全球智库信息集成服务系统

DoD Faces both Internal and External Demands for Improved Transparency

• In addition to congressional and international reporting requirements, DoD faces an equally pressing need to collect data for internal policy planning and strategic prioritization.
• More-detailed accounting of security cooperation spending is the first step toward developing effective assessment, monitoring, and evaluation of security cooperation programs.

Security Cooperation Programs Were not Designed to Provide a Comprehensive Funding Data

• Planning, programming, and management communities engaged in security cooperation have different reporting requirements, data, and data systems.
• Financial data is not consistently defined, tracked, or reported.
• Tracking of financial data is often divorced from program reporting.

Program Managers Have Adopted a Number of Ad Hoc Measures to Overcome these Obstacles

• Various program-level workarounds have been developed to create linkages between communities, collect detailed data, and develop common coding that may be applied more broadly.

U.S. Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development Foreign Aid Transparency Efforts Offer Lessons

• DoD may draw insight from USAID and DoS efforts to develop technical working groups and to utilize a "data warehouse" to generate reports.

The scope of the Department of Defense's (DoD) engagement in security cooperation has expanded significantly over the last decade as Congress has authorized billions of dollars in new programs to meet an ever-widening set of U.S. national security objectives. As funding of security cooperation has increased, DoD has faced new demands for transparency to allow greater public awareness and internal accountability. Yet DoD's program management and financial systems were not designed to provide the level of detail on security cooperation expenditures needed to meet new international, congressional, and internal DoD reporting requirements. This RAND report analyzes the mechanisms that DoD uses to track security cooperation spending and the obstacles that it must overcome to meet new reporting requirements. It provides an assessment of DoD's compliance with international transparency reporting standards and maps out the current processes of data collection for five Title 10 security cooperation programs. It highlights some of the program-level practices that have been developed to overcome these challenges. The report also looks at the lessons that can be learned from the U.S. Department of State (DoS) and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in improving transparency in foreign assistance reporting. Finally, the report concludes with recommendations for how DoD might streamline the security cooperation reporting process in preparation for the implementation of 2017 National Defense Authorization Act and new internal requirements for increased accountability and strategic prioritization.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  The International Aid Transparency Initiative and What It Means for Security Cooperation Reporting Requirements

• Chapter Three

  Challenges to Collecting Data on DoD Security Cooperation Programs and Ways to Overcome Them

• Chapter Four

  Lessons from Department of State and USAID Transparency Efforts

• Chapter Five

  Findings and Recommendations