Demands for greater transparency surrounding U.S. arms transfers to Israel have continued to be a top priority for advocates seeking to address and scrutinize the devastating toll the war has had on Gaza’s civilian population. These requests have been a persistent priority for lawmakers, advocates, and researchers alike, illustrating how important transparency is to ensuring U.S. arms transfers are accountable, responsible, and well-managed. But despite repeated pleas for greater visibility into the United States’ military support for the Israeli campaign, the U.S. government has continued to cite a familiar barrier to greater transparency – that further disclosures could pose an operational security risk for the United States and Israel. Far from an isolated phenomenon, the concern that greater public visibility into security cooperation and assistance creates undue operational security risks is a longstanding obstacle to greater defense trade transparency. While the roots of this concern are assuredly genuine, closer consideration illustrates that, in practice, greater transparency does not present an inherent danger to operational security.
Operational Security
Operations Security (OPSEC) refers broadly to processes and actions that “reduce the vulnerability of US and multinational forces to successful adversary exploitation of critical information. OPSEC applies to all activities that prepare, sustain, or employ forces.” In short, OPSEC reflects multifaceted efforts to restrict an adversary’s access to information that can be exploited to compromise a U.S. or partner operation.
To be sure, OPSEC is an essential component of defense planning and critical to protecting the safety and effectiveness of U.S. forces as well as those of allies and partners. Publicizing detailed information, for example, around specific troop movements, operational plans and deployments, or the geographic location of certain installations or capabilities, could all constitute unacceptable OPSEC risks. But while information disclosures must be considered carefully, most proposals to improve the transparency of U.S. security cooperation or assistance are highly unlikely to add to these risks.
For example, proposals to provide program and country-level detail Defense Department Budget Justifications; to require year-end reporting on Title 10 military assistance programs with country, year, and capability level detail; to revert to more granular year-end reporting on both commercial and government-to-government arms sales; or to make public congressional notification for direct commercial arms sales would contain no information about troop movements, deployments, or geographically exploitable details.
Similarly, claims that more transparency around proposed arms transfers would broadcast gaps in a partner’s capabilities seem to inflate the actual operational risks. Arms transfers can occur in a variety of contexts and can relate to developing, sustaining, or expanding on a particular set of weapon systems, none of which preclude the existence of analogous capabilities. Conflating transfer information with a capability gap would represent a highly risky assumption on the part of an adversary. Any such conclusion would undoubtedly be based upon a far more robust set of information and intelligence resources than would be reflected in the many proposed transparency measures.
Additionally, many security cooperation and assistance efforts take place in low OPSEC contexts. Routine arms transfers, assistance efforts to partners who do not face near-peer adversaries, or transfers of less sophisticated capabilities are highly unlikely to present any serious OPSEC risks.
Moreover, existing practices suggest that the claimed OPSEC risks surrounding greater arms transfer transparency are somewhat exaggerated. Notifications for government-to-government arms sales – which often pertain to the transfer of highly advanced capabilities to partners in complex operational environments – are already public and have not been judged to present any serious risks to operational security. Perhaps more instructively, though Ukraine faces, arguably, the most severe OPSEC risks of any U.S. partner, the Biden administration has made commendable efforts to report regularly and in relatively good detail about its security partnership with Kyiv. If the United States has determined that the OPSEC risks in Ukraine are both manageable and outweighed by the transparency benefits, it seems that similar judgments could be made for other partners in far less hostile environments.
In short, improving transparency over U.S. arms transfers and maintaining OPSEC are not mutually exclusive. Measures to improve the public availability of security cooperation and assistance data can be shaped to avoid disclosure around geographic locations, operational deployments, or troop movements. Recent and ongoing practices suggest that similar transparency in contexts like Ukraine have not added unreasonably to OPSEC risks.
Conclusion
OPSEC is a critical aspect of defense planning that must be weighed carefully and in line with specific circumstances and contexts. However, these concerns have frequently been invoked in excessively broad terms and without more thoughtful consideration of real-world interaction with transparency proposals. In most cases, improved public reporting on security cooperation and assistance can thread the needle between legitimate OPSEC standards and transparency imperatives. At the same time, rather than defaulting to OPSEC as a blanket justification for opacity, policymakers should approach these issues more deliberately and on a case-by-case basis. Contextualizing when and how these concerns become operative would allow other stakeholders to engage in a more informed dialogue on how to align important transparency measures with specific and legitimate OPSEC constraints.
OPSEC and Defense Trade Transparency
By Elias Yousif
Conventional Arms
Demands for greater transparency surrounding U.S. arms transfers to Israel have continued to be a top priority for advocates seeking to address and scrutinize the devastating toll the war has had on Gaza’s civilian population. These requests have been a persistent priority for lawmakers, advocates, and researchers alike, illustrating how important transparency is to ensuring U.S. arms transfers are accountable, responsible, and well-managed. But despite repeated pleas for greater visibility into the United States’ military support for the Israeli campaign, the U.S. government has continued to cite a familiar barrier to greater transparency – that further disclosures could pose an operational security risk for the United States and Israel. Far from an isolated phenomenon, the concern that greater public visibility into security cooperation and assistance creates undue operational security risks is a longstanding obstacle to greater defense trade transparency. While the roots of this concern are assuredly genuine, closer consideration illustrates that, in practice, greater transparency does not present an inherent danger to operational security.
Operational Security
Operations Security (OPSEC) refers broadly to processes and actions that “reduce the vulnerability of US and multinational forces to successful adversary exploitation of critical information. OPSEC applies to all activities that prepare, sustain, or employ forces.”1 U.S. Departments of the Army and Navy, “Operations Security.” 6 January 2016, https://media.defense.gov/2020/Oct/28/2002524944/-1/-1/0/JP%203-13.3-OPSEC.PDF. In short, OPSEC reflects multifaceted efforts to restrict an adversary’s access to information that can be exploited to compromise a U.S. or partner operation.
To be sure, OPSEC is an essential component of defense planning and critical to protecting the safety and effectiveness of U.S. forces as well as those of allies and partners. Publicizing detailed information, for example, around specific troop movements, operational plans and deployments, or the geographic location of certain installations or capabilities, could all constitute unacceptable OPSEC risks. But while information disclosures must be considered carefully, most proposals to improve the transparency of U.S. security cooperation or assistance are highly unlikely to add to these risks.
For example, proposals to provide program and country-level detail Defense Department Budget Justifications; to require year-end reporting on Title 10 military assistance programs with country, year, and capability level detail; to revert to more granular year-end reporting on both commercial and government-to-government arms sales; or to make public congressional notification for direct commercial arms sales would contain no information about troop movements, deployments, or geographically exploitable details.
Similarly, claims that more transparency around proposed arms transfers would broadcast gaps in a partner’s capabilities seem to inflate the actual operational risks. Arms transfers can occur in a variety of contexts and can relate to developing, sustaining, or expanding on a particular set of weapon systems, none of which preclude the existence of analogous capabilities. Conflating transfer information with a capability gap would represent a highly risky assumption on the part of an adversary. Any such conclusion would undoubtedly be based upon a far more robust set of information and intelligence resources than would be reflected in the many proposed transparency measures.
Additionally, many security cooperation and assistance efforts take place in low OPSEC contexts. Routine arms transfers, assistance efforts to partners who do not face near-peer adversaries, or transfers of less sophisticated capabilities are highly unlikely to present any serious OPSEC risks.
Moreover, existing practices suggest that the claimed OPSEC risks surrounding greater arms transfer transparency are somewhat exaggerated. Notifications for government-to-government arms sales – which often pertain to the transfer of highly advanced capabilities to partners in complex operational environments – are already public and have not been judged to present any serious risks to operational security. Perhaps more instructively, though Ukraine faces, arguably, the most severe OPSEC risks of any U.S. partner, the Biden administration has made commendable efforts to report regularly and in relatively good detail about its security partnership with Kyiv. If the United States has determined that the OPSEC risks in Ukraine are both manageable and outweighed by the transparency benefits, it seems that similar judgments could be made for other partners in far less hostile environments.
In short, improving transparency over U.S. arms transfers and maintaining OPSEC are not mutually exclusive. Measures to improve the public availability of security cooperation and assistance data can be shaped to avoid disclosure around geographic locations, operational deployments, or troop movements. Recent and ongoing practices suggest that similar transparency in contexts like Ukraine have not added unreasonably to OPSEC risks.
Conclusion
OPSEC is a critical aspect of defense planning that must be weighed carefully and in line with specific circumstances and contexts. However, these concerns have frequently been invoked in excessively broad terms and without more thoughtful consideration of real-world interaction with transparency proposals. In most cases, improved public reporting on security cooperation and assistance can thread the needle between legitimate OPSEC standards and transparency imperatives. At the same time, rather than defaulting to OPSEC as a blanket justification for opacity, policymakers should approach these issues more deliberately and on a case-by-case basis. Contextualizing when and how these concerns become operative would allow other stakeholders to engage in a more informed dialogue on how to align important transparency measures with specific and legitimate OPSEC constraints.
Notes
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