Join Alex Neads, Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre, as he presents his recent research on security assistance between the United States and NATO military forces.
Security assistance, or the provision of military training and advice to the armed forces of one country by those of another, has become a universal tool of foreign policy, albeit one with a somewhat chequered history. In recent years, the US military has developed a specialised architecture of functionally differentiated military organisations tasked with the provision of security assistance. These include both unconventional forces, such as the US Army Special Forces (the Green Berets ), and conventional troops, such as the Security Force Assistance Brigades (SFABs).
Ostensibly intended to ensure that capable and dedicated professionals undertake overseas training missions, these organisations are central to US efforts to build partner military capacity and to promote the US strategic influence abroad. However, despite the widespread use of security assistance across the NATO alliance, these new force structures and capabilities have not found universal favour among European armed forces. Indeed, the partial and uneven diffusion of specialised security assistance organisations calls into question the utility of this purported best practice, especially at a time when European defence establishments are refocusing their security assistance efforts in support of Ukraine.
This presentation examines the factors driving (and impeding) the diffusion of specialised force structures for security assistance among three European land forces: the British Army, the French Armée de terre, and the Belgian Army. The British military initially adopted US practices, creating a new Army Special Operations Brigade modelled on the US Green Berets and its own British SFAB.
However, while the UK’s special operations force continues to grow, the British SFAB has been quietly abandoned. With US help, the Belgian Defensie likewise created a new Special Operations Regiment alongside the expansion of its existing special forces, extensively deploying both to train partner armies in West Africa, but without any parallel effort to generate a conventional SFAB equivalent. Meanwhile, the French military has shown little interest in these American innovations despite the centrality of security assistance to French stabilisation interventions in Africa, and a concomitant effort to restructure in the light of strategic failure in the Sahel. The discussion will conclude with observations on the utility of force specialisation for the conduct of security assistance, the implications of partial diffusion for future practice in European armies, and the broader causes of European military change.
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