Promising officers assigned to the U.S. program represent an investment by their government and military institution in their country's future security and defense.
Graduates do rise to positions of considerable prominence.
For its part, Washington also considers these international officer graduates, and now civilian professionals, to be an important investment in U.S. security by virtue of the roles they will play in establishing or sustaining local and regional stability worldwide. This U.S. interest is pursued through foreign military education and training in several ways, as the INSS team details below. In one traditional view, IMET and other forms of security assistance are presumed to accord the provider leverage vis a vis recipients. This perspective pervades the 1975 and 1976 HIRC hearings on international security assistance that produced the IMET legislation. The study team found that almost all of today's proponents of foreign military education and training contacted during its research recognize that IMET offers no guarantee of far reaching capacity to alter recipient institutional values or governmental behavior.