Borrowed capability

We have seen a similar pattern in several jurisdictions. External support helps an institution respond to a serious security problem, and performance improves. Twelve to twenty-four months later, some of those gains have been lost. Understanding why means looking beyond the results reported while the support was in place.

In our experience, the improvement often depended on people, funding or assets that the institution could use temporarily but could not sustain on its own.

Borrowed capability is not disguised. It is simply not counted, because most assessments are built to measure what an institution has and what it is currently achieving, and borrowed capability shows up correctly in both.

The four forms it takes

In our experience it arrives in four shapes, and an institution under pressure will usually have all four at once.

• Seconded or contracted personnel. Officers or specialists on loan from a partner force or an external provider. The number is always published; the instrument almost never is. Whether they are attested, appointed under a specific provision or serving under a commercial contract determines what they may lawfully do, who is accountable for them, and what happens to their powers when the arrangement ends.
• In-kind assets. Donated vessels, vehicles, sensors and communications equipment. The gift is announced. The through-life cost is not, and it arrives eighteen months later as a maintenance liability nobody budgeted for, in a currency the donor does not pay in.
• Non-recurrent funding. Support announced package by package, usually following an incident. It is genuinely helpful and it is structurally unreliable, because the thing that triggers it is the thing everyone is trying to prevent.
• A thin trained cadre. The improvement is credited to an institution but delivered by a small number of individuals who happen to be good at it. This is the least visible of the four and the most fragile. It is a personnel dependency wearing an institutional badge.

Why assessments miss it

The usual records tell only part of the story. An establishment table may not show when seconded staff will leave, while performance figures rarely reveal how much depends on a few individuals. A budget can also leave out the value of donated equipment and support.

These records can accurately describe today’s performance without showing how vulnerable it is to changes in support.

There is also an incentive problem, and it is worth naming. Nobody involved is well served by raising it. The partner providing the support would rather report success. The institution receiving it would rather not appear dependent. The reviewer, if there is one, was usually commissioned to assess capability rather than to model its decay. The question goes unasked not because it is difficult but because it is nobody’s job.

Questions to ask

A useful review should record answers to the following questions.

• Under what instrument does each external person serve, and when does it expire? If nobody can produce the document, that is the finding.
• Which functions would stop entirely if the external contribution ended tomorrow? Not degrade. Stop.
• What is the through-life cost of every donated asset, and whose budget line carries it? If the answer is that it has not been allocated, the asset is a liability with a delay on it.
• How many individuals does the current result actually depend on? Name them. If the list is short enough to write on one hand, the capability is personal rather than institutional.
• What is the time from recruitment to competence in each critical role, and does the training pipeline produce replacements faster than attrition removes them? This single ratio predicts more than any equipment inventory.
• Which of the recommendations in the last review were implemented, and which were quietly abandoned? The pattern of abandonment tells you what the institution can actually absorb.

What it means for how capability is bought

The practical consequence is that the sequence matters more than the list. An institution operating under resource constraint cannot do everything at once, and the order in which it does things determines whether any of it holds.

It also means that some of the most valuable recommendations are the ones that cost nothing to implement and produce no procurement. Writing down an authorisation regime. Recording a tasking decision. Establishing who owns a maintenance budget. Naming a successor. None of these appear on a capability shopping list and all of them determine whether the items on that list survive contact with the next twelve months.

And it means being honest about what an external adviser is for. A team that has to be there for the capability to work has not delivered a capability. It has delivered a subscription. The test of any assistance programme is what remains when the people who built it have gone home, and that is a test most programmes are never designed to pass because nobody set the exam.

A note on where this comes from

We have spent time on the giving and the receiving side of this problem. That has included running a national strategic defence review, border security advisory work across West and Central Africa and the Sahel, mentoring of senior and junior officers in the Levant, military advisory work in Sudan, and, earlier, service as an officer on United Kingdom Strategic Defence and Security Reviews. In those settings, the reliance on external support was usually understood but not fully reflected in the assessment.

We do not name the institutions we have worked for, and the examples above are drawn from a pattern rather than from any one of them. Our concern is the recurring pattern of gains weakening within twelve to twenty-four months of support changing or ending.

Read next · Border policy

The wall and the watchman

Proposals to fence Nigeria’s northern border need to address the wider questions of response, responsibility and long-term support.