Modern Military Strategy

by Elinor C Sloan

  Scholarly work at this time made the point peace-enforcement is conceptually distinct from enforcement action which, found in Article 42 of Chapter VII, is the core of the UN Charter’s collective security remit.6 Unlike peacekeepers, peace-enforcement units deploy where there is no consent of the parties and it is likely to be necessary to use force beyond self-defence. At high ends of the spectrum, such a force might be indistinguishable from warfighting units. But Article 40 peace-enforcement remains distinct from Article 42 enforcement action because of its different military and political objectives. In Article 42 missions the UN Security Council acts as a party itself to defeat an aggressor whose guilt has been established by Council decision; with peace-enforcement international force is brought to bear not to defeat but to neutralize the local forces.

  Two and a half years separated An Agenda for Peace and Boutros-Ghali’s Supplement to an Agenda for Peace (1995). The Supplement, written to highlight certain areas where unforeseen difficulties had arisen, tenaciously hung on to at least one misconception, usefully elaborated what was ‘new’ in post-Cold War peacekeeping and starkly reflected the hard learnings of the Bosnian experience – which had only just begun when An Agenda for Peace was released. The tenacious misconception was that international troops could use force beyond self-defence and still be seen as impartial. Referencing UN efforts to protect humanitarian aid, the Secretary-General speaks of ‘a new kind of military operation’ where, even though the use of force is authorized, the UN remains impartial between the warring parties.7 In fact, the Bosnian experience revealed that it was not possible to be both forceful and impartial.8

  Distinguishing the new from the old in the international security environment, the Supplement notes contemporary (1990s) conflicts were more likely to be within states than between them. They were being fought not only by regular armies but by militias and armed civilians. Civilians had become the main victims and the main targets. Prior to this, in the late 1980s, a new type of peacekeeping operation had evolved wherein a mission was established after negotiations and with a mandate to implement the settlement. Namibia was perhaps the most successful operation of this nature, but the tool was also effectively used in Angola, El Salvador, Cambodia and Mozambique. As a result, peacekeeping tasks had expanded from patrolling a ceasefire line, which was the primary mission during the Cold War, to include a wide variety of functions: demobilizing forces, returning refugees, building new police forces, supervising constitutional reforms, overseeing elections, and coordinating economic reconstruction – all part of what would later be called stabilization and reconstruction missions (see below). Whereas traditional peacekeeping operations were made up almost exclusively of military personnel, so-called ‘second-generation’ peacekeeping involved significant civilian elements along with the military component.

  Finally, the Supplement reflected some difficult learnings about the limits of peacekeeping. In Bosnia, the Secretary-General noted, UNPROFOR had been given mandates for the delivery of humanitarian aid and the protection of civilian populations that were based on the peacekeeping principles of consent of the parties, impartiality and the non-use of force. Subsequently, peacekeepers had been given additional mandates that required the use of force. Not only did this contradict existing mandates, but peacekeepers were not given stronger military capabilities.9 ‘Nothing is more dangerous for a peace-keeping operation’, the Secretary-General pointed out, ‘than to ask it to use force when its existing composition, armament, logistic support and deployment deny it the capacity to do so’. Then he cut to the heart of the matter: ‘The logic of peace-keeping flows from political and military premises that are quite distinct from those of enforcement.’10

  While this latter point may seem an obvious one, in fact during the early post-Cold War years it was common for strategic thought in this area to present the growing range of missions as part of a ‘continuum’ where ‘at one end are the lowest intensity operations, involving the smallest number of assets and the least risk of conflict to UN contingents; at the opposing end [the] conflict level is high and involves commensurately larger military assets’.11 Under this concept, a continuum or spectrum of operations started with observer and peacekeeping missions, made its way through missions involving supervising a precarious ceasefire and protecting humanitarian aid, and escalated all the way to Chapter VII enforcement action.

  Within a few short years this perspective changed among much of the scholarly and policy-making community. Allowing for a sort of ‘grey area between peacekeeping and peace-enforcement’ had given rise to significant dangers, both to the UN troops and to the civilians they were meant to help.12 Peacekeeping and peace-enforcement, it had become clear, were ‘separate and mutually exclusive activities’ that could not be mixed. Peace-enforcement dispensed with peacekeeping principles and had to be ‘conducted, in the main, in accordance with standard military principles predicated on the identification of an enemy’.13

  As for the goal of peace-enforcement, in keeping with the provisional nature of Article 40 activity it was and is to bring about a cessation of hostilities and negotiate a political settlement among the warring parties. The challenge is how to do so, in broad conceptual terms. Discussing state-on-state warfare, Clausewitz advises identifying the dominant characteristics of both belligerents, out of which becomes clear ‘a certain center of gravity … the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends’, and then to direct all energies against that point.14 But Clausewitz’s two belligerents include one’s own state and that of the enemy. In peace-enforcement there are at minimum three parties, the outside intervener and at least two parties to the intra-state war. Herein lies the complexity of a peace-enforcement circumstance: not only must the international community need to ‘know itself’ as Sun Tzu would put it, but it needs to identify the centre of gravity of at least two (in Bosnia’s case, three) local parties. In Clausewitzian terms the international community is facing two or more ‘enemies’ at the same time, each of which requires a different strategy to get them to the negotiating table. Thus, in the midst of Bosnia, we see two diametrically opposed prescriptions as to how to bring about a cessation of hostilities: one was to ‘deny military victory to any side in the dispute’ by supporting the weaker party and ‘thereby creating the military stalemate on which negotiated settlement often depend’;15 while another was to ‘jump in and help one of the contenders defeat the other…if peace should take precedence, intervention should support the mightiest of the rivals’.16 What brought about a cessation of hostilities and the circumstances for a peace accord was the former, i.e., acting militarily in favor of the weaker party to create a balance of power on the ground, but this path may not hold true in other scenarios.

  Supplement to Agenda for Peace ended with a remarkable statement of reality. The UN, Boutros-Ghali stated, was not militarily capable of leading enforcement operations – a central reason for creating the UN in the first place. ‘One of the achievements of the Charter of the United Nations was to empower the Organization to take enforcement action against those responsible for threats to the peace, breaches of the peace or acts of aggression’, the Secretary-General stated. ‘However, neither the Security Council nor the Secretary-General at present has the capacity to deploy, direct, command and control operations for this purpose.’17 It is true that the UN had authorized the coalition operation that successfully pushed Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991, but the force itself was led by the United States. Both UNPROFOR in Bosnia and the UN Operation in Somalia during the same time period, by contrast, were UN-led operations that began under Chapter VI and were subsequently moved to Chapter VII as the situations deteriorated. In Somalia tensions and hostilities continue. In Bosnia the goal of achieving a cessation of hostilities was not accomplished until the UN withdrew its troops, paving the way for the application of force by NATO and a British–French rapid-reaction force.

  The Secretary-General’s admission marked the beginning of re
gional organizations leading missions that at one time would have been handed to UN blue helmets. The Implementation Force that deployed to Bosnia in the wake of the Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia, for example, was led by NATO, as was the follow-on stabilization force (SFOR). NATO continues to lead a large force in Kosovo, as well as missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In 2004 NATO handed the SFOR mission not to the UN but to the European Union, another regional organization. This progression to regional organizations is consistent with the UN Charter, which states in Chapter VIII that regional arrangements or agencies should make every effort to achieve pacific settlement of local disputes before involving the UN Security Council.

  Strategic thinking on post-Cold War peacekeeping: the late 1990s and the twenty-first century

  Marrack Goulding has written that whereas in the earliest Cold War years it was possible to think about ‘the evolution of UN peacekeeping’, within a few short years it was more appropriate to speak of ‘the forced development of peacekeeping’.18 Indeed, the events of the first half of the 1990s necessitated a steep learning curve on how best to employ outside military force for political ends in an intra-state conflict. The harsh conclusion for many, including official US and British military doctrine of the mid-1990s, was that there is a ‘consent divide’ between peacekeeping and peace-enforcement which renders the two types of operations mutually exclusive. The downgrading of consent from critical determinant to take-it-or-leave-it option was considered the sign of a middle-ground theory that was ultimately impractical.19

  Notwithstanding these conclusions, over subsequent years there has been an ongoing attempt to conceptually address the domain of collective military activity that lies between peacekeeping and enforcement. These efforts invariably try to square the bedrock peacekeeping principles of consent, impartiality and use of force in self-defence with the impulse – brought on by circumstances – to go beyond these principles, while still being dependent on them to certain degree for mission effectiveness. One of the earliest was the ‘three-block war’ notion put forward in the mid to late 1990s by then-Commandant of the US Marine Corps General Charles Krulak. The nature of the new sort of conflict, he argued, was such that within ‘three city blocks’ intervening militaries might have to use force in a different manner in each of the three blocks – provide humanitarian assistance in one, conduct peacekeeping in another and carry out mid-intensity warfighting in still another.20 Since peacekeeping and warfighting are premised on mutually exclusive principles, this was an unworkable formulation. The conceptual approach, which epitomized the contradictory nature of the tasks being asked of military forces at the time, did not survive in the United States beyond Krulak’s retirement.

  Another early conceptualization was that of ‘wider peacekeeping’. The 1995 British Army Field Manual defined this as ‘wider aspects of peacekeeping operations carried out with the general consent of the belligerent parties but in an environment that may be highly volatile’.21 Scholarly work at the end of the decade interpreted the wider peacekeeping approach as one of ‘induced consent’ under which peacekeeping forces, if large enough, could act effectively if there was consent at the strategic and operational levels, even if there was not consent on the ground at the tactical level. ‘The key was the legitimacy of settlements at the higher levels’, it was argued at the time, ‘and the need to make the effect of this consent felt at the tactical level’.22 Along these lines NATO’s 2001 doctrine document on peace support operations (PSO) – a term adopted in the late 1990s to collectively describe peacemaking, peacekeeping, peace-enforcement and peacebuilding – states: ‘Whilst there may be consent at the strategic level … at the tactical level there may be groups that disagree violently with their leaders, and may be hostile to the PSO.’23 Similarly, in 2008 the concept of induced consent figured centrally in a UN-sanctioned capstone document on peacekeeping doctrine. ‘“Consent” of the parties to the peace- or cease-fire agreement,’ the UN argued, ‘is a dynamic and multilayered concept; it is essential for mission success … but it is understood that it may often be lacking at the tactical level’.24

  Consent as a moving target has inevitably impacted the principle of the use of force. The Brahimi report of 2000, the outcome of a high-level UN panel on peacekeeping chaired by former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, underscored that consent of the local parties, impartiality and use of force only in self-defence remain the bedrock principles of peacekeeping. At the same time, in a somewhat schizophrenic formulation,25 the report argued peacekeepers may be operationally justified in using force beyond self-defence, as well as morally compelled to do so.26 Later in the decade the UN’s capstone document on peacekeeping doctrine reinterpreted the non-use of force as pertaining to the strategic level, while also introducing the concept of ‘robust peacekeeping’ in ‘recognition that the use of force at the tactical level may be necessary to defend the mission’.27 It further clarifies: ‘The new doctrine makes a distinction between peace-enforcement, which implies use of force at the strategic level, i.e. where consent is lacking, and robust peacekeeping, where there is consent at the strategic level, but where force may have to be used at the tactical level to manage spoilers.’28 Not surprisingly, in preparation of the capstone document doubts were raised about just how tenable the distinction between tactical and strategic use of force would be in the real world.

  Finally, there has been an ongoing attempt in the twenty-first century to parse the meaning of impartiality. ‘Impartiality’, the Brahimi report states, ‘mean[s] adherence to the principles of the Charter and to the objectives of a mandate that is rooted in those Charter principles … [and not] equal treatment of all parties in all cases for all time, which can amount to a policy of appeasement.’29 Specifically, it is argued that impartiality is not the same as neutrality. According to NATO doctrine in 2001, ‘Impartiality … requires a degree of judgement against a set of principles, or the mandate, or both, while the notion of neutrality does not. The conduct of PSO will be impartial to the parties but never neutral in the execution of the mission.’30 The impartial approach, it was and is argued, distinguished PSO from other military operations because such operations were ‘neither in support of, nor against a particular party, but rather are conducted in an impartial and even handed manner’, with the goal being not military victory but a particular political end state. ‘Principled impartiality’ was another term NATO used, where force would be applied not because of who the party is, but because of what it is or is not doing in relation to the mandate.

  Impartial intervention does seem to have worked on at least one occasion. During the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1999–2010, peacekeepers were seen to have successfully combined mid-intensity warfare with an impartial attitude toward breaches of the peace.31 The follow-on mission, the UN stabilization mission in the Congo, has been less successful in this regard, but this did not dissuade the UN from setting up a similar mission in the Central African Republic in 2014. Twenty years after it became clear that peacekeeping and peace-enforcement do not mix, there is a continued determination within the UN to authorize ‘peacekeeping’ operations under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, calling on them to deploy where there may be no tactical consent of the parties, to use force beyond self-defence and defence of mandate and to somehow present their actions as being impartial in the eyes of all parties to the conflict.32

  Stabilization and reconstruction

  Preceding and running parallel to developments in peacekeeping has been an evolution of strategic thought about how and the degree to which military forces operate in conjunction with civilian elements. As with peacekeeping’s move to peace-enforcement, the changes have been driven by the intra-state nature of the conflicts the international community has faced. The Congo mission of 1960–1964 was the first peacekeeping operation to include substantial civilian elements, but this was not followed by any strategic thinking about the interaction of military and civilian elements, n
or was it followed in subsequent decades with UN missions of a similar nature.

  The United Nations Transition Assistance Group in Namibia, launched as the Cold War thawed, introduced a new generation of peacekeeping. In that mission, as noted above, military forces working in conjunction with civilians carried out such tasks as disarming warring parties, repatriating refugees and monitoring elections. With this experience in mind, Boutros-Ghali included the concept of post-conflict peace-building in An Agenda for Peace. To help consolidate peace, the document stated, the international community would disarm warring parties, destroy weapons, repatriate refugees, monitor elections, train security personnel and build government institutions. Implicit in the discussion was that the parties had agreed to these things in the context of a comprehensive peace settlement and that, although there was no explicit breakdown between military and civilian responsibilities, these were largely civilian tasks.

  Within a few short years it became clear that many post-conflict intra-state scenarios would be less benign that the Namibian experience seemed to indicate. There was greater discussion of the role of military forces in what had hitherto been seen as a primarily civilian effort, wherein the peacekeeping operation would transfer peace-building functions to others and then depart.33 The term ‘stabilization’ began to be added to that of reconstruction, a reflection of the more challenging circumstances – hence stabilization and reconstruction missions, or simply ‘stability operations’.

  The theoretical evolution from largely civilian peace-building missions to military-dominated stability operations was driven to a significant degree by practical experience in Bosnia. When IFOR deployed late in 1995, its mission was explicitly limited to enforcing the ceasefire, supervising the withdrawal of forces and establishing a zone of separation between the parties. It was not to deliver humanitarian aid, ensure free elections, act as a police force, carry out reconstruction or other tasks of this nature seen to be a primarily civilian responsibility. But with the successful implementation of its own mandate, IFOR came under increasing pressure from the international community to assist in the civilian aspects. When SFOR deployed in late 1996, its mission, like IFOR before it, was to create the secure conditions necessary for the consolidation of peace. But in actuality it focused more strongly on implementing the civilian aspects. Along these lines, the British Army Field Manual on wider peacekeeping, released in 1996, explicitly included as military activities things that were well outside traditional peacekeeping tasks, such as conflict prevention, demobilization operations, military assistance, humanitarian relief and the guarantee and denial of movement.