McNair Paper Number 44, Chapter 1, October 1995

Our national security strategy is based on enlarging the community of market democracies while deterring and containing a range of threats to our nation, our allies, and our interests.(Note 1)

The strategy enunciated in President Clinton's A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement stresses three primary objectives: enhancing security, promoting prosperity at home, and promoting democracy worldwide. The United States employs a range of policy instruments in their pursuit. Among them is International Military Education and Training (IMET), one of the foreign assistance programs overseen by the Department of State but implemented and managed by the Department of Defense. The IMET program traditionally has been a relatively small, low-cost and low-risk appropriation with sound legislative support. As U.S. foreign aid continues to collapse under strong congressional pressure to economize, this "bonsai" appropriation in the vast forest of security assistance programs has gained in standing, potency and importance to national security far surpassing that envisioned by its political framers in 1976.

The grant IMET program has received little scrutiny since the end of the Cold War and passage of the 1991 legislative amendment expanding its mandate. Congressional interest in foreign education and training has never been significant, but in today's international security setting, concerned as it is about fragile democracies, ineffective governance, and a range of nontraditional, transnational concerns, the glimmer of hope offered by IMET should receive greater attention. More needs to be known about how the Defense Department educated foreign military students in the past, IMET's effectiveness in supporting U.S. policy interests, and its prospects for the future.

The Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) of the National Defense University recently organized a special study team of military and civilian specialists with extensive backgrounds in international military education and training to address these issues. The INSS team--cognizant of the changing international security environment, in particular, the altered purposes, missions, and requirements that political and economic changes worldwide have been imposing on the IMET program--believes the following factors to have a significant influence:

Restored political democracy in many regions of the world and growing internal dialogue with military institutions on relevant roles, missions and structures are the scenarios of the future.Renewed emphasis on professional military training in a new security context--worldwide--is reinforcing efforts to promote democratic political systems.The United States is generally viewed by governments as a model to be emulated in establishing a political-military relationship in which civilian authority is effectively developed..Challenges and upheavals in the form of internal wars, religious extremism, and ethnic separatism are generating requirements for international intervention in the form of multinational forces. The INSS study group assumed that U.S. collaboration with other participants in ad hoc military coalitions formed for peace and humanitarian assistance is facilitated when uniformed professionals shared familiar operational doctrines, command and control procedures, and logistic arrangements. In the existing post-Cold War environment, the IMET program can and does provide a foundation for mutual understanding and enhanced interoperability in a wide range of activities, including supply of medicines and foodstuffs to refugee communities, rescue of embassy and United Nations personnel, and enforcement actions exemplified by Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.

The study team's framework for analysis was the extent to which IMET serves U.S. interests. In assessing IMET, the group focused on five basic questions:

Has the program facilitated access to senior military and political leaders and promoted communication between the United States and recipient countries?Does IMET provide an effective introduction to and understanding of U.S. political values, particularly as they relate to democratic society and respect for human rights?Do military education and training experiences funded by IMET contribute, as Congress desires, to improving political-military relations in recipient countries and fostering the efficient management of their defense establishments?Does this military program serve as an important asset for interoperability in coalition peace and humanitarian assistance operations?Is familiarity with U.S. military equipment and the doctrine for its employment a useful byproduct of the IMET program? Using its own questionnaire to guide discussion, the INSS team interviewed U.S. Government officials with program-related responsibilities, reviewed past studies and relevant literature, conducted two workshops bringing together experts from agencies of the Departments of Defense and State and several nongovernmental organizations, and queried all unified commands and most of their subordinate security assistance offices, as well as service agencies that implement IMET programs and many of the schools and institutes participating in them. The team found in more than 60 responses from around the world, in the assessments of every person with whom the team had contact, and in every response to the questionnaire, over 100 people, unanimous endorsement of IMET and strong support for continuing the programs.

The team found a sound vision guiding IMET that reflected a blend of two traditional preferences in U.S. foreign policy, a mixture of pragmatism and liberal idealism. The IMET program is based on the belief that many officer-graduates will rise to positions of prominence within their armed forces and, in all probability, also within their governments and business communities. The United States desires access to these future leaders and wishes them to have a sound understanding of the United States and its history, culture, and traditions. In this regard, the IMET experience also encourages others to learn more about a form of democratic governance and civil society that the United States believes is best for the individual and the community. Such immersion includes learning more about the role of a military institution in a democracy.

The issue of political-military relations lies just below the surface of the U.S. approach to educating international officers. In the Cold War years of the IMET program, careful efforts were made to present the American democratic system in a nonpropagandistic, nondoctrinaire framework. The rationale was that foreign students should voluntarily experience the environment of an open society to best ensure the U.S. message about democracy was palatable and credible. This open and unforced approach disappeared in the 1990s. Today advocacy of the U.S. model for political-military relations in a democracy is emphatic and uncompromising.

In the pages that follow, the INSS team's analysis of IMET's effectiveness is organized in five parts:

The legislative roots of the program and its relationship to foreign military sales

The structure of IMET in FY 1995, emphasizing the importance of IMET's original synergy of English language training, a professional course of instruction conducted in the United States, and DOD's Informational Program

An assessment of the effectiveness of international military education and training made possible by IMET and other funding options

Contributions toward (1) achieving regional stability over the long term; (2) improving multilateral cooperative military relations with the United States; (3) supporting U.S. diplomatic interests overseas and economic interests at home

Making a good program better.