Security Force Assistance without Strategy: A Clausewitzian Reassessment

“We’ve trained and equipped millions. We’ve stood up armies, created partner brigades from scratch, flooded foreign ministries with civilian and military advisors, and written and developed entire doctrines and national security structures for countries not our own. Yet despite the scale of these efforts—spanning decades and continents—security force assistance remains an afterthought in strategic discourse.”

Jahara Matisek and William Reno

Introduction: Advising in the Shadow of Strategy

The training, advising, and equipping of foreign forces is as old as warfare itself. During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta and Athens did more than just fight each other—they trained, supported, and leveraged allies to project influence and win wars. From Roman military missions to Soviet support for communist movements, to the modern American security assistance industrial complex (i.e., advisor units, private military contractors), the logic is perennial: build others to fight in your interest, or at least in your image.

Security Force Assistance (SFA)—best defined by Stephen Biddle in 2017 as the training, advising, and equipping of foreign security forces (e.g., armies, police, militias, etc.) by external powers—is an instrument of strategy that is missing from most strategic discourse.[1] SFA appears in doctrine, not strategy; it fills budgets, not grand plans. Even as the United States and its allies expand SFA as part of campaigns for deterrence, influence, and strategic competition, its purpose remains clouded, its effectiveness uneven, and its theory underdeveloped. Despite spending over $600 billion on SFA since 2000, the collective West still lacks serious thinking around building foreign militaries.[2]

While our perspective is grounded in our positionality relative to the U.S. military—given both our professional affiliations and America’s dominant role in most modern SFA efforts—the implications of this strategic oversight extend beyond national borders.

This article confronts the strategic gaps in efforts to make other militaries more effective. Building on Clausewitz’s insight that war is an extension of politics by other means, we reassess Security Force Assistance (SFA) through a Clausewitzian lens: not as a technical military task, but as a strategic act with political consequences.[3] To do so, we bridge theory and practice—melding insights from Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere—to challenge the assumptions that underpin contemporary SFA efforts. In fact, most arguments about SFA just contend it is a strategic question of committing resources; small SFA investments have a small impact on the partner force, and a big SFA investment leads to a stronger partner force.[4] We counter that it is more about getting the proper strategy and rightsized SFA investment to maximize absorption by the partner force. This was the logic behind Cold War-era Foreign Internal Defense (FID), where partners often had political will and organic institutional capacity—even if they were not always liberal democracies.[5] What mattered was alignment of interests, not perfection of values.

Two U.S. Army officers writing about SFA noted that enduring relationships and readiness matter; however, these elements are not strategy.[6] Such virtues, while necessary, are not sufficient. Relationships are not strategy; readiness is not victory. And partner capability—without political alignment or institutional absorption—produces only fragile “Fabergé Egg” armies that shatter when advisors and contractors disappear.[7] Hence, we argue that most SFA failures stem not from bad training or insufficient equipment, but from the absence of political clarity and strategic coherence. As seen during the Vietnam War, the United States had a misguided focus on training days, equipment delivered, exercises conducted, etc., which substituted for real measures of effectiveness.[8] A major strategic disconnect proliferates when bureaucracies prioritize these types of bean-counting activities, when clear political objectives and feedback loops are missing.

What follows is a Clausewitzian interrogation of SFA, which is based on fieldwork and interviews with over 800 Western military advisors and foreign military personnel between 2017 and 2025. We begin by critiquing how SFA has confused tactical output with strategic success. We then examine the political terrain where SFA actually unfolds—where regime type, patronage networks, and elite interests shape outcomes more than any field manual. Next, we explore how the war in Ukraine has upended the traditional donor-recipient paradigm, revealing a model of reciprocal, recipient-led SFA. Finally, we chart a path forward: a strategic theory of SFA grounded in political realities, operational constraints, and a clearer understanding of war itself.

The Mirage of Tactical Success: When Strategy is Lost in Translation

SFA continues to be awash in metrics— numbers trained, equipment delivered, battalions certified. Yet these are input measures, not strategic outcomes. Tactical activity is not strategic success. But in the absence of a guiding strategic framework, tactical achievement becomes its own justification, a tendency that Gian Gentile identified in relation to counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.[9] Worse, most military advisors have little incentive to be creative, given that their career path will not reward them for spending the time to improve the quality of training for a foreign army.

The core problem is strategic disintegration. While U.S. doctrine clearly states that “U.S. forces must integrate SFA into the operations process at all levels” and that SFA “should be designed to work seamlessly with the host-nation government at all levels,” this aspiration often collapses under bureaucratic inertia, shifting political winds, and the tendency to treat SFA as a tactical afterthought.[10] Advisors are left improvising, disconnected from any strategy linking their work to national objectives. Clausewitz warned that activity without strategy is noise in the fog of war. SFA often drifts into this fog, mistaking motion for meaning. As in Vietnam, when political objectives were vague or absent, bureaucracies defaulted to what could be counted (e.g., bombs dropped, patrols conducted, weapons distributed, etc.). Metrics of effort replaced indicators of effect.

This vacuum is not theoretical. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S.-trained forces collapsed despite years of preparation. Why? Because SFA efforts were not nested within viable political settlements, institutional absorption capacity, or wartime strategic logic. Tactics were detached from strategy, and partners lacked purpose.

U.S. planners often conceive of operations in rigid phases—shaping, dominating, stabilizing, enabling—but these distinctions break down in war.[11] So too in SFA: training occurs without clarity on what political order it is meant to sustain, or how it transitions into sustainable security provision under civilian control.

This is not just a flaw of sequencing. It’s a deeper conceptual failure. Army doctrine reminds us that “SFA is part of a comprehensive approach… [and] should include close collaboration with military and civilian joint and multinational forces,” with the host-nation playing the lead role.[12] Yet in practice, the U.S. often marginalizes partner input and replicates its own force design in miniature. Western strategy often defaults to ‘problem-solving’ modes of thinking, reducing complex political-military issues to technocratic templates. Instead, they advocate a Clausewitzian ‘problem-framing’ approach that emphasizes context, friction, and adaptation over linear solutions.[13] SFA is often imagined as a bridge between combat operations and peace. But a bridge to where? Without clear strategic objectives—beyond the buzzwords of “stability” or “partner capacity”—SFA becomes a mirage: activity mistaken for advancement.

SFA has been shifting from irregular warfare since the first Trump Administration, through the Biden era and into the second Trump administration—with similar focuses on large scale combat operations (LSCO) regardless of leadership. Indeed, the same pathology has persisted: unclear strategic ends lead organizations to emphasize what can be measured over what matters. Theater Security Cooperation plans remain disconnected from real assessments of partner political will or absorptive capacity. National-level prioritization remains elusive, creating fragmented, stove-piped efforts that please PowerPoint but fail policy.

As Clausewitz observed, “everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.”[14] In other words, the problem isn’t what to do—it’s how to make it work in the friction of politics and institutions. The same could be said of SFA. Training a battalion is easy on paper—but absorbing it into a functional chain of command, aligning it with a political strategy, and sustaining it under fire is far more complex. The U.S. military often excels at the technical tasks of advising while underestimating the institutional and strategic terrain required for success.

In this context, the strategic value of SFA becomes circular: we advise to build capacity, and we build capacity to justify advising. Deeper questions like: What political settlement is this capacity meant to uphold? How does this effort support deterrence or shape the operational environment? These questions are often unasked, and if they are, most military advisors tell us that they are told that the next rotation will have to figure that out – or wait for the politicians to make these decisions (spoiler: they rarely do).

The irony is sharp. The more the U.S. invests in tactical preparation, the more strategic clarity becomes a liability—because it would reveal the incoherence of our aims, or the illegitimacy of our partners. This dynamic often results in what might be called a “train-and-pray” model of military advising: U.S. forces train a partner unit and then hope it holds together once advisors depart. In Afghanistan, Security Force Assistance Brigade advisors recounted how remote advising during COVID devolved into “dog-and-pony show” video calls, where Afghan units staged rehearsed briefings to satisfy checklist metrics.[15] Lacking sustained presence and feedback loops, advisors struggled to assess real progress. The obsession with input-based indicators (e.g., training days completed, equipment issued, readiness levels reported) led to Potemkin formations: Afghan units that looked effective on PowerPoint but collapsed under pressure. This performative advising culture highlights how metric-driven SFA, when disconnected from political purpose and institutional absorption, can generate the illusion of capacity while masking deep fragility.

Practitioners inside the SFA ecosystem also see this problem. Returning to the thoughts of two U.S. Army officers, they stressed the importance of “readiness and relationships” in achieving enduring strategic effects through SFA.[16] But again, they are not sufficient to achieve strategic effect without political alignment and operational integration. Without political congruence and a coherent strategic framework, even the most capable partner force may fail to deliver lasting security or influence.

If anything, the reliance on readiness and relationships reflects a deeper unease: we’ve become better at managing the mechanics of military assistance than grappling with its meaning. This is not merely a bureaucratic failure of measurement—it is a strategic failure of vision. Without political clarity, even competent SFA programs become activity without direction. We may be winning the advising but losing the strategy.

Political War by Other Means: The Real Terrain of SFA

“War is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass,” Clausewitz observed, “but always the collision of two living forces.”[17] SFA, likewise, is never a neutral act. When the U.S. trains and equips foreign forces, it engages in political collision—not just military development. These efforts invariably favor certain elites, shape institutional hierarchies, and reinforce particular visions of state authority. Yet too often, SFA is treated as a value-neutral service export, where tactical proficiency is divorced from the strategic and political order it ultimately sustains. But attempting to render SFA apolitical is itself a political decision—one that often reinforces regime stability without strategic alignment or democratic legitimacy.

SFA is not apolitical and cannot be. As Clausewitz might put it, SFA unfolds within the grammar of politics, not just the logic of tactics. Mirror imaging by Western military advisors becomes the de facto approach to training a foreign army due to bureaucratic convenience and institutional biases. To build a military force is to shape who holds power, who commands loyalty, and who can wield organized violence within a society. It is to tip the balance between regime survival and collapse, between patronage and reform, between repression and legitimacy. And yet U.S. efforts routinely ignore the domestic political terrain on which they operate.

Most SFA efforts assume that partner militaries are institutionally autonomous and politically neutral—mirror images of a sanitized ideal of the U.S. military. In reality, many recipient forces are deeply embedded in informal networks of loyalty, corruption, and regime protection. They are not instruments of national defense but extensions of elite bargains. This is why doctrine emphasizes that “legitimacy is vital” and that SFA practitioners must recognize the limits of military instruments alone, which must be nested within broader political strategies.[18] As Joseph Roger Clark argues, military strategy cannot be divorced from the political dynamics that shape conflict environments. Any attempt to build partner capacity must account for how power, legitimacy, and institutional structures interact within the recipient state.[19]

This is where SFA becomes a form of political warfare. Not in the sense of Cold War-style influence campaigns, but in the way it unintentionally props up—or threatens—domestic political orders. Training elite units in fragile states often reinforces a praetorian guard or creates enclaves of effectiveness that threaten ruling elites. The American trained “Danab” (Somali “Lightning Forces”) comes to mind when considering the creation of an effective military unit in an otherwise ineffective Somali state.[20] In other cases, when the U.S. provides logistics or Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) support, it may be empowering actors who prioritize regime survival over national cohesion.

Take Iraq after 2014. The rapid collapse of the Iraqi Army in Mosul was not merely a military failure—it was the predictable consequence of years of politicized SFA. Partner forces were hollowed out by sectarianism, absenteeism, and the quiet logic of survival under a dysfunctional political order. The problem was never just a lack of training or equipment. It was the underlying political economy of the Iraqi state.[21]

In Mali, similar dynamics unfolded. U.S. and French assistance flowed into elite units while the broader security sector languished. Rather than building national forces capable of defending sovereign territory, these efforts created islands of capability surrounded by seas of dysfunction—forces that could fight when advisors were present but faltered when left to their own devices.[22]

Effective SFA must account for ’embedded conditionality’—how security forces relate to institutions, legitimacy, and elite interests. A brigade’s tactical proficiency matters little if it answers to a warlord, a corrupt minister, or an oligarchic patron. Regardless, the West should not stop SFA, but instead, assistance must be more politically literate. Advisors must be trained not only in tactics, techniques, and procedures, but also in recognizing the political structures within which their partners operate. SFA is not a military task, but a political act with strategic consequences. This raises a final question: is the failure of SFA primarily bureaucratic—driven by institutional inertia and mirror imaging—or strategic, stemming from the absence of coherent political goals? The answer is likely both. While these failures highlight the pitfalls of politically blind SFA, the war in Ukraine offers a contrasting model—one where the recipient’s strategic coherence and political will redefine the advisor’s role, revealing a new paradigm for assistance.

Reverse SFA and the Clausewitzian Pivot: When Partners Become Teachers

The war in Ukraine has not only revived Western interest in large-scale combat operations—it has exposed the brittle assumptions underpinning decades of SFA. For once, SFA has not failed. And that success says as much about Ukraine’s own strategic culture as it does about the emergency Western aid and assistance provided.

Unlike in Afghanistan or Iraq, where U.S. aid often tried to fabricate institutions on weak or artificial foundations, Ukraine entered its war with Russia with a hardened sense of national purpose and a growing appetite for operational independence. Yes, Western advisors helped by restructuring logistics, decentralizing command, and building out the noncommissioned officer corps. But crucially, Ukrainians adapted what was offered. They shaped assistance to their own strategic needs. They improvised under fire, modified doctrine in contact, and created operational effects that even surprised their donors.[23] In this way, Ukraine represents a modernized form of FID—less about suppressing communist insurgency and more about enabling resistance against great-power aggression, with political will and self-directed adaptation at its core.[24]

This isn’t traditional SFA—it’s reverse SFA: a model where strategic absorption runs uphill. We term this ‘reverse SFA,’ where the recipient actively shapes and adapts donor assistance to align with its own strategic needs, inverting the traditional donor-centric model. Ukraine’s success rests on what Clausewitz might call the moral forces of war—cohesion, conviction, and genius in command—mirroring its strategic coherence, political will, and improvisation under fire. Western advisors have relearned the value of mission command, distributed decision-making, and bottom-up initiative.[25] The advisor has become the advised.

What distinguishes Ukraine from past recipients is not merely its will to fight, but its political clarity. The Ukrainian state, while imperfect, enjoys broad societal legitimacy. Its military institutions are tied to a national cause, not to regime protection or elite patronage. This allows Western assistance to be absorbed, adapted, and weaponized effectively.

Contrast this with Afghanistan, where the U.S. invested over $80 billion in security assistance—only to watch the entire edifice collapse in a few weeks.[26] In Ukraine, far less assistance has generated far greater returns because the recipient state possesses three things most SFA efforts lack: strategic coherence, political will, and wartime improvisation.

Reverse SFA challenges the donor-centric logic that has dominated the field. It forces us to ask: what if the partner knows better? What if the recipient is not just a passive object of reform but a sovereign actor with its own operational genius?

This also has profound implications for the future of advising. The most successful advising occurs when the recipient innovates in wartime and the donor adapts accordingly. As doctrine affirms, “SFA is inherently a developmental effort,” where success is measured not by training completions or kit deliveries but by the recipient force’s increased “capability, capacity, competency, commitment, and confidence.”[27] If war is the final auditor of military assistance, then Western militaries must become better students of their partners—especially when those partners are actively fighting and innovating under fire. Clausewitz wrote that war is a duel between thinking adversaries, but we must also recognize that SFA is a dialogue between thinking allies. To be clear, Ukraine’s success to date should not obscure the fragility of its position. Western assistance has enabled remarkable Ukrainian resilience against a much larger Russian military, but the long-term outcomes—military, political, and institutional—remain uncertain.

The Clausewitzian pivot, then, is this: rather than forcing our models onto others, we must recognize that effective assistance begins not with our templates, but with our partner’s war—and their political logic. Ukraine reminds us that good strategy is contextual, not universal.

Conclusion: Toward a Strategic Theory of Security Force Assistance

Security Force Assistance (SFA) is not going away. If anything, its strategic utility is increasing—as a tool of deterrence, influence, and indirect warfare in an era of renewed great power competition. But for SFA to deliver on that promise, it must be rescued from its current condition: an operational reflex untethered from strategic thought.

Too often, SFA has become the military version of foreign policy autopilot—well-resourced and procedurally sound, yet directionally adrift. We send trainers, gear, and funding, and then watch partner forces collapse when advisors depart. The problem is not that we advise poorly. It’s that we advise blindly—without a clear understanding of what political ends we’re serving, what regimes we’re supporting, and what wars we’re preparing our partners to fight.

A true strategic theory of SFA begins with political realism. This realism was also central to U.S. experience in the Philippines and South Vietnam—where, despite uneven outcomes, strategic clarity mattered more than technocratic perfection. It asks not what we want partners to be, but what they are. It recognizes that military institutions do not exist in a vacuum—they are embedded in regimes, shaped by patronage, and constrained by political economy. And it understands that tactics do not scale unless the state can absorb them. Ukraine has shown that effective assistance is reciprocal. When partners innovate, we should learn. Clausewitz taught that friction tests every assumption. SFA must likewise become a strategic dialogue—not a blueprint to impose. Metrics should shift from counting battalions trained to assessing institutional cohesion and alignment with political objectives. Feedback loops, modeled on Ukraine’s reciprocal approach, can ensure donors adapt to recipient innovations, fostering a dialogue that enhances strategic coherence.

The strategic gap at the heart of SFA is not a doctrinal problem. It is a conceptual one. We do not need better advising templates or more modular training kits. We need a strategic culture that treats assistance as an extension of statecraft, not just soldiering. Otherwise, we will continue to repeat the train-and-pray cycle of making technically proficient partner units that cannot survive the strategic vacuum of advisors departing. Technical improvements are necessary—but not sufficient—for achieving strategic success. Without political clarity and strategic alignment at the national level, even the best advising models will fall short. As Hal Brands argues in The Twilight Struggle—his study of Cold War strategic logic—success in long-term great power rivalry comes not from tactical brilliance but from a steady, politically informed approach that adapts across decades of competition.[28] Thus, strategists must link tactics to strategic ends, especially in gray zones and advisory contexts.[29] This means aligning SFA with clear political objectives, phasing assistance within broader campaign plans, and measuring success not in partner battalions trained, but in political-military outcomes achieved.

As the case of Ukraine reveals, strategic assistance flows both ways. Effective SFA today must embrace the possibility of reverse SFA, where recipients shape the war, and in doing so, teach the donor what strategic adaptation really looks like.[30]

War is too serious a matter to leave to generals, Clausewitz warned. The same applies to SFA. If we continue to treat it as a technical mission divorced from strategy, we will keep producing hollow forces and temporary gains. This is not simply a failure of execution in the field—it is a failure of conception at the strategic level, where ends, ways, and means remain misaligned. But if we embed SFA in a Clausewitzian logic—one that centers political purpose and strategic coherence—it can become what it always promised to be: a lever of influence, a shaper of outcomes, and—at its best—a catalyst for strategic advantage in wars we don’t fight alone, but with and through others.