US professional military education and democratization abroad

Abstract

United States Professional Military Education (US PME) has commonly been blamed for training some of the worst abusers of human rights — Latin American dictators and thugs like Argentina’s Leopoldo Galtieri and Panama’s Manuel Noriega, Timorese counterinsurgents, and even some officers who would eventually serve the Taliban in Afghanistan. We test this conventional wisdom using both large-N analyses and case studies of Argentina, Greece, and Taiwan. Our large-N results suggest that US PME trained foreign officers prove to be an important stabilizing force during times of democratic transition. Our case studies uncover very few cases of US PME officers linked to human rights abuses; interestingly, in each of our cases, the US PME trained officers provided the initial infrastructure needed to begin domestic military education programs that encouraged civilian control of the military in emerging democracies.