Institution Building in Weak States. Andrew Radin
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
In January 2015 I made my first trip to Ukraine for a RAND Corporation project to advise the Office of the President of Ukraine on security sector reform. After Russia had seized Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine was at war, but its defense establishment was in poor condition. Ukrainian military units were at low readiness—only six thousand soldiers of the forty-one-thousand-strong Ukrainian army were available for use.1 Civilian volunteers provided basic logistics and formed new units outside the formal military structure. There was little coordination between the stovepiped defense and security institutions. Ukraine’s large defense industrial complex was focused on exports, not on meeting the immediate needs of the military. To understand the problems facing Ukraine, our team met with a wide range of ministries and agencies responsible for security. On subsequent trips, we traveled to Kramatorsk to talk with Ukrainian personnel serving in the conflict. It was clear that major changes would be necessary to improve Ukraine’s military effectiveness and achieve European and NATO standards of transparency and accountability.2
In my work in Ukraine, I drew from my prior work studying security sector reform in Bosnia and Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia or BiH), Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and Iraq.3 I had previously observed that foreign reform efforts in these societies often sought to replicate Western-style institutions. However, the elites and the mass population in these societies opposed reform when Western demands threatened domestic political priorities, and at times this opposition undermined foreign-supported reform. While some of my colleagues at RAND argued that it was most important for us to provide a model for what Ukraine’s defense institutions should become, I was concerned that a backlash similar to what I observed in my previous work might occur in Ukraine. I therefore believed that we should design our recommendations with the likely sources of domestic opposition in Ukraine in mind. Our interlocutors in the government of Ukraine, however, resolved this tension by asking us to make recommendations for how the Ukrainian military could meet NATO standards, not for recommendations that were politically feasible to implement.
We proceeded by identifying problems with Ukraine’s current structures and practices based on interviews with local officials and foreign advisers. We drew on models of defense institutions from countries such as the United States, France, Germany, and Australia. Perhaps our most critical recommendation was to reorganize the Ministry of Defense by subordinating the General Staff and Armed Forces of Ukraine under a civilian minister of defense. We hoped this change would strengthen civilian control, make decision-making more efficient, and encourage better coordination. We also made suggestions to improve combat