Richard Bennet and Alexander Noyes, "War at Arm's Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance" (Yale UP, 2026)

About this episode

The episode discusses how the United States can effectively build partner militaries through military assistance, highlighting key factors for success.

An in-depth examination of how the United States can build more effective partner militaries. Military assistance has a bad reputation. Large-scale attempts to build partner militaries in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam cost the United States billions of dollars and ended ignominiously, with the collapse of local forces as American troops withdrew. Arms transfers of sophisticated, American-made weapons often appear to do more harm than good. Yet military assistance and support—operating indirectly through partners—when done right, can deliver remarkable strategic results for the United States and its partners. Working effectively with partner militaries is one of the most pressing national security challenges for the United States today. In their latest book, War at Arm's Length: How America Can Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance (Yale University Press, 2026), Richard Bennet and Alexander Noyes offer a systematic look at military assistance in the twenty-first century, examining a frequently deployed but often misunderstood set of tools that allows the United States to leverage partner militaries to achieve national security objectives. Bennet and Noyes posit…

People in this episode

Guests: Richard Bennet, Alexander Noyes

Topics covered

• military assistance
• national security
• partner militaries
• strategic results
• institutional capacity
• security issues

Keywords

• military assistance
• United States
• partner militaries
• national security
• strategic results
• institutional capacity
• security alignment

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Yale University Press, United States, Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam

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