At the Middle East Institute (MEI) on October 10th, 2019, a panel of experts gathered to examine the “By, With, and Through” (BW&T) approach to CENTCOM operations. Panel experts concluded that the lack of interagency understanding and consensus on how and when to pursue BW&T partnered military operations impede U.S. and global security. The discussion was prescient in light of President Trump’s decision to abruptly end U.S. BW&T operations with Syrian Kurds earlier this month, calling into question the very idea of alliances, the stakes of walking away, and the need for more deliberate analytic and decision-making tools to showcase the value of partnerships when politics strike.   

Without losing sight of the current crisis unfolding in Northern Syria, some historical perspective on U.S. partnered military operations may be in order. The term “By, With, and Through” emerged in World War II to describe special operations forces (SOF) working ‘through, with, or by’ indigenous elements including non-state militias and resistance forces in Europe. These light footprint partnerships with locals were an essential complement to unilateral operations against the Nazis, securing victory for the Allies even in places U.S. troops never reached. Half a century later, U.S. SOF again proved the need for partners when our alliances with Afghan and Iraqi guerillas willing to launch Unconventional Warfare (UW) against the Taliban and Hussein regimes respectively facilitated speedy battlefield wins. Not surprisingly, BW&T -- in term and practice – deservedly regained prominence. Today, it seems the term is used to describe everything from kinetic operations alongside irregular forces, to interagency strategies to build defense institutions of allied states. Dalphonse, Townsend, and Weaver offer a thoughtful critique of the term’s ubiquitous, if ambiguous, uses in their 2018 article, nevertheless concluding that BW&T is essential to sparing U.S. blood and treasure, but more importantly, resolving conflict in a durable, locally-legitimate manner.  

Few U.S. military leaders can speak to the benefits and costs of BW&T with as much personal experience as former CENTCOM Commander, General (ret.) Joseph Votel. Speaking at the MEI panel, the seasoned leader outlined what it takes for American forces to successfully engage in BW&T operations: 1) A commitment to building on local partners’ strengths and capabilities instead of recreating them; 2) Acceptance of partners’ design and leadership; and 3) Constant communication, especially about expectations and commitments. Though easy to summarize, Votel’s principles have been harder to operationalize, a point made as much by history as by the other panelists. 

Bilal Saab, senior fellow and director of MEI’s Defense and Security Program, and Dana Stroul, senior fellow in The Washington Institute's Beth and David Geduld Program on Arab Politics, agreed that everything from inconsistent authorities and decision-making processes across the U.S. interagency, to a fluid public appetite for partnerships with armed foreign actors, are factors that hinder effectiveness and consistency when it comes to BW&T. Even when the Pentagon, State Department, Congress, and American people see the value of BW&T to gain access or achieve operational gains, implementing BW&T strategies is never easy. For one, the trust required to forge cross-cultural alliances amidst complex conflict can take years to build, a point Votel suggested adds to the sting when BW&T relationships end unexpectedly as they did for the Kurds this month. Overcoming a legacy of broken pledges, it turns out, is just one of many hurdles in any future journey towards conceiving, authorizing, resourcing then carefully cultivating BW&T partnerships with any future partner.   

Yet instead of developing processes to ensure these myriad challenges are overcome, gut instinct and partisan politics still dominate U.S. decision-making on partnered operations, while informed analytic approaches to assess the risks, rewards, and requirements for successful BW&T are absent. Though there is no avoiding realpolitik, history and the MEI panelists make a compelling demand for better tools to answer the critical questions of with whom, why, how and when to invest (or divest) from BW&T operations.  

One possible option: Motive International’s Social Contract Assessment Tool (SCAT), an empirically rooted framework for assessing the precise values, internal communications and performative utility of would-be BW&T partners, all through a simple analytic framework that can be populated with open-source data. Based on social contract theory and proven in real-world contexts, the SCAT could be used by U.S. interagency strategists, analysts, policymakers and operators alike to assess the legitimacy internal to partners’ organizations as well as the compatibility and potential pitfalls of joining forces with them. The benefits? A clearer, less politically charged way to evaluate the merits of partnering (or not) that is based on social science instead of whim.  

The SCAT, developed by Motive International and taught in Motive’s Governance/Counter-Governance course, has already been embraced by hundreds of U.S. security officials and has been proven effective in evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of partner organizations as varied as NATO partner militaries to foreign civil defense forces. Designed for policymakers as much as tactical troops, the SCAT is agile, easy to use, and devoid of jargon and bias. If applied on a routinized basis to capture and convey the contours of ever-shifting alliances – especially those as geopolitically complex and tempting to discard as that between the U.S. military and the Kurds --  the SCAT may be just the tool to clarify the logic of partnering even in the fog of war. This could prove invaluable to remind U.S. officials what history has time and again shown: victories are won by, with and through our partners around the globe.   

Click here to read an applied case study of the SCAT in the context of countering Russian hybrid warfare in Europe, or learn how you can become a SCAT master in Motive’s Governance/Counter-Governance course.