Paper Trails and Paper Targets: A Researcher's Guide to Tracing US Military Aid and Human Rights Harm

The United States is the world's largest arms exporter and one of its most prolific providers of military assistance. In fiscal year 2023 alone, Washington delivered or authorized tens of billions of dollars in weapons transfers, foreign military financing, and security sector training to governments across six continents. Some of those governments have credible, documented records of committing serious human rights violations—often with equipment or training that bears an American pedigree.

Connecting those dots is painstaking work. It requires navigating a sprawling, inconsistent, and sometimes deliberately opaque landscape of federal databases, congressional notifications, State Department certifications, and international arms registries. But the data exists. Much of it is public. And for researchers, journalists, and human rights advocates, knowing where to look—and how to link what you find—can be the difference between allegation and documented accountability.

This guide is designed to serve as a practical starting point.

Understanding the Funding Channels

Before you can follow the money, you need to understand how it moves. US military assistance flows through several distinct legal and budgetary channels, each with its own disclosure requirements and paper trail.

Foreign Military Financing (FMF) is the primary grant and loan program through which the US government funds foreign militaries' purchases of American-made defense equipment and services. Administered by the State Department and implemented through the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA), FMF data is published in annual congressional budget justifications and in the State Department's annual report to Congress on foreign military assistance.

Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) involve private American defense contractors selling weapons or equipment directly to foreign governments, with State Department licensing approval required under the Arms Export Control Act. The State Department publishes an annual report on DCS authorizations, though actual delivery data is often less complete than licensing data.

Foreign Military Sales (FMS) represent government-to-government transactions in which the US acts as an intermediary, purchasing equipment from American manufacturers on behalf of foreign buyers. DSCA publishes quarterly FMS delivery reports and issues public notifications—required by law—for major proposed sales above certain dollar thresholds.

Section 333 Authority (formerly Section 1206) funds the training and equipping of foreign military forces for counterterrorism and other security purposes, often with less public visibility than FMF or FMS programs.

Knowing which channel a particular transfer moved through will determine which databases and reports are most relevant to your research.

The Core Databases

Several publicly accessible databases should form the foundation of any investigation into US military assistance.

The DSCA website (dsca.mil) publishes congressional notifications for major FMS cases, quarterly delivery reports, and historical data on security assistance by country. This is frequently the most granular publicly available source for specific equipment transfers.

The State Department's annual 655 Report—formally titled the "Section 655 Annual Military Assistance Report"—provides country-by-country breakdowns of FMF, FMS, DCS, and excess defense articles transfers. It is submitted to Congress each year and is publicly available on the State Department's website, though publication timelines are inconsistent.

The US Agency for International Development's Foreign Aid Explorer (explorer.usaid.gov) covers economic and development assistance but also includes some security assistance data and allows for country- and program-level filtering.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Arms Transfers Database (sipri.org) offers independently compiled data on major conventional weapons transfers globally, including US exports. Because SIPRI uses its own methodology, its figures sometimes differ from official US government data—those discrepancies are themselves worth investigating.

The UN Comtrade database tracks arms trade data reported by member states and can serve as a cross-reference for official US figures, particularly for cases where recipient governments' own reporting may diverge from American disclosures.

Cross-Referencing with Human Rights Records

Raw arms transfer data becomes investigatively meaningful only when it is mapped against credible human rights documentation. Several authoritative sources can anchor this analysis.

The State Department's annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices are legally mandated and cover virtually every country that receives US assistance. Critically, the Leahy Law—codified in both the Foreign Assistance Act and the Defense Department appropriations process—prohibits US security assistance to foreign military units that have committed gross human rights violations without being credibly prosecuted. The State Department maintains a vetting process under this law, but its implementation has been criticized as inconsistent. Comparing assistance flows with the State Department's own human rights findings can reveal apparent contradictions worth pursuing.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project) all maintain detailed databases of alleged violations, often with unit-level specificity that can be matched against training and equipment records.

The UN Human Rights Council's database of special procedures and country-specific commissions of inquiry provides another layer of independent documentation, particularly for conflicts where US-backed forces have been implicated in civilian harm.

Case Study: Using FOIA to Surface What Reports Miss

Public databases capture a significant portion of the picture, but they are rarely complete. The Freedom of Information Act remains an essential tool for surfacing documents that illuminate the gap between official policy and operational reality.

In a well-documented 2019 case, journalists and advocates used FOIA requests to obtain State Department cables and internal assessments related to Saudi Arabia's conduct in Yemen—assessments that suggested officials had privately documented civilian targeting patterns even as public certifications of Saudi compliance with humanitarian standards were being issued to Congress. The resulting reporting contributed directly to congressional efforts to invoke the War Powers Resolution and restrict arms sales.

For FOIA requests related to military assistance, the most productive targets typically include the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, and the relevant geographic combatant commands. Requests for end-use monitoring reports—documents that track whether equipment is being used as intended—are particularly valuable and frequently underpublicized.

Organizations including MuckRock (muckrock.com) provide templates and filing support for FOIA requests and maintain a searchable archive of previously released documents that may overlap with your research area.

Building the Evidentiary Chain

The most credible investigative work links specific equipment or training to specific incidents through a documented chain of custody. This requires triangulating across multiple source types: procurement records showing a transfer occurred, photographic or field evidence showing the equipment present at a documented abuse site, and victim or witness testimony placing the incident in context.

This methodology—sometimes called "weapons tracing"—has been employed to considerable effect by organizations including Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab and Bellingcat, whose open-source verification techniques have become a model for the field.

For advocates seeking policy impact, the goal is not simply documentation but accountability. Under the Leahy Law, a credible, well-documented allegation can trigger a vetting review that suspends assistance to implicated units. Presenting findings directly to congressional offices—particularly members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or House Foreign Affairs Committee—or to State Department officials through formal channels can initiate that process.

A Note on Limitations

No public database is complete, and the US government's disclosure practices have historically been inconsistent and, at times, politically influenced. Some of the most sensitive assistance programs—particularly those routed through the CIA or conducted under classified presidential findings—will not appear in any public record. Significant amounts of "train and equip" funding are embedded in defense authorization bills in ways that resist straightforward public tracking.

These limitations are not reasons to abandon the inquiry. They are reasons to be precise about what the evidence does and does not show, and to frame findings accordingly. The goal of evidence-based advocacy is not certainty—it is accountability grounded in the best available record. In the case of US military assistance and its human consequences, that record, imperfect as it is, contains far more than most policymakers would prefer the public to see.