This arti­cle first appeared on Tom Dis­patch.

Win­ning! It’s the White House watch­word when it comes to the U.S. armed forces. ​“We will give our mil­i­tary the tools you need to pre­vent war and, if required, to fight war and only do one thing – you know what that is? Win! Win!” Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump exclaimed ear­li­er this year while stand­ing aboard the new air­craft car­ri­er U.S.S. Ger­ald R. Ford.

Since World War II, how­ev­er, nei­ther pre­vent­ing nor win­ning wars have been among America’s strong suits. The nation has instead been embroiled in ser­i­al con­flicts and inter­ven­tions in which vic­to­ries have been remark­ably scarce, a trend that has only accel­er­at­ed in the post‑9/​11 era. From Afghanistan to Iraq, Soma­lia to the Philip­pines, Libya to Yemen, mil­i­tary invest­ments – in lives and tax dol­lars – have been cost­ly and endur­ing vic­to­ries essen­tial­ly nonexistent.

But Amadou Sanogo is some­thing of a rare all-Amer­i­can mil­i­tary suc­cess sto­ry, even if he isn’t Amer­i­can and his suc­cess was fleet­ing. Sanogo learned Eng­lish in Texas, received instruc­tion from U.S. Marines in Vir­ginia, took his intel­li­gence train­ing in Ari­zona, and under­went Army infantry offi­cer basic train­ing in Geor­gia. Back home in his native Mali, the young army offi­cer was report­ed­ly much admired for his sojourn, stud­ies, and train­ing in the Unit­ed States.

In March 2012, Sanogo put his pop­u­lar­i­ty and skills to use when he led a coup that over­threw Mali’s elect­ed gov­ern­ment. ​“Amer­i­ca is [a] great coun­try with a fan­tas­tic army. I tried to put all the things I learned there into prac­tice here,” he told Der Spiegel dur­ing his tenure as Mali’s mil­i­tary strong­man. (He even­tu­al­ly lost his grip on pow­er, was arrest­ed, and in 2016 went on tri­al for ​“com­plic­i­ty in kid­nap­ping and assassination.”)

Since 9⁄ 11 , the Unit­ed States has spent more than $250 bil­lion train­ing for­eign mil­i­tary and police per­son­nel like Sanogo. Year after year, a sprawl­ing net­work of U.S. pro­grams pro­vides 200,000 of these sol­diers and secu­ri­ty offi­cers with assis­tance and sup­port. In 2015, almost 80,000 of them, hail­ing from 154 coun­tries, received what’s for­mal­ly known as For­eign Mil­i­tary Train­ing (FMT).

The stat­ed goals of two key FMT pro­grams – Inter­na­tion­al Mil­i­tary Edu­ca­tion and Train­ing (IMET) and the Com­bat­ing Ter­ror­ism Fel­low­ship Pro­gram (CTFP) – include pro­mot­ing ​“inter­na­tion­al peace and secu­ri­ty” and increas­ing the aware­ness among for­eign mil­i­tary per­son­nel of ​“inter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized human rights.” In real­i­ty, these pro­grams focus on strength­en­ing U.S. part­ner and proxy forces glob­al­ly, though there’s scant evi­dence that they actu­al­ly suc­ceed in that goal. A study pub­lished in July, ana­lyz­ing data from 1970 to 2009, finds that FMT pro­grams are, how­ev­er, effec­tive at impart­ing skills inte­gral to at least one spe­cif­ic type of armed under­tak­ing. ​“We find a robust rela­tion­ship between U.S. train­ing of for­eign mil­i­taries and mil­i­tary-backed coup attempts,” wrote Jonathan Caver­ley of the U.S. Naval War Col­lege and Jesse Sav­age of Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin in the Jour­nal of Peace Research.

Bad Actors

Through near­ly 200 sep­a­rate pro­grams, the State Depart­ment and the Depart­ment of Defense (DoD) engage in what’s called ​“secu­ri­ty coop­er­a­tion,” ​“build­ing part­ner capac­i­ty,” and oth­er assis­tance to for­eign forces. In 2001, the DoD admin­is­tered about 17% of secu­ri­ty assis­tance fund­ing. By 2015, that fig­ure had jumped to approx­i­mate­ly 60%. The Com­bat­ing Ter­ror­ism Fel­low­ship Pro­gram, a post‑9/​11 cre­ation indica­tive of this growth, is most­ly run through the DoD and focus­es on train­ing mid- and senior-lev­el defense offi­cials from allied mil­i­taries in the tenets of coun­tert­er­ror­ism. The State Depart­ment, by con­trast, is the dri­ving force behind the old­er and larg­er IMET pro­gram, though the Defense Depart­ment imple­ments the training.

Under IMET, for­eign per­son­nel – like Sanogo – trav­el to the U.S. to take class­es and under­go instruc­tion at mil­i­tary schools and bases. ​“IMET is designed to help for­eign mil­i­taries bol­ster their rela­tion­ships with the Unit­ed States, learn about U.S. mil­i­tary equip­ment, improve mil­i­tary pro­fes­sion­al­ism, and instill demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues in their mem­bers,” wroteJoshua Kurlantz­ick in a 2016 Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions mem­o­ran­dum aimed at reform­ing the program.

How­ev­er, in an inves­ti­ga­tion pub­lished ear­li­er this year, Lau­ren Chad­wick of the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integri­ty found that, accord­ing to offi­cial U.S. gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, at least 17 high-rank­ing for­eign­ers – includ­ing five gen­er­als– trained through IMET between 1985 and 2010 were lat­er accused and in some cas­es con­vict­ed of crim­i­nal and human rights abus­es. An open-source study by the non-prof­it Cen­ter for Inter­na­tion­al Pol­i­cy found anoth­er 33 U.S.-trained for­eign mil­i­tary offi­cers who lat­er com­mit­ted human rights abus­es. And experts sug­gest that the total num­ber of crim­i­nal U.S. trainees is like­ly to be far high­er, since IMET is the only one of a sprawl­ing col­lec­tion of secu­ri­ty assis­tance pro­grams that requires offi­cial reports on human rights abusers.

In their Jour­nal of Peace Research study, Caver­ley and Sav­age kept the spot­light on IMET because the pro­gram ​“explic­it­ly focus­es on pro­mot­ing norms of civil­ian con­trol” of the mil­i­tary. Indeed, it’s a tru­ism of U.S. mil­i­tary assis­tance pro­grams that they instill demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues and respect for inter­na­tion­al norms. Yet the list of U.S.-trained coup-mak­ers – from Isaac Zida of Burk­i­na Faso, Haiti’s Philippe Biam­by, and Yahya Jam­meh of The Gam­bia to Egypt’s Abdel-Fat­tah el-Sisi, Moham­mad Zia-ul-Haq of Pak­istan, and the IMET-edu­cat­ed lead­ers of the 2009 coup in Hon­duras, not to men­tion Mali’s Amadou Sanogo – sug­gests an embrace of some­thing oth­er than demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues and good gov­er­nance. ​“We didn’t spend, prob­a­bly, the req­ui­site time focus­ing on val­ues, ethics, and mil­i­tary ethos,” then chief of U.S. Africa Com­mand, Carter Ham, said of Sanogo fol­low­ing his coup. ​“I believe that we focused exclu­sive­ly on tac­ti­cal and tech­ni­cal [train­ing].”

In 2014, two gen­er­a­tions of U.S.-educated offi­cers faced off in The Gam­bia as a group of Amer­i­can-trained would-be coup-mak­ers attempt­ed (but failed) to over­throw the U.S.-trained coup-mak­er Yahya Jam­meh who had seized pow­er back in 1994. The unsuc­cess­ful rebel­lion claimed the life of Lamin San­neh, the pur­port­ed ring­leader, who had earned a master’s degree at Nation­al Defense Uni­ver­si­ty (NDU) in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. (Two oth­er coup plot­ters had appar­ent­ly even served in the U.S. mil­i­tary.) ​“I can’t shake the feel­ing that his edu­ca­tion in the Unit­ed States some­how influ­enced his actions,” wrote Sanneh’s for­mer NDU men­tor Jef­frey Meis­er. ​“I can’t help but won­der if sim­ply imprint­ing our for­eign stu­dents with the ​‘Amer­i­can pro­gram’ is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive and unethical.”

Caver­ly warns that Wash­ing­ton should also be cau­tious about export­ing its own for­eign and domes­tic pol­i­cy imper­a­tives, giv­en that recent admin­is­tra­tions have left the Defense Depart­ment flush with fund­ing and the State Department’s cof­fers so bare that gen­er­als are forced to beg on its behalf. ​“Put more suc­cinct­ly,” he explained, ​“you need to build up mul­ti­ple groups with­in civ­il soci­ety to com­ple­ment and some­times coun­ter­bal­ance an empow­ered military.”

Caver­ley and Sav­age iden­ti­fied 275 mil­i­tary-backed coups that occurred world­wide between 1970 and 2009. In 165 of them, mem­bers of that country’s armed forces had received some IMET or CTFP train­ing the year before the coup. If you add up all the years of such instruc­tion for all those coun­tries, it tops out at 3,274 ​“coun­try years.” In 165 instances, a takeover attempt was car­ried out the next year. ​“That’s 5%, which is very high, since coups hap­pen rarely,” Caver­ley told TomDis­patch. ​“The ratio for coun­try-years with no U.S. train­ing is 110 out of 4101, or 2.7%.”

While U.S. train­ing didn’t car­ry the day in The Gam­bia in 2014 (as it had in 1994 when U.S. mil­i­tary-police-train­ing alum­nus Yahya Jam­meh seized pow­er), it is nonethe­less linked with vic­to­ri­ous jun­tas. ​“Suc­cess­ful coups are strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with IMET train­ing and spend­ing,” Caver­ley and Sav­age not­ed. Accord­ing to their find­ings, Amer­i­can trainees suc­ceed­ed in over­throw­ing their gov­ern­ments in 72 of the 165 coup attempts.

Train Wreck

There is sig­nif­i­cant evi­dence that the sprawl­ing patch­work of America’s mil­i­tary train­ing pro­grams for for­eign forces is hope­less­ly bro­ken. In 2013, a State Depart­ment advi­so­ry board found that Amer­i­can secu­ri­ty aid had no coher­ent means of eval­u­a­tion and no cohe­sive strat­e­gy. It com­pared the ​“baf­fling” array of pro­grams to ​“a phil­an­thropic grant-mak­ing process by an assem­blage of dif­fer­ent foun­da­tions with dif­fer­ent agendas.”

A 2014 RAND analy­sis of U.S. secu­ri­ty coop­er­a­tion (SC) found ​“no sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant cor­re­la­tion between SC and change in coun­tries’ fragili­ty in Africa or the Mid­dle East.” A 2015 report from U.S. Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Command’s Joint Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Uni­ver­si­ty not­ed that efforts at build­ing part­ner capac­i­ty have ​“in the past con­sumed vast resources for lit­tle return.” That same year, an analy­sis by the Con­gres­sion­al Research Ser­vice con­clud­ed that ​“despite the increas­ing empha­sis on, and cen­tral­i­ty of, [build­ing part­ner capac­i­ty] in nation­al secu­ri­ty strat­e­gy and mil­i­tary oper­a­tions, the assump­tion that build­ing for­eign secu­ri­ty forces will have tan­gi­ble U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty ben­e­fits remains a rel­a­tive­ly untest­ed proposition.”

“There are no stan­dard guide­lines for deter­min­ing the goals of [counter-ter­ror­ism] secu­ri­ty assis­tance pro­grams, par­tic­u­lar­ly part­ner capac­i­ty-build­ing train­ing pro­grams, or for assess­ing how these pro­grams fit into broad­er U.S. for­eign pol­i­cy objec­tives,” reads a 2016 Cen­ter for a New Amer­i­can Secu­ri­ty report. ​“And there are few met­rics for mea­sur­ing the effec­tive­ness of these pro­grams once they are being imple­ment­ed.” And in his 2016 report on IMET for the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions, Kurlantz­ick not­ed that the effort is deeply in need of reform. ​“The pro­gram,” he wrote, ​“con­tains no sys­tem for track­ing which for­eign mil­i­tary offi­cers attend­ed IMET… [a]dditionally, the pro­gram is not effec­tive­ly pro­mot­ing democ­ra­cy and respect for civil­ian com­mand of armed forces.”

Stud­ies aside, the fail­ures of U.S. train­ing efforts across the Greater Mid­dle East have been obvi­ous for years. From the col­lapse of the U.S.-built Iraqi army in the face of small num­bers of Islam­ic State mil­i­tants to a still­born effort to cre­ate a new armed force for Libya, a $500 mil­lion failed effort to train and equip Syr­i­an rebels, and an often incom­pe­tent, ghost-sol­dier-filled, deser­tion-prone army in Afghanistan, large-scale Amer­i­can ini­tia­tives to build and bol­ster for­eign forces have crashed and burned repeatedly.

One thing state­side U.S. train­ing does seem to do, accord­ing to Caver­ley and Sav­age, is increase ​“human cap­i­tal” – that is, for­eign trainees’ pro­fes­sion­al skills like small unit tac­tics and strate­gic plan­ning as well as intan­gi­bles like increased pres­tige in their home coun­tries. And unlike oth­er forms of Amer­i­can aid that allow regimes to shut­tle state resources toward insu­lat­ing the gov­ern­ment from coups by doing any­thing from brib­ing poten­tial rivals to fos­ter­ing par­al­lel secu­ri­ty forces (like pres­i­den­tial guards), FMT affords no such out­let. ​“If you give assets to a group with guns and a strong cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty with­in a coun­try lack­ing well-devel­oped insti­tu­tions and norms, you cre­ate the poten­tial for polit­i­cal imbal­ance,” Caver­ley told TomDis­patch. ​“An extreme exam­ple of that imbal­ance is an attempt to take over the entire government.”

Strength and Numbers

The Unit­ed States has a trou­bled past when it comes to work­ing with for­eign mil­i­taries. From Latin Amer­i­ca to South­east Asia, Wash­ing­ton has a long his­to­ry of pro­tect­ing, back­ing, and fos­ter­ing forces impli­cat­ed in atroc­i­ties. With­in the last sev­er­al months alone, reports have sur­faced about U.S.-trained or ‑aid­ed forces from the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates, Syr­ia, Cameroon, and Iraq tor­tur­ing or exe­cut­ing prisoners.

Some U.S.-trained fig­ures like Isaac Zida in Burk­i­na Faso and Amadou Sanogo in Mali have expe­ri­enced only short-term suc­cess­es in over­throw­ing their country’s gov­ern­ments. Oth­ers like The Gambia’s Yahya Jam­meh (who went into exile in Jan­u­ary after 22 years in pow­er) and Egypt’s pres­i­dent – and for­mer U.S. Army War Col­lege stu­dent – Abdel Fat­tah el-Sisi have had far more last­ing tenures as strong­men in their homelands.

Any for­eign mil­i­tary train­ing pro­vid­ed by the U.S., write Caver­ley and Sav­age, ​“cor­re­sponds to a dou­bling of the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a mil­i­tary-backed coup attempt in the recip­i­ent coun­try.” And the more mon­ey the U.S. spends or the more sol­diers it trains via IMET, the high­er the risk of a coup d’état.

In 2014, the U.S. resumed IMET sup­port for Mali – it had been sus­pend­ed for a year fol­low­ing the insur­rec­tion – and even increased that fund­ing by a mod­est $30,000. That West African nation has, how­ev­er, nev­er recov­ered from the coup cri­sis of 2012 and, half a decade lat­er, remains wracked by an insur­gency that Sanogo, his suc­ces­sors, and a French- and U.S.-backed mil­i­tary cam­paign have been unable to defeat. As the mil­i­tant groups in Mali have grown and metas­ta­sized, the U.S. has con­tin­ued to pour mon­ey into train­ing local mil­i­tary per­son­nel. In 2012, the year Amadou Sanogo seized pow­er, the U.S. spent $69,000 in IMET funds on train­ing Malian offi­cers in the Unit­ed States. Last year, the fig­ure reached $738,000.

For the bet­ter part of two decades from Afghanistan to Iraq, Yemen to Pak­istan, Soma­lia to Syr­ia, U.S. drone strikes, com­man­do raids, large-scale occu­pa­tions and oth­er mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions have led to small-scale tac­ti­cal tri­umphs and long-term stale­mates (not to men­tion death and destruc­tion). Train­ing efforts in and mil­i­tary aid to those and oth­er nations – from Mali to South Sudan, Libya to the Philip­pines – have been plagued by set­backs, fias­cos, and failures.

Pres­i­dent Trump has promised the mil­i­tary ​“tools” nec­es­sary to ​“pre­vent” and ​“win” wars. By that he means ​“resources, per­son­nel train­ing and equip­ment… the finest equip­ment in the world.” Caver­ley and Savage’s research sug­gests that the Pen­ta­gon could ben­e­fit far more from ana­lyt­i­cal tools to shed light on pro­grams that cost hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars and deliv­er coun­ter­pro­duc­tive results – pro­grams, that is, where the only ​“wins” are achieved by the likes of Yahya Jam­meh of The Gam­bia and Egypt’s Abdel-Fat­tah el-Sisi.

“Warfight­ers focus on train­ing oth­er warfight­ers. Full stop. Any sec­ond order effects, like coups, are not the pri­ma­ry con­sid­er­a­tion for the train­ing,” Caver­ley explains. ​“That’s why secu­ri­ty coop­er­a­tion work by the U.S. mil­i­tary, like its more vio­lent oper­a­tions, needs to be put in a strate­gic con­text that is large­ly lack­ing in this cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion, but was not much in evi­dence in oth­er admin­is­tra­tions either.”

This piece was orginial­ly pub­lished in TomDispatch