Col John Zavage, the Foreign Area Officer Chair under the NSA Department and retired NSA Professor Robert Springborg have written a paper (with F.C. “Pink” Williams), which has just been released by the Carnegie Middle East Center. The paper is titled Security Assistance in the Middle East: A Three-Dimensional Chessboard. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is the world’s testing ground for the effectiveness of security assistance provided by global and regional powers. That security assistance has contributed to the intensity and frequency of proxy wars—such as those under way or recently wound down in Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq—and to the militarization of state and substate actors in the MENA region. The authors of the paper note that security assistance is at the core of struggles for military, strategic, ideological, and even economic preeminence in the Middle East; however, despite the broad and growing importance of security assistance for the region and for competition within it between global and regional actors, security assistance has been the subject of relatively little comparative analysis. Efforts to assess relationships between the strategic objectives and operational methods of security assistance providers and their relative impacts on recipients are similarly rare. This paper examines the security assistance approaches of the United States, Russia, and Iran in the MENA region.

To read the paper, click here.