DOD to take greater role in bankrolling foreign militaries
By Juliana Gittler, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Friday, February 3, 2006
Changes passed in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act allows the Pentagon, rather than the State Department, to take a greater role in foreign military financing, including security assistance programs, training and equipment sales.The change, Pentagon officials said, would ease the flow of money and resources to the places it’s needed most.
Foreign military financing allows the U.S. government to give or loan money to allies for military articles, services and training to help them bolster their defense against mutual threats including terrorism, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the agency that helps manage the program. In the Pacific and Asia, the largest recipients are the countries with the strongest alliances to the U.S. military, including Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore.
But the program has armed other, less-friendly countries in their fight against terrorism, State Department officials have said, including the Philippines and, since November, Indonesia. In both countries, foreign military financing programs were interrupted for about a decade: reduced in the Philippines following the closure of U.S. bases there, and halted completely in Indonesia after reports of widespread human-rights abuses were reported in the late 1990s.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war on terror, both nations have supported U.S. actions worldwide. The improvement in relations has evolved into the resumption of military financing. In the Philippines, for example, in addition to Pentagon- and Pacific Command-sponsored training such as the annual exercise Balikatan, the U.S. State Department has helped rebuild the country’s military by funding a series of counterterrorism training modules led by U.S. forces, officials at the embassy in Manila have said.
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