Americans are not well prepared to
deliberate on U.S. participation in peace operations. They know
little about their history. Most Americans learn about war from
books in which battles end on one page and peace breaks out in the
next chapter. The shadowland in between, where the military is used
to constrain rather than to inflict violence, is rarely discussed.
At the same time, the language used to describe and debate
operations that could include anything from monitoring a border to
battling insurgents is little known and poorly understood.
The
armed forces' appreciation is not much better than that of the
public at large. Among the traditions, experiences, preconceptions,
and routine practices that determine how the military wages the
fight for peace, the most powerful force shaping its thinking is a
"tradition of forgetting." The services, particularly the Army,
have a long record of conducting various kinds of peace missions.
Traditionally, however, the armed forces concentrate on warfighting
and eschew the challenges of dealing with the battlefield after the
battle.
The
Army's experience and knowledge in peace operations have never been
incorporated into mainstream military thinking in any major,
systematic way. For example, the official report on the U.S.
participation in the occupation of the Rhineland after World War I
noted that, "despite the precedents of military governments in
Mexico, California, the Southern States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama,
China, the Philippines, and elsewhere, the lesson seemingly has not
been learned." After
World War I, the tradition of forgetting continued. As the United
States prepared to enter World War II, the military discovered it
had virtually no capacity to manage the areas it would likely have
to occupy. The Army did not even a have a field manual on the
subject before 1940. In fact, one of the planners' first acts was
to root out the report on lessons learned from the Rhineland
occupation. After
the Second World War, the Pentagon largely forgot about the problem
and continued to reinvent solutions each time it faced a new peace
operation.
The
military's reluctance to think deeply about the place of peace
operations in military affairs derived from a rich tradition of
Western military theory, typified by the 19th century Prussian
thinker Carl von Clausewitz, who emphasized the primacy of winning
battles and destroying the enemy's conventional troops. Clausewitz,
a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, could perhaps be forgiven for not
even mentioning peace operations in his classic treatise On War.
After all, peacekeeping operations were something new and novel in
his time, first conducted by allied forces dismantling Napoleon's
empire in 1815. The
U.S. military, which could look back on over a century of these
operations by modern states, had less of an excuse.
It
is little wonder that in the post-Cold War world, soldiers, let
alone policymakers and the public, have difficulty distinguishing
between operations in Haiti, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
and Iraq, or for that matter intelligently debating the
appropriateness of potential future interventions in Liberia or
other world trouble spots.
Public policy debates would be greatly
served by a common framework for describing the various kinds of
military peace operations and their implications for U.S.
security.
Though there are no universally agreed
upon terms to describe them, military peace operations can be
divided into three types of actions.
Post-Conflict Operation
The
first, and most clearly relevant for U.S. military forces, is a
post-conflict operation. Post-conflict activities are an integral
part of any military campaign in which U.S. forces are required to
seize territory, either to free an occupied country, as was the
case during the liberation of Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War, or
to dispose of an enemy regime, as during the postwar occupations of
Germany and Japan. Such missions are not "optional" operations;
they are an integral part of any military campaign.
The
military's appropriate role in post-conflict activities is limited,
but vital. Nation-building is a task for which military forces are
neither well-suited nor appropriate. In addition, prolonged
occupation ties up valuable military manpower that might be used
elsewhere. Yet, after any campaign the United States will have
moral and legal obligations to restore order, provide a safe and
secure environment for the population, ensure people are being fed,
and prevent the spread of infectious disease. In short, the
military's task is to provide a secure atmosphere for the
reestablishment of civilian government and domestic security and
public safety regimes.
In
addition, maintaining a safe and secure environment in the
post-conflict phase will be vital for ensuring the national
interest that precipitated U.S. involvement to begin with, whether
that task be disarming and demobilizing an enemy force, hunting
down the remnants of a deposed regime, or restoring a legitimate
border.
Finally, the initial stages of any
occupation have to be primarily a military-led effort. Only the
occupation forces can provide the security and logistics needed to
get the job done and offer a focal point for the unity of effort
required to make the troubled transition from war to peace.
While this is an inevitable task for the
U.S. military in any conflict, it is one that arguably receives
little attention from the public, policymakers, or the military
itself. In both the Iraq and Afghanistan operations there are
abundant signs that public expectations have been far from
realistic. Before the battle, everyone wants clear answers on what
lies ahead, but there are few military activities more difficult
than predicting the end state of a conflict. It is unlikely that,
prior to the onset of post-conflict operations, the military can
provide firm assessments on the cost, character, or duration of an
occupation.
Once
operations are underway, public expectations that post-conflict
activities will be smooth uncomplicated, frictionless, and
non-violent are equally unrealistic. There is a "fog of peace" that
is equally as infamous as Clausewitz's "fog of war," which rejects
the notion that any military activity can follow a prescribed
rulebook.
While civilian expectations and
assumptions are usually wrong, the problems of public misperception
are often aggravated by inadequate military preparations. Iraq may
offer a case in point. Occupation duties are never easy, and it
would be unrealistic to expect normalcy to quickly return to
country that has been exploited by a ruthless dictator for decades.
But while it is too soon to judge the effectiveness of the
occupation, it does seem that preparations for the post-conflict
period were inadequate.
Peacemaking Operations
A
second category of peace operations could be labeled peacemaking. This involves the use
or threat of violence to compel compliance with resolutions or
sanctions designed to end conflict. These are the most problematic
of all peace operations. The most significant challenge is
determining the appropriate level of force and the correct rules of
engagement, a calculus that in part requires the consent or at
least the acquiescence of local warring factions. No mission is
more contentious. The history of U.N. peacekeeping operations is
replete with failures that resulted from an inordinate mismatch
between available forces and actual requirements.
Maintaining neutrality is an equally
difficult challenge for peacemaking operations. This is
particularly true for the United States. As a global power with
interests in virtually every corner of the world, it is difficult
to conceive of many conflicts where America would be seen as a
neutral power. Even when a third-party intervention force is
recognized as neutral, turning that status into a military
advantage can be extremely problematic. An effort to appear neutral
may actually prolong the conflict, preventing either side from
defeating the other. Neutral intervention might mean little more
than abetting "slow-motion savagery."
The
reality of peacemaking operations is that to inflict peace,
military forces may have to go to war against one or more of the
combating factions. This suggests that powers should become
involved only where they are capable or willing to employ decisive
force. There are cases in which small units have succeeded in
ending fighting with a mere show of force. In addition, some have
argued that if the international community had intervened with only
a brigade-sized contingent of a few thousand troops in Rwanda in
1994, a horrific genocide could have been prevented. Such examples,
and the humanitarian compulsions of Western powers, often lead to
calls for intervening in intrastate conflicts--looking for cheap
wins.
On
the other hand, there are also instances, such as operations in
Somalia, where the supporting countries, when faced with stiff
opposition, were unwilling to escalate violence and withdrew in
failure. These disasters do little to ameliorate conflict, damage
the prestige of the intervening powers, and sour Western tastes for
future operations.
The
dynamics of peacemaking suggest it should receive the same careful
consideration from states as deliberations over actually going to
war. Nations or coalitions should be wary of engaging in these
activities if they lack the will or capability to follow through.
National interests should be commensurate with the lives and
national treasure that might be required if peace fails and combat
operations begin.
Peacekeeping Operations
A
third category of peace operations might be called peacekeeping. Here, operations are
undertaken with the consent of all major warring parties, and are
designed simply to implement a peace agreement. The United States
is currently conducting a number of these missions around the
world, including in the Sinai, Kosovo, and Bosnia.
These activities are usually the most
clear-cut of any peace operation. The force requirements are known
and relatively stable, and the threat of violence minimal or at
least manageable. With less uncertainty and fewer resources
potentially at stake, states are likely to be far more willing to
participate even when less than vital national interests are on the
line.
Conclusion
Of
these three missions, post-conflict operations are undoubtedly one
with which the United States must remain concerned in the future.
They are an inevitable responsibility at the conclusion of a
campaign. Ensuring that the military does the right things after
the war and works with the right people are skills not easily
learned and quickly forgotten. The United States needs to prepare
better for the post-conflict period. Someone has to have clear
responsibility for the doctrine, detailed coordination, force
requirements, and technologies required to efficiently mount these
operations.
The
need to conduct other peace operations is a matter of strategic
judgment. The United States is engaged in a global war on
terrorism, a war that may take many years, and require the
extensive use of our troops. The armed forces are already straining
to meet the demands of global conflict. America needs to pace
itself and reserve its military instruments for advancing vital
national interests. In that regard, peacemaking operations should
be avoided, as they could well embroil the United States in
conflicts that would require substantial military resources.
America should also refrain from taking on
major roles in peace enforcement operations. These activities offer
substantially fewer risks than peacemaking, but that means many
nations with only a modicum of military capability and some outside
support can also perform them. The United States should reserve its
forces for the great power missions that require the preponderance
of military power that only the United States can provide.
James
Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow for
National Security and Homeland Security in the Kathryn and Shelby
Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage
Foundation.