Follow the Money

📖 The Scoop

"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"--Publisher's web site.

Genre: History / Military / Strategy (fancy, right?)