Anatomy of Post-Communist European Defense Institutions: The Mirage of Military Modernity by Thomas-Durell Young

Author:Thomas-Durell Young [Young, Thomas-Durell]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-06-29T04:00:00+00:00

Incoherence of Western gifts

In the twenty-five years since the end of the Cold War, former communist defense institutions have been exposed to what must be all possible aspects of what constitutes Western democratic defense governance concepts. Yet, as a general critique, both Western donor and Eastern recipient countries have generally failed to appreciate that reform of these defense institutions, absent the wholesale dismissal of the entire officer corps presented, optimistically, a long-term challenge that requires constant high-level political management. From an Eastern perspective, the way forward was equally unclear. General Henryk Szumski, the then-Polish CHOD, pointed out that reform was an ongoing process, but lacked coherence. In short, he argued that reforms “were superficial, partial, and not based on a final vision.” No one had a firm picture of what the final result would look like.16 This lack of coherence was abetted by Western advice and assistance projects which tend to be largely designed and managed as one-off training events, PME courses for individuals, seminars, or workshops. A former Latvian minister of defense observed that this plethora of advice was “often uncoordinated and short-term in nature” and had the result of producing confusion, vice providing solutions.17 Thus, it was left to severely underdeveloped defense institutions the responsibility of discerning which of the countless models, organizational templates, procedures, and techniques were even generally, let alone optimally, well suited for their requirements. And, fundamentally, one can pose this important question: how many of those Western officials providing assistance had any inclination of what they were proposing was antithetical to the conceptual basis of the recipient country’s defense institution? The fact that one sees repetition of assistance programs, projects, and subjects, uninformed by experience, speaks legions to the failure of Western policies and the assumptions upon which these programs are based. In the following section, the most egregious examples of patterns of advice and assistance that have been particularly ineffectual, are discussed.

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