Partnership for Peace and the Warsaw Initiative Funds Celebrate their 20th Anniversaries
On January 11 NATO celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Partnership for Peace (PfP) Program, its chief cooperation program with non-NATO members in Europe and Central Asia. The State Department marked the anniversary by stating, “Partnership for Peace and other partnership programs have strengthened NATO by adding diversity and political insight while expanding its security reach.” In fact, the United States plays a significant role in the PfP program, using the Defense Department’s Warsaw Initiative Funds (WIF) to fund countries’ participation in PfP activities. PfP participants come almost exclusively from the former Soviet Republics and include the three countries in the South Caucasus and the five Central Asian states.
This post provides some additional information about the Partnership for Peace and the Warsaw Initiative Fund programs --
Partnership for Peace in brief: Who, What and Why?
The Partnership for Peace Program was created in 1994 to increase defense cooperation between NATO and non-NATO member states in Europe and Central Asia, mainly from the former Soviet Union. Thirty-four countries have signed onto the program’s framework agreement, which outlines the five objectives of PfP. These objectives range from assuring transparency in and democratic control of the participant country’s defense establishment to promoting interoperability and cooperation between the participant country’s military and NATO forces. NATO initially utilized the program to groom countries for NATO membership, according to a Government Accountability Agency report on the program. As such, many of the 34 participant countries eventually became NATO members and left the program, leaving 22 PfP participants today.
The majority of remaining PfP participant countries do not aspire to join NATO. In fact, only one of the eight PfP countries in Central Asia and the South Caucasus – Georgia – is hoping to gain NATO membership. As the GAO notes, the non-aspiring countries use PfP for a variety of reasons, from gaining access to NATO training and technical assistance to mitigating geopolitical pressures from other countries. NATO has worked in recent years to introduce flexibility into the program, allowing each participant country to select its own level of engagement with NATO based on the country’s needs and priorities. For example, while Kazakhstan is more engaged with the Russia-led security alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, than it is with NATO, it still utilizes its PfP participation to develop its peacekeeping capabilities, according to analyst Roger McDermott.
A major benefit for NATO in engaging the PfP participant countries has been their contributions to NATO’s military and peacekeeping operations, especially the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan. The GAO notes that in 2010 PfP participants contributed 2,000 troops to NATO’s operation in Afghanistan, a number that has since increased as Georgia nearly doubled its deployment to Afghanistan (from 925 to 1,560) and became the largest non-NATO contributor to the war efforts. Moreover, NATO has also used its relationship with the South Caucus and Central Asian states to secure territorial access to Afghanistan, obtaining over-flight rights, refueling capabilities, and transportation routes in those regions.
The U.S. Role in Partnership for Peace:
- The Warsaw Initiative Fund (WIF): The WIF is a Defense Department assistance program that enables PfP countries to participate in PfP related activities. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) writes that the WIF is “designed to provide financial support to partners that without it would be unable to participate in PfP activities and cooperation mechanisms.”
- The WIF’s Goals: The WIF shares similar aims to those listed in the PfP framework agreement, including: reform the defense institutions in partner countries to reflect the Euro-Atlantic model; enhance partner capacity to contribute to NATO and U.S. operations; promote cooperation and integration with NATO; and assure peacetime and contingency access for U.S. and NATO forces. The DSCA’s WIF justification also emphasizes the impact of the WIF program on the Afghanistan mission, in terms of obtaining troop contributions and territorial access from PfP countries.
- What does the WIF Fund? Because PfP’s activities are so varied, the WIF funds engagements ranging from defense education seminars to military exercises. For instance, some FY2012 funding went towards NATO’s Defense Education Enhancement Program, supporting Georgia’s expansion of its National Defense Academy and Kazakhstan’s establishment of National War College. Meanwhile, WIF monies were also used in 2012 for to support numerous military exercises, including: Sea Breeze 12, Rapid Trident, Immediate Response, Regional Cooperation 12, and Steppe Eagle 12.
- How does the funding work? Appendix II of the aforementioned GAO report details the WIF’s funding process, which begins when the DSCA allocates the WIF to numerous institutions that implement the WIF’s activities. The largest implementers of WIF activities are the combatant commands (U.S. Central Command, Europe Command, and Joint Forces Command), which use the funding for military exercises and other military contact programs. Another significant portion of WIF monies goes to the WIF’s own defense reform program called the Defense Institution Building (DIB) Program, run by Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey. Interestingly, the DSCA also uses a small portion of the WIF to fund courses at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany, even though the center has an independent funding source through the Defense Department’s Regional Centers program. The courses run by the regional centers and the units who attended these courses are listed in the State Department’s annual foreign military training report.
- Is the WIF the only assistance program in the region? No. There are many other State Department and Defense Department assistance programs active in the region. Many of these assistance programs have similar goals to the WIF program, and in some cases, redundancy occurs. For instance, the GAO writes that the DIB program has struggled to gain traction in the region, partly because it replicates a similar defense reform initiative funded by the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing account.
- Recent trends in WIF funding: Funding for the WIF program has declined in the past few years to correspond with the decline in PfP membership – from an average of $43 million annually through 2005 to $29 million between 2006 and 2010, according to the GAO. The GAO further writes that the majority of WIF funding (79 percent) now targets countries that don’t aspire to NATO membership, whereas 70 percent of WIF funding once went to countries aspiring to NATO membership. In 2010 35 percent of the WIF funds were used on multilateral and bilateral military exercises. Lastly, the most recent WIF justification from the DSCA notes that after 2014, the WIF “begins a downward glide path, from $22.5 million programmed in FY15 to $8.5 million in FY2018.” This is largely because U.S. European Command foresees a decreased need for the WIF program as the mission in Afghanistan winds down.