U.S. Foreign Military Training: Global Reach, Global Power, and Oversight Issues

Over the past decade one of the principal means by which the U.S. has interacted with almost all governments in the world is by training their military forces. In recent years U.S. forces have been training approximately 100,000 foreign soldiers annually. This training takes place in at least 150 institutions within the U.S. and in 180 countries around the world.1

The means and programs through which this training is provided have mushroomed. Since 1994, funding for the best-known of these programs, the International Military Education and Training program (IMET), has increased fourfold. During this period each of the military training programs has been justified, at least partially, as strengthening human rights and democratization. In truth, most of the programs have had no discernible focus on human rights and have been carried out in a highly, if not completely, unaccountable manner. The State Department’s 2002 Human Rights Report cited the security forces in 51 of the countries receiving IMET training (38% of the total) for their poor human rights records (see Map 1, page 24, and Appendix 2, pages 41-45).

Several different congressional committees bear oversight responsibility for military training. None has command of the big picture—the scope, magnitude, and potential impact of this domain of U.S. foreign policy. U.S. military training programs expanded during the 1990s with insufficient congressional oversight and scant public debate.

Training programs in the past decade were justified mainly on counternarcotics or “peacekeeping” grounds, but the September 2001 terrorist attacks have created a new rationale for expanding them. In December 2001, Congress established a new regional counterterrorism fellowship program to fund training of foreign officers at U.S. military institutions. This program is aimed primarily at Indonesian officers—currently banned by a separate act of Congress from receiving other forms of military training due to the Indonesian Army’s egregious human rights record.

Since September 11, the Bush administration has offered police or military training to a growing list of countries said to be at the front lines in the fight against global terrorism—including Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colombia. Many of these new allies have extensive records of ongoing human rights violations, including torture and assassination (see Appendix 2, pages 41-45). The administration’s March 2002 “emergency supplemental appropriations” request includes well over a billion dollars in new military aid and training. Among the items requested is $100,000,000 that the Defense Department would distribute for weapons and training to countries it would secretly choose; it would do so without congressional oversight; and it would assert the right to discard any human rights or other conditions that Congress has developed over the past decades to minimize unintended negative consequences of U.S. military aid.

Training conducted by covert intelligence units has been a perennial problem for oversight, and new problems have been created by the trend toward outsourcing training to private companies. Now the Bush administration is seeking to restrict the flow of information to Congress and the public even more. Most notably, the executive branch is trying to scale back the Foreign Military Training Report, which in recent years has provided the most comprehensive public accounting available, and is seeking authority to provide assistance with no transparency or accountability, as in the 2002 emergency supplemental request.

Greater scrutiny needs to be devoted in particular to the widespread training deployments of U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF). These troops, which operate in small commando units and utilize unconventional warfare tactics, have gained acclaim for their role in the war in Afghanistan and enjoy greater public prominence with recent revelations that they are training Filipino, Yemeni, and Georgian troops. In reality, these forces have been training foreign military and paramilitary forces in these and other countries around the world throughout the past decade, but their routine training deployments have been shrouded in secrecy.

Questions persist about the skills that SOF units are conveying and the impact of this assistance. During the cold war and throughout the 1990s, these troops were revealed to be training foreign units with bloody records, including the Atlacatl Battalion in El Salvador in 1989 (this battalion killed six Jesuit priests whom they viewed as too sympathetic to guerrillas, their housekeeper, and her young daughter during that same year) and Kopassus units in Indonesia through mid-1998 (these units supported and armed militias in East Timor that brutally attacked and killed citizens and UN officials during the vote for independence in 1999).

The long-term legacies of foreign military training must not be excluded from current decisionmaking about the costs and benefits of this exercise of foreign policy. Throughout the cold war, the U.S. government facilitated and condoned many human rights abuses by providing training and assistance justified in the name of fighting “global communism.” Some of the unintended consequences of doing so are only now coming to light. Most notably, by arming and training local anticommunist forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S. government helped establish the global network of militant anti-Western Muslim fundamentalists that it is now combating. If in this current effort U.S. forces intervene and provide training in support of regimes repressing legitimate political activism and/or using torture or coercion to maintain power, they are likely to foster, rather than diminish, political violence (terrorism) around the globe.

Given the pace at which military-to-military relations are now being established and ratcheted up in the name of fighting terrorism, serious scrutiny is needed more than ever to ensure that America’s fight against terrorism is pursued by means and in partnerships consistent with its democratic ideals and with national and international legal obligations.

This report outlines the range of known training programs, the budgets for those programs, some of the human rights issues raised, and areas needing congressional and public oversight.

Among the key recommendations of this report are:

• Increase transparency regarding SOF foreign training missions in order to help ensure public accountability, given the major SOF role in foreign military training abroad, their unconventional warfare tactics, and their recent training of abusive troops in Colombia, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
• Ban unaccountable covert intelligence-run military and paramilitary training programs, given the record of terror such operations have inflicted on civilians.
• Declassify all curricula and doctrine being taught to foreign military trainees and ensure that all training includes a strong emphasis on human rights and international humanitarian law obligations that pertain both in internal and in international armed conflicts.
• Require increased disclosure about the activities of private military companies that the U.S. State Department has authorized or hired to train foreign militaries.
• Cut off all forms of operational military assistance and training to any government when a pattern of abuse by its military is identified.
• Establish greater dialogue and cooperation between the various congressional committees with oversight responsibilities for U.S. military training programs both to ensure that the committees do not work at cross-purposes and to increase oversight.