Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates has defined the current strategic preoccupation of the U.S. military, the war on terror, as “a prolonged, worldwide irregular campaign—a struggle between the forces of violent extremism and those of moderation.” In order to effectively carry out such a campaign, Gates writes, the military must learn two hard lessons from the wars it has conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq since the fall of 2001.

The first lesson is that “over the long term, the United States cannot kill or capture its way to victory.”¹ In other words, “soft power”—including diplomacy, strategic communications,...

Although both concepts have deep historical roots, building partner capacity and stability operations have only recently migrated to positions near the top of the U.S. national security agenda. Furthermore, government officials have tended to consider the two topics separately rather than focus on the nexus between them. As a result, there is no clearly defined and well-integrated strategy for using BPC activities to build stability operations capabilities in partner nations. In addition, key agencies have yet to reach a consensus on their respective roles and missions.

Until recently, BPC guidance has been directed toward facilitating U.S.-led coalition operations, giving less...

Having synthesized U.S. government guidance in order to identify roles, missions, and capabilities for building partner capacity to conduct stability operations, this chapter describes the BPC for stability operations activities and programs currently being conducted by the Department of Defense, other U.S. government agencies, and major U.S. allies. This analysis will help Army leaders to better understand what BPC for stability operations programs and activities are being conducted—both within the Army and elsewhere.

This baseline analysis indicates that the U.S. Army has policy, planning, and resource management authority over only a small fraction of these activities; most are controlled...

Building on the role, missions, and capabilities synthesis in Chapter Two and the baseline programmatic analysis in Chapter Three, this chapter provides a preliminary assessment of a range of BPC for stability operations programs. At the heart of this analysis is a six-step assessment approach designed to enable the Army and other DoD agencies to make more informed decisions about BPC for stability operations planning, programming, and budgeting. This approach provides a systematic method to evaluate existing security cooperation program and activity performance and effectiveness with respect to stability-related objectives and end states in particular countries. This approach is described...

In an effort to provide some analytical rigor and standardization to the partner-selection approach, this chapter proposes a relatively simple spreadsheet method for determining potential partners, pros and cons of each partner, and ways to weight and assess selection factors. Using the proposed methodology, we also conducted an exploratory analysis that highlights the relative advantages and disadvantages of most of the world’s countries as U.S. partners for stability operations.

Currently, various organizations within DoD, including OSD, the COCOMs, and the services, establish foreign partnership priorities based on generally high-level criteria whose application to specific countries is neither completely clear nor...

There are a number of principal recommendations based on our study’s analyses of BPC and stability operations guidance, baseline activities, programmatic effectiveness, and potential partner countries. Given the ambitious scope of the project, the evolving character of the topic, and constraints on researchers’ access to complete datasets, these recommendations should be treated as more suggestive than definitive. Significantly more data collection and analysis will be required before DoD and other government officials have the knowledge and understanding necessary to bring the various aspects of BPC for stability operations policy into alignment.

First, BPC and stability operations guidance needs to be...