Influence by Design: Reassessing U.S. Military Advising
by Alexandra Chinchilla
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07.23.2025 at 06:00am
Influence by Design: Reassessing U.S. Military Advising Image
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Editor’s Note: this article is being republished with the permission of the Irregular Warfare Initiative as part of a republishing arrangement between SWJ and IWI. The original article was published on 5 June 2025 and is available here.
Introduction: Rethinking U.S. Military Advising
After the failure to build a sustainable Afghan military that could survive without U.S. presence, many scholars and practitioners now argue that U.S. efforts to build foreign militaries are nearly predestined to fail and should rarely, if ever, be undertaken. In Training for Victory: U.S. Special Forces Advisory Operations from El Salvador to Afghanistan, Frank Sobchak pushes back against this view, arguing that “…we have not failed because advising our allies is too hard; we’ve failed because we have never taken it seriously …Building foreign militaries is a difficult, long-term, and often thankless endeavor. But it is not impossible” (2024, 177). To support his argument, Sobchak examines five cases of U.S. military advising: El Salvador during the Cold War, and the Philippines, Colombia, Iraq, and Afghanistan during the Global War on Terror. While cases like Colombia and El Salvador are considered successes by some scholars, Afghanistan is widely seen as a failure. Sobchak seeks to understand why some advising efforts succeed while others do not. He tackles this challenging analytical problem with a clear research design and well-researched case studies offering new empirical detail on important U.S. advising missions.
Existing explanations attribute security force assistance outcomes to structural conditions or the provider’s use of strategies like carrots and sticks or military-to-military socialization to encourage local compliance. Sobchak’s work broadly supports the findings of researchers who argue that human contact between militaries generates more influence for security force assistance providers. His contribution lies in demonstrating that advising missions vary greatly in their design across cases, and this variation makes some more successful than others at generating influence. Within the U.S. special operations forces (SOF) community—the military organization most frequently engaged in advising—so-called “SOF truths” shape beliefs about how special operations forces should be built and maintained. Despite this shared reference point, in practice, U.S. SOF advise differently across cases. Sobchak leverages variation in the design of military advising missions to determine which are more effective. The implications are important for policy: if certain kinds of advising missions are correlated with better outcomes, security force assistance providers have some control over whether the outcome mirrors Afghanistan or more closely resembles El Salvador.
The Role of Human Relationships in Advising
https://smallwarsjournal.com/2025/07/23/influence-by-design-reassessing-u-s-military-advising/
