Corrupted Militaries: Criminality, Conflict, and Coercion
Reprinted from New Routes Journal
By Matt Herbert, F10
Originally posted in the third 2009 issue of New Routes Journal.
Military corruption presents an overlooked yet daunting challenge to state security. Corruption exists to differing degrees within nearly every military organisation, though normally oversight bodies are able to keep such activity to a minimum. Yet, in situations of low state capacity, when civilian oversight and military accountability is weak, military corruption can become endemic. Widespread corruption can degrade a military’s capabilities, rendering a state unable to field a force equipped with upto-date weaponry or adequate supplies. Corruption can also directly impact the force’s operational effectiveness, with bribery utilised as a tool by insurgents to escape government forces or gain valuable information. Finally, endemic or high-level corruption can lead to severe civil-military tension, resulting in out-ofcontrol militaries cowing civilian governments, or seizing them all together.
This article will explore the nature of military corruption and its impact on intra-state conflict. The detrimental impact of military corruption on conflict cessation will be illustrated by the experience of the Philippines, where multiple ethnic and ideological insurgencies have festered for decades despite a strong materiel and manpower commitment by the government to defeat them. While the causes of this failure are varied, endemic corruption within the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) has played a key role. Corruption has also increased tension between the AFP and the Philippine Government, leading to several coups and attempted coups in recent decades. These coups have increased societal instability, deterred foreign investment and contributed to the government’s hesitancy to engage in rigorous oversight of the AFP.
Categorising military corruption
Corruption, defined as “the misuse of entrusted power for personal gain”, can be broken down into two broad categories. The first, termed “bureaucratic corruption”, involves officials charged with implementing policy or delivering public services, engaging in corrupt acts in exchange for generally small-scale recompensation. Covering the majority of corruption within a military, bureaucratic corruption can be further subcategorised as fraud, embezzlement or bribery. Fraud involves the manipulation by public officials of entrusted information or government material for private profit. The most common type of fraud engaged in by corrupt military personnel involves the exploitation of the force’s procurement and supply distribution systems. Embezzlement refers to the theft or diversion of government resources by those in a position of authority. Finally, bribery involves the gifting of money, material or services to military personnel in order to achieve an otherwise unattainable, or difficult-to-attain, result.
Such low-level, low-stakes corruption contrasts with “political corruption”. This second category involves high-stakes acts that are only achievable by individuals with significant connections or power within a society, such as military commanders or civilian defence chiefs, who have the power to alter policies and political systems to facilitate abuse. Political corruption within a military can involve all subcategories of activity described above. However, large-scale procurement fraud, involving actions taken to influence the awarding of military contracts or to otherwise interfere in the bidding process, appears to be the most common type of political corruption.
Challenges to conflict cessation
Public corruption almost always impacts the effectiveness of the agency involved. However, the unique role of the military in securing the state assures that corruption within the military can have a particularly severe effect on a nation’s stability. Corruption lessens the military’s ability to deter and to defeat insurgents. It also de-legitimises the military in the eyes of the local populace. Such a loss of legitimacy may impede the collection of information on insurgent activities from local civilians and reduce overall support for the military’s presence. Rarely do corrupt military officials deliberately subvert their organisation; rather, their interest is in financial gain. Nonetheless, corrupt acts are corrosive to a military’s operational effectiveness. Their impact is well-illustrated by the challenges military corruption has posed to conflict cessation in the Philippines.
Procurement fraud has a toxic impact on a military’s ability to prepare and supply its forces, as decisions on equipment procurement become guided by personal interest rather than operational utility. In the Philippines, procurement fraud has impeded attempts to modernise the military, leaving it with aging and increasingly obsolete equipment. Because political level procurement fraud affects decisions on national security strategy and on specific weapons programmes, corruption at this level can have a long-term impact on a military’s basic capabilities. At the bureaucratic level, procurement fraud can seriously impact the efficiency and effectiveness of individual units. In the Philippines, commanders are known to collude with contractors in order to convert budgeted funds into liquid assets, resulting in equipment shortages on the front lines. Such shortages prevented government forces from achieving decisive victory, thereby lengthening the conflicts’ duration.
Similarly, embezzlement by military personnel has a damaging effect on military operations. Embezzlement involves the diversion of funds by senior officers for private use or, more commonly, the sale of military material for private gain. The latter form of embezzlement often involves goods which are easily obtainable for officers and in high demand generally, such as weapons, ammunition or fuel. This problem is acute in the southern Philippines, where insurgent groups obtain much of their weaponry from army stockpiles. Ready access to weaponry increases the operational abilities of insurgent groups and limits the availability of those same materials to front-line units. In the case of the Philippines, embezzlement of military resources has closed the operational and tactical capabilities gap between insurgents and the military, reinforcing the stalemated nature of the conflict and increasing its duration.
Corruption as conflict tactic
Although the motivation for most corruption is financial gain, in a minority of cases one actor employs corruption, usually bribery, to achieve a specific operational end. This can include accessing secure government areas, subverting government military operations or gaining access to otherwise secret information. In such cases the use of bribery to advance tactical or strategic victory for the insurgent group transforms corruption into a conflict tactic. The likelihood that it will be used as a tactic increases when insurgents are unable to win by forceful coercion, when conflict actors hope to create long-term relationships amongst themselves or when insurgents are pursuing goals other than control of governance in the area of conflict.
Insurgent groups in the Philippines frequently utilise corruption as a conflict tactic. The Philippine Government notes “armed groups buy off the police, military, and other officials to get access to targets of violence, and to ensure their escape after attacks”. One well-documented example involved a cornered group of Abu-Sayyaf militants and their hostages escaping when soldiers in one area of the perimeter were ordered away from their posts. The escape reportedly resulted from a financial agreement between AFP commanders and the insurgents to split the hostages’ ransom. In the Philippines, the tactical use of corruption has thus given minimally capable insurgent groups the ability to attack high-value targets and survive government attacks.
Corruption also increases civil-military tensions, especially if the civilian government attempts to implement reform policies on a military riddled with high-level corruption. By threatening the vested interests of military commanders, government anti-corruption actions increase the chance of coups or the threat of coups in order to force a change in government policy. Yet, the potential for a coup may result in the military essentially “capturing” the state by blackmail, if not by force.
Finally, corruption within a military force can increase intra-force tensions, due both to unequal access to corruption profits and potentially due to attempts by some members of the military to report or end corrupt acts. Such intra-force tensions will decrease the force’s capability, while heightening the likelihood of the military splitting into competing groups.
Conclusion
In theory, the military’s hierarchic nature should make corruption easy to combat through strong directives by commanders acting with integrity. However, when corruption becomes entrenched within a military organisation there may be a dearth of will to address the issue. In such situations the hierarchic structure can actually impede the reporting of corrupt acts by lower-level personnel, especially if their commanders are involved in the illicit activity.
The international community should focus on the minimisation of military corruption, not only because the abuse is a waste of public resources and a threat to proper governance of the state, but also for peacebuilding reasons. Simply put, military corruption impedes conflict cessation and therefore must be stopped. An analysis of the forms and severity of military corruption should be undertaken in all active and post-conflict states. Agencies should build anti-corruption capacity, including through the development of laws offering clear definitions of corruption and corresponding deterrents. Such mandates should also affect international assistance, especially military assistance, and should be contingent on the implementation of anti-corruption programmes. In the most severe situations a wholesale reconstruction of the force should be considered.
Military corruption has a strongly negative impact on conflict cessation. It degrades the operational effectiveness of the military force, increases the relative power of insurgent groups and allows those same groups to escape government attempts to destroy them. There is a risk of corrupt military commanders developing self-interest in the continuation of the conflict, lessening the likelihood that they see winning as in their ultimate interest. Military corruption therefore presents a conflict trap, both resulting from and contributing to the emergence of countries in which conflict is endemic, government capacity is low and oversight is lax. It is an issue too potentially deleterious on conflict cessation and peace building to be ignored.