Security cooperation (SC) is an overarching term that defines “those activities conducted with allies and friendly nations to build relationships that promote specified U.S. interests, build allied and friendly nation capabilities for self-defense and coalition operations and supporting institutional capacity, [and] provide U.S. forces with peacetime and contingency access.”¹ Examples include training and combined exercises, operational meetings, contacts and exchanges, security assistance, medical and engineering team engagements, cooperative development, acquisition and technical interchanges, and scientific and technology collaboration. The Department of Defense (DoD) has a long history of conducting SC activities with partner countries for a variety of purposes, including...

This chapter provides further clarity of the specific elements used in characterizing SC mechanisms. While mechanisms are a convenient way to think about how the various elements are organized, in practice, the way these elements are drawn together to create real BPC activities is much more of a patchwork. The RAND Security Cooperation Database contains information on all of these elements, and can give the user insights into what may be available to support specific objectives and priorities. But, as the chapter concludes, the realities of program funding, geographic restrictions, and other factors impose limitations on what can be done...

This chapter presents RAND’s review of the SC mechanisms the CCMDs use to build partner capacity in their AORs. The aim of the analysis is to evaluate SC mechanisms’ contributions to the achievement of CCMD objectives regarding BPC drawn from OSD guidance, not to assess the performance of the CCMD or the ability of partner nations to receive and incorporate U.S. support. It is important to capture the experiences of SC professionals at the CCMDs—the planners, resource managers, and implementers—to better understand factors that contribute to or detract from the effectiveness and efficiency of existing SC mechanisms. From...

This report provides an approach to capturing assessments of the variety of SC mechanisms available to the CCMDs to achieve their BPC objectives, and to considering the successes and limitations of the mechanisms in terms of their overall effectiveness and efficiency from the CCMD perspective. The first section of this chapter compares the areas of convergence and divergence among the four CCMDs to identify key trends, along with findings that apply specifically to just one CCMD. The second section returns to our original hypotheses to present the team’s overall findings relative to those hypotheses. The third provides the study team’s...