Building partner forces is a persistent challenge for U.S. strategy in an era of strategic competition, and security force assistance efforts frequently fall short.
In this episode of Coffee With the Fellows, Alex Chinchilla and Jacob Zack sit down with IWI Fellows Lumpy Lumbaca and Paul Kearney to unpack what it takes to build effective partner forces and where those efforts most often break down.
The conversation opens with a distinction that runs through the whole episode: capacity is not capability. Capacity is inputs and inventories, units trained and platforms delivered. Capability is what those forces can actually do when it counts. Lumpy draws on his work with resistance forces to argue that a society's willingness to fight and its readiness to fight are different things, using Taiwan and Ukraine as reference points.
Paul pushes back on what he calls the "physicist approach" to security force assistance, the assumption that assistance can be designed as a frictionless engineering problem. Real partner capacity work sits inside host-nation politics: budget tradeoffs, coup-proofing, regime survival. What looks like dysfunction from Washington is often a rational response to a problem the host government is actually trying to solve. Paul also argues that the weakest link across tactical, operational, and strategic levels tends to determine the outcome.
Both Fellows return to a simple point: partnership only works when the host nation wants it. As Lumpy puts it, "we can't want it more than they do."
Listen to the full conversation above.
About the guests
Lumpy Lumbaca is an IWI Fellow and retired U.S. Army Special Forces officer whose work focuses on resistance and irregular warfare.
Paul Kearney is an IWI Fellow, an active duty U.S. Army strategist, and a PhD candidate researching security force assistance, civil-military relations, and strategic competition.
Hosted by Alex Chinchilla and Jacob Zack.
The views expressed are those of the participants and do not represent those of the U.S. or any other government.
