Modern Military Strategy

by Elinor C Sloan

  The wider peacekeeping concept evolved into that of multidimensional comprehensive settlements. The progression captured the attempt to move beyond traditional peacekeeping which, far from resolving conflicts, was seen by many as a barrier to peace because it held in place – stalemated – a conflict. The new type of international activity, by contrast, could help address the underlying factors leading to the conflict in the first place. Working toward a comprehensive settlement seemingly answered the Clausewitzian question of ‘to what end the use of force’, with the answer being to create the conditions under which the parties would come to the negotiating table and agree to a settlement. The conditions themselves are not set in stone, with (as noted above) the military defeat of one party or the creation of a balance of power among parties being two of perhaps many possibilities.

  An ongoing debate pertaining to stabilization and reconstruction missions centres on the extent of the military role. Early on, in its 2001 doctrine (pre-9/11), NATO established that the primary role of military forces deployed within a comprehensive peace settlement was to create the secure environment within which civilian agencies could focus on the reconciliation and peace-building process. It stated ‘military enthusiasm to help should be balanced against the danger of creating dependency’, and cautioned against short-term military gains that could sacrifice longer-term development strategies.34 In other words, NATO set conceptual limits on the military role within a peace-building operation.

  Post 9/11, and with the onset of the stabilization mission in Afghanistan, strategic thinking in this area began to change. Over the next several years a more central role for military forces in peace-building efforts became codified in US military doctrine. A 2005 Pentagon directive defined stability operations as ‘military and civilian activities conducted across the spectrum from peace to conflict to establish or maintain order in states’. Critically, it also specified that ‘stability operations are a core U.S. military mission … [that] shall be given priority comparable to combat operations’.35 According to the directive, while stability tasks were best carried out by civilian professionals, the military was to be prepared to conduct all tasks necessary to maintain order when civilians could not do so.

  The US military’s embrace of stabilization operations was not without dispute. Critics argued that warfighting and stability operations should not be on a par, and that conducting stability and peace-building operations for more than brief periods of time served to erode an army’s warfighting capability. The significant doctrinal shift in this direction, argued one scholar and former US military officer at the end of the millennium’s first decade, has not been adequately debated.36 Nonetheless, stability operations have continued to figure centrally in US Army doctrine, gaining significant conceptual elaboration over the years. Doctrine from 2014 draws a distinction between ‘peace operations’ (peacemaking, conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peace-enforcement and post-conflict peace building) and five ‘stability tasks’ (establish civil security, establish civil control, restore essential services, support governance and support infrastructure development) and points out that peace operations often have a large stabilization component, as do counterinsurgency operations (see Chapter 5). The first role of the military is to establish civil security, the doctrine states, but as stability increases the military needs to be prepared to support the other four tasks.37

  Recent US doctrine also makes it conceptually clear how a progression of stabilization and reconstruction terms since the turn of the century relate to one another. In essence they form a concentric circle, with the 3D approach (defence, diplomacy and development) at the centre, the whole-of-government approach surrounding and building on this, and the comprehensive approach forming a third and all-encompassing layer. In the late 1990s and early 2000s the focus was on military forces working in conjunction with diplomats and government aid agencies to help bring stability to war-torn nations. The practical manifestation of this 3D approach was the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) concept launched by the United States in Afghanistan in 2002, and later adopted by NATO. The roughly two dozen NATO PRTs in Afghanistan that were eventually established each comprised about 250 personnel, a mix of civilian and military, with the idea that military forces would provide security so that aid workers and non-governmental organizations could undertake reconstruction work. In reality, however, the security situation meant that most PRTs were dominated by military forces, with only a handful of civilians involved. The PRTs and the 3D approach in general also revealed the magnitude of the cultural differences among the military, diplomatic and development agencies, spawning a dramatic learning curve quite apart from the requirement to learn about the society within which they were operating.38

  As the Afghanistan mission continued, it became clear that stabilization operations required far more than the interaction of the 3Ds. Other players are necessarily involved, such as civilian police and intelligence. Thus emerged the whole-of-government approach characterized by interagency cooperation among many government departments, including and in addition to the original 3Ds. Moreover, even as each of the major Afghanistan troop contributors adopted a 3D and whole-of-government approach – in theory, if not always in practice given security circumstances on the ground – they were also involved with non-governmental agencies, other countries, and international organizations. Therefore, in a further evolution of conceptual thinking, by the mid-2000s the notion of a comprehensive approach was adopted by NATO and its allies to describe the requirement for civilian and military cooperation across nations and organizations in a stability operation. The comprehensive approach thus encompasses the original 3D and whole-of-government players as well as this broader range of actors. Large-scale Western involvement in Afghanistan has come and gone, but the imperative of operating with a comprehensive approach in mind when responding to an intra-state conflict or counterinsurgency with a stability operation continues.39

  Humanitarian intervention

  One circumstance where it is clearly not the international community’s intention to act impartially is humanitarian intervention. The principle of state sovereignty – the view that one state should not intervene in the affairs of another state over matters that are basically of domestic jurisdiction – is one that emerged after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and became implicitly entrenched in international law in the centuries that followed. The UN Charter codified this in 1945 when it stated explicitly that: ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.’40 At the same time, the Charter offered an ‘out’: the principle of non-intervention ‘shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures under Chapter VII’.41 That is to say, UN enforcement action involving an offensive war to save people from a tyrannical government or genocide was and is permissible.42 But the Cold War stand-off and the accompanying deadlock in the UN Security Council meant that despite large-scale atrocities during the Cold War (think of Idi Amin in Uganda or Pol Pot in Cambodia, for example), this option was not exercised.

  The end of the Cold War provided the political environment for a new perspective on such circumstances, while actual atrocities tragically provided the proximate impetus. Thus in a 1999 speech and again in his Report to the Millennium Assembly in 2000 UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan asked: ‘[I]f humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica – to gross and systemic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?’ (emphasis in original).43 The well-known events to which the former Secretary-General referred was the slaughter of a half million or more Tutsi by members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda in spring 1994, and the summer 1995 killing of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at the hands of Bosnian Serbs.

  The challenge was to determine guidelines, and an overall conceptual rationale, for when the UN Security Cou
ncil should authorize a humanitarian intervention. The outcome of this strategic thinking about when to employ force for these political ends was the Responsibility to Protect concept, commonly known as R2P (see Box 6.3).

  Box 6.3 R2P

  • The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty was established in 2000 to address the question of when, if ever, it is appropriate for states to take coercive action against another state to protect people at risk in that other state. Its findings were presented in a report issued in December 2001.

  • A founding principle of the UN Charter is to maintain member states’ sovereignty. But, the Commission argued, there is an equally compelling mission to promote the interests and welfare of people within those states. To reconcile this dilemma, it proposed thinking of sovereignty as a responsibility, not a right.

  • Sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe, but when the state is unable or unwilling to do so, or if the state itself is the perpetrator of atrocities, then the responsibility should be borne by the broader international community.

  • According to this ‘modern understanding of the meaning of sovereignty’, sovereignty implies a dual responsibility: externally, to respect the sovereignty of other states; and internally, to respect the dignity and basic rights of the people within the state.

  • The Commission focused not on a ‘right to intervene’ but rather a ‘responsibility to protect’. It set out six criteria for ‘determining when, prima facie, military intervention is defensible’:

  a Right authority. The ‘most appropriate body’ is the UN Security Council, authorizing Chapter VII enforcement action. If this is not possible, due to great-power veto, the Commission suggests acting under the Uniting for Peace Resolution within the UN General Assembly, or a multilateral intervention by a regional organization.

  b Just cause. Intervention is justified if one of two situations present themselves: large-scale loss of human life (actual or apprehended) or large-scale ‘ethnic cleansing’ (actual or apprehended).

  c Right intention. The primary purpose of the intervention should be to halt or avert human suffering.

  d Last resort. Military intervention is justified only if every diplomatic and non-military option for peaceful resolution has been explored.

  e Proportional means. The scale, duration and intensity of the planned military intervention should be the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective.

  f Reasonable prospects. There should be a good chance the intervention will be successful in halting or averting the crisis, and minimum chance the consequences will be worse than no action at all.

  See: International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, 2001), Chapters 2, 4 and 6.

  The R2P criteria invited substantial critique. Including ‘right authority’, some argued, gives states a place to hide if there is no authorization, thereby absolving them of a moral responsibility to act. The ‘just cause’ thresholds are open to wide interpretation and provide no real guidance on casualty levels, nor any indication of how to, or who should, predict (apprehend) future casualty levels. Insisting on a moral ‘right intention’ removes circumstances when an intervention based on state interest would have a humanitarian side effect; from this perspective it may be better to focus not on the state’s motive but on the humanitarian outcome. As for ‘reasonable prospects for success’, this raises a whole range of questions such as: How do you determine this? Who determines it? How do you balance short-term success with long-term success?44

  While all valid criticisms, in fact these criteria are based on longstanding Just War Doctrine pertaining to the war decision (jus ad bellum) dating to the thirteenth century, and as modified over the course of the twentieth century up to the end of the Cold War. They are perhaps the best one can get in an imperfect world. That said, some attempt at refinement has been made. Robert Pape has argued that ‘large scale’ should mean a mass homicide circumstance when a state has killed 2,000 to 5,000 civilians, while the anticipated future deaths threshold should be 20,000 to 50,000 civilians – based on the view that ‘current conditions can be predictive of future harm’. Further, states should only intervene if military operations can be effective within the required time to save a large number of lives, and at low cost to the intervener. This is most likely when there is an identifiable target population, a separable target population, an available local ally, an organized international coalition, an extreme imbalance of power in favour of the intervener, and lucrative targets against which to strike. Critically, Pape argues that when it comes to humanitarian intervention the international community must identify an aggressor, agree which is the threatened party, and intervene on the side of threatened party. Humanitarian intervention is, in other words, an Article 42 enforcement operation, politically (but not necessarily militarily) different from an Article 40 peace-enforcement operation, which is meant to be provisional in nature and impartial among parties.45

  In its World Summit Outcome resolution adopted in 2005, the UN General Assembly endorsed the R2P approach. The inclusion was remarkable on at least two counts: first, R2P has been criticized by some countries as being a tool for justifying Western interventionism and so its acceptance was far from assured; and second, two other pressing topics at the time – a definition of terrorism and criteria for launching pre-emptive war – did not make it into the resolution due to lack of agreement. On R2P the World Summit Outcome states ‘[e]ach individual state has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’, and that the UN is prepared to take collective action under Chapter VII, on a case-by-case basis, if states are failing to do so.46

  To date the R2P concept has only been put into practice on one – qualified – occasion, the NATO-led intervention in Libya in 2011. UN Security Council Resolution 1970 authorizing international action in Libya under Chapter VII of the UN Chapter included the phrase ‘Recalling the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect its population …’.47 Without debating the details or merits of this intervention, many if not most experts agree that the initial intervention was indeed driven by humanitarian motives, not state interest. But the mission did clearly evolve into one that involved the goal of regime change, the greatest evidence of this being that the NATO mission ended within days of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s death. Because the mission went beyond the more limited goal of protecting civilians under threat of attack, which was the original mandate, some argue the West missed the opportunity to advance the concept of R2P.48 At minimum the international community has not evoked R2P in any crisis since that time, most notably in Syria where the circumstances for an effective and low-cost intervention, as outlined by Pape, have not been met.

  Conclusion

  The end of the Cold War brought with it both a new-found political ability for the UN Security Council to address threats to international peace and security, and a concurrent increase in the number of intra-state conflicts around the world as tensions previously held in frozen status bubbled over. The combined result was a dramatic increase in the number of UN missions launched in the early 1990s. But the cupboard of UN mission experiences contained only ‘Chapter Six and a Half’ peacekeeping, leading the international community to set up operations that were ill-suited to the new, post-Cold War circumstances. A key learning, early on, was that peacekeeping and peace-enforcement are mutually exclusive concepts, based on different relationships to the principles of consent, impartiality and the use of force in self-defence. But, driven by demand, this did not stop conceptual and practical efforts to work within the grey area between the two mission types that have continued to this day.

  Meanwhile, early post-Cold War peacekeeping efforts, at first called ‘second-generation’ peacekeeping, sowed the seeds of the peace-building conc
ept. As new players were added, or merely taken into account in conceptualization, this theme expanded to stabilization and reconstruction, to 3D to the whole-of-government approach, and ultimately to the comprehensive approach. Today, a wide array of players are recognized as being critical to stabilizing-war torn societies. From the late 1990s onward peace-building, peacekeeping and peace-enforcement are collectively known as peace support operations, a key distinguishing feature being that these missions were seen to be provisional in nature with regard to the positions of the parties, and thus falling under Chapter VII Article 40 of the UN Charter (if not under Chapter VI). A third type of operation, humanitarian intervention, clearly falls under Chapter VII Articles 41 and 42 in that an ‘enemy’ is identified. Here, strategic thought on the role and application of military force has run in parallel with that pertaining to peacekeeping and stabilization, pushing forward the international legal framework, but seeing as yet only one practical manifestation.