SPRINGFIELD, Ill. - The National Guard Bureau and the U.S. Department of Defense have announced the establishment of a State Partnership Program, or SPP, between the Illinois National Guard and the Portuguese Armed Forces.
“We are incredibly proud of the role the Illinois National Guard has played in security cooperation around the world,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said. “This new partnership with Portugal offers an extension of that global reach as well as new opportunities for the state of Illinois.”
The Illinois National Guard also has shared a 32-year SPP partnership with the Polish military, which is considered the gold standard of the state partnerships, said Maj. Gen. Rodney Boyd, the adjutant general of Illinois and commander of the Illinois National Guard.
“We plan to leverage our well-established experience with the SPP program to help increase security cooperation with our new partners in Portugal,” Boyd said.
“There are a multitude of existing areas where both nations’ armed forces will now work together to increase our shared levels of interoperability, global deployability, combat-projection capability and civilian and military organizational capacity,” Boyd said.
In a statement, the Portuguese Ministry of Defense said, “Our cooperation with the United States is long-standing, credible, and strong. We are very honored to be establishing this partnership between Illinois National Guard and the Portuguese Armed Forces. We are committed to further deepening our enduring relationship.”
The United States and Portugal, both founding members of NATO, have a strong existing security relationship and share an unwavering commitment to global security, rooted in decades of partnership and shared global deployments. Portugal’s strategic location and contributions to NATO missions have made it an important player in safeguarding transatlantic security.
“Illinois is the clear choice for this new Portugal partnership,” Pritzker wrote in his letter endorsing the partnership.
Illinois is home to about 12,000 Portuguese Americans, including more than 13 percent of the population of Sammons Point in Kankakee County.
Portugal’s ties to America predate the founding of the United States. There is also a unique history between Illinois and the Portuguese island of Madeira. The Founding Fathers toasted the signing of the Declaration of Independence with Madeira wine. Seventy years later, a number of Portuguese immigrants facing religious persecution left Madeira for Morgan County, becoming the first Portuguese immigrants to settle permanently in Illinois. Their descendants continue to enrich the cultural fabric of Illinois, with the largest percentage of the population claiming Portuguese ancestry residing in Cook County.
Potential areas of cooperation between Portugal and the Illinois National Guard through the SPP partnership include enhancing mutual cyber capabilities to address national and regional threats and increasing interagency coordination; supporting crisis response and disaster preparedness; leveraging complementary strengths in agriculture, infrastructure and academia; conducting joint environmental research initiatives in soil management and water usage; and developing operational space capabilities.
The U.S. Department of Defense National Guard Bureau’s State Partnership Program has been successfully building relations for more than 30 years and now includes 106 partnerships with 115 nations around the globe.
The SPP evolved from a 1991 U.S. European Command decision to set up the Joint Contact Team Program in the Baltic Region with Reserve component Soldiers and Airmen. A subsequent National Guard Bureau proposal paired U.S. states with three nations emerging from the former Soviet Bloc, and the SPP was born, becoming a key U.S. security cooperation tool that facilitated cooperation across all aspects of international civil-military affairs and encouraged people-to-people ties at the state level.
This cost-effective program is administered by the National Guard Bureau, guided by State Department foreign policy goals and executed by the state adjutants general in support of combatant commander and U.S. Chief of Mission security cooperation objectives and Department of Defense policy goals. With a budget of about $48 million, the State Partnership Program has an outsized return on investment for the Department of Defense’s security cooperation capacity building.
Through SPP, the National Guard conducts military-to-military engagements in support of defense security goals while also leveraging whole-of-society relationships and capabilities to facilitate broader interagency and corollary engagements that span military, government, economic and social spheres.
The State Partnership Program embodies a collaborative approach to strengthening defense capabilities and warfighting readiness. Through sustained engagement and shared training, the SPP moves beyond transactional relationships, cultivating genuine partnerships where partner nations are empowered to shoulder a greater share of the security burden in this challenging global environment.