The Cult of the Persuasive

The Cult of the
Persuasive

Rachel Tecott Metz

Why U.S. Security Assistance Fails

the
Second Division of the Iraqi Army melted away and a few hundred Islamic
State ªghters in pickup trucks took Mosul.1 The fall of Mosul was less a testa-
ment to the strength of the Islamic State than to the failure of the United States’
multibillion-dollar effort to build an army in Iraq.2

2014,

June

Security assistance is a pillar of U.S. foreign policy and a ubiquitous feature
of international relations. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States tried to
stand up local security forces so that U.S. forces could stand down.3 Beyond
Iraq and Afghanistan, the White House and the Department of Defense pro-
mote security assistance as an economical tool to build the capacity of partners
to address local threats, to inºuence partners to align with the United States
against U.S. adversaries and competitors, to deter adversaries from coercive
action against partners, and, if deterrence fails, to weaken adversaries while
managing the risk of direct confrontation.4 From 1999 to 2016, the United

Rachel Tecott Metz is Assistant Professor at the U.S. Naval War College.

For helpful comments and suggestions at various stages in this project’s development, the author
thanks Nicholas Anderson, Ryan Baker, Stephen Biddle, Jessica Blankshain, Jasen Castillo, Jona-
than Caverley, Ben Connable, Ryan Grauer, Andrew Halterman, Emily Holland, Kendrick Kuo,
Aidan Milliff, Roger Petersen, Sara Plana, Barry Posen, Michael Poznansky, Erik Sand, John
Schuessler, Joshua Shifrinson, Caitlin Talmadge, the anonymous reviewers, and seminar partici-
pants at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the George Washington University, Texas A&M
University, Dartmouth University, and the U.S. Naval War College. The research for this article
was supported by RAND Corporation and by a fellowship from the Smith Richardson Foun-
dation. The ideas in this article were ªrst presented in “The Cult of the Persuasive: The U.S. Mili-
tary’s Aversion to Coercion in Security Assistance,” PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 2021. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily repre-
sent those of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components.

1. Michael Knights, The Long Haul: Rebooting U.S. Security Cooperation in Iraq, Policy Focus
137 (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2015), https://www
.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/long-haul-rebooting-us-security-cooperation-iraq.
2. Amy Belasco, The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations since 9/11,
CRS Report RL33110 (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service [CRS], 2014), https://
sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf.
3. “Full Text: George Bush’s Iraq Speech,” Guardian, June 28, 2005, https://www.theguardian
.com/world/2005/jun/29/iraq.usa.
4. The United States intends security assistance to advance a wide range of objectives. This study
focuses exclusively on the goal of building more effective militaries in partner states. Patricia L.
Sullivan, “Does Security Assistance Work? Why It May Not Be the Answer for Fragile States,”
Modern War Institute Blog, November 15, 2021, https://mwi.usma.edu/does-security-assistance-

International Security, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Winter 2022/23), 95–135, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00453
No rights reserved. This work was authored as part of the Contributor’s official duties as an Employee of the
United States Government and is therefore a work of the United States Government. In accordance with 17
U.S.C. 105, no copyright protection is available for such works under U.S. Law.

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International Security 47:3 96

States trained over two million service members from almost every country in
the world.5 The U.S. Army stood up the ªrst Security Force Assistance Brigade
(SFAB) in February 2018, institutionalizing security assistance as an enduring
competency of the U.S. Army.6

Although security assistance is a routine tool of U.S. foreign policy, the re-
sults are mixed at best, and the collapse of the Iraqi Army is more norm than
exception. In August 2021, the Afghan National Security Forces—organized,
funded, trained, equipped, and advised by the United States for two decades—
disintegrated before the Taliban.7 Dozens of smaller-scale U.S. military-
building projects around the world have likewise produced “Fabergé egg
arm[ies]: expensive to build but easy to crack.”8

Security assistance is notoriously difªcult to execute. Once a certain resource
threshold is met, how well a military can ªght hinges largely on decisions that
political and military leaders make regarding personnel, training, command
structures, information management, and resource allocation. To create mili-
tary power, leaders must implement meritocratic personnel policies, follow a
chain of command, root out corruption, and take other steps to facilitate unit
cohesion, tactical proªciency, and complex battleªeld operations.9 Leaders do
not always prioritize building militaries that can ªght, however. Political lead-

work-why-it-may-not-be-the-answer-for-fragile-states/; John Amble, “MWI Podcast: Security
Force Assistance in an Era of Great-Power Competition,” Modern War Institute Podcast, July 8,
2020, https://mwi.usma.edu/mwi-podcast-security-force-assistance-era-great-power-competi-
tion/; Scott Jackson, Franky Matisek, and Renanah Miles Joyce, “The Future of U.S. Security Force
Assistance and the Lessons Learned from 20 Years of Training Foreign Militaries,” Irregular War-
fare Initiative and West Point International Affairs Forum Event Panel, November 9, 2021,YouTube
video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v(cid:2)UVK9aos_-jc.
5. Theodore McLauchlin, Lee J. M. Seymour, and Simon Pierre Boulanger Martel, “Tracking the
Rise of United States Foreign Military Training: IMTAD-USA, a New Dataset and Research
Agenda,” Journal of Peace Research 59, no. 2 (2022): 286, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022343321104
7715.
6. Sierra A. Melendez, “1st Security Force Assistance Brigade Holds Activation Ceremony,”
Army News Service, February 9, 2018, https://www.army.mil/article/200403/1st_security_force
_assistance_brigade_holds_activation_ceremony.
7. David Zucchino, “Kabul’s Sudden Fall to Taliban Ends U.S. Era in Afghanistan,” New York
Times, August 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/15/world/asia/afghanistan-taliban-
kabul-surrender.html.
8. Jahara Matisek and William Reno, “Getting Security Force Assistance Right: Political Context
Matters,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 92 (2019): 65–73, https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/
Documents/jfq/jfq-92/jfq-92_65-73_Matisek-Reno.pdf.
9. Caitlin Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army: Battleªeld Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); Risa A. Brooks and Elizabeth A. Stanley, eds., Creating Military
Power: The Sources of Military Effectiveness (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Stephen
Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2004).

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The Cult of the Persuasive 97

ers may fear coups more than they fear the threats that their militaries are in-
tended to combat, or they may be motivated primarily to consolidate political
power for their regime. Such leaders may base promotions on loyalty rather
than merit, place key units under their direct control, cultivate patronage net-
works, and take other steps that undermine military effectiveness. Meanwhile,
military leaders may view their commands as opportunities for pursuing per-
sonal enrichment, selling equipment on the black market, hoarding resources
for themselves and their families, and otherwise diverting resources away
from the military.10

In a form of adverse selection, the United States tends to provide the most
security assistance to those states that have the weakest political and military
institutions—countries more likely to be governed by leaders with strong in-
centives to implement policies that undermine the United States’ advisory
mission.11 Thus, the central challenge for security assistance providers is inºu-
ence. The success or failure of U.S. security assistance depends largely on the
United States’ ability to inºuence how recipients use or misuse it.

How do U.S. military advisers aim to inºuence recipient leaders to build
better militaries and what explains their approaches? I conceptualize inºuence
in security assistance as an escalation ladder with four rungs: teaching, persua-
sion, conditionality, and direct command. In practice, military advisers rarely
escalate to conditionality or direct command. Instead, they rely almost exclu-
sively on teaching and persuasion, even when their counterparts routinely ig-
nore their advice and implement policies that keep their militaries weak.

I argue that the bureaucratic interests of the U.S. Army, and the ideology of
advising that it has cultivated to advance those interests, help to explain the
preference for persuasion in security assistance. Washington increasingly dele-

10. Talmadge, The Dictator’s Army.
11. Stephen Biddle, “Building Security Forces and Stabilizing Nations: The Problem of Agency,”
Daedalus 146, no. 4 (2017): 126–138, https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00464; Stephen Biddle, Julia
Macdonald, and Ryan Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff: the Military Effectiveness of Security
Force Assistance,” Journal of Strategic Studies 14, nos. 1–2 (2018): 89–142, https://doi.org/10.1080/
01402390.2017.1307745; Eli Berman and David A. Lake, eds., Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence
through Local Agents (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Walter C. Ladwig III, “Inºu-
encing Clients in Counterinsurgency: U.S. Involvement in El Salvador’s Civil War, 1979–92,”
International Security 41, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 99–146, https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00251;
Stephanie Burchard and Stephen Burgess, “U.S. Training of African Forces and Military Assis-
tance, 1997–2017: Security versus Human Rights in Principal-Agent Relations,” African Security 11,
no. 4 (2018): 339–369, https://doi.org/10.1080/19392206.2018.1560969; Eric Rittinger, “Arming the
Other: American Small Wars, Local Proxies, and the Social Construction of the Principal-Agent
Problem,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2017): 369–409, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/
sqx021.

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International Security 47:3 98

gates military-building missions to the Department of Defense, and the latter
to the U.S. Army.12 In advisory missions, the U.S. Army aims to protect its core
combat mission, maintain the smooth function of its bureaucratic machinery,
and preserve its autonomy against civilian intrusion. It prefers to rely on
rapport-based persuasion because persuasion helps the army achieve these
bureaucratic interests, whereas conditionality threatens them. To encourage
advisers to rely on persuasion, the army promotes an ideology—what I call
“the cult of the persuasive”13—emphasizing both the normative belief that
persuasion is right and conditionality is wrong, and the causal myth that per-
suasion works and conditionality backªres. Army advisers in the ªeld follow
the ideology, relying on teaching and persuasion and rarely using conditional-
ity to incentivize their counterparts to follow their advice. The cult of the per-
suasive persists despite repeated advisory failures because the U.S. Army has
no bureaucratic incentive to change course.

This study makes several contributions. First, it advances the growing
security assistance scholarship by presenting a novel typology of inºuence ap-
proaches in advising, and by offering an organizational theory to explain ad-
viser choices among them. I shed light on the United States’ broader struggle
to build better militaries in partner states by exposing the bureaucratic drivers
of suboptimal inºuence in advising. Second, the study helps to explain why
the United States failed to build an effective military in Iraq, a central failing
in the Iraq War. Finally, the study revives and adapts organizational theory as a
lens through which to understand military behavior and defense strategy.
Organizational theory has faded from international security scholarship since
its intellectual heyday in the 1980s, a trend in need of corrective, given that bu-
reaucratic interests and organizational behavior continue to shape how foreign
policy is formulated and implemented.

The rest of this article proceeds as follows. The ªrst section reviews existing
literature on inºuence and security assistance. The second section presents a

12. Susan B. Epstein and Liana W. Rosen, U.S. Security Assistance and Security Cooperation Pro-
grams: Overview of Funding Trends, CRS Report R45091 (Washington, DC: CRS, 2018), https://
crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45091/3s; Christina L. Arabia, “Defense Primer: DOD
‘Title 10’ Security Cooperation,” In Focus, CRS, May 17, 2021, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/
IF11677.pdf.
13. The “cult of the persuasive” adapts Stephen Van Evera’s term, “the cult of the offensive.” See
Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Secu-
rity 9, no. 1 (Summer 1984): 58–107, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538636; Jack Snyder, “Civil-Military
Relations and the Cult of the Offensive, 1914 and 1984,” International Security 9, no. 1 (1984): 108–
146, https://doi.org/10.2307/2538637.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 99

typology of inºuence approaches in security assistance and identiªes the
actors who employ them. The third presents a novel theory to explain ad-
viser inºuence choices—the cult of the persuasive. The fourth section ex-
amines the explanatory power of the cult of the persuasive in a critical
case and hard test—the U.S. effort to build the Iraqi Army from 2003 to 2011—
and addresses alternative explanations. Analysis draws from over one hun-
dred original interviews with U.S. military advisers and retired Iraqi general
ofªcers,14 oral histories by former U.S. advisers, and recently declassiªed
U.S. Central Command documents. The ªfth section discusses the external va-
lidity of the argument beyond Iraq. The conclusion summarizes the argument,
highlights areas for future research, and presents broader theoretical and
policy implications.

Existing Literature

A growing security assistance literature identiªes interest divergence between
provider and recipient as the fundamental challenge of security assistance. But
little scholarship examines how the United States aims to inºuence recipients
to reform their militaries, who precisely is doing the inºuencing, and why they
choose certain approaches to inºuence while eschewing others. The few schol-
ars who directly address the inºuence challenge in security assistance empha-
size the importance of incentives for effective inºuence and effective security
assistance. The literature demonstrates that U.S. inºuence in security assis-
tance tends to be more effective when the United States makes elements of its
assistance conditional on recipient cooperation and reforms.15 It also notes the
rarity of conditionality in security assistance. Some scholars identify the rarity

14. The interviews were approved through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Institutional
Review Board Protocol no. 1812628779. To mitigate any personal or professional risks for subjects
associated with participating in the interviews, I was transparent with subjects about my identity
and purpose and took a series of steps to protect the anonymity of all Iraqi subjects and the U.S.
subjects who preferred anonymity. I included U.S. subject identities with their permission and
when their position was vital to illustrate the signiªcance of their perspective.
15. Accumulating empirical evidence suggests that conditionality—though no panacea—is a
helpful ingredient for effective inºuence and effective security assistance. See, for example, Biddle,
Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff”; Eli Berman and David A. Lake, “Conclu-
sion,” in Berman and Lake, Proxy Wars, 289; Ladwig, “Inºuencing Clients in Counterinsurgency,”
144; Rachel Tecott, “The Cult of the Persuasive: The U.S. Military’s Aversion to Coercion in Secu-
rity Assistance” (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2021), 132–158, 221–240, 306–
326. Additional research is needed to identify the conditions under which conditionality in
security assistance is more or less likely to secure recipient cooperation.

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International Security 47:3 100

of conditionality in security assistance as a puzzle for future research.16 I ad-
dress this puzzle. Others attribute the rarity of conditionality to prohibitively
high interest divergence combined with inadequate monitoring capacity and
bargaining credibility.17 I offer an alternative explanation.

Neither monitoring capacity nor bargaining credibility can explain the rarity
of conditionality in U.S. security assistance. Often, recipient misuse of U.S. mil-
itary assistance is obvious. Even when their numbers are limited, teams of U.S.
military advisers attached to partner military units bear witness to counter-
part policies undermining military effectiveness, which they report up their
chain of command. Senior advisers receive adviser reports and communicate
regularly with senior partner leaders, who often choose to excuse, explain, and
defend rather than hide the corruption, coup-prooªng, neglected training regi-
mens, and parallel command structures that rot their militaries. Monitoring ca-
pacity has rarely (if ever) been a limiting factor.18

Security assistance relationships are also conducive to credible bargaining.19
Security assistance relationships are not binary, all-or-nothing alliance commit-
ments in which the only sticks are the extreme options of proxy replacement or
complete abandonment, and the only carrots are unwavering support or sui-
cidal collective defense. In security assistance, the United States has these ex-
treme options, but advisers can also incentivize cooperation through more
modest and tailored adjustments to the kind and quantity of assistance. More-
over, security assistance relationships are typically long term, involving itera-
tive interactions between provider and recipient. An extended shadow of the
future permits U.S. advisers to establish the credibility of their threats and
promises through consistent follow-through20—if they choose to do so.

16. David A. Lake, “Iraq, 2003–11: Principal Failure,” in Berman and Lake, Proxy Wars, 244; Ste-
phen Biddle, “Policy Implications for the United States,” in Berman and Lake, Proxy Wars, 267–
278; Ladwig, “Inºuencing Clients in Counterinsurgency,” 101.
17. Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff,” 94, 129. This explanation
aligns with the prevailing view in the alliance management literature. See, for example, Glenn H.
Snyder, Alliance Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 165–200; Robert O. Keohane,
“The Big Inºuence of Small Allies,” Foreign Policy, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 161–182, https://doi.org/
10.2307/1147864.
18. Host country leaders often tell U.S. advisers what they want to hear, while continuing objec-
tionable behaviors behind the advisers’ backs, and/or reforming on paper but not in practice.
Most advisers are constantly frustrated, not fooled, by such practices.
19. Snyder, Alliance Politics, 165–200; Thomas C. Schelling, “Bargaining, Communication, and
Limited War,” Journal of Conºict Resolution 1, no. 1 (1957): 19–36, https://doi.org/10.1177/
002200275700100104; James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organiza-
tion 49, no. 3 (1995): 379–414.
20. Robert Axelrod and Robert O. Keohane, “Achieving Cooperation under Anarchy: Strategies

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The Cult of the Persuasive 101

As discussed in the next section, U.S. military advisers have the agency to
choose how they aim to inºuence recipient leaders to reform their militaries,
and these advisers tend to eschew conditionality in favor of persuasion.

The Inºuence Ladder and the Military Advisers Who Climb It

This section presents a novel typology of adviser inºuence approaches in secu-
rity assistance.

a four-rung inºuence escalation ladder

I conceptualize inºuence in advising as an “escalation ladder” with four
rungs: teaching, persuasion, conditionality, and direct command. Teaching,
persuasion, conditionality, and direct command are not mutually exclusive.
Advisers might ªrst attempt to teach recipients to build a better military. If
they encounter resistance, they may try to persuade their counterparts to fol-
low their guidance. If persuasion fails to reduce (or reduces but does not elimi-
nate) interest divergence, advisers may use carrots and sticks to incentivize
recipients to follow their advice. Or advisers might give up on indirect inºu-
ence and take direct command of partner units (or the entire partner military)
and try to implement the preferred policies themselves. Providers may rely ex-
clusively on teaching and persuasion, or they may escalate to incentives when
teaching and persuasion fail. The question is not whether advisers use persua-
sion or conditionality. The question is whether advisers combine persuasion
with conditionality. Figure 1 depicts the four rungs on the inºuence ladder.
teaching. A teaching approach aims to inºuence recipient leaders by pro-
viding them with information that they may need to improve the effectiveness
of their militaries. Information could include assessments of ofªcer perfor-
mance, advice in the development of curricula for ofªcers, training in the U.S.
Military Decision Making Process,21 and any other instruction designed to pro-
vide recipient decision-makers with information that could help them ªght
better. Teaching is ubiquitous in U.S. security assistance and security coopera-
tion programs, such as the International Military Education and Training pro-

and Institutions,” in Kenneth A. Oye, ed., Cooperation under Anarchy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 226–254.
21. “Military Decision Making Process: Lessons and Best Practices,” Handbook no. 15-06
(Fort Leavenworth, KS: Center for Army Lessons Learned, n.d.), https://usacac.army.mil/sites/
default/ªles/publications/15-06_0.pdf.

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International Security 47:3 102

Figure 1.

Inºuence in Security Assistance: A Four-Rung Escalation Ladder

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gram. The teaching approach is predicated on an assumption of interest
alignment—information, not motivation, as the limiting factor.

persuasion. Persuasion refers to several approaches that advisers can use to
shape recipient leader thinking and behavior. First, advisers may provide in-
ducements, which are “persuasive measures to cajole the recipient into chang-
ing its behavior.”22 The distinguishing feature of persuasive inducement is its
reliance on norms of reciprocity instead of explicit or heavily implied condi-
tionality.23 Second, advisers can argue. They employ “communicative action”
to convince civilian and military leaders in recipient countries to heed their ad-
vice on the merits.24 A third tool of persuasion is demonstration—advisers try
to persuade a recipient to make better decisions by demonstrating “what right

22. Celia L. Reynolds and Wilfred T. Wan, “Empirical Trends in Sanctions and Positive Induce-
ments in Nonproliferation,” in Etel Solingen, ed., Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 58.
23. Cicero, quoted in Alvin W. Gouldner, “The Norm of Reciprocity: A Preliminary Statement,”
American Sociological Review 25, no. 2 (1960): 161–178, https://doi.org/10.2307/2092623. See also
Robert O. Keohane, “Reciprocity in International Relations,” International Organization 40, no. 1
(1986): 4–5, 19–24, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300004458.
24. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, Reason and the Rationalization of
Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985); Thomas Risse, “‘Let’s Argue!’: Communicative Action in
World Politics,” International Organization 54, no. 1 (2000): 1–39, https://doi.org/10.1162/0020818
00551109.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 103

looks like.”25 Recipient military and political leaders are expected to observe
and then emulate advisers’ behaviors.

Fourth, advisers emphasize interpersonal relationships as a tool of inºuence
in security assistance. The idea is that advisers build rapport, trust, mutual re-
spect, and friendship with partner ofªcers, who will then be more likely to fol-
low their direction. When advisers develop close personal relationships with
their counterparts, those counterparts may be more likely to receive their
arguments with an open mind, trust that the advice is sound, or emulate
their advisers’ approach. This is essentially a theory of inºuence through per-
sonal diplomacy.

conditionality. A conditionality approach to inºuence aims to incentivize
partner cooperation by using carrots to elicit compliance and sticks to deter or
curb deªance. When recipient leaders implement politically motivated person-
nel patterns, ºout command structures, hoard information, or permit (or en-
courage) rampant corruption, advisers can threaten to take away a particular
service or weapon of value to them, sever assistance to a particular unit, dis-
band a particular unit, reduce assistance overall, or recommend that the
United States sever assistance altogether. Conversely, advisers can promise to
provide requested weapons, increase aid to a unit, increase overall support
to the military as a whole, or bolster the local authority of particular leaders on
the condition that the partner implements the provider’s guidance or meets
improvement benchmarks.

direct command. Whereas teaching, persuasion, and conditionality are in-
direct forms of inºuence, direct command (as the name implies) uses the com-
mand structure to inºuence recipient partners. In this model, advisers can hire
and ªre partner personnel, oversee their compensation, manage their train-
ing, and otherwise control their decisions and behaviors. The direct command
approach aims to resolve the interest divergence problem between provider
and recipient by replacing recipient leaders with provider personnel.

It bears repeating. Teaching, persuasion, conditionality, and direct com-
mand are not mutually exclusive. Advisers can rely on teaching and per-
suasion, or they can combine teaching and persuasion with conditionality or
direct command.

25. “What right looks like” is a common phrase among security assistance practitioners. See,
for example, “Commander’s Perspective CJFLCC-OIR Operations” (Fort Leavenworth, KS:
Center for Army Lessons Learned, May 2, 2018), https://usacac.army.mil/sites/default/ªles/
publications/NFTF_White.PDF.

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International Security 47:3 104

military advisers

The constellation of advisers seeking to inºuence recipient leaders to reform
their militaries varies from case to case. This study focuses on security as-
sistance implemented by the Department of Defense, the federal bureaucracy
responsible for an increasing share of U.S. security assistance missions.26 Be-
cause most U.S. security assistance focuses primarily on developing territorial
forces, most U.S. military advisers are U.S. Army and U.S. Army Special Forces
(also known as Green Berets).27 Although civilians might make the top-level
decisions about whether to initiate or terminate assistance to recipient states,
that is often the extent of their involvement in security assistance. Theo-
retically, civilian actors could liaise with recipient leaders to encourage them to
reform their militaries, or they could provide direction to the military advisers
about how to inºuence their counterparts. In practice, however, civilian of-
ªcials tend to delegate the job of inºuencing recipient leaders to reform their
militaries to the military advisers in theater and to defer to military judgment
for most elements of advisory projects.

Precisely what the U.S. military advisers attempt to inºuence their counter-
parts to do, and the levers of inºuence available to them, vary across cases and
by seniority. General ofªcers might seek to convince partner heads of state
and ministers of defense to alter command structures, formalize and imple-
ment meritocratic ofªcer promotion criteria, crack down on ministerial-level
corruption, and otherwise modify or overhaul military organizational prac-
tices from the top down. At lower levels, U.S. colonels, lieutenant colonels, and
majors advising partner division, brigade, and battalion commanders might
urge their counterparts to discipline soldiers who do not show up for training,
to end the practice of abusing detainees, or to stop stealing soldier salaries.”28

Senior advisers have considerable power to manipulate elements of U.S. se-
curity assistance to incentivize cooperation. Certainly, decisions to sever assis-
tance altogether, to withdraw entirely, or even to replace the partner head of
state are (appropriately) made in Washington and are beyond the authority

26. The Department of State conducts security assistance, as do other federal agencies, including
the U.S. Agency for International Development and parts of the intelligence community. Begin-
ning in the 1980s and accelerating after 9/11, however, the Department of Defense has imple-
mented an increasing share of U.S. security assistance programs. Epstein and Rosen, U.S. Security
Assistance.
27. The U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy implement security assistance and security cooperation pro-
jects as well, sometimes jointly with the U.S. Army.
28. Joel D. Rayburn and Frank K. Sobchak, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 2, Surge and
Withdrawal, 2007–2011 (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2019), 114.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 105

of even the most senior military advisers in theater. That said, civilian leaders
may defer to the judgment of their senior military advisers on even these deci-
sions. Below these upper bounds, however, senior advisers have plenty of lev-
ers within their complete control. For instance, senior advisers can condition
the production of new units on progress in the performance of existing units.
They may choose to pause aid to partner divisions, refuse to provide crucial
enablers, or even disband partner divisions or their constituent units. Con-
versely, senior advisers can reallocate additional assistance to divisions, fast-
track delivery and distribution of previously halted weapons, or otherwise
reward those units that reach certain performance benchmarks.

The power of more junior advisers to manipulate elements of U.S. assistance
to incentivize partner cooperation depends heavily on support from their su-
periors. For instance, advisers who try and fail to persuade their counterpart
brigade commanders to strike “ghost soldiers” from the rolls can report the of-
fending brigade commander up the U.S. chain of command, and the senior ad-
viser in theater can then liaise with the brigade commander’s commanding
ofªcer and condition continued assistance to the brigade on the offending
commander’s course correction or removal. This was the model employed by
the U.S. Eighth Army’s Korean Military Advisory Group.29

Without strong support from above, junior advisers have limited ability to
leverage U.S. assistance to incentivize counterpart cooperation. Still, junior ad-
visers often have considerable discretion over the distribution of smaller
amounts of U.S. assistance and can leverage it accordingly. For example, a
division-level adviser might incentivize partner battalion commanders to
crack down on battalion soldiers selling U.S. equipment on the black market
by threatening to withhold logistical support to the battalion until the behav-
ior stops. In practice, junior advisers’ leverage often lies in their ability to
navigate their own bureaucracies to the advantage (or not) of their counter-
part units. The degree to which junior advisers can navigate and leverage
those bureaucracies is not preordained—it is a design choice made by the pro-
viders’ military leaders.30

The next section explains why U.S. advisers tend to rely on teaching and
persuasion, rarely escalating to conditionality or direct command to inºuence
their counterparts to reform their militaries.

29. Tecott, “The Cult of the Persuasive,” 198–240.
30. Bureaucratic ºexibility to divide, pause, and restart elements of security assistance depends on
how security assistance programs are designed, and design is a choice that falls within the author-
ity of the senior military advisers. See Biddle, “Policy Implications for the United States,” 271–273.

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International Security 47:3 106

The Cult of the Persuasive

I present a novel theory to explain adviser inºuence approaches in security
assistance—the cult of the persuasive. I argue that adviser inºuence ap-
proaches in security assistance reºect the bureaucratic interests and ideology
of the U.S. Army.

Washington increasingly delegates security assistance missions to the
Department of Defense. That civilians delegate security assistance and defer to
the military is unsurprising. Civilian efforts to direct and oversee the military
tend to be more energetic the higher the stakes for security.31 Overall, even the
largest-scale cases of security assistance are relatively low-stakes.32 Moreover,
contemporary U.S. civil-military relations are characterized by high levels of
deference to the military.33 Civilians have strong political incentives to avoid
disagreements with the most trusted institution in the United States, and rela-
tively low-stakes security assistance projects are unlikely to be the civil-
military relations hills that civilians choose to die on. At ªrst glance, security
assistance might also seem to be a harmless delegation. After all, what
could fall more squarely within the purview of the military than organizing,
training, equipping, and advising partner militaries? Building a partner mili-
tary is a deeply political project, however, and it requires the traditionally
civilian competency of achieving inºuence over partner leaders through non-
violent means.

Washington directs its federal bureaucracies to pursue challenging, long-
term, often vague goals.34 Unlike for-proªt ªrms, federal bureaucracies lack

31. Michael C. Desch, Civilian Control of the Military: The Changing Security Environment (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). The literature emphasizing the role of civilians in military
innovation also emphasizes that stakes can drive civilian intervention. See, for example, Kurt
Lang, “Military Organizations,” in James G. March, ed., Handbook of Organizations (Chicago: Rand
McNally, 1965), 857; Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany be-
tween the World Wars (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 57, 224–226.
32. I emphasize stakes from the perspective of the United States, a country that enjoys favorable
geography, powerful conventional military forces, and a secure second strike. Massive U.S. invest-
ments in capacity building may be high stakes in absolute terms, but they are low stakes relative to
other problems that civilians delegate to the military. When civilians are picking their battles with
the military, security assistance is unlikely to top the list.
33. Polina Beliakova, “Erosion by Deference: Civilian Control and the Military in Policymaking,”
Texas National Security Review 4, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 55–75, http://dx.doi.org/10.26153/tsw/
13988.
34. James Q. Wilson, Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It (New York:
Basic Books, 1989), 116–117.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 107

monetary incentives to work energetically and efªciently.35 Bureaucracies may
diligently pursue their ofªcial missions, but they may also pursue a variety of
bureaucratic objectives, such as autonomy, prestige, resources, and inºuence in
Washington.36 The pursuit of bureaucratic objectives can compromise ofªcial
missions when the two are in tension. Executives may deliberately subordinate
ofªcial missions to bureaucratic ones, but more often, they come to believe that
their bureaucratic interests and the national interest go hand in hand.37 The de-
gree to which bureaucracies compromise their ofªcial missions for their bu-
reaucratic objectives depends on a variety of factors. One factor is the degree to
which the ofªcial missions fall within, or outside, the bureaucracy’s “organ-
izational essence.” As deªned by Morton Halperin and Priscilla Clapp, or-
ganizational essence is “the view held by the dominant group within the
organization of what its missions and capabilities should be.”38 Bureauc-
racies tend to be indifferent or even hostile to missions outside their organiza-
tional essence, and more likely to prioritize advancement of their bureaucratic
objectives above such missions.

Bureaucracies face many challenges in the pursuit of their ofªcial and bu-
reaucratic objectives. To advance their objectives (whether ofªcial or bureau-
cratic), bureaucracies develop routines or standard operating procedures
(SOPs) to control and coordinate their resources. SOPs combine into programs,
and programs into repertoires.39 Often, in a pathology labeled “goal displace-
ment,” bureaucracies come to view the routines themselves as the goal, rather
than as the means through which the goal is pursued.40 Once bureaucracies in-
stitutionalize their routines, they tend to stick, even if an evolving strategic
landscape or new information suggests they should change. Without external
intervention, “bureaucracy does its thing.”41

These bureaucratic and organizational dynamics help explain the U.S.

35. Ibid.
36. Morton H. Halperin and Priscilla A. Clapp, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with Arnold
Kanter, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), 25–61, 179–197; Posen, The
Sources of Military Doctrine, 45–47.
37. Graham T. Allison, “Conceptual Models and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” American Political Sci-
ence Review 63, no. 3 (1969): 710–711, https://doi.org/10.2307/1954423.
38. Halperin and Clapp, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, 27, 38–40.
39. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine, 44.
40. John Bohte and Kenneth J. Meier, “Goal Displacement: Assessing the Motivation for Organiza-
tional Cheating,” Public Administration Review 60, no. 2 (March/April 2000): 173–182, https://
doi.org/10.1111/0033-3352.00075.
41. Robert W. Komer, Bureaucracy Does Its Thing: Institutional Constraints on U.S.-GVN Performance
in Vietnam (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1972).

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International Security 47:3 108

Army’s approach to security assistance broadly, and its preference for persua-
sion and aversion to conditionality speciªcally. The U.S. Army’s organiza-
tional essence is ground combat—despite rhetoric to the contrary, the U.S.
Army does not consider security assistance to be a core mission.42

In conducting security assistance, a primary goal of the U.S. Army is to pre-
serve its autonomy against civilian intrusion. To say that the U.S. Army
prioritizes autonomy is not to say that all army executives (general ofªcers)
consciously put the goal of building a stronger partner military second. Rather,
the army, consciously or not, optimizes its approach to security assistance
to the autonomy goal, at times to the detriment of the nominal one. The drive
for autonomy is common across federal bureaucracies, but it is especially pow-
erful in the U.S. military, in part because it has internalized Huntingtonian
norms of objective control. As Risa Brooks explains, “[Samuel] Huntington’s
construct perpetuates a conception that autonomy is an inherent prerogative
of the military and that civilian incursions into its sphere of responsibility and
authority represent a violation of that prerogative.”43

The U.S. Army enjoys a great deal of autonomy in the conduct of advisory
missions, for the reasons described above. Nonetheless, it works hard to keep
it that way. The army fears that civilians will intervene if they judge the advi-
sory projects ineffective, or if the advisory mission generates bad press. The
army thus works to preserve its autonomy in the advisory mission by project-
ing a narrative of slow but steady progress, and by avoiding actions that could
be portrayed in the press as illiberal.44 To project an appearance of progress,
the U.S. Army tracks and presents quantitative metrics such as numbers of
partner soldiers trained and riºes distributed, even though half those soldiers
might be absent without leave (AWOL) and half the riºes might be sold on the
black market. But because the progress of an advisory mission is difªcult to

42. See Kyle Atwell and Paul Bailey, “Wanna Fight? Pushing Partners Aside in Afghanistan,”
War on the Rocks, October 11, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/10/we-wanted-to-ªght-
incentivizing-advising-over-ªghting-in-afghanistan-and-beyond/.
43. Risa Brooks, “Paradoxes of Professionalism: Rethinking Civil-Military Relations in the United
States,” International Security 44, no. 4 (2020): 28, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00374. See also
Christopher Harig and Chiara Ruffa, “Knocking on the Barracks’ Door: How Role Conceptions
Shape the Military’s Reactions to Political Demands,” European Journal of International Security 7,
no. 1 (2021): 84–103, https://doi.org/10.1017/eis.2021.30.
44. The drive to present an appearance of progress and liberalism is by no means unique to the
U.S. Army. Federal bureaucracies are responsive to external constituencies that demand they be-
have within the bounds of speciªed rules and norms. See Wilson, Bureaucracy, 131–132, 205, quot-
ing Michael Blumenthal’s assessment that for federal bureaucracies “appearance is as important
as reality.”

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The Cult of the Persuasive 109

measure, and U.S. policymakers lack the information, expertise, and often the
energy to judge for themselves, the gap between military narratives of steady
progress and the actuality on the ground can yawn wide.

In addition to autonomy, the U.S. Army optimizes its efforts in advising to
the goal of protecting its organizational essence—the combat mission. Even if
Washington identiªes the advisory mission as the priority, the U.S. Army al-
ways prioritizes the combat mission. For instance, advancement within the
army is heavily contingent on combat experience as opposed to advisory expe-
rience, and high performers will avoid advisory tours and vie for combat ex-
perience. The army keeps advisory tours short so that advisers can redeploy
for combat, and so that advisory tours will not damage the morale neces-
sary for combat. Although prioritizing the combat mission does not directly
shape the army’s choice of inºuence approaches, it illustrates the broader
point that the U.S. Army does not optimize its approach to security assistance
to the goal of building better partner militaries.

The U.S. Army also aims to maintain its advisory SOPs without disruption
in security assistance missions. The U.S. Army’s bureaucratic machinery of
advisory missions consists of the complicated, time-intensive, personnel-
intensive, and attention-intensive advisory SOPs for getting U.S. advisers
trained, equipped, and into theater, fed, sustained, and protected through
their tours, and then sent home. It also consists of the difªcult mechanics re-
quired to recruit, equip, train, organize, sustain, and advise partner soldiers.
The U.S. Army’s SOPs are optimized to serve the autonomy objective. These
routines serve as the metrics that the army draws on to support the progress
narrative and the guardrails on adviser behavior that reduce the risk of bad
press. In classic goal displacement, the army comes to view sustaining the bu-
reaucratic machinery of advisory projects (rather than improving the military
effectiveness of the partner) as the goal itself.

Persuasion serves the autonomy goal. Senior advisers present friendly rela-
tions between provider and recipient as another data point in the progress nar-
rative that they communicate to U.S. policymakers. In contrast, threatening or
following through with threats to disband partner units, reduce aid, or cancel
training programs jeopardizes the progress narrative. Episodes of threats and
paused programs could lead to headlines in the press emphasizing trouble in
the advisory mission, which could cause concern about the progress of the
project. Confrontations between the U.S. advisers and their counterparts (ex-
posed through the press or elevated directly by the partner) could lead even a
deferential White House to meddle with the military’s advisory project. To

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International Security 47:3 110

sum up, a baseline level of civilian deference to the military creates the permis-
sive conditions for army interests to drive security assistance, but by relying
on persuasion, the army makes civilian oversight more difªcult and perpetu-
ates civilian deference.45

By relying almost exclusively on teaching and persuasion, the U.S. Army
also advances its bureaucratic goal of maintaining the smooth function of its
bureaucratic machinery. The U.S. Army is reluctant to condition the continua-
tion of a unit’s training program on reform benchmarks. For instance, follow-
ing through on the threat to pause the training program if the partner fails to
meet the benchmarks would require the army to disrupt its own SOPs. More-
over, threatening partners with consequences to rein in problematic military
organizational practices could lead frustrated partners to take action to disrupt
U.S. training and advising mechanics. In contrast, by limiting itself to teaching
and persuasion, and perpetuating the mechanics of the advisory relationship
regardless of whether the partner is strengthening or undermining the military
that the United States sets out to build, the U.S. Army meets its goal of main-
taining the bureaucratic machinery of the advisory project.

It is one thing for the U.S. Army to develop a preferred approach to advis-
ing, and another to ensure that its advisers implement that approach. Advisers
are often loosely supervised and free to develop their own approaches to inºu-
encing their counterparts. To encourage advisers to rely on persuasion, the
U.S. Army promotes a doctrine of persuasion internally through a variety of
formal and informal mechanisms. The ªeld manuals in which the doctrine is
ofªcially articulated are less tools of behavior control than they are written en-
capsulations of preferred behavior. The doctrine is effectively communicated
through adviser training, assigned readings, brieªngs, and informal mecha-
nisms such as statements made by key leaders in public settings. It is made
clear to advisers how they should and should not behave.

Through these mechanisms, the military promotes the normative idea that
teaching and persuasion are the appropriate approaches to shape the behavior
of allies, partners, and friends. This idea, an adaptation of anticolonialism and
sovereignty norms, promotes a corresponding distaste for what are often re-
ferred to as bribery, transactionalism, imperialism, coercion, and bullying.46 It

45. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this framing.
46. In U.S. foreign policy more broadly, the idea of attaching conditions to assistance is closer to
being normatively neutral or even positive—the negative valence that the U.S. Army attaches
to conditionality in security assistance is striking. The aversion has deep roots in old U.S. foreign
policy tradition and legitimation strategies. Attempting to explain U.S. backing of the Government

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The Cult of the Persuasive 111

also promotes the causal myth that rapport-based persuasion is an effective
approach to inºuence, and that escalation to conditionality is likely to back-
ªre. In combination, I call the ideology accompanying the army’s advisory
doctrine “the cult of the persuasive,” in an allusion to “the cult of the offen-
sive” that marched the militaries of Europe to World War I.47

Most U.S. Army advisers faithfully implement the advisory doctrine and
rely exclusively on teaching and persuasion. Many do so because of profes-
sional incentives to conform to the doctrinally sanctioned approach. Advisers
who disregard their instructions and escalate to an incentives-based approach
risk reprimand and adverse career consequences. Advisers understand that
they will meet professional expectations if they do not disrupt the bureaucratic
machinery of the advisory process or embarrass the military with bad behav-
ior. Other advisers, in contrast, faithfully implement the doctrine because they
genuinely internalize the ideology. For many advisers, it is some combination
of the two.48 Ideology thus encourages individual advisers to behave in accor-
dance with bureaucratic preferences.

For their part, U.S. policymakers tend to continue to defer to the military no
matter how ineffective the advisory projects. Stakeholders in Washington may
express skepticism of the military’s progress reports and may recognize the
gap between such reports and reality. Washington could require real progress
as a condition for continuing to fund and delegate a project. Yet, for the
reasons cited above (low stakes, political incentives to defer to the military,
and the military’s inºated progress reports), civilians refrain from enforcing
change. Moreover, and remarkably, high-proªle, incontrovertible security as-
sistance failures have no discernible impact on public attitudes toward the mil-
itary. Polls consistently show that the U.S. public holds the military in high
esteem.49 In the context of civilian deference and reliable public approval, the
U.S. Army has no incentive to change course.

of Vietnam in the context of decolonization, U.S. leaders painted U.S. intervention in terms of
helping people defend their freedoms, a rhetoric compatible with teaching and persuasion, but
difªcult to square with conditionality or direct command.
47. Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive.” Ideology as commonly understood is a belief system
shared by members of a community that governs how those members approach situations and
that, once adopted, is difªcult to shed. Teun A. Van Dijk, “Ideology and Discourse Analysis,” Jour-
nal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 2 (2006): 116, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310600687908.
48. This conceptualization of the causal effect of ideology on conºict behavior aligns with Jona-
than Leader Maynard’s internalization and structural mechanisms. Jonathan Leader Maynard,
“Ideology and Armed Conºict,” Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 5 (2019): 635–649, https://doi.org/
10.1177/0022343319826629.
49. Gallup, “Conªdence in Institutions,” https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/conªdence-institu-

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International Security 47:3 112

scope conditions

The cult of the persuasive is a theory of bureaucratic behavior, and it focuses
primarily on one bureaucracy in particular—the U.S. Army.50 Consequently,
the theory generates predictions about how the U.S. Army conducts security
assistance, and not necessarily about how the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, or
other countries’ military services conduct security assistance. Nor does the
theory necessarily apply to cases of security assistance conducted by either
State Department advisers or contractors.51

I focus on security assistance conducted by the U.S. Army for several rea-
sons. First, the universe of U.S. Army security assistance cases includes three
of the most signiªcant examples of security assistance in U.S. history—
Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Beyond these three critical cases, the universe
of U.S. Army–implemented security assistance cases is large and expanding
rapidly. The weight of U.S. security assistance missions has shifted over time
from the Department of State to the Department of Defense.52 In 2018, the U.S.
Army institutionalized the security assistance mission through the formation
of the SFABs, which conduct security assistance missions across all ªve com-
batant commands.53 Finally, the U.S. Army encourages other armies to emulate
its approach to security assistance, and there are signs that they are doing just
that.54 Focusing on U.S. Army security assistance allows me to examine the ac-
tor that not only conducts a large percentage of security assistance around the
world but also is likely to have the greatest impact on how other nations ap-
proach security assistance.

tions.aspx; David T. Burbach, “Partisan Dimensions of Conªdence in the U.S. Military, 1973–2016,”
Armed Forces & Society 45, no. 2 (2019): 211–233, https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X17747205.
50. I draw a distinction between security assistance that is conducted by either the U.S. Army or
the U.S. Army Special Forces. In practice, special forces operate as a distinct bureaucracy, with dis-
tinct interests and raisons d’être. I therefore do not expect the same bureaucratic interests to drive
both the army and the Green Berets. In fact, because the organizational essence of the special
forces is advising, the logic of the cult of the persuasive suggests that U.S. Army Special Forces
may conduct security assistance quite differently from its parent organization.
51. Although the cult of the persuasive does not necessarily apply to bureaucracies besides the
U.S. Army, it certainly could. U.S. federal bureaucracies with similar bureaucratic interests, tasked
with the same problem, may develop similar approaches independently, or they may mimic the
army’s approach.
52. Epstein and Rosen, U.S. Security Assistance.
53. Andrew Feickert, “Army Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs),” In Focus, CRS, June 1,
2022, https://sgp.fas.org/crs/natsec/IF10675.pdf.
54. Angela O’Mahony et al., Prioritizing Security Cooperation with Highly Capable U.S. Allies:
Framing Army-to-Army Partnerships (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022), https://www
.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA641-1.html.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 113

The Cult of the Persuasive: Evidence from Iraq

This section examines the explanatory power of the cult of the persuasive
through within-case analysis of the U.S. effort to build the Iraqi Army from
2003 to 2011.

I focus on the U.S. effort in Iraq for several reasons. First, Iraq is a critical
case. The United States’ invasion and occupation of Iraq, and its failure to
rebuild the Iraqi military that it dismantled, was of enormous consequence for
the people of Iraq and the direction of the Iraqi state. It is intrinsically impor-
tant to understand how U.S. military forces operated in Iraq and why they op-
erated the way they did. Understanding U.S. security assistance in Iraq has
vital policymaking implications for both Iraq and the United States. U.S. secu-
rity assistance efforts in Iraq resumed after the 2014 fall of Mosul and are ongo-
ing as of 2023.55 Practitioners within the Department of Defense continue to
draw lessons from Iraq to inform their approaches to military building in Iraq
and elsewhere. It is of immediate policy importance to excavate those lessons.

Second, Iraq is a hard test of the theory for several reasons. First, the U.S. ef-
fort to build the Iraqi Army was one of the highest-stakes cases of security as-
sistance in U.S. history. Civilians had strong incentives to oversee and direct
the military’s efforts to build an army in Iraq because competent Iraqi Security
Forces (ISF) were the United States’ ticket out of an increasingly unpopular
war. If civilians persistently deferred to the military on security assistance in
Iraq, it is likely that they would also defer on standard, lower-stakes cases of
security assistance. Second, the U.S. population paid relatively close attention
to U.S. Army operations in Iraq.56 If the U.S. Army prioritized its bureaucratic
interests over mission success in Iraq, then it would be likely to do so in lower-
proªle cases, where failures (or successes for that matter) would be less likely
to register with the U.S. public. Third, because of the large scale and long dura-
tion of the advisory effort in Iraq, information about the ineffectiveness of per-
suasion is as plentiful and as unambiguous as battleªeld information can be. If
the U.S. Army ignored torrential data suggesting that persuasion was ineffec-
tive in Iraq, it is likely to ignore more ambiguous feedback from smaller,
shorter advisory efforts.

55. Anne Gearan, “Biden, Pulling Combat Forces from Iraq, Seeks to End the Post-9/11 Era,”
Washington Post, July 26, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-iraq-911-era/
2021/07/25/619c8fe6-ecb1-11eb-97a0-a09d10181e36_story.html.
56. I discuss the imperviousness of the U.S. Army to high-proªle mission failure in the conclusion.

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International Security 47:3 114

The third and ªnal criterion for case selection was the ability to conduct the
original interviews and access the data necessary to code key variables and
trace causal mechanisms. In both meeting minutes and oral histories, advisers
often report exerting “pressure” on partners to follow their direction. The pre-
cise form of that pressure—from gentle suggestion to explicit threat—is often
vague in the written record. By choosing a contemporary case, I was able to
ask U.S. advisers of all ranks precisely how—through teaching, persuasion,
conditionality, and/or direct command—they sought to inºuence their Iraqi
counterparts. To mitigate the risk of biased self-reporting, I also travelled
to Jordan and to Iraq to interview Iraqi Army ofªcers for their perspectives.
The Combat Studies Institute’s Operational Leadership Experiences (OLE)
Interview Collection houses a large number of oral histories with former
advisers to the ISF.57 The declassiªcation of tens of thousands of documents
in January 2019, in particular the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) Iraq
Documents, opened archival treasure troves, ranging from declassiªed inter-
views with Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF-I) commanders about their in-
teractions with Iraqi leaders, to transcripts of meetings between coalition
commanders and Iraqi heads of state.58

background

In March 2003, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam
Hussein. Over the next decade, the United States struggled to build a stable,
democratic, U.S.-allied Iraq in the midst of insurgency and civil war. Building
effective ISF was a central pillar of U.S. strategy in Iraq and the United States’
exit strategy from the war. From 2003 to 2011, the United States spent over
$25 billion and deployed tens of thousands of U.S. personnel to the training and advisory mission.59 Despite the enormous expenditure, the Iraqi Army (the largest ISF service) failed basic tests of competence over the course of the advisory period and after the U.S. withdrawal.60 57. Operational Leadership Experiences (OLE) Interview Collection, Combat Studies Institute, Ike Skelton Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library, https://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/ digital/collection/p4013coll13. Hereafter referred to as OLE Interview Collection. 58. CENTCOM Iraq Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks, Penn- sylvania, https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/CENTCOM-IRAQ-papers/index.cfm. 59. Learning from Iraq: A Final Report from the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, before the Subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, 113th Cong., 1st sess. (July 9, 2013) (statement of Stuart W. Bowen, Jr., Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction). 60. For a thorough discussion of the Iraqi Army’s battleªeld performance from 2003 through 2011, see Joel D. Rayburn and Frank K. Sobchak, eds., The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 1, Invasion, In- l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The Cult of the Persuasive 115 Interest divergence was a fundamental barrier to effective security assis- tance throughout the advisory effort. Iraqi political leaders—Ayad Allawi, Ibrahim al-Ja’afari, and Nouri al-Maliki—were motivated primarily to pre- serve and consolidate their political power while maintaining their personal and regime security.61 As such, they implemented military organizational practices intended to advance those objectives, at the expense of building a more proªcient national army.62 They tried to put the most effective units in the ISF under their direct authority, or ignored the chain of command alto- gether and used their personal cell phones to command units directly.63 They demonstrated little interest in rooting out the corruption weakening the mili- tary or in training competent military forces.64 Iraqi leaders’ focus on preserv- ing political power (and personal security) is understandable in the context of post-invasion, U.S.-occupied Iraq. It was also directly at odds with U.S. goals of building an effective Iraqi military. The motivations of Iraqi military leaders varied widely over time and across the country, and generalizations are necessarily reductive. It is accurate to say, however, that many Iraqi Army ofªcers believed that the U.S. goal of building a competent, national Iraqi Army was neither important nor desirable. In the words of one retired Iraqi general ofªcer, “No one in the new Iraqi Army actu- ally wanted a strong Iraqi Army.”65 Military leaders who were apathetic or opposed to developing a strong, national army in Iraq took steps that under- surgency, Civil War, 2003–2006 (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Press, 2019); Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, vol. 2. 61. This assessment about what motivated Iraqi political leaders is uncontroversial. It is the con- sensus view among the preponderance of U.S. practitioners and academics focused on Iraq, and it is shared by the fourteen Iraqi generals (retired) and three U.S.-based Iraqi academics whom I in- terviewed for this project. 62. Al-Ja’afari’s and al-Maliki’s efforts to exclude Sunnis from the ofªcer corps and willingness to permit loyal but incompetent and corrupt Shi’a leaders to maintain commands was well known by coalition leaders and remains undisputed. See, for example, Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 2: 416. 63. Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 1: 627; Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 2: 283–283, 358–363. 64. Author interview with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) James Dubik, by telephone, August 2019; author inter- view with retired Iraqi general who served under al-Maliki, Erbil, February 2020; author interview with Iraqi general who retired before the U.S. invasion but remained in close contact with many of the Iraqi general ofªcers who served under al-Maliki, Erbil, February 2020. 65. Author interview with a retired Iraqi general ofªcer who now studies the Iraqi Army in an ac- ademic capacity, Washington, DC, July 2019. His assessment was shared by fourteen former Iraqi general ofªcers whom I interviewed in Jordan and Iraq, by former commanding generals of MNF-I and MNSTC-I whom I interviewed in Washington, DC, and by Zoom, and by former em- bedded advisers who recorded their impressions of their Iraqi counterparts in the oral histories for the OLE project of the Combat Studies Institute. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 International Security 47:3 116 mined it. For instance, Iraqi commanders permitted or encouraged soldiers to reshufºe into units of homogenous ethno-sectarian composition.66 These ho- mogenous units often operated independently, unresponsive to the nominal chain of command, responding instead to patronage networks that had little to do with the command structure on paper.67 Many commanders used their po- sitions for personal enrichment, keeping ghost soldiers on payrolls or siphon- ing contracts to family members.68 Commanders were often apathetic toward the training of their units and expressed little interest in disciplining soldiers for failing to materialize.69 These were some of the patterns of decisions that undermined the U.S. security assistance effort in Iraq—the patterns that U.S. military advisers sought to inºuence. To understand how the United States exerted inºuence in the advisory effort in Iraq, it is important to have a clear picture of the coalition command struc- ture. The coalition organized two subcommands under MNF-I: Multi-National Corps–Iraq (MNC-I), which would manage coalition operations across the country, and Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I). MNSTC-I organized, trained, advised, and equipped the ISF and developed the institutional capacity of the new Iraqi Ministry of Defense and Ministry of the Interior. The commanding generals of MNF-I and MNSTC-I (all from the U.S. Army) sought to inºuence Iraqi heads of state, ministers of defense and interior, senior staff, and senior Iraqi general ofªcers to implement military or- ganizational practices that would advance the effectiveness of the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police. Below the commanding generals of MNF-I and MNSTC-I, most of the advi- sory effort in Iraq were conducted by small teams of embedded U.S. advisers. 66. Author interview with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) James Dubik, by telephone, August 2019; author inter- view with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Michael Barbero, by Zoom, April 2020; author interview with a former embedded adviser, by telephone, July 2019. The adviser reported that the Iraqi battalion in which he was embedded “apparently started out mixed, but by the time I got there was all Shi’a, maybe 90 percent.” There is reason to believe that the coalition’s emphasis on ethno-sectarian quotas in Iraqi Army units was misguided, ultimately harming more than helping the development of the Iraqi Army. 67. Dozens of former embedded advisers interviewed for the OLE project and by the author de- scribed the units in which they were embedded as operating without regard for any centralized chain of command. 68. The “ghost soldier” problem in the Iraqi Security Forces is well known. Dozens of former em- bedded advisers interviewed for the OLE project and by the author discussed the corruption in their counterpart units. See also Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 2: 114. 69. Dozens of former embedded advisers interviewed for the OLE project and by the author re- ported the counterpart commanders’ (and their soldiers’) seeming lack of interest in training. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The Cult of the Persuasive 117 These adviser teams, ªrst called Advisory Support Teams and then Military Transition Teams, were comprised of teams of approximately ten or eleven U.S. Army ofªcers who paired with Iraqi Army units at the division, brigade, and battalion levels. Individual transition team members paired with individ- ual Iraqi ofªcers. For instance, “chiefs” (team leads) embedded within Iraqi brigades would seek to inºuence the Iraqi brigade commanders. It was up to the transition teams to convince their Iraqi counterparts to take steps to strengthen their units. coding u.s. adviser inºuence tactics in iraq The commanding generals of MNF-I and MNSTC-I and the teams of advisers under their command—the main pressure points on Iraqi decision-makers— relied almost exclusively on teaching and rapport-based persuasion to shape Iraqi military organizational practices. Col. Frank Sobchak, co-author of The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, noted: “On the topic of coercion, it seemed to us surreal how rarely we used that tool.”70 The nine commanding generals of MNF-I and MNSTC-I rarely employed conditionality.71 Stephen Biddle, Julia Macdonald, and Ryan Baker note that “there was little conditionality attached to US SFA” in Iraq, and they identify Gen. David Petraeus’s uses of condi- tionality during 2007 and 2008 as “notable exceptions.”72 Discussion below fo- cuses on Gen. George Casey as a representative of the persuasion norm, and Gen. Petraeus as the conditionality exception. Gen. Casey—commanding general of MNF-I 2004–2006—epitomizes the persistent U.S. preference for teaching and persuasion in security assistance in Iraq. Casey sought to convince ªrst Prime Minister al-Ja’afari and then Prime Minister al-Maliki to permit competent Sunni ofªcers in the ofªcer corps. He also tried to convince al-Maliki to stop violating the chain of command by is- suing direct orders to Iraqi units. Casey explained that he used “relationships” and “cunning and guile,” and “not carrots and sticks” to try to inºuence Iraqi leaders’ decisions. He established regular (thrice weekly in al-Maliki’s case) 70. Email correspondence between the author and Frank Sobchak, September 6, 2019. 71. I base this assessment on triangulation across four sources: (1) author interviews with U.S. general ofªcers; (2) author interviews with their staff; (3) author interviews with Iraqi general ofªcers over the course of ªeldwork in Jordan and Iraq; and (4) recently declassiªed documents that include accounts of interactions between U.S. general ofªcers and their Iraqi counterparts. 72. Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff,” 116. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 International Security 47:3 118 meetings to develop close interpersonal ties with Iraqi leaders, empathizing with them and the pressures they faced.73 When contentious issues arose around military organizational practices un- dermining the Iraqi Army, Casey tried to persuade Iraqi leaders that following his guidance would ultimately serve their interests better than their own pre- ferred approaches. For instance, Casey encouraged al-Maliki to permit Sunnis to serve in the ofªcer corps by trying to convince him that the more serious threat was from the range of insurgent groups, some Sunni and some Shi’a, rather than the Ba’athist resurgence. Only a professional military with a pro- fessional ofªcer corps would be able to mitigate that threat, he argued.74 Casey also tried to “get them [Iraqi senior political and military leadership] to think whatever I was suggesting had been their idea all along.”75 Similarly, Casey sought to convince Iraqi leaders that abiding by the chain of command would serve their own interests. Gen. Raymond Odierno recalled how Casey “talked [the Prime Minister and his senior advisers] through the importance of his Army and his police and using them to not having everybody giv- ing them orders but forming a chain of command, having somebody in charge.”76 Casey ultimately turned to persuasion when the didactic approach failed to keep Iraqi leaders from violating the chain of command, but he avoided conditionality.77 Casey had little success with teaching and persuasion. Al-Ja’afari and al- Maliki were deeply motivated to ªll their ofªcer corps with loyalists, both to insulate themselves against coups and to consolidate political power, and Casey was unable to persuade them that he understood their interests better than they did. Al-Maliki had strong incentives to skip the chain of command to direct Iraqi units against his personal target list, and Casey’s efforts to build 73. Author interview with Gen. (Ret.) George Casey, by Zoom, April 2020. Casey also described his efforts to build a relationship with al-Maliki in George W. Casey Jr., Strategic Reºections: Opera- tion Iraqi Freedom, July 2004–February 2007 (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2012), 98–100. 74. Author interview with Gen. (Ret.) George Casey, by Zoom, April 2020. 75. Ibid. 76. Interview, [name redacted], the Multi-National Corps–Iraq historian with Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno, Commanding General of Multi-National Corps–Iraq, June 24, 2007, CENTCOM Iraq Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsyl- vania, https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/CENTCOM-IRAQ-papers/index.cfm. 77. Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 1: 412. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The Cult of the Persuasive 119 trust and rapport with al-Maliki did not, as Casey had hoped, lead al-Maliki to abandon those interests.78 Gen. Petraeus’s willingness to use carrots and sticks to incentivize Iraqi compliance marked an important exception to the general rule of reliance on teaching and persuasion. First as MNSTC-I and later as MNF-I commander, Petraeus used an “escalation ladder” of inºuence, beginning with persuasion and then escalating to conditionality if persuasion failed. As commander of MNSTC-I, Petraeus tried to inºuence the Iraqi command structure, speciªcally by preventing interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi from taking control of the elite Iraqi special operations forces (then called the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Forces, or the ICTF). Petraeus explained that Allawi “wanted to put the ICTF directly under him. I told him that I would withdraw support for the ICTF if that was done. He was dissuaded by my pledge to cut off funding and re- sources if that took place.”79 From February 2007 to July 2008, Petraeus focused on Iraqi personnel prac- tices. Petraeus explained that as “MNF-I Commander, I had a huge issue with the leaders of the Police Commando forces (one three-star, two two-star divi- sion commanders, and at least 6 brigade commanders, plus several battalion commanders), each of whom had proven incompetent or intimidated or cor- rupt or unprofessional during the year or so leading up to the 2007 surge. Once again, I refused resources (for the formal reconstitution of each brigade— which we took about a month to do, pulling the unit off line to do so)—unless the commanders were replaced and removed from the service.”80 The escala- tion to conditionality was effective. Iraqi Interior Minister Jawad Bolani and other senior leaders within the al-Maliki government conceded, purging many of the most egregious police and military commanders.81 Petraeus’s successors—Gen. Odierno and Gen. Lloyd Austin—reverted to 78. This assessment of ineffective inºuence is uncontroversial. Casey himself publicly acknowl- edges his inability to convince al-Maliki to follow his advice. See also Tecott, “The Cult of the Per- suasive,” 307–326. 79. Email correspondence between the author and Gen. David Petraeus, February 19, 2020. Iraqi ofªcials corroborated Petraeus’s comments. Author interview with retired Iraqi general who served under al-Maliki and interacted with Petraeus, by Zoom, February 2020; author interview with U.S. ofªcer who served under Petraeus, by Zoom, April 2020. 80. Ibid. 81. Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 2: 283–285; Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint Small Payoff,” 129; Lake, “Iraq, 2003–11,” 239; Linda Robinson, Tell Me How This Ends: General David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq (New York: Public Affairs, 2008), 81, 156, 261, 331. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 International Security 47:3 120 the institutional norm, relying once again on teaching and persuasion. Like Casey before them, Odierno and Austin had little success teaching and per- suading Iraqi leaders to reform Iraqi military organizational practices.82 Below the general ofªcers, from the earliest deployments in 2004 to the last deployments in 2011 and across every province, the MNSTC-I adviser teams embedded within Iraqi Army units almost uniformly sought to teach and per- suade Iraqi division, brigade, and battalion commanders to implement more professional military organizational practices.83 In the words of another ad- viser, “It was really about building relationships. We spent as much time as we could with our Iraqi counterparts. . . . We built those relationships and tried to do our best to guide them and help them make their systems better [rather than] trying to force them to use American systems for doing that.”84 The ad- visers encouraged Iraqi ofªcers to reward merit and punish incompetence, cor- ruption, and sectarianism, and to make training regimens more realistic and urgent. They tried to convince Iraqi ofªcers that abiding by the formal chain of command and delegating authority were in their own interests. It is notable, and consistent with the expectations of the cult of the persuasive, that most ad- visers continued to emphasize the effectiveness of relationship-building in advising, despite their counterparts’ routine disregard for their advice.85 the cult of the persuasive in iraq What explains U.S. Army advisers’ preference for persuasion and aversion to conditionality in Iraq? The cult of the persuasive generates ªve main hypothe- ses. First, it expects Washington to delegate the advisory project in Iraq to the U.S. military and to refrain from intruding in the project for its duration. Sec- ond, it expects the U.S. Army to pursue its bureaucratic interests in protecting its autonomy by managing its reputation, protecting the combat mission, and sustaining its bureaucratic machinery without disruption. Third, it expects the U.S. Army to promote an ideology of persuasion emphasizing the normative and causal superiority of persuasion over conditionality. Fourth, it expects most U.S. military advisers deployed to Iraq to conform to the persuasion ap- proach because of some combination of professional incentives and genuine 82. Tecott, “The Cult of the Persuasive,” 309–329. 83. I base this assessment on my review of 317 oral histories by former embedded advisers who served across the duration of the advisory period and across the different provinces, and original interviews with twenty-two former embedded advisers. 84. Angie Slattery, “Interview with Major John Atilano,” March 1, 2012, OLE Interview Collection. 85. For evidence of Iraqi military leaders’ consistent disregard for the advice of their embedded advisers, see Tecott, “The Cult of the Persuasive,” 313–315. l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . e d u / i s e c / a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / 4 7 3 9 5 2 0 6 9 5 8 7 / i s e c _ a _ 0 0 4 5 3 p d . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 The Cult of the Persuasive 121 ideological commitment. Fifth, it expects that frequent episodes of ineffective persuasion attempts, and rare episodes of effective conditionality, will not cause the U.S. Army to signiªcantly reform its approach. The evidence aligns with these expectations. delegation and deference. After political ofªcials made the fateful deci- sions to disband and then rebuild the Iraqi Army, the U.S. military was respon- sible for designing and implementing the U.S. military assistance effort in Iraq. The ªrst Coalition Military Assistance Training Team (CMATT) com- mander, Gen. Paul Eaton, reported that the only direction he received in his initial efforts to develop the new Iraqi military was a brief PowerPoint presentation that he believed originated at U.S. Central Command. Within the conªnes of his $173 million budget, Eaton collaborated with other general
ofªcers—principally Gen. James Schwitters and his deputy, Brig. Gen. Richard
Sherlock—to get the project off the ground.86

Security assistance was central to the George W. Bush administration’s strat-
egy in Iraq. As put by President Bush in June 2005, “Our strategy can be
summed up in this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”87 Never-
theless, the Bush administration’s close attention to and direction of so many
elements of U.S. policy in Iraq, from election timelines to the employment of
coalition forces, did not extend to MNF-I’s and MNSTC-I’s efforts to develop
the ISF to actually ªght effectively.

This pattern of civilians delegating and deferring to the U.S. military with
respect to ISF development held from the Bush to the Barack Obama adminis-
trations. Gen. Odierno, MNF-I commanding general, noted approvingly, “We
haven’t gotten political pressure at all from the leadership, in my opinion. You
know, they have allowed us to make decisions and move forward as we see
ªt.”88 When I asked, “What role did the civilian executive branch play in the
military assistance efforts in Iraq?” a former MNSTC-I commander responded,
“None. They were not involved. We would notify them of what we were do-
ing.”89 Interviews with ofªcials who served on the National Security Councils
for the Bush and Obama administrations likewise afªrmed, in the words of

86. Author interview with Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Paul Eaton, by telephone, August 2019.
87. “Full text: George Bush’s Iraq speech.”
88. Interview, [name redacted], the Multi-National Corps–Iraq historian with Lieutenant General
Raymond Odierno, Commanding General of Multi-National Corps–Iraq,
June 24, 2007,
CENTCOM Iraq Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsyl-
vania, https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/CENTCOM-IRAQ-papers/index.cfm.
89. Author interview with a former commanding general of MNSTC-I, by Zoom, August 2020.

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International Security 47:3 122

one ofªcial, that “anything to do with the development of the ISF was, thank-
fully, not our job. That was an MNF-I job. We had enough on our plate.”90 U.S.
ambassadors to Iraq likewise viewed matters pertaining to ISF development as
“MNSTC-I’s lane.”91

In keeping with theoretical expectations, U.S. civilians consistently dele-
gated and deferred to the U.S. military advisers in theater to inºuence Iraqi
leaders to reform their military.

pursuing bureaucratic interests. The U.S. Army aimed in its approach
to the advisory project in Iraq to preserve its autonomy against civilian intru-
sion through reputation management, to protect the combat mission, and to
sustain the bureaucratic machinery of advising without disruption.

Although the White House did not intervene to direct the military’s ap-
proach to building the Iraqi Army, the commanding generals worried about
political pressure (particularly from Congress) and took pains to assuage the
United States’ concerns about the advisory project. Gen. Odierno, for in-
stance, explained:

There is signiªcant political pressure in the United States, and you cannot ig-
nore it. You can pretend like it doesn’t affect you, but it absolutely is not
true. . . . You know, one of the major pressures is, as we have gone out in the
press, you see people look at every word you say, and they use it to whatever
end they might. That has [been] frustrating. I think we have tried to insulate
ourselves from making any recommendation or decisions based on any politi-
cal pressure.
. However, again, the political pressure being exerted by
Congress, the inºuence they are having, trying to have, on the U.S. population,
and the pressure that puts on us has made it more signiªcant, in my mind.92

The U.S. Army tried to project a narrative of progress in the advisory mission,
including by releasing a weekly publication called the Advisor to promote ISF
accomplishments. The publication is extremely positive about the progress of
the Iraqi Army, even when the Iraqi Army clearly failed to demonstrate even
basic battleªeld competence (the contrast between Iraqi Army performance
and Advisor reporting is starkest in 2006).93 One former MNSTC-I commander

90. Author interview with former National Security Council ofªcial, by Zoom, May 2022.
91. Ibid.; author interview with a former commanding general of MNSTC-I, by Zoom, August
2020.
92. Interview, [name redacted], the Multi-National Corps–Iraq historian with Lieutenant General
Raymond Odierno, Commanding General of Multi-National Corps–Iraq,
June 24, 2007,
CENTCOM Iraq Papers, U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsyl-
vania, https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/CENTCOM-IRAQ-papers/index.cfm.
93. Multinational Security Transition Command–Iraq, Adviser, University of Florida Digital
Collections, 2005, https://ufdc.uº.edu/AA00061469/00145/citation. For discussion of the Iraqi
Army’s poor performance in 2006, see Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 1: 584–

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The Cult of the Persuasive 123

recalled his efforts to “put lipstick on a pig,” by “focusing on metrics that
made the ISF look like it was making progress.”94 This rosy outlook mani-
fested in the rubric that MNSTC-I developed for evaluating ISF units—the
Transition Readiness Assessments. These assessments were widely recognized
as a poor evaluation system by all who wrote them and all who received them.
At the mention of Transition Readiness Assessments, interviewees would
often interject before I could ªnish the sentence to tell me that they were
“trash,”95 “[totally] bogus,”96 and “way worse than SIGACT [signiªcant activi-
ties] data.”97 One former adviser explained:

The measures of effects [effectiveness] were coming down from the Coalition,
from the force up in Baghdad, were things that were irrelevant . . . like “Is the
Iraqi Security Forces fully manned?’ I’m like, Yes, it’s fully manned, it’s fully
manned with militiamen.” The historical record will be quite entertaining on
this . . . because you’re going to ªnd a bunch of categories that are color-coded
for good to go. Yet, the text boxes that go with them [are] going to say some-
thing horriªc like, “Iraqi Security Forces in MND-Southeast are completely
dominated by Shi’a militias. They sponsor attacks on the local population
against the occupation. They are sponsored by Iran. We have no control over
them. Assessment, green.” I was allowed to write what I wanted to in the box
as long as the thing was green, because by their criteria it was green.98

The Defense Department’s reports to Congress on progress in Iraq always em-
phasized progress and glossed over fundamental problems. As explained by
one incensed reader of these reports:

The ªrst three reports to Congress on Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq
failed to meet virtually every possible standard for credibility and integrity.
They were a disgrace to the public service and to everyone who participated in
drafting and approving them. Giving them a grade of “F-” was charitable . . .
the ISF section makes all the usual claims about the readiness of the Iraqi
Army, but provides no assessment of problems and risks. The major weak-
nesses and shortcomings in the Iraqi security forces, police forces, and para-
military forces are totally ignored.99

587. See also Benjamin Connable, Iraqi Army Will to Fight: A Will to Fight Case Study with Lessons for
Western Security Force Assistance (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2022), 116–149.
94. Author interview with a former commanding general of MNSTC-I, by Zoom, 2020.
95. Author interview with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) James Dubik, by telephone, August 2019.
96. Author interview with a former embedded adviser, by telephone, June 6, 2019.
97. Author interview with a former embedded adviser, by telephone, June 10, 2019.
98. Lisa Beckenbaugh, “Interview with Major Stephen Campbell,” August 27, 2013, OLE Inter-
view Collection.
99. Anthony H. Cordesman, Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq. The August 2006 Quarterly Re-
port: Progress but Far from the Facts the Nation Needs and Deserves (Washington, DC: Center for Stra-
tegic and International Studies, 2006), 4–5.

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International Security 47:3 124

Fearing civilian intrusion, many of the generals responsible for evaluating and
communicating developments in the advisory project sought to project an ap-
pearance of progress, regardless of the reality.

The U.S. military also focused on setting up and sustaining the bureaucratic
machinery of advising so that it would not compromise the combat mission,
regardless of whether that machinery was effectively advancing the nominal
goal of building a better Iraqi Army. The U.S. Army focused on stafªng the ad-
visory roles and cycling personnel in and out of theater.100 The army did little
to change the professional incentive structures that led competent U.S. of-
ªcers to avoid the advisory mission and inexperienced ones or under-
performers to settle for it. Indeed, the U.S. Army excluded the assignment
from its 2005 list of “key developmental or branch qualifying” jobs that ofªcers
required for promotion.”101 Combat remained the key to advancement up the
ranks within the army.

The design of the Military Transition Teams is a clear manifestation of the
military’s focus on setting up and maintaining a sustainable bureaucracy for
the advisory mission, regardless of whether it actually advanced the ofªcial
mission of building a better Iraqi Army. Personnel selected for the Military
Transition Teams were often underperforming junior ofªcers who had no prior
deployments or special backgrounds in advising. In reference to their motley
nature, transition team members took to calling themselves “mutts.”102

That military transition tours were short is also a telling indicator of the mil-
itary’s commitment to sustaining its bureaucracy over ensuring that it built an
effective Iraqi Army. The tours lasted approximately twelve months—usually
only nine in theater conducting advisory work. The army rotated the advisers
out of theater before they could build the personal relationships upon which
their inºuence was believed to hinge. According to The U.S. Army in the Iraq
War, “In many ways, the transition teams had been tasked to rebuild the very
sinews of the Iraqi military. . . . Yet it was on the shoulders of these transition
teams, ad hoc organizations comprised of a mismatched group of personnel
with only eight days of adviser-speciªc training, that the MNF-I campaign
plan rested.”103

promoting ideology. MNSTC-I’s instruction to its advisers in Iraq over-
whelmingly promoted persuasion and discouraged bargaining. The military

100. Author interview with Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Paul Eaton, by telephone, August 2019.
101. Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 1: 470.
102. Ibid.
103. Ibid., 1: 475.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 125

promoted the ideology primarily through training, brieªngs, and recom-
mended readings.

Training for the embedded advisers was initially brief and haphazard, but it
increased in duration and intensity over the course of the advisory period. The
senior leaders directed the advisers in the normative and causal superiority of
persuasion. Schwitters was convinced that the most important element of the
advisory effort was to cultivate the ability of advisers to persuade Iraqi
decision-makers to follow their advice. In an interview for the OLE project,
Schwitters explained:

The core aspect of what [the advisers] had to do was something we don’t usu-
ally do as soldiers—that is, to develop human relationships with individuals
and small groups. . . . We needed people who were temperamentally and
experientially trained to go in, put their arms around a bunch of folks and de-
velop relationships from which they could then inºuence action and behavior
and develop capabilities.104

Schwitters developed a makeshift pre-deployment curriculum for incoming
advisers at Camp Taji. Schwitters’s curriculum emphasized “Iraqi-speciªc cul-
tural understanding”105 as a foundation for the relationship-building that was
believed to be prerequisite—and sufªcient—for effective inºuence.

Brig. Gen. Sherlock, the deputy commander of the CMATT under Schwitters
and the person responsible for managing the process of “turning soldiers from
the 98th reserve division into military advisers,” stated that “in the Iraqi cul-
ture, everything is done on a personal relationship basis.”106 In his brieªngs to
every incoming adviser team, Sherlock explained that their mission was
“not to coerce and force Iraqis” to make certain decisions, but rather to build
the “foundations of trust” necessary to persuade Iraqi ofªcers to follow
U.S. guidance.107

Pre-deployment training for the advisers evolved quickly from the make-
shift brieªngs at Taji in 2004 to an iterative effort emphasizing the centrality of
relationships to inºuencing Iraqi decision-making. In 2005, Lt. Col. John Nagl
developed pre-deployment training for the adviser teams at Camp Atterbury

104. Steven Clay, “Interview with Brigadier General James Schwitters,” August 27, 2013, OLE In-
terview Collection.
105. Ibid.
106. Steven Clay, “Interview with Brigadier General Richard Sherlock,” November 16, 2006, OLE
Interview Collection.
107. Author interview with Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Richard Sherlock, Arlington, VA, August 2019.
Sherlock’s rank had changed by the time the interview was conducted.

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International Security 47:3 126

in Indiana. The curriculum that Nagl developed focused heavily on establish-
ing relationships with Iraqi counterparts. The training even simulated dinner
encounters with counterpart Iraqi commanders, complete with interpreters
and Iraqi food, to troubleshoot the transition team members’ approach to
building rapport.108 Once they arrived in Iraq, advisers received further train-
ing at Camp Taji and at the Phoenix Academy, where they were taught that
the keys to the relationships upon which their inºuence would hinge in-
cluded cultural sensitivity and avoiding cultural arrogance.109 Lt. Gen. Frank
Helmick, commanding general of MNSTC-I from 2008 to 2009, set up a week-
long training course for incoming adviser teams that focused heavily on
relationship-building and demonstrating what right looks like.110

The U.S. Army also assigned readings to indoctrinate the embedded advis-
ers. Dozens of advisers (and several general ofªcers, including Casey111 and
Schwitters112) identiªed T. E. Lawrence as a role model.113 Former embedded
adviser Maj. Ryan Ledlinsky, for instance, said that all embedded advisers
should read “Seven Pillars of Wisdom; it’s gospel. T. E. Lawrence was a smart
dude.”114 The embedded advisers embraced Lawrence of Arabia’s conviction
that effective advisers helped their counterparts achieve their own goals rather
than those of their advisers, and that understanding Arab culture would
form the foundation for establishing relationships, trust, and inºuence.115
Lawrence, in some sense, was the cult leader at the center of the cult of
the persuasive.

following the doctrine. The cult of the persuasive expects the general
ofªcers and embedded advisers to rely on persuasion and to eschew condi-
tionality either because they internalize the ideology that persuasion is norma-
tively right and conditionality wrong, or because they understand that their
professional incentives are best served by following the doctrine. The norma-

108. Author interview with Lt. Col. (Ret.) John Nagl, by telephone, August 2019.
109. Author interview with Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Richard Sherlock, Arlington, VA, August 2019; ibid.
110. Author interview with Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Frank Helmick, by telephone, May 2020.
111. Casey, Strategic Reºections, 51.
112. Steven Clay, “Interview with Brigadier General James Schwitters,” December 13, 2006, OLE
Interview Collection.
113. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph, subscriber’s ed. (London: Herbert John
Hodgson, 1926). One former embedded adviser, Maj. Christopher Lawson, explained in his OLE
interview that Seven Pillars of Wisdom had been assigned reading. See John McCool, “Interview
with Major Christopher Lawson,” October 31, 2006, OLE Interview Collection.
114. Jenna Fike, “Interview with Major Ryan Yedlinsky,” March 21, 2011, OLE Interview
Collection.
115. See, for example, Laurence Lessard, “Interview with Major Jon-Paul Maddaloni,” January 24,
2008, OLE Interview Collection.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 127

tive language employed by the U.S. advisers to explain their choice of
inºuence approaches aligns with these expectations.

When pressed on the subject of why he did not escalate to conditionality
when al-Maliki ignored his efforts at persuasion, Casey said, “I was an advisor
in a sovereign nation, my role was to advise my partner, and even when it was
frustrating it was up to them to decide.”116 Casey explained in Strategic
Reºections and in multiple interviews that he often disagreed with how al-
Maliki made sectarian-based promotions and disregarded the chain of com-
mand. But he did not want to use U.S. security assistance as leverage because
he viewed al-Maliki as a partner who deserved “respect and deference.”117
When Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asked Casey to exert stronger
pressure on al-Maliki, Casey refused on the grounds that his role ought to be to
provide military advice and defer to al-Maliki’s decisions, rather than to use
U.S. security assistance to incentivize al-Maliki to take steps in accordance
with U.S. interests.

The Military Transition Team advisers used similar language to explain their
approach. In the words of one former embedded adviser, “Iraq is a sovereign
nation. We weren’t there to force them to do what we wanted, we’re not impe-
rialists. They weren’t always going to do things our way and that’s okay. It’s
up to them. We do our best to earn their trust so that when we explain why
we’re saying what we’re saying they’ll listen, but it’s their decision.”118 An-
other adviser described his job in this way: “We had to . . . determine where
they wanted to be in the future and how we could help them get there.”119 Not
all advisors internalized the ideology—others followed the script because con-
formity was the safe approach from a career perspective. In one example, an
advisor explained: “We were supposed to advise, coach, train, and assist” and
to “implore them to do things we wanted them to do that they didn’t necessar-
ily want to do,” and “we were supposed to respect the fact that they were a
sovereign nation.”120 The repeated use of the word “supposed to” suggests
that he simply followed instructions (regardless of whether he believed that
they made sense) in order to get through his tour without incident.

In stark contrast and as a rare exception, Gen. Petraeus’s response to the

116. Author interview with Gen. (Ret.) George Casey, by Zoom, April 2020.
117. Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 1: 640.
118. Author interview with a former embedded adviser, by telephone, July 2019.
119. Lessard, “Interview with Major Jon-Paul Maddaloni.”
120. John McCool, “Interview with Major Paul Esmahan,” November 2, 2006, OLE Interview
Collection.

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International Security 47:3 128

question, “Why did you choose the strategies of inºuence you chose?” was
“Because it was clear that one would work better than the other. Tended to use
a ladder of escalation: persuasion ªrst, conditionality next (most often for per-
sonnel issues), threat to withdraw resources and support last . . . situations
were different, to be sure, but those are the generalities.”121

persistent persuasion. The cult of

the persuasive expects the U.S.
Army’s approach to inºuence to remain ªxed despite evidence of the ineffec-
tiveness of persuasion and indications that escalating to conditionality could
be productive.

U.S. advisers,

from MNF-I commanding generals down to Military
Transition Teams’ battalion commanders, expressed frustration with their Iraqi
counterparts’ routine disregard for their advice. Nevertheless, the institutional
approach to the interest divergence problem—persuasion but not pressure—
never budged. As discussed in previous sections, almost all U.S. advisers in
Iraq continued to rely on persuasion. The consistency is all the more remark-
able given the relative progress made by generals Petraeus and James Dubik
when they combined persuasion with conditionality. Rather than learn from
their more successful predecessors, generals Odierno and Austin reverted to
the institutional norm, relying on teaching and persuasion, and instruct-
ing their chain of command to do the same.

alternative explanations: visibility and bargaining power

The cult of the persuasive explains the rarity of conditionality in security assis-
tance in Iraq—and the occasional exercise of conditionality—better than alter-
native explanations. The prevailing view in the alliance management literature
holds that patrons fail to incentivize weaker clients to cooperate when they
lack bargaining credibility.122 Similarly, a prominent explanation in the security
assistance literature centers on variation in interest divergence, monitoring ca-
pacity, and bargaining credibility. Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker argue that
conditionality was rare in Iraq because the United States lacked the monitor-
ing capacity or bargaining credibility to overcome interest divergence and
incentivize Iraqi leaders to make necessary reforms. They attribute Petraeus’s
escalation to conditionality to the circumstances of the surge. The authors
argue that the larger number of troops in theater temporarily provided the
massive intelligence gathering apparatus that was necessary to detect Iraqi

121. Email correspondence between the author and Gen. Petraeus, February 19, 2020.
122. Snyder, Alliance Politics, 165–200.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 129

disregard for U.S. direction. They also argue that Iraqi dependence was higher
during the surge, increasing U.S. bargaining credibility.123 Upon close inspec-
tion, however, the evidence from Iraq contradicts these arguments.

The visibility factor cannot explain the infrequent use of conditionality. Iraqi
military organizational practices were highly visible to U.S. advisers not only
during the surge, but from the beginning and for almost the duration of the
advisory effort. Repeated efforts by the MNF-I commanders before the surge
(Gen. Casey) and after the surge (Gen. Odierno) to persuade Prime Minister al-
Maliki to implement more meritocratic personnel policies, abide by the chain
of command, and curb corruption make clear their acute awareness of the
problems. Former Military Transition Team advisers—deployed before, dur-
ing, and after the surge—likewise report in their oral histories their frequent
frustrations with speciªc measures taken by their counterpart division, bri-
gade, and battalion commanders that undermined the development of the
Iraqi Army.

Bargaining credibility is also not a persuasive explanation for why the
United States so rarely used conditionality to incentivize Iraqi leaders to re-
form the Iraqi Army. Prime Minister al-Maliki feared that the United States
might help Sunni elements stage a coup against him.124 Al-Maliki also under-
stood that his bid to remain in power despite his loss to the Iraqiyah party in
the March 2010 election hinged on support from the United States.125 Al-
Maliki believed that the coalition had enormous leverage over him. Rather
than leveraging al-Maliki’s existential fears of U.S. abandonment as a bargain-
ing chip, U.S. military leaders instead repeatedly assured him of the United
States’ stalwart commitment. As David Lake summarizes, “Replacement of the
proxy was also possible. Due to the deep involvement of the United States in
Iraqi politics, and its large role in handpicking al-Maliki as its proxy,
Washington could in theory have replaced al-Maliki—if not at will, given its
reliance on elections, then certainly with some relatively modest cost. This
ability was afªrmed in the 2010 election when the United States could have
tipped the scales against al-Maliki and again when it helped push him out of
ofªce in 2014.”126

123. Biddle, Macdonald, and Baker, “Small Footprint, Small Payoff,” 129.
124. Emma Sky, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq (New York:
PublicAffairs, 2015), 237.
125. Rayburn and Sobchak, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, 2: 508; author interview with an Iraqi
army expert who served in Iraq, Arlington, VA, July 2019; Sky, The Unraveling.
126. Lake, “Iraq, 2003–11,” 243. It is worth emphasizing that if the threat to remove al-Maliki

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International Security 47:3 130

The timing of U.S. advisers’ occasional exercise of conditionality in Iraq
also contradicts the argument that an increase in U.S. monitoring capacity
and bargaining credibility associated with the surge explained the choice.
Gen. Petraeus escalated from persuasion to conditionality not only during the
surge as commanding general of MNF-I but also before the surge as com-
manding general of MNSTC-I. Moreover, Petraeus’s commanding ofªcer in
2004, MNF-I commanding general Casey, had, if anything, more visibility and
leverage than Petraeus did, but, like most advisers in Iraq, he elected to rely on
persuasion. In keeping with the cult of the persuasive, rare adviser decisions to
escalate to conditionality in Iraq had less to do with structural changes in the
environment than with the idiosyncrasies of individual advisers.

Beyond Iraq

The cult of the persuasive permeates the U.S. Army and drives its approach to
inºuence in security assistance beyond Iraq and around the world. The easiest
test of external validity should be the “most similar” case—U.S. security assis-
tance in Afghanistan. Both efforts were of central importance to the United
States during the long wars of the post-9/11 period, and, commensurate with
the stakes, both were massive in terms of dollars spent and advisers sent. The
U.S. Army’s approach to inºuencing Afghan leaders to build a better Afghan
National Army aligns with the expectations of the cult of the persuasive.
Washington largely delegated the effort to build the Afghan National Army to
the Defense Department. The U.S. Army prioritized preserving its autonomy,
combat mission, and bureaucratic machinery. It taught its advisers to rely on
persuasion and to avoid bargaining in their efforts to convince Afghan leaders
to take steps, such as curbing corruption, to professionalize the Afghan
National Army.127 U.S. advisers were acutely aware that Afghan military orga-
nizational practices were stymying the progress of the Afghan Army. Rather
than escalate to conditionality, however, coalition commanders generally re-
ported slow but steady progress to Washington. For its part, Washington

from power was credible to al-Maliki, he would likely have considered (and indeed did con-
sider) the more modest threats to pause or withhold elements of U.S. assistance to be credible
as well.
127. Sarah Chayes, Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2015), 41, 45–47; John F. Sopko, Reconstructing the Afghan National Defense and Security
Forces: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan (Arlington, VA: Special Inspector General for
Afghanistan Reconstruction, 2017), esp. 107–141.

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The Cult of the Persuasive 131

passed along the military’s optimistic reports to the U.S. public and continued
to defer to the military rather than intervene to force change.128

The factors that make Iraq and Afghanistan outlier cases also make them
hard tests of the theory. There are strong indications that the cult of the persua-
sive permeates the U.S. Army, driving its advisers’ approach to inºuence in se-
curity assistance all over the world, far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. The
contemporary doctrine that describes how U.S. Army advisers should conduct
security assistance generally prescribes teaching and persuasion and pro-
scribes conditionality and direct command. Several ªeld manuals emphasize
the importance of relationships, rapport, and trust, demonstrations of cultural
understanding, and people skills. The forward to FM 3-07.1 states: “Advising
establishes a personal and a professional relationship where trust and
conªdence deªne how well the advisor will be able to inºuence the foreign se-
curity force.”129 FM 3-22 instructs advisers to “accomplish their mission by
building relationships and rapport” because it is through “their interpersonal
skills and rapport that they will positively affect counterpart action.” But be
careful, FM 3-22 warns, “genuine rapport is developed slowly, but it can be ru-
ined in an instant.”130 Doctrine provides evidence of ideology not because it
shapes how advisers think—doctrine is not necessarily widely read—but be-
cause it reºects the beliefs of the organization.

Beyond army doctrine, there are strong indications of the cult of the persua-
sive in the founding, training, and public statements of the U.S. Army’s new
Security Force Assistance Brigades. In 2018, the U.S. Army announced that it
would institutionalize the security assistance mission by forming six new
SFABs under the Security Force Assistance Command. The cult of the persua-
sive expects the U.S. Army’s approach to security assistance to optimize to
protecting the combat mission. Indeed, the U.S. Army formed the SFABs ex-
plicitly to protect the army’s combat mission from being diluted by the advi-
sory mission.131 As explained by U.S. Army readiness ofªcer Maj. Nick

128. Peter Beaumont, “U.S. Lies and Deception Spelled Out in Afghanistan Papers’ Shock-
ing Detail,” Guardian, December 9, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/09/
afghanistan-papers-military-washington-post-analysis.
129. Department of the Army, FM 3-07.1: Security Force Assistance (Washington, DC: Government
Publishing Ofªce [GPO], 2009), 2–8.
130. Department of the Army, FM 3-22: Army Support to Security Cooperation (Washington, DC:
GPO, 2013), 6–2.
131. C. Todd Lopez, “Security Force Assistance Brigades to Free Brigade Combat Teams from Ad-
vise, Assist Mission,” U.S. Army, September 19, 2017, https://www.army.mil/article/188004/
security_force_assistance_brigades_to_free_brigade_combat_teams_from.

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International Security 47:3 132

Clemente: “The previous method of providing advise and assist capability cost
the Army decisive action readiness. . . . The creation of SFABs is intended to
help alleviate this challenge by providing a purpose built advise and assist
force while freeing up our BCTs [Brigade Combat Teams] to be ready for their
primary mission.”132 In keeping with the theory’s expectations that the U.S.
Army leaders involved in security assistance are likely to focus on avoiding
reputational damage, the 1st SFAB commander stated that “advisor miscon-
duct remains the largest strategic and organizational risk for the SFAC
[Security Force Assistance Command].”133

The cult of the persuasive expects the training and public statements of
SFAB leaders and advisers to reºect and reinforce the normative belief
that persuasion is right and conditionality wrong, and the efªcacy belief that
persuasion works and conditionality backªres. Indeed, the training program
for the SFAB advisers at the Military Advisor Training Academy at Fort
Benning discourages conditionality, prohibits direct command, and encour-
ages rapport-based persuasion. The recommended reading list for the SFAB
advisers includes Stuart Diamond’s Getting More: How to Be a More Persuasive
Person in Work and Life, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Inºuence People,
and T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.134 Former SFAC commander
Maj. Gen. Scott Jackson repeatedly emphasized his faith in an approach to
inºuence based on personal relationships.135 Senior SFAB advisers report that
“the strength of the 3rd SFAB is the ability to build relationships with allies
and partners at the personal level.”136 A July 2021 Army Times cover reads
“Looking for Friends: Army SFAB Footprints Found across the Globe.”137 Ac-

132. Brian Hamilton, “Army Moves Closer to Establishing First Security Force Assistance Bri-
gade,” U.S. Army, May 18, 2017, https://www.army.mil/article/187991/army_moves_closer_to
_establishing_ªrst_security_force_assistance_brigade.
133. Kyle Rempfer, “Scandals in U.S. Adviser Brigade Alarm Leaders behind Closed Doors,”
Army Times, August 10, 2022, https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2022/08/10/
scandals-in-us-adviser-brigade-alarm-leaders-behind-closed-doors/.
134. “Combat Adviser Training Course Recommended Reading List” (Fort Benning, GA: Mili-
tary Adviser Training Academy, n.d.), https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/316thcav/MATA/
Content/pdf/CATC%20Recommended%20Reading%20List.pdf.
135. See Maj. Gen. Scott Jackson’s panel presentation in Jackson, Matisek, and Joyce, “The Future
of U.S. Security Force,” 5:34; Lopez, “Security Force Assistance Brigades.”
136. Jessica Jackson, “3rd SFAB Supports CENTCOM Objectives,” Ofªce of the Deputy Assistant
Secretary of the Army for Defense Exports and Cooperation, August 9, 2021, https://www
.dasadec.army.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/2724716/3rd-sfab-supports-centcom-objectives/.
137. “Looking for Friends: Army SFAB Footprints across the Globe,” Army Times 83, no. 2 (Febru-
ary 2022).

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The Cult of the Persuasive 133

cording to one ofªcial SFAB Twitter account, “Inºuence is a byproduct of mu-
tual trust forged in the ªeld and in the classroom, shoulder to shoulder with
our partners.”138

Conclusion

Security assistance is a ubiquitous feature of international relations and a
reºexive tool of U.S. defense strategy, and yet the United States struggles to
build more effective militaries in partner states. Security assistance is hard be-
cause recipient leaders are often strongly motivated to implement policies that
keep their militaries weak. In the context of interest divergence, the United
States builds better militaries when it successfully inºuences recipient leaders
to reform their militaries, and U.S. security assistance fails when U.S. inºu-
ence fails.

This study typologizes U.S. inºuence approaches in advising and presents a
novel theory to explain adviser choices. U.S. advisers can climb an inºuence
escalation ladder comprised of four rungs: teaching, persuasion, conditional-
ity, and direct command. I have shown that the United States’ preference for
persuasion and aversion to conditionality in security assistance can be traced
to the bureaucratic interests of the U.S. Army and the ideology that it has de-
veloped—what I call the “cult of the persuasive”—to advance those interests.
I ªnd strong support for the theory in the critical case and hard test of the U.S.
effort to build a military in Iraq, and I present evidence of the theory’s external
validity beyond Iraq. The study thus exposes the bureaucratic drivers of the
United States’ struggle to build better militaries in partner states.

The ªndings have policy implications for the United States, which promotes
security assistance as a panacea for fragile states and great power competition.
It is difªcult to build stronger militaries in fragile states, and prospects for im-
provement depend largely on whether recipient leaders prioritize military ef-
fectiveness above competing concerns. U.S. advisers are unlikely to convince
unmotivated recipient leaders to cooperate through teaching and persuasion
alone and will likely do better if they combine persuasion with conditionality
to incentivize cooperation. Whether such tactics would meaningfully im-
prove the recipient military depends on the nature of the threat and its sig-

138. The 5th SFAB’s Twitter account (@5thSFAB) may have deleted the tweet. The author can pro-
vide a screenshot of the tweet upon request.

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International Security 47:3 134

niªcance to the provider. The scale of U.S. investments, the duration of
advisory tours, and even the caliber of advisers (all frequently cited as impor-
tant determinants of security assistance outcomes) will have little bearing on
U.S. inºuence and security assistance outcomes without direct civilian in-
volvement in efforts to reform partner militaries, or fundamental reform of the
U.S. military’s approach to advising. The ªndings suggest, however, that re-
form is unlikely without civilian intervention. Finally, the study suggests that
as long as U.S. policymakers remain reluctant to play a serious role in Defense
Department–led security assistance, the United States should be more selective
about where it deploys advisers to build partner capacity.

This study also proposes several areas for future research. It would be pro-
ductive to compare the U.S. Army’s approach to advising with that of U.S.
Army Special Forces. In contrast to its parent organization, the Green Berets re-
gard advising as part of its organizational essence.139 Theories of bureaucratic
politics and organizational behavior suggest that the Green Berets might ap-
proach the interest divergence problem quite differently than the U.S. Army.
Future research could investigate whether the other military services, other
U.S. federal bureaucracies (such as the State Department), and other nations’
federal bureaucracies ªnd their interests served by reliance on persuasion in
advising. Outside the security assistance context, future research could also
explore how bureaucratic pathologies like those driving the U.S. Army’s ap-
proach to advising may distort the services’ approaches to security coopera-
tion, deterrence, and operational planning, with serious implications for the
likelihood of war and escalation.

This article has focused on pathologies in U.S. Army security assistance, but
the cult of the persuasive is a symptom of broader trends in U.S. civil-military
relations. U.S. policymakers task the Defense Department with an ever-
expanding set of missions that are further and further aªeld from the services’
raisons d’être.140 Meanwhile, civilian deference to the military erodes the links
that tether U.S. foreign policy goals to the military tools of national power.141 It
is striking that high-proªle failures to build militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan

139. Even within the Green Berets, however, there is duality between competing identities: advis-
ing on the one hand and direct action on the other.
140. Rosa Brooks, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pen-
tagon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017); Harig and Ruffa, “Knocking on the Barracks’ Door.”
141. Beliakova, “Erosion by Deference”; Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and
Leadership in Wartime (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012).

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The Cult of the Persuasive 135

did not precipitate meaningful dips in the U.S. public’s trust in the U.S.
military,142 serious efforts by civilian leaders to adjust course, or civilian deci-
sions to curtail Defense Department–driven security assistance. Understand-
ing civilian deference to the U.S. military in the United States—and the
behavior of the military in the context of civilian deference—is crucial for com-
prehending how U.S. foreign policy is formulated and implemented.

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6
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142. Gallup, “Conªdence in Institutions”; Burbach, “Partisan Dimensions of Conªdence in the
U.S. Military.” The Cult of the Persuasive image

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