Security Force Assistance (SFA) a term originating in the United States Armed Forces for military adviser assistance with "training, equipping and advising allied or 'partner' militaries to enable them to defend themselves without 100,000 Americans on the ground to do it for them."[1] SFA is used when improving the security of the host country aligns with the national interests of the donor country.[2] It may be used alongside or instead of larger commitments of the donor country's military personnel and matériel.[1] This means SFA can provide an alternative to large-scale operations if a war becomes controversial or politically difficult.[1] Given the ending of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with US-led multinational missions to train and equip the militaries of weak states for counterinsurgency and counterterrorism purposes, the US (and many other Western militaries) have increasingly shifted towards SFA programs that make host-nation security force more capable of conducting Large Scale Combat Operations (LSCO).[3]
Security force assistance is the unified action to generate, employ, and sustain local, host-nation or regional security forces in support of a legitimate authority.
— Field Manual 3-07.1: Security Force Assistance, 2009[4]
Allied Joint Publication-3.16 defines SFA as:
Security force assistance (SFA) includes all NATO activities that develop and improve, or directly support, the development of local forces and their associated institutions in crisis zones. Local forces comprise indigenous, non-NATO military security forces...
— Allied Joint Doctrine for Security Force Assistance (AJP-3.16), 2016[5]
Security force assistance is the set of Department of Defense security cooperation activities that contribute to unified action by the United States Government to support the development of the capacity and capabilities of foreign security
forces and their supporting institutions, whether of a partner nation or an international organization (e.g., regional security organization), in support of US objectives.
SFA is linked to, though distinct from, Foreign Internal Defense (FID). It is a common misconception that the two are the same.[7] One difference between the two is that FID is chiefly smaller-scale and the domain of Special Operations Forces (SOF), and SFA is chiefly larger-scale and the domain of conventional forces, but neither exclusively so.[7] Differences may also be found in that FID is a tactical mission of irregular warfare (IW), giving focus on the local population facing internal threats, whereas SFA is an operational or strategic mission that falls under conventional warfare and focuses on state-level forces that may be both internal and external. Where FID was carried out for decades by special operations forces during the Cold War, the United States developed SFA beginning in about 2006.[7] Given the relative youth of the concept of SFA, and that the experiences of SOF with FID would inform the practice of SFA during its infancy, one can understand there would likely be difficulty in distinguishing the two until SFA has matured in and of itself.
Following their initial invasions, both the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War developed into guerrilla wars, with the US-led allies in both conflicts primarily carrying out counterinsurgency and nation-building thereafter.[14][15][16][17] The importance of SFA in the subsequent strategy of the Western forces can be seen in the respective formation of the International Security Assistance Force and NATO Training Mission – Iraq. The key role of SFA in US strategy in the War on Terror and lack of existing SFA doctrine meant that it had to be developed; this began in approximately 2007 to 2008.[18][19][20]
^Dempsey, Martin E. (1 May 2009). Security Force Assistance. DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY WASHINGTON DC. Archived from the original on June 1, 2022. Retrieved 3 November 2021.
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