Rachel Tecott Metz's article on U.S. security assistance1 enriches the surprisingly belated scholarly literature on defense cooperation.2 It rightly identifies a chasm between U.S. military advisers’ implacable optimism and their dubious record at building professional forces that defeat adversaries (pp. 96, 109). The Iraq case study employs interviews, oral histories, and military documents to identify U.S. advisers’ worldviews. Metz argues that advisers’ optimism and failure stem from the same sources: beliefs in the normative rightness, causal effectiveness, and organizational value of leading by example and instruction rather than by coercion or command, which she calls the “cult of the persuasive” (pp. 98, 110–111). I endorse the pessimistic description of Iraqi outcomes, I welcome the resulting interrogation of security assistance effectiveness, and I have made similar claims elsewhere about organizational politics’ counterproductive impact on cooperation initiatives.3 This letter is therefore a sympathetic critique.
I am not persuaded by...