The Abongo Abroad: Military-Sponsored Travel in Ghana, the United States, and the World, 1959-1992
288
The Abongo Abroad: Military-Sponsored Travel in Ghana, the United States, and the World, 1959-1992
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826521538 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Vanderbilt University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/19/2017 |
| Series: | Cold War in Global Perspective |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Modernization Ideology and the United States Military Assistance Program
Military leaders are often far less suspicious of the West than civilian leaders because they themselves are more emotionally secure. This sense of security makes it possible for army leaders to look more realistically at their countries. All of these considerations make it easier for military leaders to accept the fact that their countries are weak and the West is strong without becoming emotionally disturbed or hostile toward the West.
— Lucian W. Pye, "Armies in the Process of Political Modernization"
"With the signing into law of this bill, a Decade of Development begins," President John F. Kennedy declared on September 4, 1961, as he authorized the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. Seven months had passed since he took office, and in some ways Kennedy's "Decade of Development" was already in full swing. Within weeks of the inauguration, his "Special Message to the Congress on Foreign Aid" and urgent-sounding State of the Union address had replaced "mutual security" with "development" as the justification for American foreign assistance, had claimed "the whole southern half of the globe" as the new battleground in the Cold War, and had offered a compelling litany of priorities for the fight. Atop the list, Kennedy blasted the United States' $3.2 billion security assistance program as "bureaucratically fragmented," "awkward and slow," "haphazard and irrational," "obsolete, inconsistent and unduly rigid," and he recommended "the replacement of those agencies with a new one — a fresh start under new leadership." The Foreign Assistance Act was an essential first step, and all summer, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and assorted undersecretaries and deputies wrangled with congressional committees to ensure its passage.
Kennedy issued three orders the following day that demonstrate how tightly he correlated the Cold War to military assistance for the "southern half of the globe." After ordering the resumption of underground nuclear testing, Kennedy demanded an update on the status of education and training programs for military officers from Latin America and Africa. Responding to a political crisis in Brazil, Kennedy announced, "As the events of the past week have shown in Brazil, the military occupy an extremely important strategic position in Latin America. I would like to know how many officers we are bringing up from Latin America to train here and whether we could increase the number." He issued a national security action memorandum requesting "what other steps we are taking to increase the intimacy between our Armed Forces and the military of Latin America" and recommended creating programs to bring to the United States "a good many officers from the different countries of Latin America" for lessons in combating communism and subversion, controlling mobs, and fighting guerillas. "In addition to increasing their effectiveness," Kennedy supposed, "it would also strengthen their ties with the United States." As if completing that thought, Kennedy issued National Security Action Memorandum 89 moments later, demanding an update on "whether Mr. Nkrumah is going ahead with his plan to send 400 of his troops to the Soviet Union for training."
Those two concerns — Latin American officers training in the United States and the source of military training for Ghanaian cadets — reflected both old and new directions in US foreign policy in 1961. Providing training for military personnel in target countries had been an essential aspect of American military assistance in the decade prior to the "Decade of Development," but Kennedy's idea to bring as many of them as possible to the United States reflected a new faith in the potential for the United States to instill more than just combat skills. Likewise, Kennedy and his cabinet considered Ghana a bellwether for all of Africa. They acknowledged President Kwame Nkrumah's influence as a pan-African leader, and carefully considered the public relations impact of every aspect of US-Ghanaian relations. Kennedy and Nkrumah had tangoed all summer. In March, after meeting Kennedy in Washington, Nkrumah declared, "We are anti-colonialists and we shall always remain so until all the colonialists are gone" but, to calm US fears, added, "I think anti-colonialism was invented by the United States." In April, Nkrumah provided Kennedy a "small miracle" by becoming the first world leader to invite Peace Corps volunteers, probably saving Kennedy's high-profile program. By September, Nkrumah pressed Kennedy to confirm the United States' offer to help fund the Volta River Dam project while simultaneously offering (or threatening) to send up to four hundred army cadets to the Soviet Union for training. All sides accepted that military training abroad denoted states' strategic alignment in the Cold War, but, more than that, Kennedy and his advisors believed that military training caused lasting psychological and emotional transformations that could propagate throughout a society. This was why they were so keen to maximize the number of officers from Latin America attending training in the United States and so concerned over Nkrumah's plan to send cadets to Russia.
This chapter explores how training and education for foreign military personnel in the United States came to assume such strategic and psychological significance in the early 1960s. It argues that influential academic elites, guided by modernization theory, integrated prior American assumptions about the military as a modern institution in the late 1950s, and they restructured foreign assistance policy in the 1960s to make international military education and training a preferred method to transform visiting elites from target states into "modern" men and American allies at a low cost. These programs tapped into the deeply held assumption that life among American communities spontaneously conveyed the same political, economic, and social values that American social scientists later equated with modernity, and that helps explain the persistence of international military education programs long after modernization theory declined in influence.
American military assistance programs had implicitly accepted American communities' power to transform visiting military personnel from underdeveloped countries for half a century. That faith paralleled other American assumptions about the psychological power of military defeat to goad the underdeveloped world to choose to modernize. These two beliefs merged powerfully in the late 1950s, as American military assistance programs expanded rapidly in the Cold War's heat and as a coalition of professional academics and policy makers applied new theories of economic development to American foreign policy. With funding from an often-opaque alliance of philanthropic foundations, research universities, and the CIA, a core of influential historians, sociologists, economists, and political scientists developed a theory — or ideology — of modernization, which articulated a collection of assumptions about the nature of American society and its ability to transform the economically and culturally deficient world.
The great, founding projects of modernization theory connected economic development in poorer nations to eventual success in the Cold War, but they were not, essentially, about economics. Modernization was both an ideology and a discourse, and it dictated strategies in foreign aid, trade, counterinsurgency, and nationalism that were partly economic, partly political, but largely mental. Academics such as Walt Whitman Rostow, Lucian Pye, and Daniel Lerner became policy makers after Kennedy's election in I960, and they applied modernization theory to all aspects of American foreign policy as a result.
When modernization theorists in the Kennedy administration asserted control over military assistance policy, especially those parts of American military assistance that sponsored foreign military personnel for training in the United States, they were not inventing a new purpose for military assistance. Instead, they reimagined the role for military forces in newly decolonized states away from intimidation and coercion into a kind of institutional bridge. A new ideological emphasis on economic and political development could supplement preexisting programs that connected the US Armed Forces with the new states' national militaries. Development theorists used American military assistance programs as vehicles to transfer "modern" ideas about technology, rational organization of society, and citizenship directly from westerners onto new states' emerging military elites. In the larger context of the 1960s, which often rationalized military force in the service of modernization projects, programs that targeted specific military individuals for lessons in modernity thrived.
This chapter describes the two essential transformations that had to occur in order for this to happen. First, modernization theorists wrested control of the massive American Military Assistance Program of the 1950s from "unimaginative" and security-minded bureaucrats in the Eisenhower administration and Defense and State Departments. Second, those theorists supplied military assistance with a new reserve of intellectual credibility — or at least the opportunity to reframe the American Cold War foreign policy debate away from a defensive focus on "security" to match their program of transforming the world through economic development.
Modernization theory fueled the great, often tragic projects of American foreign policy in the first half of the 1960s, but behind the projects lay assumptions about what made modernized people and what role those people played in hoisting their societies into modernity. Massive development programs, including the Alliance for Progress, TVA-style resettlement in Afghanistan's Helmand Valley, and the "strategic hamlets" on the Mekong River, typified the lofty, often faulty, ideologically driven "Economists with Guns" at the tragic height of their power. In the heyday of authoritarian high modernization, there was no distinction between hydraulic and social engineering, dam builders achieved the status of a technocratic warrior elite, ideology was strategy, and "developmental dictatorships" were preferable to vulnerable democracies.
Not all projects of modernization theory occurred overseas or with such tragic consequences. American military assistance, including education and training of foreign military personnel, occurred in hundreds of places. For many soldiers, especially in Southeast Asia and Latin America, American military training came to them. For thousands of others, officers and enlisted — up to fifteen thousand per year, some years — the United States paid for their travel and training in America. Especially in countries where the United States had few military assets, little capacity to project military power, but the desire to influence policy, international military education and training was the only program of American military assistance. The United States had such a relationship with Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Senegal, Niger, Ivory Coast, and Liberia between the early 1960s and 1990. In Ghana, despite twenty-five years of military regimes — some with American support, some without — alternating with brief interludes of civilian government, American military assistance policy based solely on training exchanges sturdily weathered great changes in American foreign policy objectives and Ghanaian political realities.
The Vietnam War supposedly exposed the hubris behind modernization ideology. Massive aid budgets collapsed and the "New Mandarins" retreated, chastened, to academia. But one of the most compelling ideas behind the ideology in the first place never went away — that life among ordinary Americans left lasting impressions on visitors from the Global South, and these individuals could, over time, refine entire societies. That vision of the "imagined world" of global, human interdependence the modernization theorists had temporarily assimilated as they tended the supposedly "real world" of competing sovereign states, power, and nations, had survived. It was not clear whether that ideal would be enough to preserve international military training programs in the era of reduced faith in foreign aid, reduced confidence in the good intentions of the US government, and reduced budgets after the Vietnam War. Individuals around American schools always considered their relationships with visiting military families the program's most significant outcome anyway, so they seemed not to notice the rise and fall of the sociology of modernization theory.
Mutual Security Program Reform as Ideological Reform
With large budgets and little data demonstrating their effectiveness, American military assistance programs were likely targets for modernization theorists' intellectual makeover in the 1960s. Military assistance had been the focus of postwar American aid in Europe, Iran, Korea, China, and the Philippines since World War II, and, by the 1950s, promised to expand everywhere else the Truman Doctrine grasped. In the 1950s, states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that were emerging from colonialism or colonial-type exploitation were central to US foreign policy. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower deemed controlling access to its resources, markets, and labor crucial to containing the Soviet Union and defending US hegemony everywhere. Therefore, they justified most foreign aid primarily in terms of political and economic security, even when the targeted recipients had no obvious military connection. Nearly all foreign aid deemed even remotely "security-related" fell under the massive Mutual Security Program, which had grown to $3.2 billion by 1960. Mutual Security Program projects designed to increase international cooperation and foster peace dwarfed any comparable civilian program. In 1960, for example, the Mutual Security Program provided funding for 16,500 foreign military personnel to receive training or education in the United States — exceeding the number of students trained there under the Fulbright, Smith-Mundt, and Agency for International Development programs combined.
In the first months of Kennedy's presidency, when he promised to transform the United States' bloated foreign assistance bureaucracy and replace it with a responsive, pragmatic, and administratively centralized infrastructure headed by "first-class development planners," the Mutual Security Program was a prime target. As he eliminated the jumble of disparate assistance programs it unevenly contained, and consolidated control over all foreign assistance — civilian and military — within the State Department's new Agency for International Development, his staff reevaluated the ideological potential of American military assistance and altered those aspects they considered most likely to have long-term effects at the lowest cost. Programs that sponsored foreign military personnel for training and education in the United States survived because they could provide both.
Kennedy was not the first president to think seriously about foreign aid, however, and while his reforms were significant, they occurred at the nexus of contending political forces over a decade old. During his second term, Truman attempted to replicate the successes of the Marshall Plan, proposing a massive foreign aid program to combat communism by promoting economic recovery through "technical assistance" to poor nations around the world, but a parsimonious Congress immediately limited the program's funding. Eisenhower likewise struggled to convince Congress and the American people of the need for more foreign aid funds and greater flexibility to administer them. Different congressional factions hindered Eisenhower's initiatives to expand the foreign aid program while pressing the administration to spend its money on programs variously more, or less, justified by national security alone — even as the very definition of "national security" shifted and expanded continuously. On the other hand, nearly all agreed that the American people themselves were the best ambassadors of the American way of life to the rest of the world. Notable cultural diplomacy programs expanded in the 1950s, including the Fulbright-Hays scholarships; the president's Special International Program — jazz musicians on tour; and "People-to-People International," which Eisenhower founded in 1956 to help "people to get together and leap governments — if necessary to evade governments — to work out not one method but thousands of methods by which people can gradually learn a little bit more of each other." And since any dollars that brought foreigners to the United States would be spent in the United States, each party in the negotiation over the size and role of American foreign assistance policy considered those dollars well spent.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword ix
Introduction 1
1 Modernization Ideology and the United States Military Assistance Program 15
2 Independent and International: Ghana's National Military and American Assistance Policy 49
3 Writing for Peace: International Men and Women of the Ghana Armed Forces 93
4 "I think they would be better off if we took them on a tour of Disney World": Continuity and Change in International Military Education and Training 129
Conclusion 167
Notes 173
Bibliography 241
Index 265