Speaker
Description
Security assistance, or the provision of military training and advice to the armed forces of one country by those of another, has become a ubiquitous tool of foreign policy – if one with a rather chequered history. In recent years, the US military has developed an array of functionally specialised military organisations tasked with the provision of security assistance, ostensibly to improve the effectiveness of such activities. Yet, despite the widespread use of security assistance across the NATO alliance, these new force structures and capabilities have found limited favour with European armed forces, calling into question the purported utility of functional specialisation for security assistance. This paper examines the causes and consequences of this uneven diffusion among three European land forces: the British Army, the French Army, and the Belgian Army. The British military initially adopted US practice with enthusiasm, creating a new Army Special Operations Brigade modelled on the US Green Berets and its own Security Force Assistance Brigade (SFAB) mimicking the US Army’s. But while the UK’s special operations force continues to grow, the British SFAB has been quietly abandoned. Belgium likewise created a new Special Operations Regiment with US help, and has subsequently made extensive use of these units to train partner armies in West Africa, but without any concomitant attempt to generate a conventional SFAB equivalent. Meanwhile, the French military has shown little interest in these American innovations - despite the centrality of security assistance to French stabilisation interventions in Africa, and recent efforts to restructure in the light of strategic failure in the Sahel. The paper proposes a new framework to explain the uneven diffusion of these security assistance practices, highlighting the implications of partial adoption for the future conduct of security assistance in European armies.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | No, I am submitting a Closed Panel abstract |
|---|---|
| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | No |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | International Security / Strategic Studies |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | Assistant Professor |
| In which country is your home institution? | UK / Italy |
| What is your gender? | Male |