Developing an Assessment, Monitoring, and Evaluation Framework for U.S. Department of Defense Security Cooperation
Abstract Every year, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) conducts thousands of cooperative activities with officials from security institutions and with security forces around the world. How effective are these activities? Answering this question is challenging, to say the least. Yet, given the priority placed on security cooperation in U.S. government strategies and the billions of dollars spent on its execution, the answer goes to the heart of understanding the success or failure of U.S. foreign policy. How can senior policymakers, members of Congress, and the American people better understand security cooperation? Why is DoD working with particular foreign countries, and in what ways? How is security cooperation expected to make a difference? How does DoD monitor these activities to ensure that everything is on track? Most importantly, what is working, and what is not? The answers to these questions are sometimes very specific, but more often they are broad and unclear, especially for those far from the action. Understanding security cooperation starts with understanding its objectives. As a precursor to this report, RAND researchers conducted a study to help DoD develop specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and results oriented, and time bound (SMART) security cooperation objectives. Not every objective can meet every one of these criteria on its own; some must be supplemented with information about the tasks planned within each objective.