The United States has a long history of helping other nations develop and improve their military and other security forces. U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) efforts with a goal of building partner capacity (BPC) continue in earnest in the contemporary era and will remain prominent defense activities in the future. However, changing economic realities and the ongoing reductions in overall defense spending related to the end of more than a decade of war will affect the funding available for these initiatives. How can DoD increase the effectiveness of its efforts to build partner capacity while also increasing the efficiency of...

This chapter provides background on U.S. BPC efforts, along with key terminology and information about authorities and various approaches to working with PNs in a BPC context. It begins with an overview of BPC, describing important terms and the basic oversight of BPC efforts. Next, the chapter continues with a discussion of how BPC objectives are identified and pursued—in other words, the BPC process. We focus, in particular, on how the study drew on an important assessment tool, the DSART, as a way to methodically evaluate the effectiveness of historical cases of BPC. Finally, the chapter concludes with a...

Chapter Two provided an overview of U.S. BPC efforts, describing the types of activities conducted under the BPC rubric and the categories of objectives that can be pursued with BPC. This chapter begins to explore factors that might influence, or that at least correlate with, different degrees of effectiveness in capacity building.

Obviously, some programs and activities are more effective for capacity building: Some properties of programs or activities increase or decrease effectiveness, some conditions or contextual factors make certain BPC easier or harder, and certain combinations of activities, activity features, and contextual factors interact to make BPC more or...

This report presents our findings regarding BPC activities, their effectiveness, and the contexts in which they were undertaken in 29 case-study countries. Each case spans the 20-year period from 1990 to 2009—so, beginning with the end of the Cold War. This chapter describes how the cases were selected and provides information about the data collection efforts that informed our analysis. To protect the sensitivity of some details of the partnerships, this report does not list the 29 selected partners. However, we do rely on examples drawn from the less sensitive of the cases, as well as examples of other...

This chapter presents our analyses of the 29 country cases whose selection was described in Chapter Four. This chapter begins with a description of the data and the various subsamples of the phases and cases considered in the analyses. This is followed by a discussion of the ways in which changes in DSART scores for different BPC objective areas in different phases were used as analytic outcomes, followed by the analyses and results. The latter sections first address the tests of the various hypotheses (as listed in Chapter Three), then explore patterns of factors and their relationships with outcomes using...

This research confirmed that effectiveness in BPC is, in large part, a product of the BPC inputs (funding and activities) and the context for those inputs (predominantly, characteristics or behaviors of the partner, but also the broader security context). The bulk of our findings are based on hypotheses about inputs or context, and, thus, our conclusions follow these two general themes.

This single prominent observation inspired the central metaphor of this report: Find the right ladder, find the right rung. The historical cases show that BPC is effective when the capacity being built meets the interest of both the partner...