McNair Paper Number 44, Chapter 8, October 1995

Political and economic liberalization, which have yielded democratic elections and free market economies in many parts of the world, also nurture anxiety within impatient electorates and conservative national institutions. Questions of leader integrity and the perceived inability of governments to reduce poverty and correct long-standing social inequities have led to urban and rural violence in a number of nations. The strategic interests of the United States are served by working with elected officials to encourage social stability, ensuring the sustainability of the progress already made, and helping them travel the difficult road still ahead. As this process unfolds, military institutions also have begun to reexamine their roles, missions, organizations, and institutional values. Many are trying to reconcile traditional corporatist thought and the relatively new liberal thinking. Many also are trying to rethink the customary relationship between the military and political sectors of their society. From a U.S. perspective, this is an opportune time to stress the important contributions that professional education in the U.S. and contact with Americans can make, not only for military officers but also for civilian officials.

Learning About Liberty in the United States

International military students have played positive supporting roles in remarkable national political transformations over the past five years. These officers were among the pro-democracy forces in Mali, for example, when the 23-year old military dictatorship was overthrown in 1991. They had a key role in rallying pro-democracy Thai protesters in 1992 and championing the cause of human rights and representative government in Thai politics. Graduates commanded the Army units that successfully put down Venezuela's two attempted coups in 1992 and played important roles in Guatemala when their institution opposed the President's attempted autogolpe (self-coup) in 1993. And in many other less dramatic and visible ways, they have helped sustain liberty's momentum that Washington praises today.

What these officers share in common is an experience in the United States that changed their thinking about democracy. Many of the military officers involved in the events above attended service schools in the United States during the 1980s. Trying to explain their willingness to promote and defend democracy, the INSS team found that U.S. professional military education and technical training, designed for U.S. students, generally offer little formal instruction, other than resource management, on the liberal political tradition in this country, the role of the armed forces within this tradition, and other democracy-related subjects. Even after the 1991 Expanded IMET legislation prompted new offerings of instruction on human rights and governance issues in courses on military justice and in programs such as the School of the Americas and the Defense Resource Management Institute, the core Service schools have changed little in their curricula. For U.S. officers, graduates of service academies and civilian universities, who have been taught to understand this country's unique history and culture of civilian control of the armed forces, nothing in civil-military relations has changed.(Note 50) Not surprisingly, the content of professional military and technical courses for junior officers and, to a lesser extent, at command and staff colleges, is quiet on human rights and democratic governance. The curricula at war colleges are more broadly based, paying attention to defense and service resource management, military operations, and national security policy making, which includes domestic and legislative considerations affecting security decisions. Civil-military relations in the context of intergovernmental teamwork in the execution of policy is a current issue of interest; topics on human rights usually are not. Informal discussions about the military's role in American society occur among U.S. and foreign classmates, often stimulated by an experience in the installation's Informational Program, such as a visit to a high school or college ROTC program, a National Guard armory, or a service recruiting office.

By and large, foreign students in the 1980s and 1990s gained an understanding of liberties enjoyed in this country from experiences outside the professional education or technical courses they were attending. Perhaps an occasional class, maybe discussions with U.S. officers (classmates and sponsors), but certainly contact with the American way of life shape their attitudes. An example from Mali, provided by a Foreign Service Officer who was assigned there between December 1990 and February 1994, illustrates the process and influence of this immersion.(Note 51)

[T]hose officers who had benefitted from IMET training tended to support the transition to democracy and civilian control of the military. In addition, many of them had a heightened sense of the professionalism ... and how it related to human rights issues and support for democracy, even though they had not been in courses specifically designed to address these issues. (This was just before E-IMET was created.) Some of them spoke often about the importance of their IMET experience both for professional development and for what they learned about how a professional military acts in a democracy. Some of them emphasized that this came not only from the course, but also from contact with U.S. military and civilians, and from just living in the U.S. for a year.(Note 52)

The study team discovered that, of all the experiences which foreign military students remember, contact with the American culture stands out. As mentioned earlier, this comment is made time and again in the responses to the INSS survey. The role of DOD's extracurricular Informational Program (IP) is frequently singled out. Curiosity about the United States and how a free market democracy functions today is greater than ever. The IP tries to nurture and focus this interest, as well as the natural tendency of visitors to compare cultures, to ensure that students have insightful encounters with democracy in action and that the significance of each is not lost. The original 1976 legislation creating IMET encourages "understanding between the U.S. and foreign countries." INSS found that this goal is best served by combining an assignment at a U.S. military school with participation in the IP and incidental contact with Americans and their way of life.

Helping to Bring Civilian and Military Leaders Together

The Expanded IMET program is uniquely able to bring civilian and military personnel together for a common educational experience, in many cases, for the first time. At present, this occurs most effectively outside the United States, using a Mobile Education Team (MET) from either the Naval Justice School's International Training Detachment, the Defense Resource Management Institute or the Center for Civil-Military Relations to present an in-depth seminar or course of instruction. Such occasions provide the U.S. ambassador the opportunity to bring together a large number of senior government officials, legislators, representatives from the media and other nonmilitary groups to stimulate dialogue and enhance mutual understanding. "Just being the 'event' that brings all parties together is significant," observed a participant of several MET's on military law. "Moreover, working groups, follow-on classes, combined training, . . . spurred by the E-IMET training, have continued and improved communication."(Note 53) The Chairman of the Defence and Security Committee of the Malawi National Assembly recently was one of 38 participants in a seminar conducted in Zomba by the Centre for Civil-Military Relations. His letter to Defense Secretary Perry underscores the power of a mobile education team to assist high-level democratic authorities in ways that would not be possible in the United States:

The thirty eight participants in the seminar included the full spectrum of Malawi leadership in the Armed Forces, the Legislature, the Media, the Ministry of Defence and other key ministries.

My colleagues and I found the Seminar extremely interesting and useful. We were able to discuss problems that have never been examined in an open manner in Malawi before. We were also able to analyse how other democracies have resolved their problems in civil-military relations, and plan to use this analysis to address our own challenges in the areas of Ministry of Defence Organisation, Defence Policy Formulation, Roles and Missions of the Army and Police as related to internal and external threats, the relationship between the Press and the Military, the role of Legislative oversight and the appropriate role for military personnel in relation to political activity.(Note 54)

Because it is explicitly designed to address human rights and democratic institution issues, E-IMET has a more direct and measurable impact on these questions. "Let's not just measure bodies, but rather changes in statutes, in procedures," argued a military lawyer in one of INSS's workshops. In many African and Central European countries, military justice codes are being re-written. Many of the new codes are modeled on the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice as a result of the Naval Justice School's efforts. A program in Senegal is typical. "After showing a [civilian] military judge for Senegal . . . our system of court procedures emphasizing the accused's rights and the need to make sure the accused understood them, the judge significantly changed his. . .procedures and adopted the U.S. model virtually verbatim."(Note 55) In the Czech Republic and other Central and Eastern European countries, E-IMET programs complement other programs--multimillion dollar programs--sponsored by the Committee for Eastern European Legal Education (CEELE), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the American Bar Association and others. These efforts focus on the judiciary, commercial codes, and legal practices. Few, if any, have contact with the military. Only E-IMET does. The programs work well together, but only E-IMET provides a venue for civilians and military to meet on neutral ground.

Improving National Defense Management

In their ongoing period of economic reform and constrained resources, governments have expressed considerable interest in developing expertise in the field of resource management. IMET and E-IMET programs fund military and civilian/military participation respectively at a wide range of different defense and service schools in this field. It is significant that the first U.S. Army War College graduate from one of the new Eastern European republics recently headed the commission which planned the restructuring of his country's armed forces.(Note 56) The Defense Resource Management Institute, however, has the most experience with these programs. Since 1965, the Institute has conducted professional education courses in analytical decision making, resource management, and civil-military relations in defense planning and budgeting for roughly 12,000 U.S. military and civilian officials and over 8,200 personnel from 125 other countries. Since E-IMET was launched in 1991, DRMI has averaged about 225 international students per year attending its resident courses. The Institute also has conducted 8 to 10 mobile education courses abroad each year which add another 350 to 400 participants.

DRMI has increased its activities, and influence, overseas. It currently teaches an annual 2-week seminar on resource management at the Honduran National Defense College (the Institute helped design the curriculum in 1991). Mobile Education Team's have visited Argentina, Poland, Hungry, Romania, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and several countries in southern Africa over the last 4 years. The Argentine military has integrated its MET instruction into curricula at their National Defense School and Superior Studies Course. An early December 1994 visit by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, resulted in the Institute immediately conducting a special 2-week course for a high-level delegation of eleven deputy cabinet ministers from executive departments in Ukraine. The Czech Republic is planning a similar program. Case studies based on the DRMI curriculum are used at the Venezuelan Naval War College. And the Colombian Minister of Defense has recently asked for assistance with the formulation of his country's next defense budget.(Note 57) Colombian graduates of DRMI resident courses are working in the Ministry of Defense planning office and other resource management positions. Two METs have worked with a cross section of Colombian ministries that are involved in the defense planning process. In addition to 38 Colombians attending the March 1995 mobile course, there were two Bolivians, two Costa Ricans, and one participant from El Salvador.(Note 58)

Buying USA

Exposure to a wide variety of U.S. military systems and related material is a powerful incentive for foreign students to recommend that national leaders "buy USA" after their return home. These officers have not only planned for the use of U.S. weapons and equipment in the classroom and actually practiced with them in the field, but they also have a good understanding of their operational abilities and limitations, logistical requirements, and employment doctrine. Often as the result of continued U.S. professional training and education, the national military leadership in wealthier countries adopts a pro-U.S. defense equipment mind set. The sustained effectiveness of U.S. training programs for Spain's F-18 fighter pilots, for example, contributed immeasurably to the government's decision to purchase 24 additional USN F-18S aircraft. The procurement of the HAWK missile system as the Spanish Air Defense system can be attributed to the number of senior officers involved in the decision process who attended the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.(Note 59) The Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, and Ecuadoran armed forces have reorganized and modernized using U.S. equipment, tactics and operational doctrine. Material recommendations in these institutions frequently are made by panels of officers who share the common experience of attending the same U.S. military staff or war college.(Note 60)