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Aug. 28, 2026

Intellectual Interoperability: Lessons from Afghanistan for Security Cooperation

Sae Schatz and Scott C. Buchanan
©2026 Sae Schatz and Scott C. Buchanan

ABSTRACT: This article argues that intellectual interoperability—the cognitive and conceptual alignment necessary for multinational partners to coordinate decision making effectively—is a critical, yet undervalued, dimension of security cooperation. While considerable scholarship already explores technical and procedural interoperability, this piece examines its human dimensions and demonstrates their significance through an evidence-based analysis of gaps observed in Afghanistan (2001–21). Drawing on policy documents, doctrine, scholarly literature, and one author’s firsthand experience as a Ministry of Defense adviser in Afghanistan, this article offers military and policy practitioners three actionable lessons for building security partnerships resilient enough to withstand strategic pressure.

Keywords: Afghanistan, interoperability, security cooperation, NATO, institutional capacity building

 

International cooperation is a difficult endeavor, even when stakeholders’ goals broadly align. Recent interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and earlier interventions in Vietnam and Korea, demonstrate the difficulty of successfully meeting objectives through collective action in a conflict environment. Different states often have different tactics, techniques, procedures, and mindsets because of their historical contexts or political preferences. Kenneth Pollack examined some of these challenges in the context of security cooperation. Through an analysis of Arab military effectiveness, Pollack explored why Arab militaries are not more effective, including the role of imported Soviet doctrine, the politicization of the military in such countries as Egypt and Iraq, and the influence of political and social factors in Arab societies that limits military development.1 The overarching message, however, was that failure to develop military interoperability, and failure to understand how to develop it comprehensively, undermines successful security cooperation.

Interoperability is essential for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and, consequently, the concept has been researched and actively pursued by NATO and its allies and partner states. These stakeholders develop sufficient commonality of purpose, values, and vision to cooperate effectively, even across potentially divided actors.2 Increasingly over recent decades, this work has emphasized the value of shared intellectual frameworks, including cognitive, cultural, and emotional alignment. This article builds on that insight by examining intellectual interoperability in the context of international security cooperation. It contrasts this often-overlooked concept with other, more tangible forms of technical and procedural interoperability, and it considers lessons from a case study on the attempted rebuilding of Afghanistan with Western allies and partners from 2001 to 2021.

This article is divided into two parts: the theoretical scaffolding of intellectual interoperability as a concept and a case study that draws lessons from the international engagement in Afghanistan. The first section pulls from NATO’s post–Cold War history and the conceptual framework it used to align Eastern European countries to achieve successive rounds of NATO accession. The second section builds out three lessons from Afghanistan related to intellectual interoperability—first, that insufficient interoperability between security-exporting nations undermines security cooperation; second, that insufficient alignment between principals and agents can undermine security cooperation; and finally, when security exporters insufficiently address institutional development, they undermine security cooperation objectives.

Background

The US Department of War (DoW) defines security cooperation as a set of activities designed to encourage and enable international partners to work alongside the United States in support of shared strategic objectives.3 The United States, NATO, and other mature nations invest in security cooperation for several practical purposes, such as to help allies and partners strengthen their capabilities so that they better contribute to collective deterrence and defense and to enable more effective coordination during multinational operations. An important component of security cooperation is interoperability: the ability to operate together coherently, effectively, and efficiently to achieve tactical, operational, or strategic objectives.4

Coalition military forces have classically pursued functional interoperability. As early examples, the Australian and British armies formed an agreement in 1902 for equipment and organizational interoperability that supported actions during World War I, and starting in 1947, the American, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Armies’ Program extended this pursuit of military interoperability.5

As the range of military operations has grown in scope and complexity, it has become clear that achieving security objectives, particularly in multinational operations, requires multiple categories and levels of interoperability. Areas where interoperability has become essential include, but are not limited to, communication and information systems, logistics, doctrine, training, intelligence sharing, joint fires, language and terminology, command-and-control structures, compatible procedures and organizational processes, and cultural understanding among coalition forces. These forms of interoperability are necessary across different levels of military effect and different time horizons, from immediate local levels (“boots on the ground”) to long-term strategic perspectives.6 In other words, as NATO and allied nations now typically understand, effective interoperability requires broad integration across technical, procedural, and human domains and at the tactical, operational, and strategic levels.7

Brief History of Human Interoperability

Human interoperability is a relatively new concept in the context of multinational security. Certainly, military stakeholders have long recognized the importance of people-related factors such as trust and communication. Attention, however, has historically gravitated toward technical and procedural interoperability, investing in the compatibility of equipment, networks, and processes. It was not until the post–Cold War era that human factors in interoperability were more fully explored as essential elements for operational success.

In the early 1990s, the Gulf War highlighted the need for better integration of command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) systems across US military services and multinational forces, which catalyzed new thinking about interoperability. The war highlighted the need for better integration of command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) systems across US military services and multinational forces. In response, the US then–Department of Defense established “C4I for the Warrior.” While initially focused on technological integration, the concept gradually encompassed a broader scope, including people and organizations, based on the recognition that war-fighting effectiveness requires more than the coordination of networked technologies.8

Around the same time, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and subsequent disbandment of the Warsaw Pact catalyzed a wave of new security cooperation initiatives within NATO and among its member nations.9 One of the most significant initiatives was NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) program, launched in 1994. The program built trust, fostered interoperability, and laid the groundwork for eventual NATO membership for countries emerging from the former Soviet sphere.10

Many of these states inherited military structures, doctrines, and professional norms rooted in Soviet models that were fundamentally different from Western approaches. Security leaders soon began to realize that the core barriers to achieving interoperability with post-Soviet states were “clearly conceptual.”11 In response, NATO’s security cooperation initiatives increasingly turned to human interoperability, understanding that a “mental transformation” was needed to overcome the hierarchical, compartmentalized, and authoritarian decision-making processes characteristic of Soviet legacy systems.12

In 1998, the United States and Germany proposed to create a PfP Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes to foster shared ways of thinking and the ability to implement Western military concepts.13 The initiative formally launched in 1999. That same year, Czechia, Hungary, and Poland became the first former Warsaw Pact states to join NATO. Analysis underscored the importance of “intellectual interoperability” in their accession into the Alliance, including “not only the way of thinking but also language training and the implementation of operational command procedures as the basis of cooperation between armed forces.”14

NATO also established the Defence Capabilities Initiative (DCI) in 1999. It focused on improving various functional capabilities, such as deployability and logistics, and it explicitly emphasized interoperability, including human interoperability. The initiative’s guidance noted that “the effectiveness of multinational operations will require particular attention to the challenges of interoperability. In this context, increased attention must be paid to human factors.”15 Although the DCI proved to have limited success overall, it helped raise the priority of interoperability among NATO Allies and partners, and it advanced the concept of human interoperability, including cultural interoperability (the “shared ways by which NATO armies ‘do business’​”) as central to the success of coalition forces.16

Components of Intellectual Interoperability

Human interoperability, sometimes referred to as “co-operability” or “soft interoperability,” focuses on how personnel perceive, understand, communicate, and behave.17 It is now recognized as “the lynchpin of cohesion within a coalition.”18

Although the terms “human interoperability” and “intellectual interoperability” are sometimes used interchangeably, we make a distinction in this article. We consider human interoperability as the overarching dimension of people-related interoperability, and intellectual interoperability is a cross-section of it. Human interoperability includes components that go beyond the scope of intellectual interoperability, for example, the synchronization of job codes and the coordination of personnel systems.

Intellectual interoperability is the “similarity of thinking of actors sufficient for cooperation.”19 It includes the cognitive and conceptual alignment necessary for personnel to anticipate each other’s actions, achieve common understanding, plan coherently, synchronize their decision making, and exchange information efficiently. Importantly, intellectual interoperability is not a kind of forced uniformity where everyone thinks the same thoughts.20 Rather, it is about enabling human-centric coordination, including ways to disagree and debate appropriately, to reach optimal solutions informed by multiple perspectives.21

Intellectual interoperability encompasses several interrelated facets. At its foundation is communication interoperability. Language interoperability is a natural prerequisite for information exchange, but effective communication also requires social communication skills and a mutual understanding of the “action language” necessary for coherent joint operations.22 Communication alone is insufficient, however, if partners lack cognitive alignment, which includes a shared understanding of military concepts, shared mental models of doctrine, and the ability to develop and maintain a suitable level of common understanding of the environment and the commander’s intent.23 This alignment is closely related to Hungarian military professor Sándor Munk’s concept of shared semantic understanding: agreement on the meaning of concepts and communicated information, so that partners interpret messages and data consistently, rather than falling prey to “conceptual spaghetti.”24 Without this semantic foundation, even partners who share a common language may act on fundamentally different interpretations of the same directive.25

Intellectual interoperability also depends on competencies that are cultural and normative in character. Cross-cultural competence, including interpersonal adaptability in cross-cultural interactions and the ability to foster a shared sense of purpose and organizational cohesion across diverse teams, enables coalition partners to collaborate effectively despite different national traditions and organizational cultures.26 Ethical and normative alignment reinforces this collaboration through shared professional ethics (such as personal responsibility and integrity), societal expectations (such as rules of engagement and civil control of the military), and trust based on shared moral reference points.27

Finally, interpersonal relationships among individuals and organizations provide the social infrastructure on which these cognitive and cultural dimensions depend. Personal relationships contribute to mutual trust and understanding, and they create pathways for liaison across institutional and national boundaries.28 While interpersonal relationships extend beyond the scope of intellectual interoperability proper, they are often the vehicle through which cognitive alignment and shared understanding develop in practice.

Fostering Intellectual Interoperability

For more than two decades, NATO and nations have sought to enhance intellectual interoperability among Allies and partners. These activities span various lines of effort but can generally be described by two broad, often overlapping categories, as explained in more detail in this section: programs that foster components of intellectual interoperability or build the institutional systems to do so, and programs that create opportunities for multinational experiences.

The first category encompasses programs designed to grow interoperability directly. These efforts include training and education programs that develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential for intellectual interoperability, such as adaptive thinking skills, cross-cultural competence, and language proficiency.29 While such competencies are often developed within national institutions, some security cooperation programs go further by building partners’ capacity to generate these capabilities independently.

For example, the Defense Education Enhancement Program (DEEP) grows partner capacity and fosters intellectual interoperability by conducting reciprocal exchanges with partners’ professional military education (PME) institutions and providing their faculty with professional development on NATO-approved curricula and teaching processes.30 The program grew out of the previously mentioned PfP Consortium, which was originally designed to build bridges between NATO and former Soviet states. DEEP quickly demonstrated its value; for example, playing a significant role in enabling the first multinational deployment of Kazakh infantry on a UN peacekeeping mission and in assisting Ukraine in the development of its noncommissioned officer corps.31 Between 2010 and 2021, DEEP also supported faculty at the Marshal Fahim National Defense University in Afghanistan, and in 2025 DEEP worked with 15 partner nations through more than 600 engagements.32

DEEP is one of several such initiatives. Other complementary programs exist across nations and NATO. The International Military Academic Forum, for example, convenes educators from allied and partner nations to exchange students and faculty, share pedagogical best practices, and promote a common security and defense culture.33 Another example is NATO’s Global Programming process, which establishes common standards for knowledge, skills, and attitudes across military education systems.

The second category of intellectual interoperability initiatives emphasizes creating opportunities for shared experiences and the development of interpersonal relationships across multinational forces. Programs of this type prioritize sustained, direct interaction through operational and training contexts, essentially any experience that creates “real opportunities to actually work together.”34

The US International Military Education and Training (IMET) program, for example, brings foreign military and civilian leaders into United States PME institutions. In addition to traditional educational benefits, IMET encourages participants to build peer networks that often persist throughout their careers.35

Staff exchanges and liaison officer placement programs offer another example. These programs embed personnel within allied headquarters or operational units, facilitating daily collaboration and the natural exchange of operational and institutional knowledge.36 Security cooperation programs may also embed experienced professionals into partner nations and institutions. For instance, Foreign Area Officer programs identify select officers to become experts (“military diplomats”) in a particular region, including applicable cultures and languages as well as the underlying cross-cultural competencies necessary to navigate Joint, interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational (JIIM) environments with poise.37

Similarly, the United States DoW’s Ministry of Defense Advisors (MoDA) program deploys civilian experts to work alongside partner-nation defense officials in areas such as institutional reform, policy development, and defense resource management. The then–Department of Defense established MoDA in 2009 to support strategic capability development in Afghanistan and to encourage genuine relationships between US civilian advisers and their partner-nation counterparts. Beyond other personnel exchanges or technical assistance programs, MoDA relationships encompass facets of character, shared understanding, and the development of conceptual alignment—essential elements for advancing intellectual interoperability. Through sustained personal engagements at the ministerial level, MoDA advisers build the intellectual framework for long-term multinational security cooperation across a nation.38

Several of these programs, including DEEP and MoDA, were employed in Afghanistan during the two decades of NATO-led engagement. Yet, despite these efforts, the rapid collapse of Afghan security forces in 2021 raises difficult questions about whether intellectual interoperability was sufficiently developed and whether the broader approach to security cooperation adequately prioritized it. The following case study examines this experience in detail.

Case Study: Afghanistan

Today, the US Department of War carries out hundreds of security cooperation missions around the globe to build the capabilities of allies and partners. Before 2001, however, security cooperation was largely conducted by special operations forces and framed as “train and equip” missions. The United States and its partners often underemphasized intellectual interoperability in these programs, particularly within fragile states.39 While NATO has increasingly recognized the importance of intellectual interoperability over the past 25 years, this case study highlights the continued struggle to value and achieve it. In this section, we examine some of the missed opportunities to build intellectual interoperability in Afghanistan (2001–21) and the potential implications of these oversights.

Background

Afghanistan occupies an important location as a route to India and a buffer between the Middle East and China. Throughout the nineteenth century, Afghanistan’s strategic location placed it at the center of the “Great Game” between Russia and Britain. The country’s history of foreign intervention, however, extends much further—from Alexander the Great and the Mongols to the Soviets and the United States.40 These conflicts fomented long-standing tensions among the regional tribes and ethnicities, eventually provoking a civil war in the late 1970s.

A bloodless coup removed King Mohammad Zahir Shah in 1973 and installed his cousin, Mohammad Daud Khan, who was later overthrown in a violent revolution in 1978 that installed a Marxist-Leninist communist government. This revolution widened the schisms among tribes and ethnicities, further destabilizing the nation. It also facilitated the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which was ostensibly intended to support the newly established Afghan communist government.

Indeed, the Soviets helped modernize aspects of Afghanistan’s military capabilities. They built the Afghans’ military in the Soviet image, including their centralized, hierarchical model of military decision making. The Soviet military accomplished this modernization in part by training and educating Afghan officers at Soviet academic institutions (like the United States IMET program). In large part, the Soviets invested in building the Afghans’ capability to counter US and Pakistani efforts to arm resistance fighters.41

In the early to mid-1980s, the United States and Pakistan cooperated to counter the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, with United States and Saudi support, channeled weapons and funding to a network of seven major Afghan mujahideen factions, which became the principal insurgent forces fighting the Soviets. These groups, often referred to as the “Peshawar Seven,” played a central role in sustaining the insurgency that eventually compelled the Soviet Union to withdraw in 1989.42 Following the Soviets’ departure and the collapse of the Afghan communist government in 1992, however, rival mujahideen commanders turned their forces against one another, reigniting the civil war. Out of this fragmentation, the Taliban emerged in 1994 and consolidated control over most of the country by the late 1990s.

The US- and NATO-led intervention in Afghanistan (2001–21) began as a counterterrorism campaign to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban regime, but it rapidly expanded into a two-decades effort of counterinsurgency, state building, and security sector reform. Over the course of the war, international forces partnered with Afghan political and security institutions to build civil society capacity while simultaneously conducting combat operations against armed insurgent groups. Despite extensive investment in training, equipping, and mentoring Afghan forces, the mission faced persistent challenges: endemic corruption, uneven governance, competing political agendas, and limited institutional absorption of NATO doctrines and practices.43 Ultimately, the effort failed to produce sustainable Afghan self-reliance, culminating in the rapid collapse of the state following the withdrawal of US and allied forces in 2021.

Throughout the Soviet and NATO occupations of Afghanistan, international forces focused their security cooperation efforts on immediate war-fighting priorities, largely at the expense of building the enduring capability and competence of Afghan military institutions. This oversight may help explain why relatively proficient Afghan military units dissolved in the face of Taliban pressure in 2021. Despite their tactical capability to fight, Afghan soldiers did not believe that Afghan security institutions would support them beyond the departure of international forces. In other words, the Soviet (1979–92) and NATO (2001–21) investments in security cooperation had merely established the veneer of institutional capacity and a weak strategic commitment that could not withstand significant or sustained conflict.

The speed of the collapse underscored the fragility of two decades of Western and NATO investment. By prioritizing short-term tactical effectiveness over the deliberate cultivation of resilient institutions, international forces failed to establish the foundations necessary for Afghan self-sufficiency, thereby undermining local confidence and the credibility of the broader Western security cooperation enterprise. The following section draws lessons from this engagement that may prove instructive for security cooperation efforts.

Lessons from Afghanistan

Considered through the lens of intellectual interoperability, at least three lessons emerge from the international experience of Western security cooperation in Afghanistan.

1. Invest in robust cognitive alignment, broadly and longitudinally. The first lesson is to invest in building a shared understanding of the operational environment and strategic intent among intervening stakeholders, including among national and allied forces. Without deep cognitive alignment, individuals and groups become susceptible to myopic thinking and may pursue actions that fail to support broader, collective goals.

In Afghanistan, for example, international forces failed to coalesce on a single strategy for stabilizing the nation. They could have taken one of two paths: one was to align with the warlords to secure a patchwork of local areas, while the other was to support a central government capable of securing the whole of Afghanistan. The United States and its NATO Allies failed to appreciate the range of policy options and failed to coordinate internally on which option to resource fully. Instead, the pursuit of both options—with special operations and intelligence forces often supporting (including financially) the warlords, and the US State Department, the US Defense Department, and NATO institutions supporting the central government (without full financial resources)—undermined the opportunity to achieve either.

For US and NATO forces, it became a truism that the international operation was not a single 20-year conflict, but rather a series of 20 one-year operations, with little continuity from year to year. Over the course of the 20 years, virtually every policy choice was made, including those in direct conflict with each other. For example, in one year, international forces might prioritize counter-drug operations to reduce Taliban income streams, while the next year, counter-drug operations might be sidelined to support improvements in human intelligence gathering.44 Additionally, NATO experimented in Afghanistan with various reconstruction approaches, including the “lead nation” concept, in which Germany led police reform efforts while Italy led the justice sector reform, the United Kingdom led counternarcotics, Japan managed disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration, and the United States led training for the Afghan army. Such efforts resulted in inconsistent visions and fragmented implementation—a direct consequence of insufficient cognitive alignment among the contributing nations.45

This compartmentalization coincided with short-term thinking, which led coalition military forces to undervalue long-term relationship-building with Afghan security institutions. Military leaders often focused on expedient, transactional cooperation suited to their immediate local objectives. For example, after the October 2001 invasion, US Special Operations Forces partnered with the Northern Alliance, a coalition of anti-Taliban factions composed largely of former mujahideen commanders whom the United States had supported in the 1980s against the Soviets. These partnerships initially enabled local security, but over time, reliance on warlord networks complicated efforts to build cohesive national security institutions with the central government.46

In December 2001, the US and allied nations supported Hamid Karzai as the Chairman of the Afghan Interim Authority, a transitional government that evolved into the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) in 2004. While this central government was nominally responsible for nationwide security, its influence was limited, and factional leaders within it jockeyed for influence and resources. For instance, the Northern Alliance held significant autonomous power. Following the establishment of the Afghan Ministry of Defense, much of the Northern Alliance was integrated into the newly formed Afghan National Army (ANA). Rather than strengthening federal power, however, this move preserved factional divides, with the Northern Alliance often competing against other elements of GIRoA for international military aid, thereby exacerbating tensions within the central government and with regional warlords.

International support for Afghan security forces further reinforced this imbalance. Rather than investing in long-term capacity building to mature the ANA, US Special Operations Forces (largely responsible for security cooperation at that time) focused on building Afghan special operations and tactical air support capabilities, while offering limited resources and training to the rest of the Afghan army. Meanwhile, NATO and coalition trainers focused on expanding the ANA and police in terms of numbers rather than institutional depth. This approach produced a divergence: the elite Afghan special operators became relatively proficient, while the vast majority of Afghan soldiers and police remained undertrained, under-resourced, and relegated to basic duties, such as manning stationary checkpoints. The result was a hollow force structure that lacked the institutional foundations necessary for independent sustainability.

This lesson highlights the importance of cognitive alignment among coalition partners, particularly at the strategic and operational levels. The early phase of the Afghan war is instructive for its divergences between short-term incentives and long-term strategy, and among the competing priorities of different stakeholders. Short-term outcomes should be pursued in ways that reinforce (rather than undermine) broader strategic impacts, and ideally, they should serve as building blocks that contribute to lasting goals. Achieving success requires not only shared strategic goals but also a consistent, semantic understanding of those goals, broadly across stakeholder groups and longitudinally across time (across personnel rotations). In the Afghan case, this alignment failed to materialize. Instead, daily tactical actions often worked at cross-purposes with strategic priorities, and the absence of continuity over time further weakened collective effectiveness, illustrating how the lack of intellectual interoperability can erode even the most resource-intensive security cooperation efforts.

Future security cooperation efforts could mitigate these challenges through robust multinational planning processes that situate short-term efforts within a longer-term political strategy. Focusing on processes, however, is likely insufficient; intentional efforts to build intellectual interoperability among allied mission teams are also needed. This level of intellectual interoperability could be accomplished, for instance, through increased personnel exchanges and specially trained embedded JIIM advisers (similar to the MoDA program).

2. Align strategic intent, not just observable behavior. A second lesson related to intellectual interoperability is the importance of aligning strategic intent among all stakeholders. In Afghanistan, the allied forces and the Afghan government appeared to have shared goals, but this alignment was superficial. For example, the United States initially focused on al-Qaeda’s defeat while GIRoA sought to secure Afghanistan’s territory (and its own position) by preventing the Taliban from returning to power. Allied forces were able to cooperate with Afghan stakeholders to achieve these mutually beneficial outcomes in the short term, but over the long term, the differing strategic aims undermined success.

Since short-term goals were aligned, US efforts remained largely transactional, time-bound, and focused on countering the threat of terrorism emanating from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, GIRoA actually required a sustained commitment—including resources—for governance, stability, and legitimacy. The inability to reconcile these divergent interests contributed to strategic incoherence and ultimately weakened the prospects for a durable Afghan state.

The transactional nature of this relationship can be seen in how the United States and NATO approached the development of Afghanistan’s security sector. From the outset, international efforts prioritized quantifiable outputs, such as the number of Afghan soldiers and police trained, over the more difficult task of building the institutional processes needed to generate, sustain, and manage those forces effectively. NATO militaries, rather than Afghan trainers, conducted most of the instruction, which left Afghan institutions dependent on external support. Coalition military forces even trained the Afghan civilian police, which prepared them for kinetic action, but at the cost of developing police forces capable of building rapport and trust within communities.47

Frequent personnel turnover compounded matters. Each allied rotation reset the relationship between coalition advisers and Afghan counterparts, making it difficult to build shared strategic understanding. Coalition military leaders instead sought to achieve results within their limited tours of duty, often within only 3–12 months.48 They focused on obvious and tangible short-term outcomes, even if these initiatives failed to align with longer-term capacity building objectives, which typically require multiple years to institutionalize. Some commanders even changed their short-term objectives, “moving the goalposts” to work toward something they believed was attainable during their leadership tenure.49

This mindset discouraged international forces from prioritizing efforts to build the human capital and administrative capacity necessary to run ministerial-level institutions, such as recruitment, logistics, payroll, and planning systems.50 US commanders were hesitant to relinquish control, often regarding Afghan ministries with suspicion and as sources of corruption. While corruption was undeniably a problem, this stance discouraged sustained engagement with the very institutions that would have needed to change if Afghan forces were to become self-sufficient. Consequently, the security sector grew in size but remained hollow and unable to function independently.

This lesson illustrates the difference between behavioral alignment and intellectual interoperability. In Afghanistan, behavioral alignment was often mistaken for genuine interoperability. Afghan and NATO forces trained side by side, their operational objectives were mutually supporting, and Afghan ministries adopted the rhetoric of reform. Yet, without a shared understanding of what success looked like and a mutual commitment to achieving it, such cooperation only produced temporary gains.

This example also demonstrates the distinction between transformative and transactional approaches.51 Transformative relationships build trust, shared values, and long-term commitment, while transactional relationships emphasize short-term expediency. In Afghanistan, most interactions remained transactional, limiting the opportunities to build shared strategic intent or to shift the organizational incentives that sustained institutional inertia and corruption. More broadly, the Afghan case demonstrates that without intellectual interoperability, security cooperation risks producing short-term alignment that conceals deeper fractures and leaves institutions fragile.

Future security cooperation efforts should invest in deliberate mechanisms to surface and reconcile divergent strategic intent among all stakeholders, including coalition partners and partner nations, before and throughout an engagement. Effective security cooperation requires more than monitoring and evaluation; it demands sustained interpersonal engagement across the strategic level, where advisers and counterparts can develop the shared understanding necessary to distinguish genuine alignment from its transactional imitation. Programs that build transformative relationships, such as long-term embedded advisory programs, offer a more promising foundation than rotational models optimized for short-term outputs.

3. Invest in expert institutional capability building. A third lesson from Afghanistan is that senior leaders must commit to building intellectual interoperability at the institutional level. Institution building should receive at least as much attention and investment as the provision of equipment and tactical training. Developing competent tactical formations is a bankrupt strategy if not accompanied by sufficient institutional development.52

In the context of security cooperation, institution building refers to the process of developing the organizational structures, administrative systems, and governance mechanisms that enable a partner’s institutions to function effectively and sustainably. This institution building process involves strengthening organizations, their leaders, and their workforces to manage core functions such as resource allocation, logistics, personnel, procurement, oversight, and strategy.53

In the 1980s, the Soviet Union noted persistent problems with the Afghan High Command and the Afghan Armed Forces, particularly in officer preparation and the correct usage and maintenance of equipment, and there were severe training and readiness shortfalls.54 NATO Allies later recognized the same shortfalls. Afghanistan’s “often-interrupted history” of foreign interventions and civil conflict, combined with Afghanistan’s Soviet-style military built during the occupation in the 1980s, disrupted US and NATO efforts to build enduring governance structures in the form that the Allies intended.55

Coalition partners sought to build a modern, air-supported ground force modeled on NATO militaries, but this approach required more than military instruction. Before they could engage with this advanced doctrine, Afghan personnel needed to develop enabling competencies, such as literacy, numeracy, technical skills, and English language proficiency.

Helping Afghans develop the competencies necessary to build modern institutions would have required a generational investment in education and personnel. It would have also required institutional investments, for example, merit-based career ladders that individuals could climb through education, training, and experience. From 2001 until around 2010, however, the US military focused on the Afghan military’s tactical capabilities without developing the sustaining processes, capabilities, or organizational culture at the operational and strategic levels. Advancement in the Afghan army was based more on patronage and corruption than on merit, even though many Afghans in the security ministries were educated during the Karzai era, and many more young and well-educated Afghans joined the ranks during Ashraf Ghani’s presidency (2014–21). Starting around 2014, these younger Afghans began to reform the security ministries, at least until the departure of NATO forces led to their dissolution.

In 2010, the United States began deploying expert civilian personnel, known as “MoDAs,” who were knowledgeable in strategic functions and institutional operations such as logistics, finance, personnel, public affairs, or intelligence. Their missions were to build relationships with senior Afghan leaders in similar functional areas and foster intellectual interoperability at the institutional level. These civilian experts first advised the older generation of senior Afghan leaders, followed later by the younger, reform-minded generation of Afghans.

For the first several years of its existence, the MoDA program faced dual obstacles. The first was convincing US government offices to allow their experienced, high-performing civilian personnel to deploy for a year (or more). As a result, the MoDA program was frequently forced to “satisfice,” that is, to place qualified, but not perfectly aligned, personnel into certain roles. For example, a finance officer from the Defense Commissary Agency might be assigned to advise on defense acquisition (an adjacent area of expertise).56 At other times, MoDA positions went unfilled.

The second obstacle was to convince coalition military leaders that such civilian expertise and subsequent institutional development were essential. While military advisers are not a new idea, advising at the ministerial and institutional levels to build partner capabilities is relatively novel for the United States and its NATO Allies. Before the United States implemented the MoDA program, NATO military personnel generally advised the Afghan Security Ministries. Often, this arrangement led to situations where military personnel who were accomplished at the tactical level served as advisers at the strategic level, despite their lack of experience in establishing bureaucratic functions such as policy implementation and resource management.

By 2018, thanks to encouragement from General John “Mick” Nicholson (the then–Commander of US Forces – Afghanistan and the Resolute Support Mission) and advocacy from then–Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the MoDA program finally overcame these obstacles and a sufficient number of high-performing institutional advisers were deployed. Unfortunately, these efforts were undercut later that year, due to increased security requirements and a shift toward cultivating “reliable partners” (that is, powerful Afghan individuals who could deliver immediate results). This shift undermined the effectiveness of the newly deployed advisers and reinforced Afghanistan’s reliance on individual personalities rather than institutional capacity.57

By mid-2021, as senior Defense and Interior leaders (that is, the “reliable partners”) began to depart service in GIRoA, the Taliban began to advance, and absent coalition support, the Afghan military began to fold. The swift collapse of the ANA and police forces led many commentators to raise concerns about Afghans’ “will to fight,” with critics deriding the seemingly wasted investments by the US and Allies on training and equipping security forces at the tactical level. Commentary, however, often overlooked the failure to invest in strategic and ministerial-levels institutions.

In Afghanistan, the incentive structure rewarded immediate, quantifiable outputs over slower, longer-term institutional development. The US commanders were frequently evaluated on metrics such as the number of troops trained, the amount of money spent, units stood up, or operations conducted with coalition forces. These measures provided quantifiable evidence of “progress,” but they did little to ensure that Afghan ministries could recruit, sustain, and direct their forces independently. In prioritizing tactical displays, senior leaders unintentionally disincentivized investments in the long “tail” of enabling institutional capacity—ultimately, at the expense of enduring Afghan self-sufficiency.

The consequences of focusing on short-term gains and failing to establish intellectual interoperability extended beyond Afghanistan: NATO’s credibility as a security provider was damaged, regional stability was shaken, and adversaries drew lessons about the limits of Western state-building efforts. More broadly, the failure highlights that technical and material assistance alone cannot generate durable security partnerships; intellectual interoperability is essential for ensuring that local institutions can absorb, adapt, and sustain the principles on which multinational operations depend.

This lesson highlights that modern security cooperation requires deliberate investment in skilled advising at the highest levels of partner governments. Institutional capacity building is the primary mechanism through which intellectual interoperability is operationalized at scale. It transforms shared understanding from an interpersonal quality into an organizational capability that can endure beyond individual relationships. Programs such as PME exchanges and DEEP in-region engagements offer a reinforcing means of developing shared intellectual frameworks at the individual and organizational levels. In Afghanistan, DEEP’s engagement with the Marshal Fahim National Defense University demonstrated early promise, but it did not receive the necessary support to cultivate the leaders needed to sustain institutional reforms independently.

Conclusion

The experience in Afghanistan demonstrates that intellectual interoperability represents a critical, yet often undervalued, dimension of successful security cooperation. The problems that occurred in Afghanistan cannot be attributed to a single cause, but this case study illustrates that insufficient cognitive and conceptual alignment can undermine even the most well-resourced efforts.

The Afghanistan case study exemplified three generalizable insights. First, cognitive alignment among Allies and partners must extend beyond immediate operational objectives to encompass long-term strategic vision and implementation approaches. This alignment is most critical (and most achievable) among the security-providing nations, whose fragmentation of effort in Afghanistan illustrates how tactical cooperation can persist even when strategic frameworks remain misaligned. Second, alignment with the partner nation is equally important, but behavioral conformity should not be mistaken for genuine intellectual interoperability. Surface-level adoption of procedures, terminology, or organizational structures may mask fundamental divergences in understanding, intent, and commitment that ultimately undermine partnership sustainability. Third, institutional capacity building requires sustained investment in developing not just individual competencies but organizational cultures and decision-making processes that can function autonomously. Partners must work at the institutional level to achieve enduring intellectual interoperability.

These lessons extend beyond Afghanistan. As great-power competition intensifies and security challenges grow increasingly complex, the ability to forge durable partnerships becomes ever more critical. Yet, current security cooperation approaches may still prioritize quantifiable, short-term outputs over the patient cultivation of shared intellectual frameworks that enable authentic collaboration. Current assessment frameworks still emphasize quantifiable outputs over indicators of intellectual interoperability such as institutional decision-making autonomy, strategic alignment durability, and the capacity of partner institutions to generate and sustain their own cognitive and cross-cultural competencies. Developing such indicators would give decisionmakers concrete tools for allocating scarce resources toward the dimensions of security cooperation most likely to produce enduring results.

Moving forward, security cooperation practitioners should also consider several adjustments to existing approaches. Personnel rotation policies should be examined; the frequent turnover of military leaders in Afghanistan likely undermined critical relationship building. Additionally, the time horizons for partnership development must align with the generational time frames required for genuine institutional transformation rather than the tactical timelines that dominated Afghanistan operations. Programs that embed expert civilian advisers at the ministerial level, such as MoDA, and programs that develop partner-nation educational institutions, such as DEEP, should be expanded and sustained as core elements of security cooperation strategy rather than treated as supplementary efforts.

The concept of intellectual interoperability offers a valuable lens for understanding why some security partnerships endure while others collapse despite significant investment. By recognizing cognitive and conceptual alignment as foundational requirements rather than ancillary benefits, security cooperation can become more effective. The lessons from Afghanistan, while painful, offer a foundation for building the kind of durable, intellectually grounded partnerships that future security challenges will demand.

 
 

Sae Schatz
Sae Schatz works at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. She previously served as the executive director of the Partnership for Peace Consortium and, before that, as the director of the Pentagon’s Advanced Distributed Learning Program. Schatz has more than 15 years of experience in research, higher education, government, and international security cooperation, and she holds a PhD in modeling and simulation, with an emphasis in human systems, from the University of Central Florida. She has coauthored and coedited several books, including Modernizing Learning: Building the Future Learning Ecosystem (Government Publishing Office, 2019).

Scott C. Buchanan
Scott C. Buchanan previously served as the Department of War director for security cooperation, and he deployed multiple times to Afghanistan as an adviser, including as the senior adviser to the Afghan National Security Council in the Resolute Support Mission’s Executive Advisory Group, 2018–2020. He currently serves as the chief of staff for defense continuity and mission assurance in the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Policy. Buchanan holds a PhD in public policy from George Mason University and graduate degrees from the Naval War College and the University of Denver.

 
 

Endnotes

  1. 1. Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (Oxford University Press, 2019).
  2. 2. Sten Rynning, NATO: From Cold War to Ukraine, a History of the World’s Most Powerful Alliance (Yale University Press, 2024); and Philip H. Gordon, ed., NATO’s Transformation: The Changing Shape of the Atlantic Alliance (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997).
  3. 3. “Security Cooperation,” in electronic Security Assistance Management Manual (E-SAMM) Glossary, DSCA Manual 5105.38-M, Defense Security Cooperation Agency, accessed February 27, 2024, https://samm.dsca.mil/listing/esamm-glossary.
  4. 4. “Interoperability,” in E-SAMM Glossary.
  5. 5. Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA), Interoperability, Army Regulation 34–1 (HQDA, 2020), 21.
  6. 6. For an overview and history of military interoperability, see Sándor Munk, “An Analysis of Basic Interoperability Related Terms, System of Interoperability Types,” Academic and Applied Research in Military Science (AARMS) 1, no. 1 (2002): 117–31; and HQDA, Interoperability, 2.
  7. 7. The three-factor model is a common framework for interoperability used across NATO and allied nations; for example, see John R. Deni et al., “Measuring Interoperability Within NATO: Adapted Off-the-Shelf or Bespoke Solution?,” Parameters 55, no. 1 (Spring 2025): 60, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol55/iss1/6.
  8. 8. As discussed in Munk, “An Analysis of Basic Interoperability Related Terms”; and see also US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), C4I for the Warrior (JCS, 1992), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA340641.pdf.
  9. 9. The Warsaw Pact (1955–91), a collective defense treaty among the Soviet Union and seven Eastern European communist states, served as the Soviet counterpart to NATO. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Warsaw Pact” by Britannica editors, March 30, 2026, https://www.britannica.com/event/Warsaw-Pact.
  10. 10. For example, see William M. Wheatley, Partnership for Peace in a New Millennium (US Army War College, 2001), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA390643.pdf; and NATO, “Partnership for Peace Programme,” press release, June 28, 2024, https://nato.int/en/what-we-do/partnerships-and-cooperation/partnership-for-peace-programme.
  11. 11. Thomas-Durell Young, “Impediments to Reform in European Post-Communist Defense Institutions: Addressing the Conceptual Divide,” Problems of Post-Communism (2016): 3, https://hdl.handle.net/10945/50647.
  12. 12. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, “Secretary-General’s Opening Speech” (speech, PfPC’s 10th anniversary conference, NATO Headquarters, Brussels, Belgium, June 18, 2008), cited in Walter L. Christman, “The PfP Consortium ‘Community of Experts’ Approach to International Security Cooperation,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 7, no. 3 (2008): 15, https://doi.org/10.11610/Connections.07.3.02.
  13. 13. Frederic Labarre, “Whence and Whither the PfP Consortium?,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 7, no. 3 (2008): 70, https://doi.org/10.11610/Connections.07.3.06.
  14. 14. Pál Dunay, “Operability and Shared Responsibility After New Membership: First Impressions from East-Central Europe,” Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals, no. 49 (2000): 36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40585799; and see also David M. Glantz, “Military Training and Education Challenges in Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 11, no. 3 (1998): 27.
  15. 15. “Defence Capabilities Initiative,” sec. 4, NATO, April 25, 1999, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_27443.htm.
  16. 16. On the limited success of the DCI, see Carl W. Ek, NATO’s Defense Capabilities Initiative, Congressional Research Service (CRS) Report RS20907 (CRS, updated May 22, 2001), 6, https://congressionalresearch.com/RS20907/document.php?study=NATOs+Defense+Capabilities+Initiative. For the concept of human interoperability, see Donna Winslow and Peer Everts, “It’s Not Just a Question of Muscle: Cultural Interoperability for NATO,” in A History of NATO—The First Fifty Years, ed. Gustav Schmidt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 85, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-65576-2_7.
  17. 17. Agnietė Žotkevičiūtė-Banevičienė, “The Cultural Element in NATO Military Doctrines: Important, but a Declarative Issue?,” Politologija 108, no. 4 (2022): 87, https://doi.org/10.15388/Polit.2022.108.3.
  18. 18. Steven Paget, “​‘Interoperability of the Mind’: Professional Military Education and the Development of Interoperability,” The RUSI Journal 161, no. 4 (2016): 48, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2016.1224496.
  19. 19. Munk, “Basic Interoperability Related Terms,” 128.
  20. 20. In other words, everyone does not need identical ideologies or to reach identical conclusions.
  21. 21. Munk, “Basic Interoperability Related Terms,” 129.
  22. 22. Harald Gell and Sylvain Paile, eds., Lessons Learnt from the International Military Academic Forum (Federal Ministry of Defence and Sports of the Republic of Austria, 2014), 64.
  23. 23. Munk, “Basic Interoperability Related Terms,” 125; and Sándor Munk, “Role of Semantic Interoperability in Warfare of Our Age,” AARMS 3, no. 4 (2004): 104.
  24. 24. Young, “Impediments to Reform,” 9.
  25. 25. In digital systems, an analogous distinction is often drawn between syntactic (messages can travel across systems) and semantic (shared meaning is conveyed across systems) interoperability. A simple example is the communication of dates, where “01/07/2026” may refer to early January in the United States but to a date in July in most European nations.
  26. 26. Žotkevičiūtė-Banevičienė, “The Cultural Element in NATO Military Doctrines;” and Linton Wells II et al., eds., Changing Mindsets to Transform Security: Leader Development for an Unpredictable and Complex World (Center for Technology and National Security Policy, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 2013), 338, https://digitalcommons.ndu.edu/ndupress-books/17.
  27. 27. Wells II et al., Changing Mindsets, 180; and Gell and Paile, Lessons Learnt, 63.
  28. 28. Shelley Gallup et al., Human Interoperability: Experimentation to Understand and Improve the Human Component of Complex Systems (Naval Postgraduate School, 2008), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/tr/ADA487997.
  29. 29. Refer to the competencies and references listed in the prior section of this article; and see also Christopher G. Pernin et al., A Leader’s Guide to Interoperability, RBA3241-1 (RAND Corporation, 2024), https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RBA3241-1.html; Angela R. Febbraro et al., Multinational Military Operations and Intercultural Factors, RTO Technical Report TR-HFM-120 (NATO Research and Technology Organisation, 2008), 168, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA496055; and Silvia Haas, “Roadblocks and Gateways in the Human Domain: A Cognitive Interoperability Framework for Allies and Partners” (master’s thesis, Swedish Defence University, 2023), https://fhs.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1813102/FULLTEXT01.pdf.
  30. 30. Timothy Dreifke and Iryna Lysychkina, “Reference Curricula: An Impactful Tool for Institutional Capacity Building?,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 24, no. 1 (2025), https://doi.org/10.11610/Connections.24.1.08.
  31. 31. For the Kazakh case, see Trevor Johnston and Alan G. Stolberg, The Challenges and Opportunities of Institutional Capacity Building Through Professional Military Education: Lessons from the Defense Education Enhancement Program, RRA1238-1 (RAND Corporation, 2022), 11, https://www.rand.org/t/RRA1238-1; and for the Ukraine case, see Alan G. Stolberg et al., Building Partner Nation Capacity Through the Defense Education Enhancement Program, PE286 (RAND Corporation, 2018), 11, https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE286.html.
  32. 32. Partnership for Peace Consortium (PfPC), Annual Report 2025 (PfPC, 2026), 16, https://www.pfp-consortium.org/media/661/download.
  33. 33. For information on the International Military Academic Forum, see Gell and Paile, Lessons Learnt; and for general principles, see Rudolf Urban, “Internationalization: A New Challenge for Military Universities,” International Conference Knowledge-Based Organization 21, no. 1 (2015): 287, https://doi.org/10.1515/kbo-2015-0048.
  34. 34. Wells II et al., Changing Mindsets, 56.
  35. 35. David M. Glantz, “Accomplishments, Strengths, and Weaknesses of the US Military (Security) Assistance Program,” The Journal of Slavic Military Studies 11, no. 4 (1998): 28, https://doi.org/10.1080/13518049808430360; Stephen J. Carl, “United States Foreign Assistance Programs: The Requirement of Metrics for Security Assistance and Security Cooperation Programs” (thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, 2012), 97, https://hdl.handle.net/10945/7316; and John F. Troxell, “The Moldovan Military Academy: Transforming Officer Education,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 11, no. 4 (2012): 105.
  36. 36. Febbraro et al., Multinational Military Operations, 3-8.
  37. 37. Febbraro et al., Multinational Military Operations, 3-21.
  38. 38. James A. Schear et al., “Ministerial Advisers: Developing Capacity for an Enduring Security Force,” PRISM 2, no. 2 (March 2011), https://www.jstor.org/stable/26469119.
  39. 39. Barbara Salera, “The Case Against Security Cooperation in Fragile States,” War on the Rocks, July 18, 2022, https://warontherocks.com/2022/07/the-case-against-security-cooperation-in-fragile-states.
  40. 40. In 1901, Rudyard Kipling’s novel, Kim, popularized the term the “Great Game” in the context of the Russo-British rivalry in the region. See Rudyard Kipling, Kim (Macmillan & Co, 1901).
  41. 41. For relevant historical accounts, see, for example: Elisabeth Leake, Afghan Crucible: The Soviet Invasion and the Making of Modern Afghanistan (Oxford University Press, 2022); Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023); George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times (Grove Press, 2003); and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Books, 2004).
  42. 42. For example, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (Penguin Books, 2004).
  43. 43. Enrique Baltar Rodríguez, “Why Did State-Building Policy Fail in Afghanistan?,” Open Journal of Political Science 13, no. 1 (2023): 136, https://doi.org/10.4236/ojps.2023.131008.
  44. 44. Vanda Felbab-Brown, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 155.
  45. 45. Michael E. O’Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan, Toughing It Out in Afghanistan (Brookings Institution Press, 2010), 24; and David P. Auerswald and Stephen M. Saideman, NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting Together, Fighting Alone (Princeton University Press, 2014), 34.
  46. 46. Coll, Ghost Wars, 170.
  47. 47. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), Police in Conflict: Lessons from the US Experience in Afghanistan, SIGAR-22-23-LL (SIGAR, June 2022), 89.
  48. 48. Special operations tours generally lasted three to four months, coalition forces tours often lasted around six months, and general-purpose forces tours generally lasted eight to nine months. For example, see Troy D. Busby, “Smooth Is Fast: Managing Security Transitions for Enduring Freedom,” Military Review 92, no. 6 (2012): 61, https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/2012-Archive.
  49. 49. The then–US Department of Defense was required to provide measures of progress in a report to Congress. It was not uncommon to change markers of progress at the beginning and end of tours to demonstrate individual influence over progress within a six-month tour.
  50. 50. For example, see SIGAR, Staffing the Mission: Lessons from the US Reconstruction of Afghanistan, SIGAR 25-05-LL (SIGAR, November 2024), 20; and SIGAR, Final Report: Seventeen Years of Reconstruction Oversight, SIGAR 25-31-IP (SIGAR, December 2025), 83.
  51. 51. John M. Gillette, “Strategic Advising: Should It Be Transactional or Transformative?,” Small Wars Journal, October 28, 2018, https://archive.smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/strategic-advising-should-it-be-transactional-or-transformative.
  52. 52. Institution building is essential for developing intellectual interoperability, but it is not an equivalent concept. Institution building is a process that (among other things) can encourage interoperability, and intellectual interoperability is one beneficial outcome that effective institutions may produce.
  53. 53. Alexandra Kerr, “Defense Institution Building in the US Context,” Connections: The Quarterly Journal 17, no. 3 (Summer-Fall 2018): 31, http://jstor.org/stable/26934685?seq=1.
  54. 54. Russian General Staff, The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost, trans. and ed. Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress (University of Kansas Press, 2002), 49.
  55. 55. Tamim Ansary, Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan (PublicAffairs, 2014).
  56. 56. John F. Sopko, Divided Responsibility: Lessons from US Security Sector Assistance Efforts in Afghanistan (SIGAR, 2019), 43, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/trecms/pdf/AD1137649.pdf.
  57. 57. Eric Hoelscher et al., Framing the Post-2020 Afghan Environment: Thoughts and Recommendations (Naval Postgraduate School, 2018), 8, https://calhoun.nps.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7e6b307c-42f1-4b88-91a8-2bbdab46403a/content.
 
 

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