Questions
1 What are the key principles of traditional peacekeeping operations?
2 How did the nature of peacekeeping change at the end of the Cold War?
3 What new types of peace operations were identified in the 1990s and what were the key lessons learned about how they relate to one another?
4 How did 1990s ideas about the new generation of peacekeeping continue to be reflected in the strategic thought of the 2000s?
5 What were the driving forces behind the development of stabilization and reconstruction operations and how did they come to be reflected in military doctrine?
6 How do the concepts of 3D, the whole-of-government approach and the comprehensive approach relate to one another?
7 What are the humanitarian intervention criteria developed as part of the R2P doctrine and how have these criteria been critiqued?
Notes
1 The first operation authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter was the US-led coalition of the 1991 Gulf War. The UN’s response to the Korean War was authorized by the UN General Assembly under the ‘Uniting for Peace Resolution’. This was made possible/necessary because the Soviet Union was temporarily absent from the UN Security Council in 1950, in protest over the West’s refusal to allow the new Communist Chinese government to hold the Chinese seat in the UNSC.
2 United Nations, The Blue Helmets: A Review of United Nations Peace-keeping, second edition (New York, NY: United Nations Department of Public Information, 1990), 15.
3 Ibid., 18.
4 Marrack Goulding, ‘The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping’, International Affairs 69:3 (1993), 455.
5 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York, NY: United Nations, 1992), 26.
6 The discussion below is drawn from Elinor Sloan, Bosnia and the New Collective Security (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998), 7.
7 Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace (UN Document A/50/60-S1995/1, 3 January 1995), para. 19.
8 Richard K. Betts, ‘The Delusion of Impartial Intervention’, Foreign Affairs 73:6 (November/December 1994), 25.
9 There are various reasons why the stepped-up mandates were not matched with stepped-up military force size and capabilities. In the early post-Cold War era many Western countries downsized their militaries and were stretched to send additional troops and equipment to Bosnia, while the United States, scarred from its recent experience in Somalia, refused to send ground troops to a UN mission. At the same time the UN Security Council was managing political differences among its members, notably Russia’s longstanding historical support for Serbia and the largely Western (NATO) attempt to protect and provide aid to Muslims and to certain extent Croats. Maintaining the pretext that this was a peacekeeping mission, not an enforcement operation (i.e. war), helped contain these tensions.
10 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, para. 35.
11 John Mackinlay and Jarat Chopra, ‘Second Generation Multinational Operations’, Washington Quarterly (Summer 1992), 116–117.
12 Goulding, 461.
13 Charles Dobbie, ‘A Concept for Post-Cold War Peacekeeping’, Survival 36:3 (Autumn 1994), 121.
14 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 595–596.
15 John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Wandering in the Void’, Foreign Affairs 72 (November/December 1993), 30.
16 Betts, 28, 32.
17 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, para. 77.
18 Goulding, 451.
19 David Jablonsky and James S. McCallum, ‘Peace Implementation and the Concept of Induced Consent in Peace Operations’, Parameters (Spring 1999), http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/99spring/jablonsk.htm/ (accessed 20 July 2016).
20 A. Walter Dorn and Michael Varey, ‘The Rise and Demise of the ‘Three Block War’, Canadian Military Journal 10:1 (2009), 41. The three-block war concept saw new life in Canada in 2005 but was abandoned a few years later when its Canadian proponent, Chief of Defence Staff Rick Hillier, retired.
21 British Army, ‘Wider Peacekeeping’, RUSI Journal (NATO Document AJP-3.4.1, January/February 1996), 45.
22 Jablonsky and McCallum.
23 NATO, Peace Support Operations (NATO Document AJP-3.4.1, July 2001), para. 309.
24 Cedric de Coning, Julian Detzel and Petter Hojem, UN Peacekeeping Operations Capstone Doctrine, Report of the Oslo Doctrine Seminar, Oslo, Norway, 14 and 15 May 2008, 2.
25 James Sloan, ‘The Evolution of the Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping’, Journal of Strategic Studies 37:5 (2014), 691.
26 United Nations, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (UN Document S/2000/809, 21 August 2000), paras 48–50.
27 De Coning et al., 2.
28 Ibid., 4.
29 United Nations, Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations, para. 49.
30 NATO, para. 307.
31 Dorn and Varey, 43.
32 Mats Berdal and David H. Ucko, ‘The Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping Operations: Problems and Prospects’, RUSI Journal 160:1 (February/March 2015), 7–8; Sloan, 700.
33 Boutros-Ghali, Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, para. 52.
34 NATO, para. 224.
35 Department of Defense, Military Support for Stability, Security, Transition, and Reconstruction Operations (Directive 3000.05, 28 November 2005), paras 3.1 and 4.1.
36 Gian P. Gentile, ‘Let’s Build an Army to Win All Wars’, Joint Force Quarterly (Spring 2009), 28.
37 US Army, Stability, Field Manual 3–07, Washington, DC (2 June 2014), paras 1–120 and 1–122.
38 Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandhar (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2007), 279.
39 US Army, paras 3–120.
40 UN Charter, Chapter I, Article 2(7).
41 Ibid.
42 William V. O’Brien, The Conduct of Just and Limited War (New York, NY: Praeger, 1981), 23.
43 Kofi Annan, We the Peoples: The Role of the United Nations in the Twenty-First Century (UN Document A/54/2000, 27 March 2000), para. 217.
44 See Jennifer Welsh, Carolin Thielking and S. Neil MacFarlane, ‘The Responsibility to Protect: Assessing the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’, International Journal 57:4 (2002), for an elaboration of these points.
45 Robert A. Pape, ‘When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention’, International Security 37:1 (Summer 2012): 42 fn 4, 53–58.
46 United Nations, 2005 World Summit Outcome (UN Document A/RES/60/1, 24 October 2005), paras 138 and 139.
47 United Nationsl Security Council, Resolution 1970 (UNSC Document S/RES/1970, 26 February 2011).
48 Jonathan Eyal, ‘The Responsibility to Protect: A Chance Missed’, in Adrian Johnson and Saqeb Mueen, Eds, Short War, Long Shadow: The Political and Military Legacies of the 2011 Libya Campaign (London: Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall Report 1–12, 2012): 53–62.
Further reading
Berdal, Mats and David H. Ucko. ‘The Use of Force in UN Peacekeeping Operations: Problems and Prospects’, RUSI Journal 160:1 (February/March 2015).
Betts, Richard K. ‘The Delusion of Impartial Intervention’, Foreign Affairs 73:6 (November/December 1994).
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. An Agenda for Peace (New York, NY: United Nations, 1992).
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros. Supplement to An Agenda for Peace (UN Document A/50/60-S1995/1, 3 January 1995).
Eyal, Jonathan. ‘The Responsibility to Protect: A Chance Missed’, in Adrian Johnson and Saqeb Mueen, Eds, Short War, Long Shadow: The Political and Military Legacies of the 2011 Libya Campaign (London: Royal United Services Institute, Whitehall Report 1–12, 2012).
Goulding, Marrack. ‘The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping’, International Affairs 69:3 (1993).
Mackinlay, John and Jarat Chopra. ‘Second Generation Multinational Operation
s’, Washington Quarterly (Summer 1992).
Pape, Robert A. ‘When Duty Calls: A Pragmatic Standard of Humanitarian Intervention’, International Security 37:1 (Summer 2012).
Ruggie, John Gerard. ‘Wandering in the Void’, Foreign Affairs 72 (November/December 1993).
Sloan, James. ‘The Evolution of the Use of Force in UN Peackeeping’, The Journal of Strategic Studies 37:5 (2014).
United Nations. Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations (UN Document S/2000/809, 21 August 2000) (The Brahimi Report).
Welsh, Jennifer, Carolin Thielking and S. Neil MacFarlane. ‘The Responsibility to Protect: Assessing the Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty’, International Journal 57:4 (2002).
Part III
Technology and strategy
7 Joint theory and Military Transformation
A glance back on the historical record reveals that the idea of sea, land and, more recently, air forces operating ‘jointly’ on the battlefield is not a new one. Europeans began thinking about cooperation between sea and land forces as early as the seventeenth century, although this was generally limited to landing ground forces some distance from the homeland and then resupplying them by sea. The American Civil War saw the first joint operations, with seaborne attacks on ground targets and the landing of naval troops. The value and importance of joint warfare became most apparent in World War One when the Dardanelles campaign failed largely because of a lack of cooperation between the British army and navy. By the latter part of the war both sides were operating jointly, using aircraft to support ground forces. Two decades later Germany’s lightning war, or Blitzkrieg, tactics in the opening days of World War Two fully revealed the power and potential of integrating air and land power. The United States subsequently conducted joint operations in the Pacific, while the Normandy invasion represented the most complex joint operation of the war.
Yet military services have historically been far more likely to resist cooperation, and this reality has been reflected in the content of strategic thought. Although Jomini discussed amphibious warfare and Corbett spent some time detailing the linkages between naval power and landpower, Clausewitz famously ignored naval warfare, Mahan gave only passing attention to the employment of naval forces against the land (and when he did so advised it should be avoided) while Douhet argued strenuously that airpower should operate independently of other dimensions of war (although Mitchell did see the value of air forces operating in conjunction with armies). Even the tactical brilliance of Blitzkrieg was not followed by any appreciable body of thought on joint warfare. For Williamson Murray inter-service cooperation in the late stages of World War Two represented the peak of jointness, with such cooperation not to be seen again until the 1991 Gulf War.1
Truly joint warfare is arguably a late twentieth-century, if not twenty-first-century, phenomenon. As advances in civilian information technologies in the 1970s spilled over into the military technological realm, it became increasingly possible and desirable for sea, land and air forces to be integrated into what is often described as a ‘seamless’ three-dimensional battlefield. Contemporary strategic thought on joint warfare began with the US Army’s seminal AirLand Battle, first enunciated in the early 1980s and officially adopted in the closing days of the Cold War (see Chapter 3). But the furtherance of jointness in practice, at least in America’s case, required passing legislation. The 1986 Goldwater–Nichols Act was specifically designed to promote cooperation and reduce inter-service rivalry. Joint ideas were later picked up and pushed forward as part of 1990s thinking about an RMA, later called Military Transformation, while the actual conduct of genuinely joint warfare first took place in Afghanistan in 2001–2002 and Iraq in 2003.
This chapter examines strategic thought on joint warfare in the post-Cold War period. It begins by highlighting the origins and content of, and thinkers involved in, the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs, later known as Military Transformation. They include former Secretary of Defense William Perry, Army Lieutenant Colonel (retired) Andrew Krepinevich, Andrew Marshall, longstanding Director of the Pentagon’s ONA, scholar Eliot Cohen, the futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler and Admiral (retired) William Owens, among others. The chapter then turns to more detailed concepts which emerged from the overall RMA/Transformation construct, including NCW, EBO, and rapid decisive operations (RDO) or ‘shock and awe’. These concepts cross environmental boundaries and cannot be neatly categorized into the sea, land or air dimensions of warfare, and are therefore considered as representing strategic thought on joint warfare. Notable theorists here include Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski and Air Force Lieutenant General David Deptula, while the ideas of Air Force Colonel John Warden, analyst Harlan Ullman and Marine Corps General James Mattis are also relevant. The RMA and Military Transformation may be considered examples of military and doctrinal innovation. Thus the chapter concludes by examining the ideas of Stephen Biddle, Stephen Rosen, Theo Farrell and others on how and why militaries innovate.
The RMA
Strategic thinking about a contemporary RMA can be traced to the late 1970s when Soviet military officers began to write about a Military Technical Revolution (MTR). At the time, the conventional military advantage of the Soviet Union and its satellites over the United States and its allies was significant in absolute numbers – at least 3 to 1, and so large that NATO had always retained the nuclear trump card, refusing to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons. But fledgling advances in military technologies such as the military application of computers, satellite surveillance and long-range missiles were already of a degree that Soviet writers were concerned the balance in conventional force capability would shift significantly in the Western favour. By the mid-1980s interest in an MTR had risen to the highest levels in the Soviet military, with the Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Nicolai Ogarkov, writing extensively on the need for the Soviet Union to reorient his country’s defence budget toward the sorts of electronic investment that could be seen in the United States.
William Perry
The collapse of the Soviet Union rendered mute Ogarkov’s case, but the trends he and other Soviet writers had identified were accurate. In the late 1970s the United States had launched an ‘offset strategy’ which involved using the US technological edge to offset the Soviet Union’s advantage in numbers. A key thinker behind this strategy was William Perry, the Pentagon’s Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering in the Carter administration and later Secretary of Defense in the first Clinton administration. As Perry describes in a 1991 Foreign Affairs article, ‘high technology’ was explicitly pursued as a means of addressing the Soviet threat.2 The idea was not to build better ships, tanks and aircraft – since no matter how advanced the platform, they would still be outnumbered – but rather to develop new technologies that could support each individual platform in a manner that multiplied the platform’s combat effectiveness. The goal, in short, was to strengthen the US military through the use of technological synergy. Notable technological advances that could further this goal could be found in command, control, communications, computers and intelligence processing (C4I); stealth or low observability; precision guidance; and ISR.
The impact of these technologies was apparent in the Gulf War. The combination of advanced C4I and ISR, including for the first time using satellite systems to support field commanders, dramatically increased what Perry called ‘situation awareness’ – that is, a knowledge of where friendly and opposing forces were located – thereby according commanders a degree of understanding about what was going on in the field that had not been achieved in any previous operation. Meanwhile, incorporating stealth technology into fighter aircraft and arming them with significantly more precise weapons than had historically been the case gave coalition forces ‘air dominance’ by enabling them to quickly suppress enemy air defence systems. In later writings Perry would stress the demonstrated synergy and enhanced warfighting capability cr
eated by combining stealth, advances in precision strike, new levels of situation or battlespace awareness, and ‘focused logistics’ (applying advanced technologies to logistics efforts).3
Andrew Marshall, Andrew Krepinevich and the ONA
Whether this enhanced warfighting capability could be considered revolutionary was debated extensively in military circles throughout much of the decade. The intellectual charge was led by the Pentagon’s ONA, particularly Andrew Marshall and Andrew Krepinevich. In probably the first US assessment of what was then still called the Military Technical Revolution, Krepinevich argued in a 1992 ONA paper that a military revolution occurred when technological change combined with operational (or doctrinal) innovation and organizational adaptation in such a way as to fundamentally alter the character and conduct of war.4 This became the essence of the ONA’s ‘official’ definition of an RMA during the 1990s. Krepinenich later elaborated that the new circumstances could be considered revolutionary if they produced a dramatic change by ‘an order of magnitude’ in the combat potential and military effectiveness of a military force. By this criterion, he argued, there had been as many as ten RMAs since the fourteenth century (see Box 7.1).5
Box 7.1 Military revolutions
In 1993 the Pentagon’s ONA defined an RMA as ‘a major change in the nature of warfare brought about by the innovative application of technologies which, combined with dramatic changes in military doctrine and operational and organizational concepts, fundamentally alters the character and conduct of military operations’. By this definition, it is possible to identify at least ten military revolutions since the fourteenth century:
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