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Published by the Federation of American Scientists Fund No.
48 (August 2002)
In May, the Bush administration released the 2002 Foreign Military Training Report (FMTR), an annual summary of most military training programs run by the Departments of State and Defense. According to the report, U.S. training programs in FY2001 and FY2002 are likely to involve 108,500 foreign soldiers and civilian officials from 176 countries.
This year's report is a mixed bag. The content and format is a vast improvement over last year's report. The administration could do better, however, both in terms of the content of the report and the training programs themselves.
Reasons for Tempered Celebration
This year's FMTR reverses the past two years' trend of cutting out additional categories of data from the declassified section. Restored in this year's report is data on the training location, the unit or government agency to which the trainee is assigned, and the dates of the training. This information is crucial for enforcing key restrictions on military aid such as the Leahy Law, which bans military aid to specific units of foreign security forces that commit human rights abuses.
Evidence of a persistent, if sporadic, U.S. commitment to enforcing its own human rights and nonaggression norms is also present in this year's report. The FMTR notes that the U.S. decided to deny most forms of military training to several regimes - including Rwanda, Burundi, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Fiji, Equatorial Guinea, Uganda and Cote d'Ivoire - because they were involved in regional conflicts or because of their regimes' anti-democratic behavior.
But Before We Uncork the Champagne...
But before we can toast a new era of transparency and accountability in the history of military training programs, both the FMTR itself and the training programs it documents still need to be improved in many ways. The report itself lacks consistently detailed information about the units to which the students are assigned, refers to courses that are either not included or mislabelled in the course descriptions section, and includes no information about several problematic training programs implemented by the intelligence community and Private Military Companies (PMCs). Finally, many of the regimes denied certain types of military aid were nonetheless permitted to send students to the Defense Department's Regional Centers for Security Studies.
The marked increase in the number of Joint Combined Exercises and Training (JCETs) missions - which are used to teach deadly warfare skills to foreign troops under the pretense of training U.S. soldiers - is another area of concern. JCET activity in the Philippines increased dramatically, jumping from 343 Filipino participants in FY2000 to 573 in FY2001, despite the fact that the Armed Forces of the Philippines continued to be accused by the State Department of violating international human rights norms. Lastly, the FMTR reveals that the U.S. continues to turn a blind eye to human rights abuses committed by recipient countries that are geostrategically important. Forty-two of the regimes that received combat training were accused by the State Department of having "poor" human rights records or engaging in "serious" abuses.
Whither the FMTR? Current Concerns
Annoyed by the time it takes to compile the report and convinced that few people bother to use it, some U.S. officials are trying to scale back or eliminate the report altogether. Both the House and the Senate have bills that would limit the scope of the 2003 report. The Senate bill (S. 1803) would eliminate the reporting requirement for NATO countries and major non-NATO allies unless this information is requested by ranking members of a relevant congressional committee. The House version (H.R. 1646) is much worse. The administration would be entirely relieved of its responsibility to assemble the report unless a ranking committee member requests it. Even then, only those countries specified by the requestor would have to be included.
Even if Congress ends up preserving the report, the message sent by the House is clear: the training report is both burdensome and expendable. Such a brazen attack on so crucial a report should serve as a wake up call for advocates of transparency and accountability in security assistance programs; the report's survival could depend on their willingness to speak out on its behalf.
