Assessing, Monitoring, and Evaluating Army Security Cooperation

The U.S. Army conducts security cooperation activities with partner nations to achieve several objectives, including building relationships that promote U.S. security interests and developing partners' capabilities for self-defense and multinational operations. Evaluating the effectiveness of these activities, however, has been difficult. To examine this issue, this report addresses two questions: when can Army security cooperation have the greatest impact, and how should the Army assess, monitor, and evaluate security cooperation? The authors conducted a literature review of both security cooperation and international development assistance studies; they identified factors corresponding to when assistance was provided and where it was effective. They followed this up with a statistical analysis in which they reviewed more than 9,000 security cooperation activities conducted between 2009 and 2014 for how well they aligned with lessons learned from the literature review. They found that Army security cooperation generally favors countries in need of greater engagement, countries with which the United States would like to improve relations, and countries for which engagement will be the most productive. And while Army security cooperation activities have aligned fairly well with what previous analyses have found contribute to effectiveness in both security cooperation and international development assistance, the lack of systematic assessment, monitoring, and evaluation across activities makes it difficult to know whether the activities effectively met their objectives. Thus, the authors present a framework and portfolio tool to help the Army implement an assessment, monitoring, and evaluation process that is in line with current Army doctrine and emerging guidance from the Department of Defense.