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

Abstract

Training other countries’ armed forces is a go-to foreign policy tool for the United States and other states. A growing literature explores the effects of military training, but researchers lack detailed data on training activities. To assess the origins and consequences of military training, as well as changing patterns over time, this project provides a new, global dataset of US foreign military training. This article describes the scope of the data along with the variables collected, coding procedures, and spatial and temporal patterns. We demonstrate the added value of the data in their much greater coverage of training activities, showing differences from both existing datasets and aggregate foreign military aid data. Reanalyzing prior research findings linking US foreign military training to the risk of coups d’état in recipient states, we find that this effect is limited to a single US program representing a small fraction of overall US training activities. The data show comprehensively how the United States attempts to influence partner military forces in a wide variety of ways and suggest new avenues of research.

School of influence: Human rights challenges in US foreign military training

“…To measure this I used data from McLauchlin et al's (2022) International Military Training Activities Database-USA. The dataset provides information on the US’ foreign military training activities between 2000 and 2016, drawing from the State Department's Foreign Military Training Report and the Department of Defense's Engagement of Activities of Interest Report, with additional US government documents used to supplement missing information (McLauchlin et al, 2022). 4…”

“…5 I exclude police training and include only the training of the armed forces. To distinguish between the two different mechanisms discussed in the lead-up to Hypotheses 1a and 1b, I consider both all military training and only the training that McLauchlin et al (2022) code as having human rights training as an objective. I convert the number of trainees to a proportion of the size of the military as whole.…”

“…The problem with removing military training from a recipient as punishment for the security forces violating human rights is that one of the major purposes of foreign military training provided by the US is indeed to promote human rights through training and education (McLauchlin et al 2022). As noted by Joyce (2022), transmitting liberal norms to trainees is “a primary policy objective to nearly half of all states that receive [US] military training” (p. 49).…”

“…The next section then develops a theoretical argument for the settings in which we should expect to see a decrease in repression by the armed forces in countries in which the US engages in human rights-focused military training. These expectations are then tested in both a global context, using events data and data on human rights-specific military training coded by McLauchlin et al (2022) as well as in a narrower Latin American context using the same military training measure and a new measure of human rights violations by the armed forces coded specifically for this project. The final section concludes and discusses policy implications and future avenues of research.…”

“… 5. I note that because McLauchlin et al (2022) count the number of individuals participating in any given program in a year, individuals who participated in more than one program would be counted more than once, reflecting a larger amount of training given to the armed forces of that country. In some of the robustness checks I use the Security Assistance Monitor data (Monitor, 2017), in which students taking several courses in a given year are included only once.…”