need to be boarish.
No.
Right. You just need to be willing to have a conversation. And what has been surprising to me in a positive way, and I suspect this has been General Hooper’s experience as well. They often wanna know what you’re thinking—
Absolutely.
From the US perspective, they wanna know what your priorities are. They wanna know when do you expect them to be fighting next year, your military and when are you not expecting them to do so. So you don’t need to do it in a sort of a pseudo-colonial way, but you do need to be willing to articulate it.
Absolutely, absolutely. And you need to demonstrate how changing their practices will create value for them. And value may be measured in a number of ways, value may be measured in an increased and a more favorable positive international profile, value may be measured by them in, if you do this, this way, you will be a more efficient and effective military force, and oh, by the way, you won’t have half the problems receiving the best technology and what weapons in the world that you might be having now. So there’s several ways to create this value, but in having that frank conversation with them, you can get to the heart of the matter and move forward.
Professor, we’ve focused a little bit on the case studies where this hasn’t worked. Where do you think, in history, or recent times is an example of building up a partner military has led to stability, has advanced, has fulfilled US strategic goals?
So, there are positive examples, I don’t want you all to just hear doom and gloom. One of my favorite examples is actually looking at Greece just after World War Two. And this is not the Greece of your summer vacations. This is a Greece that looks a lot more like Syria today to be frank, its infrastructure is destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people have died from starvation. It is facing a pretty robust insurgency supported by Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia. And the US goes in to work with this military, and there’s a story there about how the US operates, both internally and vis-a-vis the partner. So working with the partner, the US is willing to articulate its views, and it helps the Greek military figure out what its mission is, it helps it reorg, it helps push out a lot of incompetent leaders, indeed, much of the senior military leadership. And then there’s also the inside story, which is that the US military puts in superstars to work on it. You have unity of vision, both inside the US government in Athens, and also vis-a-vis Washington. And perhaps above all, there is a willingness continually in that administration to step back and assess, how is this going and under what circumstances do we need to become combatants? So under what circumstances do we need to stop this by, within, through idea and just do it ourselves?
General at times, US policy has been to express displeasure with a ally or a partner or a frenemy by taking back security cooperation, reducing it, cutting it off, often Pakistan after their nuclear tests is held up. You were in Egypt, when the US government’s rolled back, cut out, stopped, halted some of its assistance. What was that experience like? Can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of using security cooperation as a political tool in that way?
I can actually. And as as Julian was saying, I was the Defense Attaché to Egypt immediately following the ouster of President Morsi and we had expressed our displeasure by suspending their military assistance. And so my instructions were to go and preserve the mil to mil relationship as we move forward. I wanna tell you a quick anecdote that’s relevant to this. So I was a young assistant army attaché in Beijing, and in those days, we lived in these Soviet-style apartment blocks, where my neighbor was the Assistant Egyptian Air Attaché, okay. And he had just converted from MiGs to the American F-16 Fighter, and I don’t think there was anybody in the planet prouder to be an F-16 pilot than that guy was. So he had studied in the states, and on the basis, and I call this the basis of commonality. On the basis of his transition to US equipment, he was no longer one of them, he was one of us. His kids were about same age as my kids, they loved microwave popcorn, which was okay for Mr. Hooper, ’cause Mr. Hooper didn’t have to get up to get the kids microwave popcorn. They could do that themselves. But we developed a relationship, we exchanged meals and things. After our tours were done, he went his way and I went mine. 20 years later, I get to Egypt as a defense attaché, the relationship is at a low, my instructions are preserve the military relationship. And I’m going to my first meeting with the head of, the Major General head of Egyptian Air Force Procurement, and the the suspension that hit the Air Force particularly hard, because the majority of their fourth-generation equipment is US. And you know where this story is going. So I walk in, and I look at him and he looks at me, and he smiles and says, “Maybe this meeting won’t suck after all.” (laughter ensues) Okay. The point of the, (laughs) thank you. The point of this is those relationships are important. So an answer to the question. It was tough going, but I’ll tell you, this is where strengthening our reliance and inter-partnership comes in. For all of their faults and flaws the entire Egyptian military leadership is a product of the US Professional Military Education system. Everybody from the President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Fort Benning, Army War College, the Defense Minister, Army War College, the Chief of Defense, the US Army Armor School, Fort Knox, Kentucky, the commander of the Navy, Newport, Rhode Island, every senior Air Force pilot in the Egyptian military flew US equipment. And so the bottom, the answer to your question is, even at that low point, whenever I call they always answered my phone calls, okay. And I never heard them once say, a bad thing about their experiences in the United States as military officers with their families. You know, Maya Angelou, the poet says, “People will forget what you said, “they’ll forget what you did, “but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” So, that military relationship with Egypt, and the fact that those officers were felt positively and proudly about, their affinity and their affiliation with US equipment, their time in the United States, that bridged a very difficult time in that relationship. And I’ll tell you something else. On average, in a given year, we transit about 98 times through the Suez Canal, okay. And we had a goal to get a ship through the Suez Canal from no notice notification until passage 24 hours and we never missed that, okay. And any given year 2,100 US aircraft overfly Egypt. And even at the low point in that relationship, we had no problems transiting Egypt during that time. So that investment in a long term partnership institutionally served us well even during that downturn in the relationship.
So if I might add, Churchill has this wonderful quote, “However beautiful the strategy, “you should occasionally assess the results.” And I think this Egypt example is perfect. So what you’re hearing is that we got this passage through the Suez, we get this overflight, and key point, the reason the US has this relationship with Egypt is because of the Camp David Accords, right? You have a cold peace between Egypt and Israel. This is why it may not be terribly important that the Egyptian military isn’t that competent, right? It may not matter as much that they aren’t great at fighting threats that they have to deal with, or perhaps threats that we are somewhat concerned about, because we get these other things about it. What is important though, is to have that honest conversation and say, you know what, we’re getting all these other things, and so it’s all right, we want to maintain this, the bang is worth the buck.
Let me, real quick.
[Julian] Please.
A couple of examples of, because we talked about historical vignettes and successes. Let me talk about a couple of very contemporary successes around the world. Let’s start with Ecuador. Previous Ecuador regime administration had kicked out US Security Cooperations personnel in the embassy in Quito, closed the office. The minute that the administration changed, they wanted us back. Within a week, we had opened that office again, and then within 60 days, I had met in Washington with the new Minister of Defense of Ecuador, to start the process of moving forward. So, now the Ecuadorians had a choice of our strategic competitors, they immediately came back to us. Second example. Many of you know that the Bangladesh military had some issues with the Rohingya crisis on their border, some of their, their neighbors were on the opposite side of the issue. Their Chinese equipment and their Russian equipment did not perform very well. And I got a message from the ambassador saying they wanna talk to us about shifting from their traditional suppliers, our strategic competitors to the United States. Within a week, I was on a plane to Dhaka to talk to them. Within 30 days, we had an inter-agency team seated in Dhaka, talking to them about transitioning. So, people are looking towards us in the strategic competition.
And it’s important that they look towards us and not toward Moscow and not toward Beijing.
Exactly.
If I might just add one more point, because there are more contemporary examples, right? And I wanna add to these important points General Hooper’s making. So again, this is not just you know, doom and gloom, it’s important to recognize the US military is complicated, and so are other militaries, right? Or violent non-state actors. So if you look at our partners in Syria, they’ve done a mighty good job dealing with ISIS. Now, they’ve caused a whole lot of thorns in our relationship with Turkey, that’s complicated. If you look at our partners in the Lebanese military, they’ve been able to counter Al-Qaeda affiliates, ISIS surrogates, you name it. They’re not necessarily able to deal with the threats from Hezbollah, but we were able to get cooperation on key challenges of mutual concern. There is goodness there, however imperfect.
We’re gonna take your questions in just a second, so be thinking of that. I wanna ask one more before we do that, which is, you just talked about, you know, Russian and Chinese cooperation versus US cooperation. This great power competition that’s emerging may look a lot like the Cold War in one respect, where we are vying for influence with different countries around the world, it may less be a direct conflict as something that involves proxy forces. How does, can the US compete with China’s Belt and Road in Africa? Can the US compete with Russian arms sales that are often cheaper than the United States? How does it, how does security cooperation play into the great power competition?
Okay, first of all, not only can we compete, we’re going to win, okay? And I’ll tell you why we’re going to win and Mr. Rood talked a little bit about it. The values-based approach that we take that distinguishes us and sets us apart and above from our competitors, who are mostly interested on in a transactional relationship and the point of sale. That’s how we’re going to win. We talk about, in the agency, we talk about the transparency of the US process, everything you wanna know about buying arms from the United States is online. We talk about the responsiveness of the US approach. We’re getting things out faster by working. We talk about the integrity of the US approach. I’ve met with the Minister of Defense of India about 10 times in the last two years, and she’s very detailed woman and she has a list of things, and she often asks, “Well, General Hooper, why is this, “this price, and why is this, this price?” And I tell her every time Madam Minister, the books are always open, when you do business with the United States which is important, because there’ve been some arm scandals involving our competitors involved in that. And the last one is the commitment to a long-term relationship, okay?
[Julian] Questions, anyone? Here in the front if. Wait for the microphone so the world can hear you.
Listening to all this. How do you consider the Turkish buying equipment from Russia?
Well, and, sir, I appreciate your question. Our leadership in the last few days, as you know, and for those of you who are not aware, there’s been an issue with the Turks procuring the S-400 system, and the United States has taken steps that we had articulated quite often and loudly in terms of responding to that acquisition by the Turks. The leadership has been very articulate and very complete in describing the steps we’re taking. We have taken definitive steps to register our displeasure with the acquisition of this system and we will continue to register those. But I can’t possibly add to what my leadership’s already talked, mentioned on this issue.
Right there in the back. There’s a microphone right there, yeah.
Thank you very much. Kevin Kline, Homeland Security Advisor for the state of Colorado. General Hooper, could you talk a little bit about the special relationship that our National Guards have and take the Jordanians with the Colorado Guard?
Yes, for those of you that don’t know, many of our states and the National Guard Bureau, many of our states have one-on-one bilateral relationships with our foreign partners overseas. So Colorado has a partnership with Jordan, New York, California has a partnership with Nigeria and others, and these are very helpful because as Mara knows very well, as there’s sometimes cyclical approach to security cooperation, that happens from time to time, the consistency of the relationship between our state National Guard Bureaus, and our partners is absolutely essential towards building that long-term partnership, that long-term relationship. And it is also an excellent example of civilian subordination or military subordination to civilian authority, and how the citizen soldier in a country operates and how he conducts themselves. So, the State Partnership Program is an essential tool, it’s even more essential in places like Africa, where we have limited resources and limited troop presence. And so they do a fantastic job, and as a matter of fact, I’m working with the Bureau now. One of the advantages I have is General Lengyel, who’s the head of the National Guard Bureau, he had my job in Egypt. So, he understands the importance of that, and we’re looking to put actually National Guard personnel in the DSCA, to further solidify the relationship between the security cooperation effort, and the State Partnership Program.
Also there in the back there.
Hi, Jonathan Landay, I’m a reporter with Reuters. I’d like to plumb this question of values-based of the values-based basis that you make these judgments on, particularly in the case of Saudi Arabia with the enormous suffering and civilian casualties it has caused with US weaponry, and the humanitarian suffering that it has caused with the blockade with the humanitarian blockade. With the Egyptian military, which killed hundreds of protesters in the streets, staged a coup, and overthrew a democratically elected president, and has been laying waste to villages in the Sinai and killing civilians there in a war that we have, in a war against supposedly Al-Qaeda that we have absolutely no visibility into, and that they have denied the United States the ability to have visibility on. As well as the fact that you have General Sisi who doesn’t appear at any rate, at this point, to be ready to hold democratic elections. So could you square the values-based judgments you make on arms sales with those examples, please.
[Julian] And I want you both to react to that.
Okay, you wanna go first. (audience laughing) It doesn’t matter, I can go first. Listen, there are always going to be inherent tensions in our provision of security cooperation to sovereign nations. Is it why are there inherent tensions? Because we are providing potentially lethal capabilities to sovereign nations, in order to further our own, and our collective security objective goals, but nevertheless, we’re doing that. And I will tell you, for those of you that don’t know, every time we sign an agreement with a country to provide them with these weapons and these systems, they have to submit, to end-use monitoring and monitoring checks by the United States, and they make a commitment to do so. Now, we do this all over the world in over 180 countries, we can’t be everywhere at once. Are there going to be incidents? There absolutely are, but I’d like to address a couple of things to address that. Number one, we are the only great power who cares about the values that are attached to the use of our equipment. I don’t see any of our competitors, you know, losing any sleep, over holding their recipients accountable, much less themselves. And we do hold ourselves accountable for that, so that’s number one. Number two, we have made, we have taken increasing steps to further refine the restrictions on the use of our equipment, number one. And for example, by instituting not only periodic end-use monitoring checks, but now we’ve instituted random end-use monitoring checks. We’ve expanded the curriculum at the Defense Institute for International Legal Studies, which comes under DSCA and has responsibility for teaching the law of armed conflict, the law of land warfare, and avoiding civilian casualties, we have increased the curriculum and the capacity of that institution, and we’re sending mobile training teams to all of our allies and partners to help them to understand as I said before, not only that this is, that they need to use our equipment consistent with the values, but the value that’s created by doing so. Number three, in the area of avoiding civilian casualties, we’re taking increasing steps, both in our organization and in the department, and in the inter-agency, to ensure that we minimize the probability of civilian casualties, for example, in our agency, we just brought on a senior civilian casualty avoidance advisor, an extraordinarily qualified person who has experience in non-governmental organizations, as well as in government and in the private sector. And her job is to help advise on how we can further expand our efforts to ensure that weapons are used consistent with our values, and to ensure that we provide our allies and partners with the instruction, or the information necessary to reduce the probability of civilian casualties. So we are taking steps to do that.
So, there’s always a balance between US national security interests, and what our partner is doing. I think Saudi Arabia is a perfect example of this need for constant reassessment. So when the Saudis say they’re going to go into Yemen, the Obama Administration says, “Hey, you’re gonna fight for the first time, “let’s see how we can help you out.” Now, we have years and years of evidence that actually they’re not getting better at it, and that US assistance isn’t doing a whole lot. So hence, the need to reassess and absolutely rethink it. I will say, though, along this idea of civilian casualties, the US military has gotten a lot quieter about its role in civilian casualties as well, in the last few years. There’s been a lot less transparency, unfortunately, on what role the US military has had in exerting civilian casualties in various conflicts around the globe.
Should we be willing to cut off completely a country that behaves in a way that we don’t like, I mean, ending, kicking officers out of US military schools, stopping all cooperation, is that a viable strategy in a situation where our country is engaged a war that’s a humanitarian disaster or human rights violations?
Look, it depends, right? You ideally wanna have a whole of government relationship with a country, it is dangerous if the most capable folks in a country happen to be the ones with guns, right? You want not just your Pentagon, but also your State Department and other parts of your inter-agency, working with them, to the extent you see consistent and egregious violations, a lack of willingness to listen to what the United States is saying and to make appropriate changes. You do wanna rethink relationships. However, you don’t wanna threaten that and then not be willing to follow through.
Other questions from the audience, there in the back. We’ll race two microphones over to you. And we have a winner.
Thank you very much. You mentioned Egypt, I wanted to hear a little bit more about the rest of Africa, especially as you mentioned with this kind of pullback of US forces throughout the continent. And because that’s happening at the same time as Russia and China are increasing ties with the continent and China establishing their first overseas military base there.
Okay, well, first of all, I wanna clarify, I didn’t say there was a pullback, but certainly there is less force presence in the African continent, than perhaps other theaters that we have. We have, Africa is a good example. And I was for those of you that don’t know, I was the Director of Security Cooperation Programs for Africa. And in Africa, we’ve taken enormous efforts to improve our institutional capacity building in many of those African nations, because frankly, that’s what will be most assistance to them, in addition to providing them with our defense articles and services appropriate to their situation. Quick example in Africa, I was just in Kenya about two months ago. Now, Kenya flies, the F5E Tiger Fighter, it’s about a 40-year-old fighter, those fighters are still flying and operational, still participating in combat operations, American fighters, Northrop product, why? Because we worked with the Kenyans, to develop a culture of maintenance excellence. And those fighters take off and land every day, passing Chinese helicopters that are five years old, that don’t run, okay. So that’s the kind of impact we’ve had. The impact we’ve had in Liberia, where we, of course, Liberia, coming out of horrific civil wars now has a stable government, now has an armed force that is more respectful of the people. I was just with their chief of defense in Botswana, after the Paris Air Show. So Liberia we’ve had success, Africa, I mean, in Kenya we’ve had success. Morocco was one of our most stable partners in North Africa. So we’ve had a lot of success in Africa.
You know, while Africa is a kind of low cost, small footprint economy of forces, the euphemism kind of area of responsibility for the US military. One of the reasons you have so many good examples, as General Hooper is noting, is because you do have this whole of government approach at the combatant command, where it is so tightly knit with the development folks with the state folks, in a way, frankly, that I don’t know that you see otherwise. I just wanna emphasize though, as much as we’re talking about our partners and our allies and their flaws and our flaws, we have to remember, the US military does not win wars on its own. It never has and it never will. We don’t become a country without the French help. We need others, we have to figure out how to work with them most effectively and most efficiently but we gotta have them on our team.
We’re out of time and that’s a great place to end. Please join me in thanking our high energy panel. (audience applauding) Thanks, thanks.