Modern Military Strategy
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65 Frank G. Hoffman, ‘Hizbollah and Hybrid Wars’, Defense News, 14 August 2006.
66 Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington, VA: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, December 2007), 14.
67 Ibid., 28.
68 Ibid., 29.
69 Racz, 36.
Further reading
Arquilla, John and David Ronfeldt. The Advent of Netwar (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1996).
Callwell, C.E. Small Wars: Their Principles and Practice, third edition (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
Galula, David. Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (New York, NY: Praeger, 1964).
Gentile, Gian P. Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of Counterinsurgency (New York, NY: The New Press, 2013).
Hammes, Thomas X. The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century (St Paul, MN: Zenith Press, 2004).
Hoffman, Frank G. Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars (Arlington, VA: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, December 2007).
Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
Kaplan, Fred. The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2013).
Kilcullen, David. The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (New York: NY: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Krepinevich, Andrew F. The Army and Vietnam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Lawrence, T.E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940).
Lind, William S., Keith M. Nightengale, John Schmitt, Joseph W. Sutton and G.I. Wilson ‘The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation’, Military Review (October 1989).
Mao, Tse-tung. On Guerrilla Warfare, trans. by Samuel B. Griffith (New York, NY: Praeger, 1961).
Munkler, Herfried. The New Wars (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2002).
Nagl, John A. Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Porch, Douglas. Counterinsurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Racz, Andras. Russia’s Hybrid War: Breaking the Enemy’s Ability to Resist (Helsinki: The Finnish Institute of International Affairs, June 2015).
Shultz, Richard H., Jr and Andrea J. Dew. Insurgents, Terrorists and Militias: The Warriors of Contemporary Combat (New York, NY:Columbia University Press, 2006).
Smith, Rupert. The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2005).
Thompson, Robert. Defeating Communist Insurgency (New York, NY: Praeger, 1966).
US Army. The U.S. Army – Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Van Creveld, Martin. The Transformation of War (New York, NY: The Free Press, 1991).
6 Peacekeeping, stabilization and humanitarian intervention
In our discussion of how best to employ the military instrument for the ends of policy, no volume would be complete without an examination of peacekeeping, stabilization missions and humanitarian intervention. The first two types of operation can be conceptually located under Article 40 of the UN Charter, a little-quoted paragraph in Chapter VII which is better known for Article 41 on sanctions and Article 42 on use of military force against an identified enemy. Article 40 calls on parties to comply with ‘provisional measures [that are] without prejudice to the rights, claims, or position of the parties concerned’. An enemy is not identified and the action is not taken ‘against’ one or the other parties. From the third-party perspective, the goal is simply to check the undesired activity, to bring about a cessation of hostilities. Article 40 basically equates to ‘we don’t have a dog in the fight, we just want the killing to stop’. There are many qualifiers to this statement, to be sure, since in every situation state interest will be involved to a certain degree. Nonetheless, it captures the essential distinction between these missions and those where military force is used against an identified adversary. Humanitarian intervention, by contrast, is launched in clear support of one party over the other, and therefore better falls under Articles 41 and 42 of the Charter.
This chapter discusses strategic thought pertaining to humanitarian intervention and to those missions originally established as a provisional measure in relation to the local parties. It begins by discussing the emergence of peacekeeping and its accompanying principles, before examining the manner in which strategic thinking about peacekeeping, particularly its relationship to a new mission of peace-enforcement, evolved in the post-Cold War period. It goes on to discuss strategic thought on stabilization and reconstruction missions, before concluding with a look at the post-Cold War period’s theoretical, and to some degree practical, developments in humanitarian intervention.
Peacekeeping and its variants
The UN Charter provides for two basic means of addressing threats to international peace and security. Chapter VI, ‘Pacific Settlement of Disputes’, sets out diplomatic actions parties to a dispute should undertake, including negotiation, mediation and arbitration. If this does not resolve the dispute, then the UN Security Council has the power to act under Chapter VII, ‘Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression’, recommending what measures should be undertaken under Articles 41 and 42. But the Cold War stand-off meant that the UN Security Council – by virtue of the veto held by each permanent member – did not agree on any Chapter VII actions.1 At the same time, a number of conflicts erupted around the world that could not be resolved through Chapter VI means and required UN action to avoid broader hostilities. The result was the invention of peacekeeping as a sort of holding action that could contain the conflict and help create the conditions under which a long-term political solution could be found. Constituting more than the diplomatic action of Chapter VI, but less than the enforcement action of Chapter VII, peacekeeping famously falls under ‘Chapter Six and a Half’.
Peacekeeping thus emerged during the Cold War as a stop-gap measure to forestall war between states so that a local conflict would not escalate to involve the superpowers. The first such circumstance was the war that broke out in Palestine in 1948 after Britain relinquished its mandate over Palestine and the state of Israel was proclaimed. After the United Nations negotiated an uneasy truce between Israel and its Arab neighbours, an observer mission, the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), was established to supervise the ceasefire and later the Armistice Agreements signed in 1949.
Although the political environment of UNTSO’s deployment has changed dramatically over the decades, notably after the 1956, 1967 and 1973 wars, its tasks have remained quite constant, providing a useful theoretical baseline for understanding this particular use of military force for political ends. Observer missions are comprised of unarmed military observers and their role, as pointed out in a comprehensive compendium of peacekeeping missions published by the UN in the waning days of the Cold War, is to ‘act as go-betweens for the hostile parties and as the means by which isolated incidents could be contained and prevented from escalating into major conflicts’.2 Being unarmed, ‘[t]here was no element of enforcement in their functioning, although their very presence was something of a deterrent to violations of the truce’.3 Observer missions, of which there have been just over a dozen since 1948, operate with the consent of the parties and are dependent on the cooperation of the parties for their effectiveness.
Israel, Britain and France’s attack on Egypt after the latter nationalized and closed the Suez Canal in 1956 provided the impetus to make the observer mission concept more robust. After an emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, a UN Emergency Force of lightly armed military personnel (infantry) were deployed to supervise the withdrawal of military forces and the reopening of
the canal. This early mission, as well as the handful of other peacekeeping missions created during the Cold War, established the limited scope of what was later called ‘traditional’ peacekeeping. Tasks included monitoring a ceasefire, overseeing the withdrawal of military equipment and forces and patrolling the border between opposing forces.
Over time, a set of three principles emerged by which such missions were to operate. First, peacekeeping missions were only to be established with the full consent of the parties. This was necessary since a peacekeeping operation was not equipped or mandated as an enforcement operation and was dependent for its success on the cooperation of the parties. Second, peacekeeping troops were to use force only in self-defence. This was a step beyond observer missions which (being unarmed) use no force at all, but by no means did/do they have an actual ‘warfighting’ capability. Third, peacekeepers were to operate impartially with respect to the conflict at hand. Echoing Article 40 of the UN Charter, they were to act without prejudice to the claims or positions of the parties to the conflict. These three peacekeeping principles were first formally captured in a 1973 report to the UN Security Council pertaining to the second UN Emergency Force. They are what define a peacekeeping operation; that is to say, if consent of the parties, impartiality and use of force in self-defence are not present, then it is not a peacekeeping operation – and troops cannot be armed as though it is such a mission. This reality was not fully understood in the early days of the post-Cold War era.
The end of the superpower stand-off removed many of the political obstacles that had previously limited the scope of peacekeeping. With the UN mission in Namibia in 1989–1990 the UN moved beyond monitoring ceasefires and containing hostilities to include in its peacekeeping tasks overseeing free and fair elections and implementing a peace plan. The success of this mission helped promote an activist agenda on the part of the international community, enabled by the thawed relations between East and West. And there was no shortage of places to which to turn their attention – the Cold War thaw also prompted the outbreak of conflict in many areas of the world. Notable among these was the break-up of the former Yugoslavia into its constitutive six republics, and the raging civil war that resulted from the fact that the republic borders did not line up neatly with the location of ethnic groups. Most precarious was Bosnia, made up of Bosnian Croats supported by neighbouring Croatia, Bosnian Serbs supported by neighbouring Serbia, and Bosnian Muslims who enjoyed no nearby support. The UN mission deployed in response to the growing carnage in the summer of 1992, the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR), was tasked with ensuring Bosnian Muslims received humanitarian aid and, later, with protecting them in so-called ‘safe areas’.
Billed as a peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR was originally established under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. The troops were lightly armed and committed to carrying out their mission impartially, and the force itself was not deployed until a ceasefire had been agreed among the parties. But problems quickly emerged. It was not possible to carry out an impartial delivery of humanitarian aid to the Muslims because the Bosnian Serbs deemed this as evidence of the international community taking sides. Therefore the Serbs targeted not just the Muslims but the international peacekeepers. Meanwhile, securing consent and a ceasefire among non-state actors was revealed to be very different from working with state actors. Even if faction leaders agreed to the ceasefire, it was not always the case they could control the activities of their forces. The result was dozens of negotiated and broken ceasefires. And finally, when the Serbs blocked humanitarian aid and threatened the safe havens, the peacekeepers were necessarily instructed to use force beyond self-defence, authorized under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
From 1973 onward, in addition to its literal meaning, ‘the use of force in self-defence’ had been taken to mean using force when peacekeepers were being prevented by armed persons from fulfilling their mandate, such as soldiers preventing a UN convoy from getting through a roadblock. But, notes Marrack Goulding, one of the early post-Cold War thinkers in this area, the wider understanding of self-defence was rarely put into practice during the Cold War. ‘This reluctance was based on sound calculations related to impartiality, to their reliance on the continued cooperation of the parties, and to the fact that the force’s level of armament was based on the assumption that the parties would comply with their commitments.’4 In Bosnia such reluctance was set aside because it simply was not possible to fulfil the humanitarian assistance and safe-haven mandates without going beyond the use of force in self-defence. Hesitant and circumscribed at first, this move culminated in NATO’s application of precision airpower against Serbian positions in 1994 and 1995, paving the way for the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords. Over the course of three years the attempt to stick to traditional peacekeeping concepts while operating in new peacekeeping circumstances proved to be untenable (see Box 6.1).
Box 6.1 UNPROFOR in Bosnia: the pitfalls of applying peacekeeping principles in non-peacekeeping circumstances
• UNPROFOR was established in Bosnia in 1992 to deliver aid to civilian populations.
• Set up as a peacekeeping operation, UNPROFOR was dependent on the cooperation of the parties to achieve its mission. Cooperation, in turn, was dependent on the operation being perceived as impartial.
• But the mandate contradicted these principles. The mission was not seen as impartial because it called for providing aid to one of the parties (the weaker party, which was the Muslims). As a result the stronger party, the Serbs, did not always cooperate with the peacekeepers.
• To get the aid through, UNPROFOR was authorized to use force beyond self-defence, but the mission had not been sized and equipped for a more robust mandate. The result was that much of the aid could not be delivered.
• In 1993 the international community expanded UNPROFOR’s mandate to include protecting civilian populations in so-called ‘safe areas’. But UNPROFOR possessed neither the manpower nor the heavy weapons required to respond to bombardments and thus to deter attacks.
• Like the humanitarian assistance mission, the safe-area mandate had been premised on the consent and cooperation of the parties. But since the mandate was not compatible with the principle of impartiality, the parties did not cooperate with UNPROFOR.
• The Bosnian Serbs bombarded many Muslim towns, in some cases overrunning them (including the tragedy at Srebrenica).
• The inherent contradictions in the safe-haven mandate were exacerbated by the application of NATO airpower, which eroded any lingering perception of impartiality and rendered the principle of consent increasingly inoperative – even as the effective implementation of the safe-area concept remained dependent on the degree of consent by the parties on the ground.
• UNPROFOR was not successful in its mission and was withdrawn in 1995, to be replaced with a more robust NATO-led mission designed to implement the Dayton Peace Accords.
See: Elinor C. Sloan, Bosnia and the New Collective Security (Westport, CT: Praeger 1998).
Strategic thinking on post-Cold War peacekeeping: the early 1990s
During the Cold War UN peacekeeping was confined to a specific type of operation, based on the principles noted above, and involving state actors. A key exception was the UN mission in Congo in the early 1960s, during which UN troops became embroiled in a civil war as the country transitioned from colonial rule to independence. In the wake of the Cold War, intra-state war predominated as the type of conflict the UN was addressing, posing unique challenges for its troops. The organization’s experience in Bosnia, as well as in other large missions like Cambodia and Somalia in the first half of the 1990s, prompted a significant degree of strategic thinking around the whole area of peacekeeping. One of the first challenges was to draw a conceptual distinction among the many types of activities the UN was now carrying out, all under the general banner of ‘peacekeeping’. A benchmark document in this regard was An Agenda for Peace, published by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 1992, which exam
ined a number of distinct yet related tools for managing post-Cold War crises (see Box 6.2).
Box 6.2 A range of tools for managing post-Cold War crises
Preventive diplomacy: ‘Action to prevent disputes from arising between parties, to prevent existing disputes from escalating into conflicts and to limit the spread of the latter when they occur.’
Peacemaking: ‘Action to bring hostile parties to agreement, essentially through such peaceful means as those foreseen in Chapter VI of the Charter of the United Nations.’
Peacekeeping: ‘The deployment of a United Nations presence in the field, hitherto with the consent of all parties concerned, normally involving United Nations military and/or police personnel and frequently civilians as well.’
Post-conflict peace-building: ‘Action to identify and support structures which will tend to strengthen and solidify peace in order to avoid a relapse into conflict.’
See: Boutros Boutros-Ghali, An Agenda for Peace (New York, NY: United Nations, June 1992), 11.
In addition to these four types of operations (one of which was simply underscoring Chapter VI of the UN Charter on pacific settlement of disputes), Boutros-Ghali raised a new requirement for what he called ‘peace-enforcement units’. The Secretary-General linked these forces to the specific circumstance of when ceasefires had been agreed to but not complied with, and therefore forces were necessary to restore and maintain the ceasefire. The problem, he pointed out, was that the task would often ‘exceed the mission of peacekeeping forces and the expectations of peacekeeping force contributors’. What was necessary, therefore, was the deployment of more heavily armed forces with the basic mission of creating a ceasefire between warring parties. Such peace-enforcement units, he argued, were ‘warranted as a provisional measure under Article 40 of the Charter’.5