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In January 2015 I made my first trip to Ukraine for a RAND Corporation project to advise the Office of the President of Ukraine on security sector reform. After Russia had seized Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine was at war, but its defense establishment was in poor condition. Ukrainian military units were at low readiness—only six thousand soldiers of the forty-one-thousand-strong Ukrainian army were available for use.¹ Civilian volunteers provided basic logistics and formed new units outside the formal military structure. There was little coordination between the stovepiped defense and security institutions. Ukraine’s large defense industrial complex was focused on exports, not on meeting the immediate needs of the military. To understand the problems facing Ukraine, our team met with a wide range of ministries and agencies responsible for security. On subsequent trips, we traveled to Kramatorsk to talk with Ukrainian personnel serving in the conflict. It was clear that major changes would be necessary to improve Ukraine’s military effectiveness and achieve European and NATO standards of transparency and accountability.²

In my work in Ukraine, I drew from my prior work studying security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia or BiH), Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and Iraq.³ I had previously observed that foreign reform efforts in these societies often sought to replicate Western-style institutions. However, the elites and the mass population in these societies opposed reform when Western demands threatened domestic political priorities, and at times this opposition undermined foreign-supported reform. While some of my colleagues at RAND argued that it was most important for us to provide a model for what Ukraine’s defense institutions should become, I was concerned that a backlash similar to what I observed in my previous work might occur in Ukraine. I therefore believed that we should design our recommendations with the likely sources of domestic opposition in Ukraine in mind. Our interlocutors in the government of Ukraine, however, resolved this tension by asking us to make recommendations for how the Ukrainian military could meet NATO standards, not for recommendations that were politically feasible to implement.

We proceeded by identifying problems with Ukraine’s current structures and practices based on interviews with local officials and foreign advisers. We drew on models of defense institutions from countries such as the United States, France, Germany, and Australia. Perhaps our most critical recommendation was to reorganize the Ministry of Defense by subordinating the General Staff and Armed Forces of Ukraine under a civilian minister of defense. We hoped this change would strengthen civilian control, make decision-making more efficient, and encourage better coordination. We also made suggestions to improve combat support functions, such as logistics and communications, and proposed reforming Ukraine’s procurement system and the state-owned defense industrial complex, Ukroboronprom.

Our report was well received by the Ukrainian government and by Western analysts. Many of our recommendations were incorporated into the Strategic Defense Bulletin (SDB) approved in June 2016. In addition to informing the SDB, Ukrainian officials told me that our report spurred discussion about reform, and Western organizations used our report as a guide and benchmark to judge progress in the Ukrainian defense establishment.⁴

Ultimately, however, as my prior research suggested, individuals and organizations within Ukraine appeared to respond to our recommendations based on the perceived impact to their interests. The minister of defense, a military officer, responded positively and publicly announced that the ministry would launch a new working group to consider our recommendations.⁵ Our report generally supported his position: we recommended that the chief of the General Staff be subordinated to the minister, and we accepted that, although the minister’s successor would need to be a civilian, he could be grandfathered into his current position. According to think tank reports, other individuals were less supportive, including the chief of the General Staff, perhaps in part because our recommendations would weaken their positions relative to the Ministry of Defense.⁶ The report’s recommendations, as I detail in chapter 6, appeared to be most implemented where they posed the least threat to the existing leadership’s patron-client networks, meaning the personal connections between the leaders and subordinate officials. For example, while there was some progress implementing an e-procurement system for nonlethal supplies, major reform of the procurement system was indefinitely delayed, and there was little apparent willingness to undertake fundamental reforms of Ukraine’s sprawling and opaque defense industrial complex.⁷ These changes likely posed a greater threat to the political and economic interests of Ukraine’s leaders.

Improving state institutions in partner countries, such as the defense institutions in Ukraine, is an important and enduring task for the United States and the international community. My experience in Ukraine points to a common but understudied problem facing foreign institution builders. To improve partner institutions, foreign reformers must propose changes to these institutions, which may be framed either as obligatory demands or as optional recommendations. These changes often threaten the interests of elites and the population within the partner country, which can lead to opposition that damages the prospects for reform. This challenge raises an important question: what types of changes should foreign missions seek in partner institutions to make the greatest progress?

My central argument in this book is that foreign institution builders achieve the greatest success when they propose changes that do not provoke domestic opposition, and that they can do so by avoiding threatening two core domestic interests—nationalist goals, such as achieving independence or ethnic autonomy, and the ruling elites’ patron-client networks. I propose a “domestic opposition” theory to explain how foreign demands or recommendations that threaten these interests lead to different types of opposition. When reform threatens nationalist goals, it usually fails because of widespread public opposition, such as mass protests or boycotts by the elite. For example, in Bosnia, an effort from 2004 to 2006 to restructure the police force challenged the autonomy of the Bosnian Serbs, which led to mass protests and to Serb leaders refusing to comply with international demands for reform. The international mission was forced to compromise due to the popular opposition and as a result lost legitimacy for future reform efforts. Likewise, when reform threatens the patron-client networks of ruling elites, elites often privately oppose reform through delay tactics or co-opting state institutions. For example, in Iraq following the 2007 surge, Shia leaders blocked the recruitment of Sunnis into the police force in mixed sectarian areas, which undermined Sunnis’ confidence in the government. While well-resourced foreign reformers can make some progress against elite opposition, foreigners lack the local knowledge to fully monitor and punish obstruction by domestic elites. The most successful reforms improve state institutions by avoiding threatening nationalist goals and patron-client networks. For example, in the case of the defense reforms in BiH that began in 2003, shortly before the police restructuring effort, the international community proposed incremental changes that accommodated Serb interests while still creating a unified military out of two ethnically based militaries.

To show how foreign proposals shape the outcome of reform through domestic opposition, I explore seven cases of foreign-backed reform. The main analysis considers six reform efforts undertaken by highly resourced, post-conflict missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and Iraq. In a seventh case study, I show that similar domestic dynamics occurred in the lower resourced, non-post-conflict case of defense reform in Ukraine. Each case study uses written sources and personal interviews to explore why domestic actors opposed (or supported) reform and how their decisions influenced success. For example, in Iraq in November 2003, interviews and internal memos show how Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) officials had to compromise for fear that a Shia walkout would delegitimize Iraq’s new central governing institutions.

The book also explores two alternative theories about the success of reform that I develop from the literature on intervention. The international resources theory predicts that missions with higher resources—including a stronger mandate, more money or personnel available, and effective planning and coordination—are more likely to make greater improvements to a state institution. The path dependence theory emphasizes that state institutions are hard to change and expects that reform is also constrained by the level of development of a society and the quality of an institution before the intervention. The case studies evaluate these explanations by tracing exactly why each institution improved or declined and comparing different reform efforts (for example, military versus police reform in Bosnia) to isolate competing explanations.

In most of the cases studied in this book, domestic opposition is the most important factor determining whether reform hit a wall, made slow progress, or rapidly improved a state institution. Furthermore, it is usually more feasible for foreign interveners to change their demands or recommendations to limit domestic opposition than it is to increase international resources or avoid intervening in societies with poor preexisting institutions. Foreign reformers can achieve greater success by making demands or recommendations that avoid nationalist goals and patron-client networks while still improving a state institution. This is not to say that foreign reformers should or must accept unaccountable or ill-disciplined state institutions. Rather, foreign reformers are right to seek effective, accountable, and law-abiding institutions but need to be selective and patient in proposing changes to state institutions to accomplish these goals. Accommodating domestic interests may be disappointing, but it is a necessary tradeoff if the United States and the international community value improving partner state institutions.