Security assistance is a pillar of U.S. foreign policy and a ubiquitous feature of international relations. The record, however, is mixed at best. Security assistance is hard because recipient leaders are often motivated to implement policies that keep their militaries weak. The central challenge of security assistance, then, is influence. How does the United States aim to influence recipient leaders to improve their militaries, and what drives its approach? Influence in security assistance can be understood as an escalation ladder with four rungs: teaching, persuasion, conditionality, and direct command. Washington increasingly delegates security assistance to the Department of Defense, and the latter to the U.S. Army. U.S. Army advisers tend to rely exclusively on teaching and persuasion, even when recipient leaders routinely ignore their advice. The U.S. Army's preference for persuasion and aversion to conditionality in security assistance can be traced to its bureaucratic interests and to the ideology that it has developed—the cult of the persuasive—to advance those interests. A case study examines the bureaucratic drivers of the U.S. Army's persistent reliance on persuasion to influence Iraqi leaders to reform and strengthen the Iraqi Army. Qualitative analysis leverages over one hundred original interviews, as well as oral histories and recently declassified U.S. Central Command documents. The findings illustrate how the interests and ideologies of the military services tasked with implementing U.S. foreign policy can instead undermine it.

Military operations lie at the center of international relations theory and practice. Although security studies scholars have used campaign analysis to study military operations for decades, the method has not been formally defined or standardized, and there is little methodological guidance available for scholars interested in conducting or evaluating it. Campaign analysis is a method involving the use of a model and techniques for managing uncertainty to answer questions about military operations. The method comprises six steps: (1) question selection, (2) scenario development, (3) model construction, (4) value assignment, (5) sensitivity analysis, and (6) interpretation and presentation of results. The models that scholars develop to direct analysis are significant intellectual contributions in their own right, and can be adapted by other scholars and practitioners to guide additional analyses. Careful model construction can clarify, but does not obviate, the uncertainty of conflict. To manage uncertainty in parameter values, scholars can use the “input distribution approach” to propagate uncertainty in inputs through to a model's output. Replications and extensions of Wu Riqiang's 2020 analysis of Chinese nuclear survivability and Barry Posen's 1991 analysis of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's prospects against the Warsaw Pact illustrate the six steps of campaign analysis, the value of transparent models and the input distribution approach, and the potential of campaign analysis to contribute to policy and theory.