| In the post World War Two era, the United States has regularly supported advisory mission to organize, train, equip, rebuild and advise foreign security forces. Today the conventional military of the United States are continually called upon to train a wide variety of foreign security forces ranging from conventional military units to police forces. Examinations of the U.S. Security Force Assistance (SFA) campaigns since World War II illuminates the broader roles and missions that the Department of Defense, the Department of State and other U.S. government entities have placed in the support of host nation foreign security forces through training and equipping. Due to the sensitive politico-military nature of these campaigns, decision-making in and oversight of these campaigns usually resides with the President and senior policy makers of departments as well as the statutory members to the National Security Council.;This dissertation examines the policy and strategy of U.S. security force assistance campaigns within a host nation. The central question o this research is what factors best explain the success and failure of U.S. SFA campaigns in support of a host nation's security forces? This study provides generalizations about how the United States provides support to the organization, training, equipping, rebuilding and advising of a foreign security force. More specifically, it examines the U.S. historical experience to find evidence of a SFA campaign's strategic effectiveness and what variables pertinent to decision making at the national level explain that effectiveness. This dissertation closes with recommendations on the policy, strategy and implementation of security force assistance campaigns.;This study draws from an interdisciplinary body of literature to build a theoretical model known as smart partnership to describe past experience and prescribe future strategy development and implementation of support to security force assistance missions. This model is tested against three cases: U.S. SFA efforts in El Salvador from 1979--1989, U.S. SFA efforts in Kosovo from 1999--2009, and U.S. SFA efforts in Iraq from 2003--2011. |
