A recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) took the Department of Defense to task over its poorly written project proposals for the Global Train and Equip program—basically a $4.1 billion security cooperation fund dedicated to improving our allies’ counterterrorism capabilities. Under an Obama-era directive, Defense and State Department officials are supposed to consider four distinct modules when crafting Train and Equip projects: project objectives (what security gap the project is intended to fill); absorptive capacity (the recipient country’s ability to use the training or equipment provided to it in an effective manner); baseline capabilities (to what degree the recipient country’s forces are already capable of performing the task for which they are being trained or equipped); and sustainment arrangements—that is, how the recipient country will be able to sustain that capacity through its own funds or through continued support from the U.S. government. GAO’s primary finding—or at least the one it went out of its way to highlight—was that these four elements were routinely omitted during the drafting process. While all proposals included information about project objectives and most included baseline assessments, less than half addressed absorptive capacity, and less than three quarters included complete sustainment plans.

This isn’t the first time the Defense Department has come under fire for bureaucratic laziness. In 2016 the GAO criticized the department for being chronically late—almost two years, in some cases—in delivering statutory updates to Congress on the effectiveness of its Train and Equip programs. But underneath these managerial worries is a more alarming finding: According to the new report, only eight of the 21 aid programs examined by the GAO showed any improvement in their defensive capabilities under the DoD’s own internal scale. Even in those eight, the results were modest: GAO found that on a five-point scale, six programs moved from level two to level three and just two programs moved from level one to level three.

Together, these programs cost the United States hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Many spanned half a decade or more. Yet for all that, the data is clear: Most of them do not actually work.

The New York Times justifiably homed in on the spectacular inefficiencies described in the report, but the results here are hardly surprising. U.S. security cooperation efforts have been failing to produce their intended outcomes for years, in large part because these programs seek to accomplish too much in places where the likelihood of success is slim. The important point is that despite new and concentrated efforts by the Defense Department and State to be more judicious when deciding which Train and Equip programs to fund, the vast majority still don’t deliver.

The GAO had some guesses as to why. Citing interviews with agency officials, it noted that the primary obstacles to operational effectiveness—project design weaknesses, equipment suitability and procurement issues, partner nation shortfalls, and workforce management issues—were “consistent with the challenges noted in our April 2016 report.” Each category contained several headline-grabbing examples: body armor and helmets were inconsistent with the average size of partner nation soldiers. Bright orange life jackets were procured as tactical equipment for units that required camouflage. In one particularly egregious incident, a lack of equipment maintenance had resulted in warped gun barrels.

Part of the problem is that the Global Train and Equip program has grown too rapidly for intelligence officials to keep up. Small staff teams within the Pentagon, geographic combatant commands, embassies, and elsewhere are being asked to manage triple the number of cases as they had in previous years—not that they had been doing a flawless job before, but the added cases have made mistakes even more likely. The turnover associated with the new Administration, the civilian hiring freeze, and the mass exodus within the State Department have only made matters worse. It’s no surprise, then, that the majority of Train and Assist Programs aren’t working as advertised. What is surprising is that those with the power to change the system have largely failed to do so. While the GAO reports shows some improvements when it comes to drafting complete project proposals, this has not translated into a higher success rate for security cooperation projects. It is, I think, rather strange to be more concerned with the integrity of paperwork than the actual programs said paperwork describes.

Indeed, the fact that improvements in proposal-writing haven’t corresponded to improvements in outcomes suggests that the ineffectiveness of Train and Equip owes less to poor planning than to poor conception. After $4.1 billion in spending, we still haven’t figured out which sorts of projects work and which ones don’t—and that means even the best laid plans are likely to go awry.

I asserted last year that the security cooperation enterprise was failing to capitalize on the tremendous amount of money and energy being poured into its various programs. Since 2000, $316 billion in U.S. government funds has paid for security cooperation programs in nearly every country around the world. That includes everything from $2.5 million to improve partner nations’ legal systems to $250 million for border security in Iraq and Syria. (Good luck with that one.) The question I raised then, and the conversation I hoped to generate, was why: Why did U.S. Presidents, Congress, and the U.S. military insist on using security cooperation, a hybrid of diplomatic and military power, as the first resort when it came to applying force abroad? Why did the many architects of Train and Equip routinely fail to consider cultural factors when creating programs? Why were there so many stakeholders for security cooperation but no overarching leader?

And why did the U.S. government continue to ignore advice from dozens of experts it paid to tell it how to improve security cooperation? Certainly not for lack of feedback. In 2015, the Congressional Research Service produced an excellent report that found that success in Security Cooperation endeavors largely depended on the objectives in question. Victory in war or managing regional security, they found, was rarely achieved through security cooperation, but programs meant to build alliances or institutional linkages were reasonably effective.

Meanwhile a 2014 report by the RAND Corporation found that while there was a correlation between U.S defense aid and reductions in partner state fragility, the effect size did not increase with additional funding. In fact, the least expensive programs were often the most effective, particularly when they focused on training and educating security forces. By contrast, Foreign Military Financing (FMF), interest-free loans for the procurement of military equipment that often take up the lion’s share of security cooperation funds, had no impact on state fragility.

None of this seems to matter to Congress, which continues to fund foreign defense aid despite ample evidence of its ineffectiveness. Consider that assessments of the Global Train and Equip Fund for fiscal years 2013 and 2014 were not even submitted to Congress until September and December 2015 respectively,¹ even though Congress had already allocated $675 million in funds for Global Train and Equip projects that year alone. This was more than double the previous year’s $302 million. Congress essentially poured money into a program no one knew would work, then poured even more in without bothering to check whether the initial investment had paid off. If DoD is the poor student who hands in incomplete assignments months after the deadline, Congress is the lackadaisical teacher who hands out A’s without ever checking the homework. Needless to say, students rarely change their ways under such an incentive structure.

It’s not all bad news, of course. As noted earlier, some progress has been made with regard to bureaucratic efficiency and internal discipline. In 2016 the GAO found that the Defense Department was rarely including required modules in its project proposals; by 2018, while still not fully compliant, DoD had made great strides in incorporating the required elements into the majority of its projects. Moreover, it is worth noting that those responsible for adjudicating the effectiveness of security cooperation efforts appear to be doing so honestly. Speaking from personal experience, there is often a desire to make excuses for foreign trainees who have improved significantly from their own particular baseline but remain operationally under snuff. Those tasked with evaluating Train and Equip programs might therefore be tempted to exaggerate the results of failed or underperforming initiatives, but that doesn’t seem to be happening thus far. Another piece of good news is DoD’s recent release of 2019’s Security Cooperation Consolidated Budget Display report. In its own words, “This inaugural budget display is DoD’s first step toward more transparently demonstrating how the Department plans, programs, and budgets for programs and activities to align with the Department’s strategic objectives.” In surprisingly dramatic language for a government report, it refers to DoD’s efforts as “once-in-a generation institutional reforms that align strategic guidance with resource allocation and a qualitative/quantitative evaluation process to maximize return on investment.”

Taken together, then, the arc of U.S. Security Cooperation efforts is bending toward greater transparency and accountability. That’s a good thing, all else equal. Significantly, however, it does not appear to be bending toward greater effectiveness. While DoD should be applauded for taking seriously its responsibility to provide lawmakers with honest information about security cooperation, the information it has provided thus far hardly justifies Congress’s voluminous spending on Global Train and Equip. Indeed, honest assessments of these programs don’t seem to make much difference to lawmakers one way or the other, their harsh rhetoric notwithstanding.

Perhaps this is because the U.S. military is still seeking ways to win two wars it began decades ago against poorly equipped insurgencies. Even the names of these operations—Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Inherent Resolve, and Operation Freedom’s Sentinel—hint at the fact that victory is not the goal. Rather, the goal is to stay the course, sunk cost fallacy be damned. As with warfare, so with foreign aid: A lack of success is not grounds for program termination, at least as far as the Pentagon is concerned. Simply being there, even when that’s ineffective or even pernicious, is sufficient to justify the cost.

If this sounds like spending lavishly to make sure the windshield wipers work on a car that has no windshield. . .welcome to Congress.