Insurgent Armies and State Formation after Victory

If the United States or any other great power is going to think about intervening in an ongoing civil war to help one side win, in any of these cases, the outside supporter needs to be very cognizant of the fact that even if it's chosen champion in this war does win, it may still prove to be enormously challenging to consolidate that armed rebel movement into a coherent ruling force. And some of those groups, they may go back and forth between being part of a rebel group and being part of a state group based on their interests at the time. An example is a guy like some of your listeners may have studied the problems set in Mali with General Gabu, who has gone back and forth between being essentially a rebel, twa reg leader, and we're in the uniform of the state according to his own interests at the time. Welcome to the Regular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host Ben Jeb, and my co-host today is Matt Vieroli. Today's episode explores what happens after civil wars, why some victorious rebel groups remain loyal to new governments while others fragment, defect, or even overthrow the regimes they help to create. Our guests begin with a puzzle. Decided victories in civil wars are expected to bring stability, yet in many cases, post-war militaries face major crises within a decade. They explain how the pressures of war shape rebel groups, how political leaders and commanders interact, and how these patterns often affect post-conflict governance. Finally, the discussion ends by examining case studies and addressing the costs and benefits of security assistance in conflict zones. Dr. Philip A. Martin is an assistant professor at George Mason University. His research specializes in political violence in civil wars, peace building, and African politics. His article, Insurgent Army's Military Obedience and State Formation After Rebel Victory, serves as the anchor for today's conversation. Brigadier General Allen J. Pepper is the commanding general of the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command, where he leads efforts to build partner capacity and strengthen global partnerships. A career foreign area officer and West Point graduate, he has served in multiple countries with extensive experience across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He is a member of the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command, and is the director of the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command. He is the commander of the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command, and is the commander of the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command. Thanks so much. So Philip, today's conversation is going to be centered around your article, and I really like this piece, because rather than focusing on battlefield tactics or wartime strategy, your paper looks at the aftermath of civil wars. More specifically, you assess how and why some rebel groups remain loyal to new postwar governments while others don't. And there's all sorts of cool implications here, but just to start, could you discuss what motivated you to write this piece? Sure. I can answer that question on two levels. The first level would be the scholarly puzzle that I'm addressing here, and this is the question of why some winning armed movements find it very difficult to sustain obedience from the military commanders that put them into power. And then when they turn around and try to govern the state, it actually turns out to be quite difficult to sustain cohesion and loyalty from all of those different factions and commanders that were part of the winning rebel group in the first place. And this is a scholarly puzzle from a theoretical perspective, because at least when I was starting this project, the conventional wisdom among civil war scholars was that if you have a decisive victory in a civil war, this will produce long term stability because the winner is the winner. The winner can monopolize power and rebuild institutions the way that it wants to, and so you shouldn't wind up with all these civil military problems that can happen in other types of post-conflict situations. But that didn't seem to be true if we look at, you know, different cases around the world. In the article I show that actually in over half of all cases of winning arm movements, within 10 years there's some sort of major civil military crisis that happens, either a new coup, a rebellion, a mutiny, something like that. Okay. So that's the scholarly puzzle at a 10,000 foot level. I could also answer your question at a more personal and somewhat idiosyncratic level, and that is to say the first time that I went to Côte d'Ivoire, which is one of the, you know, countries where I've done a lot of my field research, I was a graduate student with a doctoral dissertation idea that was actually very different than everything that we're talking about. But when I started to do interviews and research in Côte d'Ivoire at the time, this was four years after the end of the Civil War where Alessandro Wattara had come to power, I started doing interviews with people and I would start to realize what the picture on the ground, how different that was from the picture on paper, right? On paper, Côte d'Ivoire was this successful peace building model that was rebuilding its security institutions and the United States and France and the United Nations were there to help rebuild this successful functioning model peace building success story, essentially. That was the picture that I sort of had from the outside. And then when I actually got there on the ground, I realized, whoa, things on the ground are way different. So Phillip, your case studies focus largely on African countries. And I feel like it's important to understand the operational environment here before we dig into the piece. Alan, as someone who served all over the world, but particularly in Africa as a foreign area officer, can you describe some of the security and governance issues that you witnessed firsthand in the region? Sure. I bit kick off by saying I very much enjoyed Phil's paper. I thought it was a really neat blend of the longer term approach and looking at some of the enduring consequences of situations and actions and the blend of analytical or statistical bit and then some concrete case studies. And as a guy who's spent a fair amount of time in Africa, I'm particularly interested in West Africa, I think Côte d'Ivoire is one of those that's such a great place for its complexity. So I think that gives you a really great basis to be able to do your research and then to have the case study. And I think we'll talk about that. As far as what are some of the root causes or the governance issues, I think the number one overarching issue is probably the competition for limited resources. There's two reforms of that. You could say examples such as the pastoralists versus a sedentary farmers, the clans, tribes, ethnicities. And when you talk about differences between tribes, for example, it's not always about resources, but often it's the competition resources between region tribes or other elements that see elements of that conflict. There's the central government versus the region or a distant part of the country. Often that central government will be dominated by one group or ethnicity. And then you could have a couple forms of competition there. You could have a competition for the overall state pie and how those resources are distributed. And then another one, again, for the resources is the ability to tax or control movements. And I saw that certainly in Mali, in Northern Mali, whether it's a local group, whether it's a Torah group, whether it's one of the other sedentary or transitory groups or its central government. Those are, again, all the idea of competition for resources. Then another source of conflict can be longstanding historical schisms. I served, as I mentioned, in Mali. And there the schisms between the Torah regs and what they would refer to as the black Africans is long term historical basis and some really largely depending on the question of who should rule whom. And the last one I'd have is the influence of outsiders. It's mostly neighbors. Having started in the DRC, the key examples there being Rwanda in Uganda for many years and their influence and creating conflict within the country. So far from an exhaustive list, but those are some of the things that I've seen in my time in Africa. Alan, that was a pretty great overview of the operational environment you found yourself kind of all over Africa. But let's actually dig into the article here. Phillip, let's start with your main argument. Your paper investigated why some victorious rebel movements remain loyal to new post war governments while others defect, right? And your article basically argues that the intensity of wartime threats tends to drive organizational decisions that affect the post war military obedience, right? Can you just kind of unpack the logic for our listeners here? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So my theory is pretty simple, right? It basically says that what happens during a civil war will exert some lasting impact on what is likely to happen later in the post war period after the fighting stops. We can think about those two time periods as the main situations that my theory is talking about. So I think to sort of set up the argument, you can start by thinking about who are the main actors in this drama, right? In the theory. And so on the one hand, you have central political elites, the people who are in charge of running a rebel organization. They're the ones who want to take power, become the president, become the prime minister. We can call them rulers, right? Political rulers. On the other hand, you have this layer of people just below those rulers. I call them field commanders. Some people call them warlords. They are the ones who actually control the means of violence. They're in control of troops in the field. They're controlling civilian populations during the civil war. And in the post war period, if their movement is successful, if they succeed in their war objectives, they get to take over the military and the security forces of the state. They get to become generals and colonels with nice salaries and benefits and all the rest of it. So that's the basic set of actors, right? And you would think that because these actors are on the same side, they're both part of the same armed rebellion, the same insurgency, that they would have incentives to cooperate with each other to divide those spoils, the benefits, after they win and take power. But it actually turns out to be more complicated than this, and it's not so easy to sustain cooperation between these political rulers and between these field commanders after the transition to the peacetime environment. There are a variety of reasons that that cooperation is difficult. The crux is what political scientists call a commitment problem, where the rulers can't really credibly commit to their promises to commanders to, you know, follow through on whatever they have promised them. And so commanders are going to be fearful. They don't really want to demobilize the assets that they built up during the war because they're fearful of being purged or excluded at some point in the future. Okay, so then why do some arm movements overcome that cooperation problem while others do not? My argument, and you know, just to be clear, I don't think there's a monocausal explanation for this. There are probably different factors that play in different cases. But one factor that explains a good deal of variation, a good deal of the time is the degree of wartime threat intensity that that arm movement had to face during its pathway to power. So as it was fighting the government fighting a civil war, did it face extreme threats to its own survival, either through intense counterinsurgency pressure, or through a rival arm group that was competing for supporters and territory. If a group does face that kind of intense arm threat during a civil war, I argue that it is more likely to develop the kind of organizational adaptations that will help it sustain military obedience in the long run. So two main parts of that. First, the leadership structure of the group. If a rebel group faces intense threats, it's more likely that those field commanders are going to come in to the central leadership organs of the organization and take part in the key decisions of the group. It's more important that these military commanders are able to quickly provide their feedback, quickly have a say in decisions because the group is facing life or death, a struggle on the battlefield. If that kind of collective action and inclusive leadership body is created during the war, that will help build trust between those rulers and commanders over time. They'll have experience working together, maybe experience with hardship together, and that provides a basis of solidarity and trust that can help to alleviate this commitment problem later. Alright, the second piece of the argument has to do with the way that the arm group governs civilians. If an arm group experiences intense threats during the civil war, it actually makes it a lot harder for that group to govern civilian populations in the territory that it controls. Constantly worrying about being harassed by counterinsurgent forces, it can't really set up shop openly in a civilian community. It has to hide and remain mobile, and this just makes it really hard for the group to establish sort of deep-rooted ties with a civilian population. Now this also ends up leading to more post-war obedience because the field commanders of that group, they basically remain mobile and they don't develop strong local ties with any particular civilian community that could provide a regional support base for them later. Instead, they're basically dependent on the central leaders of the group, and so when they transition into the military, they basically want to become an officer in the state, and that's how they're going to sustain their livelihoods. By contrast, if you have an arm group that experiences a relatively weak degree of threat, it's not really threatened in its territory. You can kind of set up shop and govern a civilian population in a pretty stable long-term way. Then what can happen in that situation is that the field commanders become like these entrenched barons, basically, who have their own little fiefdoms. They develop sometimes a lot of legitimacy and popularity with the local civilian population, or at least they have a lot of armed supporters in the area that they can basically continue to rely on in the post-war period as well. Alan, based on your experiences in the Army and working with other partner militaries around the world, have you seen this play out in reality? If so, what are some of the key indicators that a partner military is experiencing internal cohesion or the lack thereof? Yeah, my experiences in this domain are largely based on time spent in Mali, DRC, and Central African Republic, and I can't say my observations strongly directly support or negate Phil's conclusions. I think maybe I've had some situations where I've seen some glimpses of parts of what Phil has observed and which he presents, I think, extremely well in his paper, because often what I've seen is a solution where you have a brassage of the military with the rebel groups or kind of a hybrid solution at the end of the primary conflict where largely or entirely, regionally or ethnically linked units are incorporated into the military, where there may be multiple groups of ex-combatants that are incorporated into the military and blended with the former, those that were part of the state apparatus, let's say, prior to that. So not exactly the situations that are studied in Phil's paper, but I think there's some links there, and some of those groups, they may go back and forth between being part of a rebel group and being part of a state group based on their interest at the time. An example is a guy like some of your listeners may have studied the problem, said of Mali with General Gabu, who has gone back and forth between being essentially a rebel Tuareg leader and wearing the uniform of the state according to his own interests at the time. But I think that you can see there are certainly some schisms that are existing and that perhaps are multiplied during a period of conflict and then during the period of being brought into someone of a regimented apparatus. And those schisms can obviously make for more challenging negotiations later on as well. So in Central African Republic, we saw a situation there where the various rebel groups came together under the umbrella group of the Celica and took power in 2013. Yet within a year, the Celica had been essentially dissolved and the Jatohjah who had been brought to power was already out of power. And then you really had a scattering of these various rebel groups and they were certainly no longer under the control even of the rebel leadership. So that may have been a situation where they were not under great pressure. They had managed to take control relatively easily, very little resistance quite honestly, and therefore probably did not have those strong linkages. And when Jatohjah fell from power, even though there was still the opportunity for them to fight and continue their resistance, they largely scattered and became a whole mix of rebel groups that are out there. You asked the question there, Matt, about some indicators maybe that a partner military is experiencing or internal cohesion or lack thereof. I think the first one is on the operational side. If they're in operations, that's obviously the best time to be able to see how are they doing in the field. Are they able to follow orders and to move in a manner that supports an overall campaign plan? If you're not in operations or even if you are, there's the general question of how are they obedient to orders from above and whatever the hierarchy may be. Another one is how are resources being used? Are they being siphoned off? Are they being siphoned off at top levels, at the mid levels? Are they being distributed to the troops? I think those are key indicators of cohesion or lack thereof within a military. Then there's some other, perhaps somewhat obvious ones, of AWOLs or whatever you would call that in a rebel group when they're moving away. Are there parallel rackets that are going on? I think Phil probably observed that with the comm zones in Côte d'Ivoire. I remember visiting there a couple of times and seeing how the comm zones in Côte d'Ivoire had very much parallel rackets going along with being, in theory, part of the state structure. The last thing I'll say is sometimes hard to know how the cohesion is until it's really tested in the field. When I arrived in Mali in 2009, in many ways Mali and military was still very much considered a success story for West Africa and a progress story towards democratic control of the military, etc. And three years later, two and a half years later, we had a coup and we had the meltdown of democratic institutions. So I think sometimes until it's really tested, it's hard to know just how cohesive a military is. Yeah, I mean, if I could jump in on that point, I think this is a very poignant observation that Alan is making here. And I just wanted to comment briefly on this question of how do you know whether a post-conflict military force is actually capable of cohesive performance and is actually going to demonstrate obedience and loyalty when the chips are down and when it's actually asked to do something difficult or costly or that will require some degree of sacrifice on the part of, you know, these military factions and officers that are newly integrated into the army. And in some ways it is extremely difficult to know until the moment arrives that that test is really presented on paper, things might look great. You might have an organized chain of command. You might have a demobilization and reintegration process where a bunch of irregular militias are formally demobilized and you have this new military structure. And that all looks nice on paper until, you know, you dig under the surface a little bit more and you might realize that, oh, actually this commander has three times as many combatants under his command as exist on paper. But some of them are just formally on the blueprint and some are not. And some are kind of operating an irregular racket as Alan was talking about. Maybe they're providing security for a mine or they're providing security for some business that the commander owns. And all of these armed individuals are part of the universe of coercive power that this commander has available to them. And you really wouldn't know about it if you're just looking at the organizational diagram of the security forces of the state. It could be very misleading. Those are really insightful and helpful comments, especially for their practitioners. Going back to what Alan shared about his experience in Mali, and I think this is applicable to the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well. We've seen efforts oftentimes to encourage power sharing amongst various factions. Philip, in your conclusion, one of the findings of your paper points to the argument that actually power sharing agreements often don't work. And this is because field commanders have their own base of power amongst a specific local populace. And field commanders often lack the trust that is needed. And that would have been forged during wartime with their political leaders to actually enact a power sharing agreement. So, Phil, can you speak just a little bit about your conclusion regarding power sharing agreements? And then Alan, if you have a follow up on that too, I would love to hear your take. Yeah, so power sharing is a bit like a medicine that you administer to the most sick patients possible. And so it's a little bit unfair sometimes when you observe that power sharing didn't work and was the problem power sharing or is the problem that you were administering a medicine to a very difficult situation and nothing was likely to work. So, you know, I don't want to pick on power sharing too much because sometimes it's the only option available on a list of bad options, right? So I'll just kind of throw out that caveat. But yes, power sharing, especially military power sharing where you bring different armed factions were previously fighting against each other into a single security force. This has not a great track record of resolving civil wars and conflicts in a durable way. Sam Bannis and Glassmeyer, two, you know, scholars who have written a little bit about this military power sharing, basically concluded that it's not a very effective mode of conflict resolution. And I think one of the reasons that I would point to for that is the fact that you are trying to bring in military field commanders into a unified state structure and have them become immediately loyal to this new chain of command when their own incentives really don't support that. Yeah, they might say on paper, you know, during a peace signing process that they agree to this peace agreement, but later when it actually comes time to disarm their own followers and reintegrate into some new structure, or maybe they don't have control anymore over where they're going to be and who their subordinates are going to be. When they're actually asked to do that sort of stuff that could expose them to real risk and undermine their personal interests. That's when you often see commanders slow walking this power sharing agreement they just kind of ignore the orders to demobilize their units, or maybe there's a political crisis and they actually defect from the military entirely Alan was talking about the Central African Republic, I think you've seen a recurrent cycle of military power sharing solutions attempted to be applied or you bring together the different armed factions, maybe it lasts a month, maybe it lasts six months before it sort of crumbles again and the armed factions go back to their own corners again. And so it's very difficult to use that as a blueprint or a model to resolve what is, you know, essentially a dispute over the distribution of power and the authority structures in the country, and simply kind of paper over that with a military power sharing agreement right on its own it's probably not going to be enough without a lot more political conflict resolution, and other incentives probably are going to need to be added to that mix. But I'd be curious to know what Alan's experience with this as well. Yeah, I feel I think you really nailed it in your opening comments there when you said that it's sometimes a little bit perhaps unjust to be too harsh on the idea of the power sharing because it's the least bad among a bunch of bad options. So I can't say I've seen a ton of success with it and the two that I would cite number one, Molly, where the attempts the multiple attempts over the various twa-rake rebellions to integrate those leaders and units into the Malian military really have never born fruit to have a cohesive and unified state structure. And each time there's been the conflict of interests between those twa-rake leaders, do they lean towards the state or do they lean back towards their twa-rake communities and other interests that they have in the region, it's almost always led to most of them choosing to not side with the state and not side towards unity. And then the second one being Central African Republic, as you cited, I will say that they've never really had anything but a disjointed military that was an example of lack of unity. So they never had anything that looked like that they could go back to, that's for sure. The one that I think maybe would be worth taking a closer look at is Angola. Only short interactions with Angola. Angolan officers over time and a little bit of time visiting the country with some senior leaders and discussions there. My sense is there that MPLA did probably a better job of integrating the United States and FNLA folks into the overall structure and finding a solution that worked. But I don't claim to be an expert on the questionnaire of Angola, but I think probably might be the counter example of a more positive one that deserves a little more study. So we're covering a lot of theoretical ground here, which is great. Phillip, you mentioned commitment problems earlier, which at least in my class, we kind of applied a great power. You know, why can China and the US not agree to not fight? Well, it's commitment problems, right? And it's cool to see that you actually brought that down to the interstate level. I'd actually now like to turn our attention to some of your case studies. Can you briefly summarize the experience in Zimbabwe and the Ivory Coast and explain how they're illustrative of your findings? Yeah, so I'll try to run through these cases in a somewhat succinct way. Zimbabwe and Cote d'Ivoire are the two main case studies that I cover in this paper. They're also the two places where I did field work when I was a graduate student studying this problem of winning rebel movements in their aftermath. And of course, just at a basic level, these two cases illustrate variation in the outcome or the dependent variable that I'm studying. Whereas in Zimbabwe, you have long term military obedience to Zanu P.F., the group that took power in Zimbabwe in 1980. Whereas in Cote d'Ivoire, as I've described a little bit already, you have a more difficult process of fragmentation in the aftermath of rebel victory there. So Zanu P.F., to take the Zimbabwe case first, it was born as one of many armed factions in Zimbabwe, what was then called Rhodesia, fighting against the white settler state that existed there. Trying to win more political rights for the black majority in Zimbabwe to end the system of essentially white apartheid rule that existed since earlier in the 20th century. And over the course of the 1960s and 70s, this snowballed from a political dispute into a full blown civil war and insurgency that enveloped much of the country and led tragically to many thousands of deaths. Now, early on in this conflict, the level of threat faced by Zanu P.F. was relatively low. You know, the white Zimbabwean government didn't take these armed groups very seriously. They thought they were kind of, you know, jokers who weren't very serious politically. But over the course of the war, the whites became a lot more worried that actually they could be driven out of power, that they could lose control over the state. And so beginning sometime in the mid 1970s, the Rhodesian security forces really ramped up their counterinsurgency pressure against Zanu and Zappu, another insurgent group that was fighting as well. And the effect of this intensification in counterinsurgency pressure, as I trace out in the case study, led to the kinds of organizational transformations that my theory talks about. So the leadership body of Zanu P.F. became more inclusive in the sense that it included both field commanders of the armed wing of the movement, as well as political elites like Robert Mugabe, who went on to become the prime minister and president of Zimbabwe. And on the ground, Zanu was not really able to govern civilian populations in a very effective way. It had this idea that it would set up liberated zones, but because of the counterinsurgency pressure, it was forced to sort of remain in this mobile state of insurgency, actually use a lot of violence against civilians in Zimbabwe. And as a result of this, the field commanders of Zanu did not really have their own independent zones of power because they were forced to remain mobile throughout the war. Once Zanu took power in 1980 and developed the Zimbabwe defense forces, the former field commanders of Zanu really fell in line behind Robert Mugabe's government. They remained fiercely loyal to the Zanu P.F. Party State throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Probably the most tragic illustration of that was the enthusiasm with which these field commanders prosecuted. Another counterinsurgency against western Zimbabweans in the 1980s was known as the Gukurahundi, essentially, you know, an ethnic counterinsurgency campaign that led to a great deal of civilian suffering and death. But Robert Mugabe stayed firmly in power. He was eventually hosted by his vice president in 2017, but that was decades later. So Côte d'Ivoire illustrates the opposite pathway in my theory instead of intense threats against the winning rebels. This was a case where the winning rebels actually experienced quite weak threats. The force Nouvelle, which was a rebel group in Côte d'Ivoire that took power in the north in the 2000s, it ended up being protected from very much counterinsurgency pressure for most of the war because there was a peacekeeping intervention, ironically enough. The French intervened very early on in the Ivorian Civil War. Later, they were complimented by a UN peacekeeping mission that basically maintained this buffer zone across the middle belt of Côte d'Ivoire that protected the force Nouvelle rebels in the north from the counterinsurgency offensives that the Laurent Bagbo government wanted to launch to retake its territory, but couldn't because there was this international monitoring force there. And as a result of this, the FN developed a leadership structure that was very siloed between the political elites under Guillaume Sorrow and these comm zones, the field commanders who had their own sort of zones of control throughout the north, and the FN was able to develop a pretty extensive system of civilian governance or rebel governance in the areas that it controlled. It wasn't always great for civilians, I don't want to romanticize it, but it did do things like make sure that schools stayed open, it ran a taxation system, it issued birth certificates, it did these sorts of things that developed some degree of legitimacy for the local commanders of the force Nouvelle during the Civil War. Once the FN took power, it proved very, very difficult for the government to centralize control over those field commanders. They had their own networks of power all across the country, their own systems of racketeering as Alan was mentioning, and they didn't want to give those up. They didn't want to follow through with these plans for security sector reform that the United Nations and the United States and other international donors wanted to see. There's all sorts of peacekeeping and security force assistance implications right there, which we'll get to in a moment. But before we do, let's briefly talk about civil military relations. So Alan, from your vantage point as a military leader who's worked with foreign security forces, how do you think about civil military relations? And specifically, what does healthy civil military interaction look like in a country trying to rebuild after a civil conflict? Yeah, I'd say overall it's finding a way to strike a balance between things that you want to avoid, let's say. You want to avoid a situation where the guys toting the guns control everything, and there's no room for other leaders from other backgrounds, civil society, etc. And that's generally not a good outcome. And so how do you strike that balance? And it's not a simple equilibrium to find? Actually enough, I think that I would use the Côte d'Ivoire example as one way to strike a balance between things that you want to avoid. And so I think that's a good idea to strike that balance. And it's not a simple equilibrium to find. Actually enough, I think that I would use the Côte d'Ivoire example as one where there was probably relative success in that perhaps happenstance, maybe it was just by done luck. And so I think that I would use the Côte d'Ivoire example as one way to strike a balance between things that you want to avoid. And so I think that I would use the Côte d'Ivoire example as one way to strike a balance between things that you want to avoid. And that's what we're required to do when we do training equipped cases with our African military partners. But I'd say to use a term that may sound pre-sortive, but it's Africa good enough. It's post-conflict good enough. And that's the goals. How do you find that good enough? And I think you have an interesting situation too, perhaps, where what is good for the rulers in power might not match exactly what is good for United States foreign policy. If you look at the two examples in the case studies, I think that obviously the Zanou Piaf leadership, Mugabe and then those around him and his successors, they've probably enjoyed and benefited considerably from that solidarity in the Zanou Piaf that followed the Civil War and has really maintained a level of validity that's quite impressive and filled me, contradict me on that. That's my observation from afar. In the case in Côte d'Ivoire, as still noted, you had near-rebellions in 2018. And yet, Côte d'Ivoire in many ways is returning to what it was as an economic powerhouse of West Africa. And overall, as Nath had the atrocities of a matzabelle land that you've seen it in Zimbabwe. And so, although the challenges of leading an organization or a country that doesn't have that unity are certainly difficult for the leaders that are there, overall, for United States policy, I think there's a couple of observations that seem to indicate that it might be more in our interest not to have too much of an iron fist control of the military and the solidity within that structure. I would agree with much of what you're saying, Alan, and I would definitely underscore this point that the emergence of an obedient and loyal military and the emergence of a healthy liberal democracy are not the same thing and should not be confused. Ideally, in a functional liberal democracy, you will have military subordination to civilian control, provided that that civilian leadership is itself operating within some constitutional structure of governance. If the civilian leadership is not operating within a constitutional structure of governance or is ordering the military forces to violate human rights or repress their own citizens in grossly unjust ways, then you run into a real point of tension between a normatively desirable state of civil military relations where the military is obeying what the elected civilian government says versus a situation where the military is potentially acting in an illegal way or following through on orders that contribute to the consolidation of an authoritarian state. If listeners are interested more in that particular quandary or facet of civil military relations, I'd really recommend reading some of the work of Renana Miles Joyce, who's written a lot about this normative tension that can exist in post-civil war situations. The other observation or comment I would like to make about this, Alan mentioned that what is good for the ruling government in the capital city in a post-conflict environment may not be the same as what is good for the United States and its foreign policy interests, and I think that's true. And I would maybe add that what is good for the rulers in the capital city may not be the same thing of what is good for local populations in a more peripheral area of the country. You may have a local field commander who is embedded, who has authority, who is legitimate within that community, who serves as an ally, who provides some basic protections for people in those areas. I think in a lot of the Central African Republic, this is the sort of military actors who provide order rather than the central state. And the central state might not like that. It might not like having these commanders out there who are operating beyond the purview of the government, but removing them and replacing them with central state forces that may not be trusted or have the capacity to do a good job may lead to worse outcomes for civilians, at least in the short run. Phil, you're right. Renana Joyce is a great researcher who's written about norm transmission and security force assistance, but our readers could just go back and listen to her podcast with Ambassador Dennis Ross instead of actually having to read her articles. But I can see right now that Matt's got a burning question, so I'll hand it over to him. So as we move from the theoretical to the implications is so what of the article. Phil, your conclusion states that this paper really highlights the limits of external intervention, and that at times security assistance may actually prove counterproductive. Alan, as the commander of US Army Security Assistance Command, we're guessing you have more than a little experience implementing security assistance programs. First, could you discuss what USISAC does? And then, and I know this is a tough question, but explain briefly how the US balances building partner capacity and instilling norms like military obedience to civil authorities. Sure. First, I'll give the elevator pitch for US Army Security Assistance Command or USISAC. We execute about 95% of the Army's foreign military sales or FMS workload, both materiel and technical services. I like to refer to us as the point guard for FMS for the Army. So we establish and maintain the relationships with the partner nations and the country teams to determine the requirements. Then we work with various Army, US Army organizations to turn those requirements into what we call the total package approach, things like equipment, training, publications, spare parts, support, etc. So total partner approach commitments to our partner nations. And then we logistically support those FMS cases throughout the life site. So the contracting, requisitioning, sustainment, closure. And we also organize and execute the associated in-country training, primarily through our subordinate element known as the Security Assistance Training Management Organization or SATMO based at Fort Bragg. And we manage the money for the equipment and training provided, as well as all the baseline costs to support the development execution of Army Security Assistance Programs in their total. So that's kind of the elevator pitch of what USISAC does and as far as why we do it, we help to operationalize the national defense strategy, strengthening allies and partners, and advance the geographic combatant commanders, theater strategic objectives. Now, the question of how do we balance security assistance, maybe I'd zero in in particular on the building partner capacity portion where it's US taxpayer funded and maybe in particular, I'll say the US taxpayer funded maybe through Department of Defense or maybe through Department of State. And then instilling norms like the military, beaten civilian, and authority. I'll address this more from my experience working on a country team or at an Army service component command angle. So first off, we're going to do the lehi vetting as they call it of the units that we're going to support. We're going to make sure that and this is required by law that the unit that we're going to provide the training and equipment to is not one that has a track record of habitual human rights abuses that we're not going to purposefully provide all of this enhanced capability. The ability or capacity to somebody who we know, guys about their track record is just going to turn around the use against their populations. We're going to execute leader training. So some of that maybe their leaders being trained in the United States and through I met programs and seeing what right looks like as we believe it at least for civilian control of the military, that exposure they have to American society to the American military. I'll probably misquote it a little bit but Colin Powell when he was a Secretary of State he said you can take all the programs away from me that you want but except for I met it's that valuable he had seen the value of it over his decades and uniform. And then, as far as the in country training that we do we have the examples of our own trainers and how they talk about their following orders from above and the respect for our civilian leaders. All that is kind of the package of how we try to instill these ideas these principles of military beatings to civilian authority. And if we see that it's not working, we have the ability to pull the support if there are problems. All that said, there are limits to how successful that can be and the one that I like to site is because I saw it myself is what working as the Office of Security Cooperation Chief in Mali we set a number of Mali and officers to the United States for training. We had a fair amount of training going on in the country. One of the folks that I sent to the United States for training while I was there is a guy named Captain Snow go Captain Snow go had been through like something like six or seven I met courses during his career he's almost a poster child of being brought up in the US system and who led the in Mali Captain Snow go I convinced he could have gotten up there and taught quite well all of these classes on civilian military interactions, obedience to civilian authorities, etc. But in the end, his environment that which he bathed in day in and day out which he'd grown up in was stronger than what we perhaps been able to teach him through courses or through his interactions with the US military so they kind of goes a little bit along with the idea that Phil put in his paper as far as some of the limits of what we can do is for security assistance and other programs. I kind of want to stick with this theme of the efficacy of security force assistance and peacekeeping missions a little Phil your article suggests that propping up one faction in a civil war through security assistance may actually decrease its chances of successfully transitioning to a stable government. Could you discuss the logic there. Sure, you know just to build on Alan's prior comments here. I really agree that when we're thinking about what are the most important sort of first order reasons that a military or group of military commanders will choose to remain obedient to an elected government. Really, for me comes down to factors of domestic bargaining. Is it in their interest to do so. And if you don't have that piece in line, then it's going to be difficult to solve that problem with external intervention or courses and teaching about the importance of civil military obedience if core interests and material interests are not in line with that. So the importance of domestic bargaining to understanding this I think is paramount. Now that being said, it's not that I don't think that intervention to support security sector reconstruction in more effective ways isn't a normatively worthwhile policy objective I certainly think that it is. But there are a couple of implications for this that relate to your question more directly been. You know the first is if the United States or any other great power is going to think about intervening in an ongoing civil war to help one side win. And I was thinking a lot about the Libyan intervention in 2011 where the United States was supporting the Libyan Revolutionary Army overthrow more market daffy. There was a big debate in the Syrian civil war about how much assistance was the United States providing to the Syrian rebels. In any of these cases, the outside supporter needs to be very cognizant of the fact that even if it's chosen champion in this war does win and overthrows, you know whatever bad existing government the external intervener doesn't like, it may still prove to be enormously challenging to consolidate that armed rebel movement into a coherent ruling force that can sustain obedience from its military factions over time, because of, you know, the various issues and problems that I'm pointing to in the article, where the interveners might have autonomy they might be fearful of letting go of their own wartime networks. And so external interveners just need to act with a lot of caution if they are contemplating supporting or intervening in a civil war to support one side because consolidating that victory might be just as difficult as actually winning the conflict. I was noting a colleague of ours here at West Point Aaron lemons has done great work on this topic, specifically regarding the benefits of I meant as Alan mentioned and is currently working on a book project. But with that we always end our show with the discussion on implications. So for Alan what should practitioners policymakers and academics were interested in providing security force assistance and conflict prone states bear in mind based on our discussion today. This is one where Phil already stole my thunder there. I think he really nailed it. And that is, it's essential that we understand that number one there are limits to just about any kind of security assistance that we may provide how effective it will be. And there will be unintended consequences. We don't know what they will be, but we certainly owe it to the American taxpayer to try to delve into those as well as possible to predict as many of them as we can to reduce that remaining fragment that will never be able to predict. And then we have to of course, in the interagency policy discussions prior to any kind of security assistance decision or in the case of it perhaps of an intervention really weigh the pros and the cons there is the intervention worth it. How sure can we be that it's going to produce the outcomes desired. And we know there will be some negative consequences. We know there will be some unknown consequences. And just how sure are we that the overall aggregate is going to be in our favor. And I think Phil's work provides another brick to that building of considerations that we need to take into account. And to wrap up similar question to you Phil, based on today's conversations, what are some key takeaways for individuals interested in insurgencies and post war governance. So I guess my previous comments already reflected a little bit at a high level for some of the policy implications, you know, for people who are interested in studying and doing research on post war politics. If there are graduate students or anyone who's contemplating work in this area who may be listening this conversation. I think there is still a lot of space to do research in this area of connecting what happens during an armed conflict and what happens during a civil war to the long term transformation and rebuilding of institutions in the post conflict period, especially in the security sector. I think the linkages between the types of armed organizations and the effects for institutions that happen in a civil war period and how that carries over into the long term reconstruction process is really an area where a lot more research could be done on additional cases at the sub national level. I think it's a really fruitful area for research policy implications maybe I'll just mention two that I think haven't come up or haven't commented on yet. First, this policy of taking commanders or military officers in a post conflict state and bringing them abroad for some sort of training and I know Alan has mentioned this as part of the purview of some of his work. There's two types of benefits that you get out of that one is the direct benefit of teaching these individuals, you know, the American way of doing things the civil military relations and the sort of classic hunting Tony and sense, but there is another very pragmatic benefit of that and that is that you remove those commanders from their areas of wartime control for some period of time, and that can actually be a very effective way to shuffle them off stage for a little bit during that vulnerable post war period when the civilian government is trying to consolidate control. And actually the water our government in Cote d'Ivoire did this quite truly in the early years of its post conflict reconstruction, it sent some of these calm zones abroad to get them out of its hair. And so that can be a sort of pragmatic benefit that foreign partners can also help provide to a post war government. And it's nice thing to do for those military officers they'll usually want to do it they get, you know, the prestige and everything of participating in one of those programs. Second policy that we haven't touched on as much is support for demobilization and reintegration at the lower level of the kind of ground level combatants who actually provide the course of power for these military commanders in the aftermath of rebel military integration. And I think, keeping in mind that reintegration of combatants is not a short term box to check on some peace building checklist. It requires sustained investment, perhaps investment over years to retrain to pull these people away from their networks of wartime, you know, buddies and associates who they might get pulled back into conflict with and supporting those people to make sure that they have the ability to really durably reintegrate into civilian life, sustain an economic livelihood for themselves. And that is also going to reduce the autonomy and the local mobilization power that military commanders have available to them, and may make it easier to consolidate a more centralized and coherent security apparatus. Gentlemen, that was a fascinating conversation. Thanks for joining us today on the regular warfare podcast. Thank you. Thanks so much, Ben. Thanks so much, Matt and Alan for the conversation. Thanks again for joining us for the regular warfare podcast. Be sure to subscribe to the regular warfare podcast so you don't miss an episode. If you enjoyed today's show, please leave a comment and positive rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to the regular warfare podcast. It really helps expose the show to new listeners. And one last note. What you hear in this episode are the views of the participants and do not represent those at Princeton, West Point or for any agency in the US government. Thanks again and we'll see you next time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.