Educating the Guardians: U.S. Foreign Military Professionalization & Latin American Civil-Military Relations

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Debs, Alexandre

Abstract

Security cooperation is one of the tools the U.S. leverages to develop and maintain influence and relationships with allies and partners. As stated in the State Department’s 2020 Foreign Military Training Report, it facilitates the U.S.’s ability to shape “the development of foreign military institutions and their roles in democratic societies." The forum in which the U.S. most explicitly and deliberately attempts to exert this influence is through foreign military education at its numerous professional military education (PME) schools. These programs ostensibly serve as a form of soft power that increases support for the United States and its policies by improving foreign countries’ understanding, appreciation, and adoption of liberal democratic norms and values. Relying on a three-step causal logic that implicitly mirrors the norm diffusion model outlined by Finnemore and Sikkink in their description of the “norm life cycle," these programs seek to diffuse democratic norms and values associated with the American professional military ethic by educating individuals who will rise to positions of prominence and act as norm entrepreneurs in their home countries. This dissertation probes this logic and examines the effectiveness of U.S. PME on individual attitudinal change and organizational norm adoption with a focus in Latin America from 1996 until 2022. Using a combination of original survey experiments of international military students attending U.S. PME, elite interviews with graduates, and qualitative case studies, this dissertation outlines the conditions under which norm adoption occurs at the individual and organizational level. It contends that individuals and military organizations from countries that have experienced a crisis event that threatens the existence, identity, or purpose of the military and feature strong domestic political institutions that constrain the executive are most likely to adopt the norm of civilian control. I find that the degree of individual attitudinal change may be affected by the state of democracy in the student’s home country and the degree to which they are socialized into American life while attending PME. At the organizational level, I find that countries with strong institutions facilitate the adoption of the norm of civilian control while weak institutions disrupt the norm diffusion process. This dissertation makes a theoretical contribution to the literature on soft power, norm diffusion, and comparative civil-military relations while providing original empirical data from an elite and hard to access population. DISCLAIMER: The views presented in this dissertation are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of Department of Defense or its components.

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