Description
Security Force Assistance (SFA) involves the provision of training and equipment by the armed forces of one state to those of another, and so represents the latest rebranding of an age-old international practice. At heart, SFA providers seek to improve the ability of recipient forces to deal with particular threats of mutual concern. As such, SFA is an inherently political undertaking; it seeks to actively shift the local balance of coercive power in furtherance of the donor’s political preferences. Even so, the political applications of military assistance have traditionally been subsumed in Western military doctrine by the technical challenges of building partner capacity. However, this emphasis on ‘stabilisation’ and ‘upstream capacity building’ is increasingly giving way to a new focus on ‘competing for influence’ against revanchist powers like China and Russia. This paper examines the impact of international competition on the politics and practice of SFA, and in particular the use of military assistance as a tool to ‘block’ the diplomatic advances of global rivals. In so doing, it explores the diversity of recipient reactions to international competition between rival providers of SFA to better understand the impact of SFA-as-influence on patterns of local military effectiveness and domestic political behaviour.
