Purchasing Power: US Overseas Defense Spending and Military Statecraft

Abstract

The literature on economic statecraft has long focused on the effectiveness of foreign aid and trade as tools of inducement. However, existing scholarship largely neglects the role played by government procurement. By choosing to purchase goods or hire labor in foreign states, governments can provide economic benefits for strategic ends. The United States in particular leverages its defense procurement as a foreign policy tool. We introduce a new data set of US government procurement using information on all contracts executed overseas from 2000 to 2015. We develop a typology of how states use procurement to achieve foreign policy goals—power projection, counterinsurgency, and development—and provide descriptive statistics to explore variation in spending across countries and over time. We illustrate the power of the contract data by using it to code US military access in Africa, assess the relationship between spending and economic growth, and test whether economic inducements can buy influence.

Tracking the rise of United States foreign military training: IMTAD-USA, a new dataset and research agenda

“…Do training relationships reinforce a US-centric military system? Do they increase US influence and access to recipient states ( Blankenship & Miles Joyce, 2020 ; Martinez Machain, 2021 )? Do they impact how the USA mobilizes military coalitions ( Henke, 2019 )?…”

US global military deployments, 1950–2020*

“…The availability of detailed and complete data on US military deployments is essential for researchers interested in questions involving military deployments. As Blankenship and Miles Joyce (2020) note, as US grand strategy shifts from larger, more permanent bases towards smaller deployments spread out among various host countries, it can become more challenging to identify the areas where the US maintains a military presence (Mattis, 2018). Adequate data can thus help quantitative international relations scholars to develop better theories of international order and foreign policy, to analyze empirical patterns of an instrumental mechanism of security provision, and to examine the positive and negative externalities of servicemember deployments abroad.…”

“…Second, as a foreign policy tool, troop deployments are unique in both their credibility and fluidity. They have provided the US with the ability to deter rivals and react to emerging threats and disasters in every region across the globe (Braithwaite and Kucik, 2017;Blankenship and Miles Joyce, 2020). Importantly, troops act as a liquid asset that the US can redeploy in times of need, compared with physical bases that are relatively fixed and immobile.…”