Developing countries do not always have the capacity, so there’s always a tradeoff between whether or not you feel that you can risk using taxpayer money in a country that doesn’t have capacity. But we’ve studied these issues and believe there is more capacity out there than we’re responding to. If we really embrace the notion of country ownership and the developing countries genuinely buy in, and we use the budgets of the recipient country, we can create a situation where there is mutual accountability that does away with the dependency problem. But Moyo is right that a lot of foreign aid in the past has created dependency and that has caused many governments to simply sit back and fail to do the job they’re supposed to do as part of this mutual accountability prism

At the request of the SOCOM Commander, the study authors deployed to the Philippines to examine Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines (OEF-P). Since 2002, U.S. Joint Special Operations Task Force-Philippines (JSOTF-P) has partnered with Philippine forces to conduct counterterrorism operations. This campaign successfully targeted high-value individuals and also diminished conditions that gave rise to terrorism and insurgency. Success in this partnered operation was predicated upon contributions and adaptations from both the U.S. and the host nation. Overall, the U.S. was able to contain a terrorist threat and cement a strategic partnership with a small investment in boots on the ground. OEF-P offers critical lessons for the U.S. Government in a time of decreasing resources.

This article argues that, for the last decade, most books and articles on the American way of war have assumed that there is something wrong with it. Various criticisms and cures have been offered, as if a way of war can, and ought to, be perfected. The real problem was less with the American way of war than with the lofty expectations that prevailed as far as what it could accomplish. American policy was eventually corrected by American politics, and American objectives, too, were realigned. Still, the way of war that fought two major campaigns over the last decade has been changed by that experience and by recent adjustments in force structure. What it is now is not what it was then.