New Dataset of United States Military and Security Aid to Foreign Countries

What is it about?

This article introduces the US Aid to Security Sector Actors (USASSA) dataset, the product of a collaboration between academic researchers and the nonprofit Security Assistance Monitor. In addition to providing the most comprehensive source of data on US security assistance, the USASSA dataset transforms detailed information about how security assistance funds are spent into aid and recipient typologies that can be used to conduct more sophisticated analyses of how this foreign policy tool is employed, its utility, and its limitations. Our data clearly show not only the magnitude and geographic reach of US security assistance, but also its diversity. While some security assistance is akin to humanitarian aid, other types of assistance blur the line between foreign aid and proxy warfare. We demonstrate the utility of the dataset with an exploration of whether the effects of US security assistance on human rights violations and domestic terrorism vary across types of aid.

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Photo by Simon Infanger on Unsplash

Photo by Simon Infanger on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Interest in security assistance has surged due in part to the United States’ massive and costly efforts to train and equip state security forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in response to the apparent effectiveness of Western security aid to Ukraine, controversy over security assistance to Israel, and growing awareness of security force capacity-building on the African continent. The United States is by far the largest provider of security assistance worldwide. Although security assistance is a substantial and growing component of the foreign policy toolkits of powerful states, and security aid could have more severe unintended consequences than other forms of aid, multiple barriers to collecting comprehensive and detailed data on security assistance have stymied research in this area. Security assistance authorities fund a wide range of activities, including training and equipping militaries for combat, law enforcement training, building special forces units, institutional reform, humanitarian assistance, counterproliferation initiatives, and English language courses. Moreover, US security assistance is provided to a range of security sector actors within countries: police forces, army units, civilians in defense ministries, air force pilots, and border guards, among others. We believe this dataset can advance scholarship and inform important policy debates. We see these data contributing to advances in research in three broad categories: (1) security aid impacts in recipient countries and regions; (2) the effects of security assistance on US national security and international relations; and (3) the determinants of variation in the magnitude, modalities, and recipients of security sector assistance.