Tuesday, August 26, 2008

The military's growing foreign aid role: a bibliography

Over the past few years, Congress has acceded to several Defense Department requests to use its own budget to provide military assistance, something that it was not legally able to do on its own after 1961, when the Foreign Assistance Act became law.

The result has been a profusion of Pentagon-budget programs that provide military aid very similar to what is already provided through the foreign aid budget. The difference is that these new Defense Department programs have less (or sometimes no) involvement from the State Department; little or no oversight from the congressional foreign relations and foreign-aid committees; fewer legal restrictions on their use, including human rights restrictions; and greater obstacles to obtaining information about their use, due to lighter public reporting requirements.

Examples of such Defense Department programs on the "Just the Facts" website include "Section 1004" Counter-Drug Assistance (begun in 1991, the second-largest source of military and police aid to the region this year), the Regional Defense Counter-Terrorism Fellowship Program (begun in 2003, the fourth-largest trainer of personnel from the region), and the "Section 1206" Train and Equip Authority (begun in 2006, the fourth-largest source of aid this year). (See a full list.)

The Defense Department has made clear its desire to increase these programs' scope and to make them permanent. The result in the past two years has been an increasing debate about the Pentagon's greater role in foreign assistance, and about the military's growing foreign policy role in general.

Here is a bibliography of links to some of the key documents in what is still a very new debate.

Congress:

  • July 31, 2008: Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on "Defining the Military's Role Towards Foreign Policy"

    • Rough hearing transcript (voice-recognition, from CSPAN)
    • Audio [MP3] and Video [streaming]
    • [PDF] Statement of Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Delaware)
    • [PDF] Statement of Committee Ranking Minority Member Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Indiana)
    • [PDF] Testimony of Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte
    • [PDF] Testimony of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman
    • [PDF] Testimony of George Rupp, CEO and President,
      International Rescue Committee
    • [PDF] Testimony of Reuben E. Brigety II,
      Director of the Sustainable Security
      Program, Center for American Progress
    • [PDF] Testimony of Mary Locke,
      Former Senior Professional Staff,
      Committee on Foreign Relations
    • [PDF] Testimony of Robert M. Perito,
      Senior Program Officer,
      Center for Post-Conflict Peace
      and Stability Operations,
      United States Institute of Peace
  • April 15, 2008: House Armed Services Committee hearing on "Building Partnership Capacity and Development of the Interagency Process"

    • Audio [MP3] Part 1, Part 2
    • Statement of Committee Chairman Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Missouri)
    • [PDF] Testimony of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
    • [PDF] Testimony of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates

Defense Department:

State Department:

Other U.S. Government:

Non-Governmental Organizations and Think-Tanks:

Press:

Friday, August 1, 2008

Graphics of security assistance trends

The graphics below depict overall U.S. military and police aid to Latin America and the Caribbean since 1997, including estimates for 2008 and the Bush administration's request for 2009. Each of the region's top five aid recipients during this period gets its own color: Colombia (blue), Mexico (red), Peru (yellow), Bolivia (green) and Ecuador (purple).

These charts were created entirely with information presented on this site's "Aid By Country" page. All figures are in nominal dollars. Congress is likely to change the 2009 numbers substantially.

The charts tell us several things about overall U.S. security assistance trends.

  • Without adjusting for inflation, military and police aid to Latin America has roughly tripled since 1997.
  • This growth has not been steady. It spiked in 2000 with passage of the "Plan Colombia" aid package, then leveled off during most of the current decade. The "Mérida Initiative" aid package is expected to cause sharp growth again in 2008 and 2009, more than offsetting modest reductions in military and police aid to Colombia. Military and police aid levels to the region are now firmly above one billion dollars per year.
  • The first installment of Mérida came in late June, with approval of the 2008 Supplemental Appropriations Act. For the first time in nearly a decade, Colombia's share of total security assistance to the region slipped below 50 percent. Colombia remains in the number-one position ahead of Mexico, but not by much.
  • Aid to Mexico was a significant portion of the total in 1997-1998, when the Clinton administration briefly expanded counter-drug cooperation with the Zedillo government, including the transfer of dozens of used helicopters and the training of thousands of Mexican Special Forces. Aid to Mexico shrank significantly during Vicente Fox's term in office; in the first years of Plan Colombia, Mexico's military-aid ranking slipped from second to fifth in the region. With the new Mérida aid approved, the 2008 pie chart bears some resemblance to the 1997 chart - but recall that the 2008 pie is now a much larger pastry.

Again, to view the numbers underlying these graphics, visit our "Aid By Country" page.

1997
2000
2003
2006
2008, est.
Syndicate content