THE MILITARY IS JUST ANOTHER GOVERNMENT BUREAUCRACY:

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) took the Department of Defense to task over its poorly written project proposals for the Global Train and Equip program--basically a $4.1 billion security cooperation fund dedicated to improving our allies' counterterrorism capabilities. Under an Obama-era directive, Defense and State Department officials are supposed to consider four distinct modules when crafting Train and Equip projects: project objectives (what security gap the project is intended to fill); absorptive capacity (the recipient country's ability to use the training or equipment provided to it in an effective manner); baseline capabilities (to what degree the recipient country's forces are already capable of performing the task for which they are being trained or equipped); and sustainment arrangements--that is, how the recipient country will be able to sustain that capacity through its own funds or through continued support from the U.S. government. GAO's primary finding--or at least the one it went out of its way to highlight--was that these four elements were routinely omitted during the drafting process. While all proposals included information about project objectives and most included baseline assessments, less than half addressed absorptive capacity, and less than three quarters included complete sustainment plans.

This isn't the first time the Defense Department has come under fire for bureaucratic laziness. In 2016 the GAO criticized the department for being chronically late--almost two years, in some cases--in delivering statutory updates to Congress on the effectiveness of its Train and Equip programs. But underneath these managerial worries is a more alarming finding: According to the new report, only eight of the 21 aid programs examined by the GAO showed any improvement in their defensive capabilities under the DoD's own internal scale. Even in those eight, the results were modest: GAO found that on a five-point scale, six programs moved from level two to level three and just two programs moved from level one to level three.

Together, these programs cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Many spanned half a decade or more. Yet for all that, the data is clear: Most of them do not actually work.

The New York Times justifiably homed in on the spectacular inefficiencies described in the report, but the results here are hardly surprising. U.S. security cooperation efforts have been failing to produce their intended outcomes for years, in large part because these programs seek to accomplish too much in places where the likelihood of success is slim. The important point is that despite new and concentrated efforts by the Defense Department and State to be more judicious when deciding which Train and Equip programs to fund, the vast majority still don't deliver.

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