1275. THEY'LL READ THE DENIAL---but Washington acted on it, and got thrown out for it.
Cut the denial yourself. Tehran denied on May 15; the point is what the accusation DID
Karr and Fitzpatrick 24 — Liam Karr and Kitaneh Fitzpatrick. May 16. Africa File team, Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, in partnership with the Institute for the Study of War. Critical Threats, “Africa File, May 16, 2024: Russian Outreach across Africa; Iran’s Uranium Aims; IS Mozambique Continues March,” https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/africa-file-may-16-2024-russian-outreach-across-africa-irans-uranium-aims-is-mozambique-continues-march Clopus
Iran Iran is using defense engagement to pursue uranium access in Africa. French media reported that Iran and Niger have been negotiating since the end of 2023 for Niger to provide 300 tons of uranium yellowcake to Iran in exchange for drones and surface-to-air missiles. [71] The Wall Street Journal reported that the US told Nigerien officials during March meetings that any sale of uranium to Iran would lead to sanctions, which contributed to the junta annulling defense cooperation and eventually kicking out the over 600 US troops still stationed in the country. [72] The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran denied the reports on May 15. [73]
1281. THE SPLIT. Their own study has two effects---the institutional one is ours.
Read this BEFORE Wang---the direct effect is theirs, the indirect effect is ours
Wang 98 — T.Y. Wang. Built a causal model of arms transfers and military intervention across thirty-five African states, estimated by event-count analysis. Journal of Peace Research 35(6): 659–675, “Arms Transfers and Coups d’État : A Study on Sub-Saharan Africa,” https://www.prio.org/publications/1183 Clopus published abstract only---the article itself is paywalled at JPR
Early studies of African coups have largely focused on domestic determinants such as social mobilization, economic conditions, and the characteristics of the military itself. Scant attention has been paid to the political effects of arms transfers on military intervention in Africa. Considering that defense spending may meet the demands of the armed forces, absorb vital social and economic resources needed for development, retard the growth of the civilian domestic product, or strengthen the political position of the military, it is likely that expenditures on arms imports may directly or indirectly affect the likelihood of coups in sub-Saharan African countries. Utilizing theories of arms transfers and coups d'état, a causal model was constructed and data were collected for 35 African nations. An event-count analysis in conjunction with conventional regression techniques was employed for statistical estimation. The findings suggest that arms transfers serve to meet the military's corporate interests and have a long-term direct effect on reducing the likelihood of coups in Africa. However, arms transfers contribute to African regime instability indirectly by enhancing the military's position vis-a-vis civilian institutions in society. Former French colonies have experienced significantly fewer coups than the rest of Africa, but throughout sub-Saharan Africa, countries that experienced an economic downturn or a coup are more likely to have military intervention in politics.
1292. SALARIES. Loyalty is bought with pay---and the budget data can't separate the two.
Choulis et al. 22 — Ioannis Choulis, Marius Mehrl, Abel Escribà-Folch and Tobias Böhmelt. May 13. University of Essex; Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, University of Munich; Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; University of Essex. They coded new mechanization data for every military organization in the world through 2019. Comparative Political Studies 56(2), “How Mechanization Shapes Coups,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140221100194 Clopus
A second, indirect mechanism contends that mechanization may reduce incentives for intervening, because it exerts a positive influence on military professionalism. Professionalism is often seen as entailing militaries that are more politically neutral and, hence, reluctant to intervene in politics (Huntington, 1959:71–78). By bolstering professionalism, mechanization would then indirectly reduce coup risk. Nordlinger (1977), for example, considers expertise in the administration of violence as one of the three dimensions of military professionalism. 4 Force mechanization requires a higher level of specialization and of technical as well as tactical training to acquire the skills necessary to operate advanced equipment and carry out combined arms operations. The more soldiers train in separate locations, the more they isolate from political affairs and socialize with the military identity as well as the fundamental traits of the military profession (Janowitz, 1960; Finer, 1962; Moore, 2009). In line with Huntington’s (1959) paradigm of objective civilian control, force mechanization thus creates a more professionalized military, which operates in its own professional sphere and is disconnected from politics, making them less likely to challenge civilian supremacy. Although relevant for understanding the potential impact of mechanization on coup risk, incentive-based approaches suffer from several shortcomings. First, the incentive-based logic does not address the guardianship dilemma due to inherent commitment problems for both sides: giving the military toys still boosts their material capacities, making it less credible that they can commit not to intervene after having upgraded their power (Wang, 1998). 5
They might become (temporarily) satisfied with the status quo, but also more capable and threatening. Second, relatedly, studies of the impact of military expenditures cannot separate the effect of spending on wages and allowances from the purchase of hardware. Budgetary allocations include a number of items, which existing data do not allow distinguishing. 6 The dilemma above might be addressed if military spending reduces the disposition to plan a coup, but does not actually increase the power of the army. 7 Henk and Rupiya (2001), for example, note that an overwhelming proportion of defense spending in Sub-Saharan countries actually goes to salaries and personnel allowances (see also Powell, 2014; Powell et al., 2018). Yet, Huntington and other scholars seem to place the same weight to payments and equipment in the military’s utility function. Mechanization is linked to the military’s fighting capabilities, but not soldiers’ living conditions, which arguably makes them less important in shaping their motivations. The mechanisms relating mechanization to professionalism and, in turn, to lower coup risk are incomplete too. As pointed out above, mechanization may lead to increased corruption via arms procurements, which undermines professionalism (Ouedraogo, ´ 2014). In addition, professionalism is not
1303. SUCCESS PROBABILITY. Pay never changes whether a coup works---equipment does.
Choulis et al. 22 — Ioannis Choulis, Marius Mehrl, Abel Escribà-Folch and Tobias Böhmelt. May 13. University of Essex; Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, University of Munich; Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; University of Essex. They coded new mechanization data for every military organization in the world through 2019. Comparative Political Studies 56(2), “How Mechanization Shapes Coups,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140221100194 Clopus
2009). On the other hand, larger military expenditures do not necessarily entail better soldier quality or military capacity, since money can simply be used to fund salaries and allowances, not combat equipment or training. Mechanization is arguably the material dimension of military organization most directly associated with fighting capacity. Per the guardianship dilemma (e.g., Besley & Robinson, 2010; Svolik, 2013; McMahon & Slantchev, 2015), a first argument might thus suggest that more mechanization induces a higher coup risk as the estimated likelihood that a coup will succeed is raised. Contrary to this view, there are arguments highlighting that mechanization affects other critical considerations of plotters, namely, their incentives as well as the costs of execution and failed coordination. Eventually, to derive our hypotheses, we examine how mechanization relates to the three explanations of coup dynamics suggested by Singh (2014): coups as battles, coups as elections, and coups as coordination games. This framework allows us to theoretically scrutinize different competing arguments about how mechanization might influence military’s calculations and, hence, the likelihood of coups.
Mechanization, Military Power, and Prospects of Success
According to one view, coups can simply be seen as internal military operations designed to capture the state, which, in the event of facing resistance, are approached as a strict military confrontation. According to Luttwak (1979:
146), “the active phase of a coup is like a military operation.” Singh (2014: 17) concludes consistently, “[i]f attempts are best understood as battles, then the goal of the challenger is to establish clear military dominance,” which is a “task that is made easier by having more men with more powerful weapons”
(Singh, 2014: 16). In this context, mechanization, entailing precisely more powerful weapons and increased military power, might help establish such dominance if rebels have access to such equipment. As a result, the enhanced mobility and protection as well as the higher material and technical capabilities associated with more mechanization play a decisive role in plotters’ initial decision to stage a coup by increasing the estimated probability of success and reducing the potential personal costs ‒ and, hence, increase the expected utility of intervening in the planning stage. Much like Collier, Hoeffler, and Rohner’s (2009) claims concerning the onset of civil war, it might be mostly feasibility what matters and triggers coups as well, with military feasibility, in this case, boosted by higher mechanization. During military battles, tactical movements to capture enemy positions become central. Mechanized units, with the mobility and protection they provide as well as the overwhelming firepower they carry, might be better equipped to take on the operational steps necessary to effectively overthrow a government (Luttwak, 1979; Ferguson, 1987). According to Luttwak (1979:
138), coup execution requires “the application of force at the right place [...] by striking at the organization heart of the whole state.” As highlighted above, popular images of coups typically feature tanks and other armored vehicles on the streets and outside government buildings. This suggests that mechanization can be useful in providing challengers with the relative strength to attain the operational goals of an internal intervention, namely, asserting control over the presidential palace, the parliament, headquarters of the armed forces, radio and TV stations, and the airport (Luttwak, 1979: 122, 157). On one hand, armed forces with mechanized infantry and armor, thus benefitting from enhanced protection and mobility, could make it easier for troops to safely move from their bases and reach strategic sites in the capital. Protection helps reducing the potential personal costs of participating in a military operation, while improved mobility makes it possible for coup-makers to create an element of surprise. This allows for the opportunity to neutralize enemy forces and, by creating confusion, to hinder their ability to organize and occupy defensive positions to repel the attack. On the other hand, the overwhelming firepower that armored convoys typically carry facilitates tactical operations: it dissuades opponents from taking coordinated action against the attempt and it provides coup stagers with the strength to neutralize and defeat loyal forces protecting governmental buildings and mounting resistance to the attempt. Furthermore, once key buildings have been reached, armored vehicles could allow for a more effective takeover, subsequent control, and then hinder the potential mobilization and taking of positions by pro-government forces. For instance, during the 1973 Chilean coup, tanks shelled the La Moneda palace after Salvador Allende refused to surrender and the President’s guard (Grupo de Amigos Personales) opened fire on the rebels. In the 1967 Greek coup d’etat, the army ´ ’s tanks occupied ministries and vital
infrastructure in the capital (Kassimeris, 2006). The coup was bloodless as no actor had the means to oppose the military’s mechanized forces. Likewise, Thai coup-plotters used armored units in 2006 to occupy strategic buildings in Bangkok (Hewison, 2008: 199). Thus, force mechanization may increase the tools that officers have at their disposal to stage a coup. These arguments yield the theoretical expectation that higher mechanization increases coup risk.
1314. IT'S THE CHANNEL, NOT THE CARGO. Their mechanism is the flow a coup would cut off---delivered munitions cut off nothing.
Rahman 26 — Md Muhibbur Rahman. March 12. University of Pennsylvania. Cross-sectional time-series analysis of 160 countries, 1980–2010, with mixed-effects logistic models and instrumented robustness checks. Journal of Conflict Resolution, “Institutionalized Defense Cooperation and Regime Security,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027261432196 Clopus
How does the institutionalization of external security cooperation affect government-military relations? This question has become increasingly salient amid a dramatic increase in bilateral defense cooperation agreements over the past few decades. I argue that DCAs help stabilize government-military relations and bolster regime security by mitigating a persistent credibility problem between signatory governments and their armed forces. By securing military-specific resources, DCAs limit the government’s ability to divert benefits elsewhere. The involvement of partner states further enhances credibility, as reneging on these bilateral agreements carries diplomatic and reputational costs. Because the military depends on the government to sustain these arrangements, the costs of plotting a coup increase: any extra-constitutional removal of the government threatens the institutional channels through which critical resources flow. A cross-sectional time-series analysis of 160 countries from 1980 to 2010 suggests that one or more DCAs exhibit significantly lower odds of coup attempts. The study highlights the role of international agreements in shaping domestic political stability. It also expands our understanding of states’ unique role in managing domestic civil-military relations through international brokerage and cooperation.
1321. MECHANISM. Empowering units without oversight erodes civilian control---politicization isn't needed.
Trenkov-Wermuth and Noyes 26 — Calin Trenkov-Wermuth and Alexander Noyes. February. Former principal security governance advisor at the U.S. Institute of Peace, coauthor of The Future of the Security Sector in Ukraine. Fellow at the Brookings Institution, coauthor of War at Arm’s Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance. Journal of Democracy, “African Coups and the Elite-Forces Trap,” https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/online-exclusive/african-coups-and-the-elite-forces-trap/ Clopus
Benin’s coup attempt failed. The democratic warning it carries should not.
As insecurity spreads in the Gulf of Guinea, more governments will feel pressure to rely on elite units as expedient solutions to complex political and security challenges. When those units are empowered without corresponding investments in civilian oversight and defense governance, the result is not stability but the gradual erosion of democratic control over the use of force.
Thus, if Washington continues to privilege speed over structure and access over institutions, it will keep winning tactical battles all while watching partners unravel and fall into the orbit of adversaries like Russia and China.
The most serious threat to democracy in West Africa is not only armed groups operating at the margins of the state. It is the unintended political empowerment of military actors who come to see themselves as guardians of the nation rather than servants of elected authority.
1332. SCOPE. Their model is ground armor---it never reaches air power, and it stops before the wave.
Choulis et al. 22 — Ioannis Choulis, Marius Mehrl, Abel Escribà-Folch and Tobias Böhmelt. May 13. University of Essex; Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, University of Munich; Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; University of Essex. They coded new mechanization data for every military organization in the world through 2019. Comparative Political Studies 56(2), “How Mechanization Shapes Coups,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00104140221100194 Clopus
Note: Table entries denote Area under the ROC curve where higher values are preferred.
also omit potential outliers at the top of the mechanization distribution and examine whether our results are driven by countries such as the US, which combine high mechanization with very low coup risk. Third, we employ penalized maximum-likelihood regression, since coups are characterized by a rare-events data generating process. Fourth, we also estimate a two-stage selection model, which jointly analyzes coup attempts and coup outcomes. Interestingly, we find that mechanization does not affect the likelihood of coup success. 26 Fifth, we further take into account institutional coup-proofing (Pilster & Bohmelt, ¨ 2011), as coup-proofing can decrease coup-risk (Bohmelt ¨ & Pilster, 2015; De Bruin, 2018). Sixth, we control for total military personnel (logged) and total military spending divided by military personnel. While both items are partially included in Mechanization (due to the personnel component) and, thus, liable to post-treatment bias, this robustness check also shows that the estimated effect of Mechanization does not change in substance. The impact of Mechanization is thus not driven by more spending per soldier (as the incentive-based argument suggests) or by less personnel. Seventh, we include the Banks (Banks & Wilson, 2016)conflict index, which accounts for assassinations, purges of governmental officials, guerrilla activity, protests, riots, and strikes instead of the variables on armed conflict and non-violent campaigns (see Powell, 2012). Eighth, next to examining an interaction effect of Mechanization with regime type (in particular, democracies), we also disaggregate coups by the rank of the perpetrators (Albrecht & Eibl, 2018). Ninth, we control for the possibility that governments concentrate mechanized equipment in pro-government units or in units closer to the capital. Tenth, we include arms imports as an additional control because they are often necessary for mechanization but also associated with more inefficient militaries, we control for economic inequality as it drives mechanization (Caverley, 2014) as well as coup attempts (Svolik, 2013), we add alliance membership as a control, and we account for global trends in mechanization levels and coup propensity. Along these lines, we also further investigate whether our results are driven by mechanization picking up on organizational or cultural attributes that affect putsch activity: as French and British colonial origins affect how post-colonial militaries are organized (Asal et al., 2017; Mehrl & Choulis, 2021), we control for a country’s main colonial ruler. And to ensure that the armed forces professionalism or culture do not influence our main effect, we control for several proxies of these nonmaterial phenomena. We further ensure that the domestic and international threat environment, which affects the military’s threat orientation, does not drive our results. Some studies find that international conflict reduces coup risk (Arbatli & Arbatli, 2016; Piplani & Talmadge, 2016) and mechanization often occurs in response to international threats. At the same time, mechanization is associated with the outcome and duration of civil conflicts (Lyall & Wilson, 2009; Caverley & Sechser, 2017; Sechser & Saunders, 2010), while civil conflicts may also influence
coup risk (Bell & Sudduth, 2017; Eibl et al., 2021). We begin by separately controlling for contemporaneous interstate and civil conflict. Next, we control for different lags of these two variables. Focusing on civil conflict, we then follow Eibl et al. (2019) by distinguishing regional from center-seeking rebellions and accounting not only for their incidence but also duration and time elapsed since termination, while still controlling for interstate conflict occurrence. We also control for militarized interstate disputes instead of interstate conflict, distinguish between being the target and initiator of them, and account for their duration (Piplani & Talmadge, 2016). Because “chronic” regime threats, especially territorial disputes, may matter just as much as acute armed conflict (Florea, 2018; Kim, 2018), we report specifications where we control for interstate rivalries as well as being the challenger or target of territorial claims, the duration of these, and their salience. Finally, we address endogeneity concerns about the relationship between mechanization and coup risk by estimating a simultaneous equations model, thus explicitly allowing an effect in in both directions. The substantive result that increased mechanization is associated with a reduced probability of coup attempts holds across all additional specifications.
Conclusion
How is a country’s degree of military mechanization related to coup attempts? While previous work has seemingly overlooked this crucial factor, anecdotal evidence and some qualitative accounts may suggest that mechanization increases coup risk via, among other mechanisms, its enhancing impact on military power. Contrary to this view, we show that the level of mechanization is a significant and substantively important predictor of coup attempts: the higher mechanization in a country’s armed forces, the lower coup risk. This conclusion is based on a quantitative analysis of updated data on all countries until 2019, prediction and forecasting techniques, as well as a series of robustness checks reported in the Appendix. Our research supports the view that mechanization is likely linked to the mechanisms of expected execution costs and coordination: the former increase in light of a higher degree of mechanization, the latter becomes more difficult in a more mechanized military organization. Our research is relevant and important for the scholarly literature on civil-military relations. First, we add to our understanding of how coup attempts develop. Mechanization is a key aspect of any military organization. It was thus far unclear where and how it may influence coup risk, but our study is one of the first in theoretically and empirically establishing a link to civil-military relations. Second, by updating the mechanization data in Sechser and Saunders (2010; see also Caverley & Sechser, 2017), future work can rely on these new data to investigate other questions related to mechanization. Third,
the logic of the guardianship dilemma and anecdotal evidence suggest that more powerful armies may be more capable (and, hence, likely) to overthrow the government; and mechanization is a factor boosting military strength. By demonstrating that more powerful militaries may not always represent a bigger threat to the incumbent, we challenge these established views. Derived from this, there are important implications for the wider debate on the trade-offs associated with coup-proofing. Mechanization actually lowers coup risk according to our research, while it also decreases militaries’ counterinsurgency effectiveness (Lyall & Wilson, 2009; Sechser & Saunders, 2010; Caverley & Sechser, 2017). Hence, investing in mechanization means that governments shift risk from coups to insurgencies. Several interesting avenues for further research emerge from our work. We outline three of them. First, our focus lies on coups, but there may be consequences for the general involvement of the military in politics short of governmental overthrows (see Bove et al., 2020). It would be an effort worth making to examine how mechanization relates to other aspects of a country’s civil-military relations. Second, we concentrate on the mechanization of ground-combat forces as, in most cases, these troops are ultimately the ones executing a coup. However, examining the mechanization of naval (see Bohmelt et al., 2017 ¨) and perhaps even air forces could also be interesting in order to explore more thoroughly latent coup dynamics. Third, our research shows, in line with earlier findings, that coup-proofing efforts (and mechanization may be one of them) may produce negative, second-order consequences. Mechanization illustrates this nicely: it is helpful to lower coup risk, but may have detrimental consequences for a state’s counterinsurgency capabilities. Against this background, assessing in an all-encompassing study the various trade-offs of diverse coup-proofing strategies seems like an important avenue for future work—as this would not only shed light on the determinants of different coup-proofing strategies, but also on how coups as well as coup outcomes emerge.
1343. WRONG TREATMENT. The deployment study measures boots---and concedes presence can't stop a coup once it starts.
Allen et al. 23 — Michael A. Allen, Thomas Campbell, Nicolas Hernandez and Valeryn Shepherd. January. Department of Political Science, Boise State University; Department of Political Science, Stony Brook University; Department of Political Science and International Relations, University of Delaware; Boise State University. They coded US service-member deployments against coups worldwide from 1951 to 2019. Foreign Policy Analysis 19(1), “US Military Deployments and the Risk of Coup d’État,” https://doi.org/10.1093/fpa/orac027 Clopus
O’Kane (1993) shows how foreign troops equipped for combat might not be accepting of domestic militaries and military leaders who would be a party to a coup. If the foreign government withdraws its support after a coup, as seems to happen in the aid literature, then the benefit of a successful coup decreases substantially. However, O’Kane (1981) does say, and which we agree with, that while foreign troops may discourage a coup from happening, they will not hamper coup success. Once a group decides to attempt a coup, the presence of a foreign military does not alter the group’s success. For our argument here, the pivotal distinction is that a foreign military decreases the likelihood of coup initiation by altering the cost-benefit calculus of coup success. The presence of the US military addresses many of the conditions that make a coup an attractive option for those considering extra-legal regime change.
One of the most considerable benefits of US troop deployments to host countries is that US troop deployments boost economic growth. US troop deployments tend to encourage a “follow the flag” effect wherein states that host US troops are also more likely to see foreign direct investments flow into the country (Biglaiser and DeRouen 2007; Biglaiser and DeRouen Jr 2009). This effect increases as the size of US troop deployment increases (Heo and Ye 2019). The reason is US troop deployments provide surrounding infrastructure and jobs and by offering tacit security commitments to businesses and foreign entities (Jones and Kane 2012). Kane (2012) goes further to show that US troop deployments have aided in providing social development, such as the reduction of infant mortality rates. Additionally, both interpersonal contact between foreign troops and civilians, as well as economic benefits the presence brings, can build domestic support and even demand the presence (Allen et al. 2020). This interaction, in turn, could boost support for the incumbent regime and thereby deter a potential coup.
The host country’s military greatly benefits US troop deployments by increasing military capacity and defense expenditure. Savage and Caverley (2017) observe that when US forces 8
train militaries, it creates a more effective and powerful host-state military, which might be dangerous to the regime. However, several other studies suggest regime stability results from training and stationing troops abroad. Ruby and Gibler (2010) find that US-trained foreign troops greatly benefit while becoming more efficient and effective, have the side effects of respecting human rights and being a stabilizing force for the regime in times of political instability. Watts et al. (2018) likewise note that US-trained foreign troops reduce internal political violence, further stabilizing the country. Martinez Machain and Morgan (2013) detect the presence of troops in another country increases the likelihood that a state invests less in its military. Allen, Flynn and VanDusky-Allen (2017) show that the effect of US security commitments to other countries on those countries’ defense expenditures is dependent upon the regional context. They find that states already reliant on US troops in a region do not decrease their defense spending when receiving more US service members. However, areas enmeshed in the United States’ security presence will produce states more willing to free ride on US security commitments. Such environments would mean that even if states free ride on the US security provision, the overall support to the military is collectively higher.
A final avenue is how the US influences the behavior and norms of individuals and groups internationally through socialization processes. US troops engaging and training with for- eign militaries has recently become a staple of US foreign policy (McLauchlin, Seymour and Martel 2022). Through active engagement with different militaries, these militaries begin to establish institutionalized standard norms, values, and behaviors (Frazier and Hutto 2017). For example, while Mongolia was a USSR satellite state, the Mongolian military institution- alized Soviet norms and behaviors. Since its independence, Mongolia has incorporated more Western norms and behaviors into its military while eschewing Soviet, Russian, and Chinese norms and behaviors (Mendee 2013). As part of the Western socialization process, liberal democratic norms, and behaviors are adopted and made as institutions of host-country mil- 9
itaries (Atkinson 2006). This process also occurs outside of military interactions. When foreign non-military elites are educated in the US or other democracies, they are more likely to support democracy in their home country (Spilimbergo 2009; Atkinson 2010). Mean- ing that because of socialization processes that encourage liberal democratic norms, coup attempts by military and non-military elites will be less likely to occur. From the perspective of would-be coup plotters, the US presence provides several re- sources and opportunities to provide benefits to those that keep a government in power (De Mesquita et al. 2005). Powell and Thyne (2011) argue that two distinct groups enact coups: the military and non-military societal elites that we can conceptualize as a counter- coalition vying for government control. Given the domestic determinants of coups and how external relations and military deployments, directly and indirectly, respond to many of these causes, the US deployment of troops in a country decreases the likelihood of coup attempts. Military and other elites have to weigh the cost and benefits that the US brings along with any existing support for that presence in calculating whether action would provoke the US to leave the country. The cost of having the US withdraw is political power, military power, civilian support, security, and stability. The direct and indirect externalities of the presence detailed above lead us to our hypothesis.
1351. WRONG OUTCOME. It's the defense budget, not a transfer---and the mechanism is bargaining.
Bove and Nisticò 14 — Vincenzo Bove and Roberto Nisticò. University of Warwick. University of Essex and the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance. They build synthetic counterfactuals for forty coup-affected countries. Public Choice 161(3–4): 321–344, “Coups d’état and defense spending: a counterfactual analysis,” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-014-0202-2 Clopus
We explore how institutional set-ups, in particular changes in political institutions through coups d’´ etat , can affect the way military expenditures are determined. We use a counterfactual approach, the synthetic control method, and compare the evolution of the military burden for 40 countries affected by coups with the evolution of a synthetic counterfactual that replicates the initial conditions and the potential outcomes of the countries of interest before exposure to coups. Our case studies suggest that successful coups result in a large increase in the military burden. However, when no effects or a decrease in the defense burden are found, it is often the consequence of a democratization process triggered by the coup. These results are in keeping with recent theoretical developments on the bargaining power of the military in authoritarian regimes. Failed coups, by contrast, produce a smaller, and mostly positive, effect on the military burden, possibly as a result of the incumbent’s strategy to avert further challenges to the stability of the regime by buying off the military.
1362. THEIR OWN AUTHOR. They say the reverse effect is negative---spending is how you buy an army.
Bove and Nisticò 14 — Vincenzo Bove and Roberto Nisticò. University of Warwick. University of Essex and the Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance. They build synthetic counterfactuals for forty coup-affected countries. Public Choice 161(3–4): 321–344, “Coups d’état and defense spending: a counterfactual analysis,” https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11127-014-0202-2 Clopus
This is plausible given that the countries used to build the synthetic counterfactual do not necessarily belong to the same region and are very rarely neighboring.6 In the unfortunate cases in which the algorithm selects control countries somewhat affected in the same direction by the coup in the treated unit, the gap between treated and untreated would tend to be downwards biased. This means that, if anything, the estimated coup effect would be mitigated. 7
While the synthetic control method handles endogeneity due to (time-varying) omitted bias, a remaining limitation is that it would still suffer from reverse causation if thetiming of coups were decided by expectations about the growth prospects of the future military burden. If these expectations are not captured by pre-coup variables, the findings of the synthetic control approach would still be biased downwards. However, note that this particular instance of reverse causality is far from obvious: if anything, we would expect a negative impact of military burdens on coups d’´ etat. In fact, as we have seen in Section 2, military spending is an important tool that leaders can manipulate to control and get support from the armed forces. 8 This means that, if a reverse causality exists, and we expect a positive effect of coups on the military burden, then the estimate will be biased downward because of the reverse negative effect that the latter has on the former. Moreover, the articles summarized above suggest that military coups happen at the same time as declines in military budgets. By looking at the trajectories of the outcome variable over extended time horizons, we try to rule out any short-run bias in the results. Another important question is whether the estimated effects are statistically significant. This needs to be addressed, as large sample inferential techniques are not appropriate for comparative case studies with a small number of treated and control units (Abadie et al. 2010). The synthetic control method enables us to conduct falsification exercises, the so-called “placebo studies”, an alternative model of quantitative inference. This model is based on the premise that confidence that a particular synthetic control estimate reflects 6In those cases, the weight is often negligible (e.g., in constructing Pakistan’s counterfactual, the algorithm assigned a weight of 0.001 to India).
1371. IT'S THE OPPOSITE. Officers who trained here are twice as likely to move on their own government.
Trilling 17 — David Trilling. August 30. Staff writer at The Journalist’s Resource; former Central Asia correspondent for The Economist and a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia. Reporting the findings of Jesse Dillon Savage of Trinity College Dublin and Jonathan Caverley of the U.S. Naval War College, Journal of Peace Research 54(4). The Journalist’s Resource, “U.S.-trained militaries more likely to overthrow their governments,” https://journalistsresource.org/economics/american-trained-militaries-overthrow-governments/ Clopus
The American military trains officers from around the world. Back at home, they are nearly twice as likely to attempt a coup than officers who do not receive U.S. training.
The issue: With evident pride, Capt. Amadou Sanogo of Mali described his American military training to Time magazine. He had studied English in Texas, intelligence in Arizona, infantry tactics in Georgia, and wore a Marine Corps pin to mark his training at Quantico, in Virginia. It was 2012 and Sanogo had just overthrown the government in his native country in West Africa.
The United States spends hundreds of millions of aid dollars a year training foreign officers like Sanogo. Champions of such programs argue that they instill respect for human rights while forging American allies. But some trained officers have gone home to attempt a coup d’état or commit human rights abuses. Human Rights Watch alleges that Sanogo’s soldiers dumped opponents in mass graves and intimidated journalists. In Honduras, a 2009 coup was reportedly led by American-trained officers. And Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who ousted his country’s democratically elected government in 2013, spent a year at the United States Army War College, in Pennsylvania, where he wrote a thesis on democracy.
Other examples span the decades. Are these officers outliers?
An academic study worth reading: “When Human Capital Threatens the Capitol: Foreign Aid in the Form of Military Training and Coups,” in the Journal of Peace Research , 2017.
Study summary: Jesse Dillon Savage of Trinity College Dublin and Jonathan Caverley of the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island look for a relationship between American military training and coups around the world.
Using Defense Department data , they focus on the International Military Education and Training program (IMET), which is designed to increase the receiving military’s human capital as well as its respect for civilian government. Thousands of officers from developing countries have passed through IMET over the decades. Their countries are often poor and corrupt — countries that previous research has shown are more susceptible to coup attempts.
Savage and Caverley compare this data with lists of successful and attempted coups led by military officers (89 percent of coups over this period were).
The researchers focus on military training aid, which is given to countries for free, not trainings that are paid by foreign governments. To eliminate concerns about confounding variables, they test their findings on IMET against other types of aid data: a different U.S. military aid program designed to combat terrorism and total foreign aid to a country. And because the length of IMET training can vary from a few weeks in the officer’s home country to a year in the U.S., the authors examine overall IMET spending per country.
Key findings:
About 61 percent of coup attempts between 1970 and 2009 failed. Of those that succeeded, two-thirds were carried out by officers who participated in the IMET program. “Successful coups are strongly associated with IMET training and spending.”
60 percent of military-backed coups or coup attempts occurred in countries that had received IMET training the previous year.
Countries whose officers had participated in IMET were nearly twice as likely to experience a coup or coup attempt.
If the number of officers trained, or the amount the U.S. spends, moves from the 25 th percentile to the 75 th percentile, the chance of a coup or attempted coup doubles.
U.S. military aid (weapons, for example, but not including training) has a slightly negative relationship to coup probability, supporting the hypothesis that weapons enable regimes to protect themselves, or, as the authors call it, “coup-proof” themselves.
Other foreign aid (food, for example) has no statistical relationship to coup probability.
IMET is a subset of American foreign military training. In fiscal year 2015, the U.S. spent a total of $876.5 million to train over 76,000 foreign soldiers from 154 countries; about $300 million of that was aid.
The authors conclude, “Training imparts valuable resources to and increases the professional distance of a potentially dangerous section of a developing state’s polity [the military]. Increasing trainees’ human capital is likely to increase resource demands on the regime, and improve the military’s ability to remove the regime should its demands not be met.”
1382. THE RECORD. Every junta in the coup belt was led by somebody Washington equipped.
Turse 24 — Nick Turse. June 6. Investigative journalist and fellow at Type Media Center; author of Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. The Intercept, “After Training African Coup Leaders, Pentagon Blames Russia for Coups,” https://theintercept.com/2024/06/06/africa-coups-pentagon-blames-russia/ Clopus
Russia is to blame for coups in the African Sahel, according to a new analysis by the Pentagon’s top Africa researcher, which ignores the U.S. role in training leaders of these mutinies — and two decades of failed U.S. counterterrorism policies in the region.
The article, which calls for “standing up to Africa’s juntas,” fails to mention that at least 15 military officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror.
“An alarming string of military coups across the Sahel in recent years has greatly marginalized Western engagement in this important and highly volatile region,” wrote Jeffrey Smith, the founding director of the pro-democracy nonprofit organization Vanguard Africa, and Joseph Siegle, the director of research at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, in a recent article published in the Journal of Democracy as well as the Africa Center .
Focusing specifically on the mutinies in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, they note, “Russia has had an active and not-so-subtle hand in coups in each of these three countries, which were preceded by at least a year of intensive disinformation aimed at destabilizing the democratically elected (and Western-leaning) governments in place.”
A series of reports by The Intercept found that military personnel who had received U.S. support were involved in coups in Burkina Faso (in 2014, 2015, and twice in 2022 ), Mali (in 2012 , 2020, and 2021 ), and Niger (in 2023 ). U.S.-supported officers also played a role in coups in Mauritania (2008), Gambia (2014), Chad ( 2021 ), and Guinea ( 2021 ).
1393. NOT EVEN MEASURED. The Pentagon blew the deadline on its own report---and blamed Moscow.
Turse 24 — Nick Turse. June 6. Investigative journalist and fellow at Type Media Center; author of Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa. The Intercept, “After Training African Coup Leaders, Pentagon Blames Russia for Coups,” https://theintercept.com/2024/06/06/africa-coups-pentagon-blames-russia/ Clopus
The total number of U.S.-trained mutineers across Africa since 9/11 may be far higher than is known, but the State Department, which tracks data on U.S. trainees, is either unwilling or unable to supply it.
The Pentagon is mandated to provide a briefing on coups carried out by U.S.-trained African partners to the Senate and House Armed Services committees but missed its March deadline . A source on Capitol Hill told The Intercept that the Pentagon eventually held the required classified briefing, but the Department of Defense failed to confirm the information.
The U.S. has recently been forced into withdrawing its troops from Niger and Chad due to souring relations with these longtime allies and the former acolytes who now lead them.
140Great-power draw-in. Small-state wars become big-state wars---at the nuclear threshold.
Hersman 20 — Rebecca Hersman. Summer. Senior Adviser, International Security Program, and Director, Project on Nuclear Issues, Center for Strategic and International Studies; a leading expert on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons policy and crisis management. Texas National Security Review vol. 3 no. 3, “Wormhole Escalation in the New Nuclear Age,” https://tnsr.org/2020/07/wormhole-escalation-in-the-new-nuclear-age/ Clopus
Complex regional escalation dynamics that occur under a nuclear shadow may also play out at the geostrategic level such that “small-state” conflicts can escalate to “big-state” wars in unexpected ways. In a regional conflict or crisis, participants (states and actors who are directly engaged) and stakeholders (states and actors who are indirectly engaged) may possess different views about the value and risks of escalation. There is also the potential for states with smaller nuclear arsenals to draw big states into conflict in ways that defy the stability-instability paradox, which assumes that lower levels of conflict can be enabled rather than dampened by stability at the nuclear level because of self-regulating behavior by the states involved. However, this theory did not envision a circumstance in which smaller nuclear-armed countries might engage in more aggressive or violent competition because they believe that large countries will step in to create face-saving backstops or escalation “off ramps” and save them from themselves. Indeed, Feroz Khan has argued that deterrence in South Asia now depends on intervention by the United States to manage and minimize the consequences of either side’s destabilizing behavior. 55 For example, amid an escalatory spiral with Pakistan, India may call on the United States to step in or risk allowing it to cross the nuclear threshold. In this scenario, both global and regional strategic stability dynamics shape the way these actors interpret conflict, and by extension their perceived freedom of action and relative dominance.
“There is also the potential for states with smaller nuclear arsenals to draw big states into conflict in ways that defy the stability-instability paradox...”
The 1999 Kargil Crisis is representative of a crisis-escalation scenario in which smaller nuclear-armed states perceive that bigger powers will swoop in to save them from nuclear confrontation. Just one year after India and Pakistan became overt nuclear powers, the two countries approached the brink of nuclear war. Following an attempted land-grab by Pakistan in the hotly contested Kashmir region, the United States provided an off-ramp to de-escalate the conflict. At the height of the crisis, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif “insisted” on meeting with President Bill Clinton, according to Clinton’s senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs on the National Security Council, Bruce Riedel. 56 The United States stepped in after Clinton called both India’s and Pakistan’s leaders. Washington also sent its senior military commander in the region and a senior State Department official to Islamabad. Later, former deputy secretary of state Strobe Talbott wrote that the world was closer to nuclear confrontation than during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 57 Clearly, diplomatic interventions that can deescalate a crisis and forestall a nuclear conflict should always be pursued. However, expectations that the great powers will step in to rescue small nuclear states caught in an escalatory spiral may shift the burden of restraint and reduce accountability and responsibility for managing strategic stability among regional actors in ways that may reinforce rather than reduce risk-taking. In such a scenario, the United States may not initiate an escalation wormhole, so much as get pulled through one.