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Penny Wise, Dollar Stronger

Why the Pentagon Should Reform, Not Cut Military Advising Missions

 

Lt. Col. Jahara “Franky” Matisek, PhD, U.S. Air Force
Alexander Noyes
Robert Schafer

 

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The U.S. military faces a paradox: While investing heavily in next-generation platforms and autonomous systems for large-scale combat operations (LSCO), the Department of War is dismantling one of its most cost-effective tools—military advising—just as China and Russia expand their own advisory operations across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.¹ In May 2025, the U.S. Army announced the deactivation of two of its six security force assistance brigades (SFAB) and the downsizing of Security Force Assistance Command (SFAC) to fall under U.S. Army Forces Command (now U.S. Army Western Hemisphere Command).² These advising cuts follow earlier decisions by the U.S. Air Force to shutter three of its specialized air advising squadrons in 2022.³ Moreover, the Department of the Air Force budget for fiscal year 2026 eliminates two mobility support advisory squadrons despite their operations and maintenance costing only about $2 million a year.⁴ These cuts to advisory jobs are justified as providing more personnel to units focused on conducting LSCO. However, proxy wars continue to be a mainstay of competitive foreign policy by China, Iran, Russia, and the United States, meaning America needs more military advisors, not just more units for LSCO.⁵

The United States has long struggled to institutionalize, let alone define, military advising.⁶ For decades, ad hoc advising missions were assembled for contingency operations, often with unclear mandates and limited staying power. The results have been mixed. In Iraq and Afghanistan, over $100 billion was spent training, advising, and equipping security forces that ultimately collapsed when U.S. and Western advisors (and contractors) withdrew.⁷ These overall failures echoed similar experiences in Vietnam.⁸ Yet the more recent U.S. experience in Ukraine offers a striking counterexample that demonstrates the great, if mostly unrealized, promise of military advising when done right. There, persistent advising efforts by the United States and many other NATO countries since 2014 helped transform the Ukrainian military, and, perhaps more importantly, its defense institutions into a robust fighting force capable of withstanding the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion.⁹

Despite recent success of military advising missions, they remain poorly understood, contingent, and undervalued across all military branches. Advisors operate in the seams between peace and war, strategy and tactics—where doctrine is often unclear, but outcomes matter most. Their missions often undeservedly lack the bureaucratic clarity or prestige of traditional combat operations. Consequently, advising has been treated as a niche capability rather than a core competency. The partial dismantling of SFABs and air advising units reflects this lingering strategic prejudice and suggests that more reductions to SFABs and other advising units is likely.

At a time when great power competition hinges on the performance of coalitions and burden sharing as advocated for in the 2026 National Defense Strategy, military advising remains structurally marginalized, doctrinally underdeveloped, and bureaucratically fragmented.¹⁰ Advising missions are not viewed as a core duty by the military services because they prefer to focus on force generation (e.g., train, equip). Meanwhile, geographic combatant commands are oriented toward operational execution, and the success of most nonkinetic missions are dependent on advisors who are providing security force assistance (SFA) to bolster the military capabilities of allies and partners.¹¹ The result is an advising enterprise that remains disconnected from the larger campaign and strategic objectives, undervalued in planning processes, and underresourced in force structure. Yet military advising is a relatively cheap endeavor that can have an outsized, strategically important impact on improving the professionalism, readiness, and ultimately the military effectiveness of allied and partner militaries.¹² Advising is more than just a military task; it is also strategic campaigning through relationships and, when done right, can be a significant force multiplier that contributes to deterrence because of the ability of U.S. advisors to enable an ally or partner force to be more capable at conducting LSCO.¹³

This article argues that military advising is not a niche capability but a core pillar of joint campaigning that must be fully resourced and institutionalized to compete effectively against adversarial powers. First, we trace the evolution of U.S. advising doctrine, showing how hard-learned lessons from the Cold War have been only partially learned and institutionalized. Second, through examples from Africa, Europe, and recently conducted large-scale exercises, we show how purpose-built advisor teams can create decisive advantages across the competition continuum (competition, crisis, and conflict).¹⁴ Third, we diagnose bureaucratic seams that continue to dilute advising’s strategic value and outline why solutions to improving advising and other forms of security assistance continue to falter. Finally, we offer a practical blueprint for a permanent joint advising force that is spans strategic, operational, and tactical levels supported by a sub-unified advising command. This proposal would help unify scattered capabilities, center efforts on building the institutional capacity of military partners, drive doctrinal innovation, and give policymakers and combatant commanders a standing, scalable instrument for campaigning by, with, and through partners.

Legacy and Limitations of U.S. Military Advising

U.S. military advising has a long history but a checkered legacy. From the Korean War’s Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG) to the embedded military transition teams (MiTT) of Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. advisors have long supported the development of foreign militaries.¹⁵ Yet these efforts have varied dramatically in purpose, structure, and effectiveness. Advising has too often been improvised, a temporary wartime expedient rather than a permanent strategic function.

The KMAG, established in 1949, exemplifies successful advising. A small cadre of U.S. advisors rebuilt the South Korean army, enabling it to carry the frontline burden by 1953 and laying the foundation for a resilient military. By 1953, South Korean forces were carrying much of the frontline burden and absorbing two-thirds of total allied casualties. KMAG’s long-term, embedded presence laid the foundation for a resilient, self-sustaining military.¹⁶ This led to Gen. James Van Fleet, who already had success training and advising the Greek military, to describe the value and importance of his time training the South Korean military in his famous “25 Divisions for the Cost of One” essay written in 1954, which outlined the various ways in which U.S. advising produced major gains in the Korean War without having to risk the lives of American troops.¹⁷

By contrast, more recent efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan highlight the weaknesses of hope as a strategy when it comes to advising other militaries. This so-called train-and-pray model failed: advisors focused on metrics like troops trained or equipment delivered rather than building resilient institutions to oversee, manage, sustain, and effectively employ partner forces.¹⁸ In both conflicts, American forces largely cycled through short advisory rotations, often with unclear objectives, minimal continuity, and little cultural or institutional fluency. Despite small pockets of success in SOF (special operations forces)-to-SOF advising efforts, in 2014, the Iraqi army collapsed in the face of a numerically smaller Islamic State force, despite $24.6 billion in U.S. military assistance since 2003, while Afghanistan’s army unraveling in 2021 followed a similar pattern, with security forces cracking after U.S. and NATO forces and contractors withdrew.¹⁹

Much of these failures was amplified by a foundational mismatch between advisory ambition and institutional design. On the one hand, the U.S. military historically values lethal operations, decisive maneuver, technological superiority, conventional warfighting, and LSCO. Whereas advising, on the other hand, requires long-term relationship building, embedded presence, and a tolerance for ambiguity—qualities rarely emphasized in current U.S. military promotion systems and doctrine. There is no “perfect” checklist or manual to follow for achieving success with a partner force—advising requires adaptability, cultural fluency, and institutional insight. Moreover, previous advising efforts lacked the organizational and institutional capacity and leadership to sustain enduring capabilities within a foreign security force. For example, MiTTs and Special Forces operational detachment alphas often operated as one-off solutions, with limited ability to coordinate across echelons and domains or build institutional capacity in partner security forces.²⁰ Thus, the building of “military enclaves” of excellence with foreign SOF, such as the Danab, or “lightning force,” in Somalia, is unsustainable as it only leads to further fragmentation of host-nation security forces due to one unit being dependent on U.S. funding, training, and equipment.²¹

Since KMAG, nearly every generation has tried to codify advising under a different banner, such as the MAAGs in Taiwan and Vietnam, MiTTs in Iraq, or the operational mentoring and liaison teams in Afghanistan.²² Yet each iteration of advising was treated as a wartime expedient rather than a core competency, leaving little behind in institutional memory. Field Manual 3-22, Army Support to Security Cooperation, and Army Techniques Publication 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade, finally recognized SFA as a doctrinal function, but the force-management system never caught up, which produced mismatches between strategic ambition and organizational design evident in Iraq and Afghanistan.²³

The formation of SFABs in 2017 was an attempt to correct these deficiencies while reducing the strain on conventional units that were sliced up to contribute troops to ad hoc advising missions. Unlike previous advising efforts, which were developmental activities such as train and equip during armed conflict, SFABs were designed as dedicated advising formations in competition, manned by technically and tactically proficient soldiers who were selected and trained specifically for advisory missions. Having professionally trained advisors represented a shift from episodic, ad hoc teams to cohesive, professionalized units capable of embedding long-term with foreign security forces to advise from the tactical to the operational level. SFAB teams have deployed to every region, providing persistent engagement, logistical mentoring, operational planning support, and multinational interoperability building.

Yet, the SFAB model has struggled to overcome bureaucratic skepticism and underresourcing, and it has largely focused on the tactical level. Despite their relatively small footprint and low cost compared to combat brigades, SFABs have been subject to manning cuts and mission ambiguity. Their contributions are often misunderstood or undervalued by conventional force planners. In 2025, the decision to deactivate two SFABs reflects a broader trend: a return to episodic advising at the very moment the strategic environment demands persistent, integrated engagement. This trend is not isolated to the U.S. Army either. Interviews at the UK Ministry of Defence in March 2025 led to the discovery that the British SFAB unit—formed around the same time to emulate U.S. SFABs—was going to be disbanded due to a desire to focus on conventional warfighting.²⁴ Yet military advising can work and deliver significant strategic wins but only when it is institutionalized, resourced, and strategically nested within broader campaign plans and strategic guidance.

Advisors Across the Continuum: Competition, Crisis, Conflict Explained

Military advisors are often treated as a niche capability—an outlier that is useful in the periphery but irrelevant during LSCO. Such pessimism is outdated. New literature and experimentation show how advisors enable combat operations across the competition continuum, especially in the realm of LSCO.²⁵ When SFA is embedded in strategic planning and executed by dedicated professionals, tangible advantages are achieved in each phase of the competition continuum. Advisors shape deterrence during competition and crisis, help win the opening battles, and regenerate combat power during prolonged operations. As one current advisor put it, the ultimate aim is to build interoperability so that a partner brigade can fight with the same effectiveness of a U.S. combat brigade, especially on day one of LSCO.²⁶

Competition: Presence, access, and relationship-building. Most effective advising occurs long before the first shot is fired. In the competition phase, advisors offer the United States unique tools that shape the operational environment through forward presence, military-to-military relationships, and institutional development. Deployed advisors in critical theaters cultivate trust and promote interoperability that cannot be surged in a crisis. Stated differently, advisors are the example of how the military campaigns in competition, especially in those regions where they are the only land component force in the theater, such as in Central and South America.

In regions where great power competition is most acute, such as in the Indo-Pacific and eastern Europe, advisors provide combatant commands with persistent situational awareness and early indicators of partner-force capabilities and limitations. Unlike traditional U.S. military units that rotate episodically, advisors often remain embedded, living and working alongside their foreign counterparts. This intimacy fosters a level of ground-truth understanding that satellite imagery or unobserved partner assessments cannot match.

Advisors also serve as strategic indicators of U.S. priorities. American advisor presence reassures allies and deters adversaries by demonstrating long-term commitment. Although advising at the institutional or ministerial levels remains particularly undervalued and underused, when America does prioritize advisors at the strategic level, partners know the United States is invested not only in their training but in their institutional resilience as well. For adversaries, persistent advisor presence complicates adversarial planning, thus imposing a greater cost to adversarial aggression and contributing to deterrence.

Crisis: Integration and interoperability. When competition escalates into crisis, advisory capacity becomes a critical enabler of rapid coalition alignment and response. In this phase, advisors help synchronize planning, bridge interoperability gaps, and cue multinational action—all under tight time constraints. U.S. doctrine increasingly emphasizes the need for rapid maneuver, long-range fires, and joint all-domain operations. None of this is possible in a coalition context without advisors embedded with partner forces.

SFABs in particular are already structured for such integration. Their teams are trained to communicate across partner, joint, and interagency systems; many are equipped with digital liaison kits, enabling them to plug into combined joint all-domain command-and-control frameworks. Moreover, advisors can serve as first responders. If conflict erupts, advisors already in theater are positioned to shape outcomes from the onset of hostilities as an inside force. Their embedded presence means they are not deploying cold. Advisors help partner units fight smarter and faster, while informing U.S. forces with real-time assessments. Advisors can deconflict airspace, coordinate fires, and troubleshoot logistics in coalition operations. This is especially critical in contested theaters where delays or misalignment could cost lives and strategic momentum.

Conflict: Regeneration and endurance. Once armed conflict breaks out, advisors shift from engagement and integration to resilience and regeneration. LSCO requires partner forces to sustain momentum under extreme pressure. That means reconstituting damaged units, repairing logistics, sustaining maintenance, and building fresh formations while fighting continues. SFABs are uniquely suited for this.

Drawing lessons from KMAG in Korea and recent Western advising efforts in Ukraine, the ability to regenerate partner forces during armed conflict can be decisive.²⁷ Advisors with long-standing relationships and deep knowledge of partner institutions can rapidly assess damage, redirect logistics, and streamline mobilization processes. If given the opportunity in a conventional wartime scenario, advisors can scale up advisory missions at the operational and institutional levels by helping partners to not just survive but to rebuild and adapt mid-conflict. Unfortunately, due to palace politics, SFAB advisors to date have mostly been kept out of the broader war effort to support and liaise Ukraine’s military.²⁸

When advisors are allowed to remain embedded after conflict begins, there are numerous advising tasks they could accomplish but only because advisors had developed a relationship prior to the conflict. Such “advising-in-conflict” activities could include mentoring at training centers, supporting defense ministry logistics hubs, and/or helping partner staff officers set up tracking systems to manage fuel and ammunition flows. Such tasks are often neglected in conventional training pipelines, yet they are the connective tissue that sustains warfighting. That said, these are the types of boring, nonkinetic tasks that SOF do not perform, as U.S. SOF typically prioritize advising foreign SOF units, leaving gaps in broader development of conventional forces.

Finally, in a combat environment, SFAB advisors serve as continuity nodes. Typically, when units rotate and conditions evolve, advisors maintain the institutional memory and doctrinal bridgework that ensures interoperability does not unravel. More importantly, advisors can bring battlefield lessons back into U.S. joint planning cycles, enabling rapid adaptation for both partners and U.S. forces. In this way, advisors help generate not only combat power but also institutional resilience across multiple domains.

Toward a Joint, Integrated Advising Capability—From Ad Hoc to Enduring

Divesture of advising units across the U.S. military sends a troubling and myopic strategic message: advising is an expendable luxury rather than a foundational element of modern campaigning. While the Pentagon continues to emphasize allies and partners in its national and military strategy documents, its force structure and programming choices suggest a dangerous disconnect. The risk is not just Army-specific. Outside of smaller-scale SOF efforts, the broader joint force could be left without the institutional tools to shape, deter, and prevail alongside coalition partners—precisely at the time when adversaries like China and Russia are expanding their own military advisory footprints worldwide. When advising and security cooperation are viewed through the lenses of access, influence, and burden sharing, it becomes clear that advising should be treated as importantly as LSCO, especially given the radical cost differences between the two.²⁹

The SFAB and SFAC models were far from perfect, but they did represent a step toward professionalizing, institutionalizing, and scaling advising, at least within the Army. What is now needed is not retreat but an evolution toward a purpose-built, joint advising architecture that supports global campaigning across the tactical, operational, and the (oft-neglected) institutional levels. There are a number of ways such a capability could be stood up and effectively nested with ongoing advising efforts. One way would be to create a Joint Security Cooperation Group–Global (JSCGG)—a modular advising command capable of deploying multidomain advisory teams across the competition continuum. The JSCGG would unify existing advising units across services, develop joint security cooperation (SC) and SFA doctrine, certify modular advisor teams, and align missions with theater campaign plans.

Establishing JSCGG as a joint command would mean overcoming the typical bureaucratic dynamics, particularly around authorities, resource allocation, and interservice coordination. Clear delineation of command-and-control relationships with existing geographic combatant commands (GCC) and SOF structures would be essential to ensure seamless operational integration. A phased implementation approach could help mitigate bureaucratic resistance, starting with integrating existing advising capabilities under a unified doctrinal framework before progressing to deeper structural alignment. Moreover, to foster broad institutional support, senior leadership must emphasize JSCGG’s role as a force multiplier that enhances rather than detracts from existing service capabilities and priorities.

Another option could be creating the JSCGG as a sub-unified component command under U.S. Special Operations Command, with a theater special operations command at each GCC.³⁰ Importantly, this integrated, joint capability would not need to be built from scratch. For example, the Army’s Security Assistance Training Management Organization, SFAC, and the Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance all offer elements that could be integrated into a unified, scalable conventional advising force across echelons. Instead of being scattered across commands and stovepiped by service prerogatives, these capabilities could be fused into a joint formation aligned to regional and global campaign plans. Under this potential joint construct, advisors could be mission-tailored based on theater demand, such as more maneuver in eastern Europe, more sustainment and fires in the Pacific, or more institutional capacity building in Africa or Latin America.

The Joint Center for International Security Force Assistance is an important knowledge center; its depth of lessons learned collected from joint SFA activities are impressive, but it lacks force-generation authority. The Security Assistance Training Management Organization manages case-by-case Title 22 and Title 10 training missions but does not campaign collectively as part of any theater plan. Under this potential construct, a JSCGG should own billets, doctrine, and readiness—similar to U.S. Cyber Command’s Title 10 responsibilities—allowing it to source modular advisor teams, certify their training, and deploy them under a single global concept of employment. Current centers would fold into the new joint command as functional directorates (e.g., Doctrine, Lessons-Learned, Foreign Military Sales Integration), eliminating redundancy while preserving expertise. Critics may argue that a JSCGG diverts resources from conventional forces. However, its low-cost, high-impact model leverages existing structures, requiring minimal new investment and meeting the demands of GCCs of providing SC/SFA to certain countries to achieve priorities and objectives in specific regions.

Remodeling existing SFABs needs to also be an imperative. Rather than maintaining a legacy structure focused mostly on maneuver, these units should shift toward enabling those domains in which warfighting functions partners most struggle with such as intelligence, fires, and sustainment. They should also become habitual partners with joint task forces and combined joint operations centers, integrating advising into the command-and-control architecture of coalition warfighting, not just episodic engagements.

Importantly, such a capability must give equal priority and attention to the institutional level of advising. History shows that advisors that are deeply engaged in the oversight and management of partner forces are critical to success. This is especially so when they are deployed over the long-term, consistently to the same partners and units, and to host-nation governments with closely aligned security interests to those of the United States.³¹

In theory, such a joint, integrated advising capability would give coherence and direction to a field long plagued by improvisation and duplication. This construct would establish enduring joint SFA doctrine, codify training standards, and establish clear career pathways. It would ensure that lessons from Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and other security cooperation efforts are institutionalized rather than relearned at great cost in the next armed conflict. Most importantly, it would offer a scalable means of campaigning by, with, and through allies and partners, even in theaters where persistent U.S. presence is politically or logistically constrained. Senior leaders must seize this opportunity to institutionalize advising as a strategic priority, ensuring the joint force can campaign effectively with partners in an era of intensifying competition. Because, unlike many Pentagon programs, advising is one of the few efforts that is penny wise and dollar stronger.³²

If the United States is serious about competing with near-peer adversaries and sustaining coalitional LSCO, then advising cannot remain an afterthought. It must be hardwired into how the joint force campaigns. Strategic alignment must translate into institutional commitment—measured in billets, budgets, and force design. The alternative is returning to the train-and-pray model, where ad hoc advising teams hope that their partner forces can fight and win without enduring mentorship or operational integration.

Strategic Imperatives and the Future of Military Advising

The thinking that military advising is a peripheral activity is misguided. To meet the demands of future coalition warfare and help avoid its use, the Pentagon must elevate advising from an ad hoc task to a core competency that stretches across the tactical, operational, and strategic levels; is integrated into plans, policy, and campaign design; and is resourced accordingly. The U.S. military cannot continue to treat advising as an ancillary capability—revived in times of crisis, underresourced in times of calm, discarded when bureaucratic priorities shift, and at the cost of readiness to brigade combat teams. The current divesting of advising units reflects this pattern, which repeats the historical cycle of ignoring historical lessons of the strategic value of embedded advisors.

The international security environment no longer allows for such neglect. As China and Russia become regional hegemons, the United States cannot afford to campaign alone. Operational success in future coalitional LSCO will depend heavily on whether allied and partner militaries are ready, resilient, and interoperable. This is not a hypothetical challenge. From Taiwan to Ukraine, from the Baltics to the Sahel, America’s global strategy hinges on the performance of other foreign security forces.

Advisors are the most connective element between strategy and execution. They translate intent into capacity. They bridge cultural, doctrinal, and procedural divides that otherwise inhibit coalition warfare. They generate operational tempo not only through fires and maneuver but also through logistics, planning, sustainment, and intelligence. These are not auxiliary tasks, because they are the core to victory.

To institutionalize this capability, the joint force must create a dedicated advising capability—not necessarily large but purpose-built. This command should be jointly staffed, doctrine driven, and capable of aligning advising activities with the distinct phases of the competition continuum. It must be more than a coordination cell or administrative hub; it must house the intellectual and operational leadership for advising across the U.S. military. A new joint advising command must provide doctrinal innovation that differentiates among activities like operations, training, and equipping building alliances versus advising for LSCO while rigorously assessing partner needs versus wants. Without such a capability, advising will remain fragmented, undertheorized, and reactive. Most importantly, and in line with the Trump administration, U.S. military advising supports and enables foreign military sales, making allies and partners more likely to purchase and maintain U.S. weapon systems, further ensuring interoperability and easier integration for coalition LSCO.³³

The joint force must also rethink how it recruits, trains, employs, and rewards its advisors. Advising should not be a backwater assignment or a detour from “real” career progression. It should be a sought-after specialization, akin to foreign area officers or SOF, with clear pathways for advancement and recognition. Promotion boards should formally recognize and reward sustained advising experience, linguistic proficiency, and cultural expertise as metrics for advancement. Finally, incorporating structured mentorship programs specifically aimed at advising personnel would further demonstrate institutional commitment, helping to cultivate leaders who deeply value and understand both SC and SFA.

Doctrine must evolve as well. The binary logic of peacetime shaping and wartime fighting misses the reality that modern competition blends both. Advising must be reconceptualized as a continuous activity across the competition–crisis–conflict spectrum. Future advising formations must be trained and postured to shift seamlessly across phases: from enabling deterrence, to shaping initial responses, to regenerating partner combat power in protracted conflicts. As recent joint doctrine updates reflect, the advisor’s role is not static; it must evolve and adapt with strategic needs.³⁴

Finally, advising should be treated as a critical pillar of campaign design. Too often, advisors are inserted into operations as afterthoughts or deployed under vague mandates. Instead, campaign planners should integrate advisors directly into theater significant security cooperation initiatives where feasible. This requires not just better staffing of advisory billets but a cultural shift in how planners, commanders, and political leaders view the strategic utility of enabling multiyear, multidomain military advising.

The future of military advising must be joint, persistent, and outcome oriented. While advising outcomes are inherently difficult to quantify, relying solely on inputs like training hours or equipment delivered distorts the true impact of advisory missions. Instead, more nuanced metrics (e.g., partner force’s ability to conduct independent operations, regenerate combat power, and sustain logistics under fire) should drive assessments of effectiveness. It must focus on effects: Does this partner have the will to fight? Does their military allow them to innovate in combat? Can they survive losses and regenerate? Can they operate in stride with American units under contested conditions? How can they share global security burdens and help deter U.S. adversaries? Answering these questions requires more than mere optimism, it requires U.S. advising investments: time, talent, and institutional will. The United States cannot strategically afford another return to the train-and-pray model with foreign militaries.

The United States has a simple choice: it can allow its advising enterprise to atrophy into irrelevance or it can recommit to building the capabilities, institutions, and formations that allow U.S. power to scale through partners. As great power competition intensifies, the choice between having more or less advisors will impact integrated deterrence, resilient coalitions, and decisive victories on future battlefields. Few investments offer this level of strategic return for so little cost. Advising is where penny wisdom becomes strategic power.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Security Cooperation University research program under Grant/Cooperative Agreement No. HQ0034241006.

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Notes

1. Ilaria Carrozza and Nicholas J. Marsh, “Great Power Competition and China’s Security Assistance to Africa: Arms, Training, and Influence,” Journal of Global Security Studies 7, no. 4 (2022): ogac027; Jahara Matisek, “International Competition to Provide Security Force Assistance in Africa: Civil-Military Relations Matter,” PRISM 9, no. 1 (2020): 102–13.
2. Patty Nieberg, “Army to Eliminate 2 Security Force Assistance Brigades, Reassign Experienced Soldiers,” Task & Purpose, 13 May 2025, https://taskandpurpose.com/news/army-sfab-units-shuttered/.
3. David Roza, “The End of the Brown Beret: Air Force Special Ops Squadron Shuts Down After 28 years Advising Allied Aviators,” Task & Purpose, 10 October 2022, https://taskandpurpose.com/news/air-force-brown-beret-6th-special-operations-inactivation/; Whitney Gillespie, “Air Force Deactivates 81 FS,” Air Education and Training Command, 9 December 2022, https://www.aetc.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3242612/air-force-deactivates-81-fs/.
4. Department of the Air Force, Department of the Air Force Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 Budget Estimates, Operation and Maintenance, Air Force, vol. 1 (Department of the Air Force, June 2025), 79, https://www.saffm.hq.af.mil/Portals/84/documents/FY26/FY26%20Air%20Force%20Operations%20and%20Maintenance%20Vol%20I.pdf?ver=jWnGBgRYFfogjPXd4jvQbA%3d%3d.
5. Daniel Byman, “Are Proxy Wars Coming Back?,” Washington Quarterly 46, no. 3 (2023): 149–64; Andrew Mumford, “Proxy Warfare and the Future of Conflict,” RUSI Journal 158, no. 2 (2013): 40–46.
6. Army Techniques Publication (ATP) 3-07.10, Advising: Multi-Service Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Advising Foreign Security Forces (U.S. Government Publishing Office [GPO], June 2023), 7–8. In this joint force manual, military advising is described as developmental activities with a partner nation to organize, train, equip, build, and/or advise their security forces.
7. Jahara Matisek, “The Crisis of American Military Assistance: Strategic Dithering and Fabergé Egg Armies,” Defense & Security Analysis 34, no. 3 (2018): 267–90.
8. John Nagl, “Institutionalizing Adaptation: It’s Time for an Army Advisor Command,” Military Review 88, no. 5 (2008): 21–26.
9. Deborah Sanders, “Ukraine’s Third Wave of Military Reform 2016–2022—Building a Military Able to Defend Ukraine Against the Russian Invasion,” Defense & Security Analysis 39, no. 3 (2023): 312–28.
10. U.S. Department of War (DoW), 2026 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America (U.S. DoW, January 2026), 4.
11. U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General, Evaluation of U.S. Army Security Force Assistance Brigade Support to Combatant Commands, report no. DODIG-2025-118 (U.S. Department of Defense, June 2025), https://media.defense.gov/2025/Jun/26/2003743815/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2025-118_SFAB_REDACTED.PDF.
12. Jahara Matisek and Alex Noyes, “How to Reform Military Advising,” Lawfare, 29 June 2025, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/how-to-reform-military-advising.
13. Jahara Matisek and Austin Commons, “Thinking Outside of the Sandbox: Succeeding at Security Force Assistance Beyond the Middle East,” Military Review 101, no. 2 (March-April 2021): 33–42.
14. Field Manual (FM) 3-0, Operations (U.S. GPO, March 2025), 15–16.
15. Bryan R. Gibby, The Will to Win: American Military Advisors in Korea, 1946–1953 (University of Alabama Press, 2012); Mara E. Karlin, Building Militaries in Fragile States: Challenges for the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Thomas X. Hammes, “Raising and Mentoring Security Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Orbis 60, no. 1 (2016): 52–72.
16. Robert G. Rose, “Awake Before the Sound of the Guns,” Military Review 105, no. 3 (May-June 2025): 105–14.
17. James A. Van Fleet, “25 Divisions for the Cost of One,” Readers Digest, February 1954, 85–98, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.100899/2015.100899.The-Readers-Digest-Vol64jan-june1954_djvu.txt.
18. Jahara Matisek et al., “No More Train and Pray: The Consequences of Cutting the Army’s Security Force Assistance Capability,” Modern War Institute, 22 July 2025, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/no-more-train-and-pray-the-consequences-of-cutting-the-armys-security-force-assistance-capability/.
19. Frank K. Sobchak, Training for Victory: US Special Forces Advisory Operations from El Salvador to Afghanistan (Naval Institute Press, 2024); Jahara Matisek and Michael W. Fowler, “The Paradox of Security Force Assistance After the Rise and Fall of the Islamic State in Syria–Iraq,” Special Operations Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 118–38; Jahara Matisek, “Requiem for the Afghan ‘Fabergé Egg’ Army: Why Did It Crack So Quickly?,” Modern War Institute, 28 October 2021, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/requiem-for-the-afghan-faberge-egg-army-why-did-it-crack-so-quickly/.
20. Wesley R. Gray, Embedded: A Marine Corps Adviser Inside the Iraqi Army (Naval Institute Press, 2009), 29–30, 101–2.
21. Colin D. Robinson and Jahara Matisek, “Military Advising and Assistance in Somalia: Fragmented Interveners, Fragmented Somali Military Forces,” Defence Studies 21, no. 2 (2021): 181–203.
22. Ivor Wiltenburg and Vibeke Gootzen, “Military Adaptation to Combat Mentoring: Belgium’s Operational Mentoring and Liaison Team Experience,” Defense & Security Analysis 40, no. 1 (2024): 1–19.
23. The first attempt at codifying security force assistance (SFA) was with Joint Doctrine Note 1-13, Security Force Assistance (Joint Chiefs of Staff, 29 April 2013), https://edocs.nps.edu/2012/December/jdn1_13.pdf; FM 3-22, Army Support to Security Cooperation (U.S. GPO, July 2023), 1-2; ATP 3-96.1, Security Force Assistance Brigade (U.S. GPO, June 2025), xi.
24. The UK 11th Security Force Assistance Brigade transitioned at the end of 2025, dropping its SFA responsibilities and returning to a combat unit under the UK Land Special Operations Force. See “11th Brigade,” UK Army, accessed 8 January 2026, https://www.army.mod.uk/learn-and-explore/about-the-army/formations-divisions-and-brigades/field-army-troops/11th-brigade/.
25. Robert Schafer, “Advising the Other Side of the COIN II,” U.S. Army, 29 May 2025, https://www.army.mil/article/285881/advising_the_other_side_of_the_coin_ii.
26. Interview with a U.S. Army major in the 4th SFAB at Fort Carson, Colorado, 18 October 2024.
27. Jahara Matisek et al., “What Does European Union Advising of Ukrainian Troops Mean for the Bloc’s Security Policies? An Inside Look at the Training Mission,” Modern War Institute, 11 June 2024, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/what-does-european-union-advising-of-ukrainian-troops-mean-for-the-blocs-security-policies-an-inside-look-at-the-training-mission/; Jahara Matisek et al., “More Bang for the SFA Buck: Improving US Security Force Assistance in Ukraine and Beyond,” Modern War Institute, 15 February 2023, https://mwi.westpoint.edu/more-bang-for-the-sfa-buck-improving-us-security-force-assistance-in-ukraine-and-beyond/; Donald Stoker, ed., The History and Evolution of Foreign Military Advising and Assistance, 1815–2007 (Routledge, 2007).
28. Interviews with SFAB advisors from 2021 to 2025 indicated that Congress primarily only wanted to fund National Guard units to train and advise the Ukrainian military.
29. Erin Lemons and Ben Jebb, “Security Force Assistance as a Tool of Strategic Competition,” Military Review 105, no. 3 (May-June 2025): 95–104.
30. Kevin D. Stringer, “The Missing Lever: A Joint Military Advisory Command for Partner-Nation Engagement,” Joint Force Quarterly 81 (2nd Quarter, April 2016): 86–91.
31. Karlin, Building Militaries in Fragile States; Sobchak, Training for Victory; Richard Bennet and Alexander Noyes, War at Arm’s Length: How to Build Effective Partners Through Military Assistance (Yale University Press, 2026).
32. The term we use, “Penny Wise and Dollar Stronger,” is a modification from the original British idiom, “Penny Wise and Pound Foolish.” The original term implied that someone was being extremely careful about insignificant amounts of money while not quite as careful about much larger amounts. This factors into the argument here that the United States is divesting itself from its advising capabilities while thinking that it is saving money to be invested into other higher cost capabilities, which may not be sustainable.
33. Pete Hegseth, memorandum for Senior Pentagon Leadership, Commanders of Combatant Commands, Defense Agency and DOW Field Activity Directors, “Unifying the Department’s Arms Transfer and Security Cooperation Enterprise to Improve Efficiency and Enable Burden-Sharing,” 7 November 2025, https://media.defense.gov/2025/Nov/10/2003819440/-1/-1/1/UNIFYING-THE-DEPARTMENTS-ARMS-TRANSFER-AND-SECURITY-COOPERATION-ENTERPRISE-TO-IMPROVE-EFFICIENCY-AND-ENABLE-BURDEN-SHARING.PDF.
34. Joint Publication 3-20, Security Cooperation, change 1 (U.S. GPO, 5 July 2024), https://jdeis.js.mil/jdeis/new_pubs/jp3_20ch1.pdf.

 

 

 

 

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March-April 2026