Abstract
The civil-military interface in peace support operations is changing due to increasingly overlapping tasks, increased military involvement in humanitarian activities, and increased integration of all involved actors, not least through various current strategic concepts. This article not only describes these trends, but also, more importantly, analyses certain consequences in terms of mission effectiveness. The focus of the analysis is the ideas of ‘militarisation of humanitarian aid’ and the reverse ‘humanitarianisation of the military’. The main arguments of this contribution are that the assumptions of increased effectiveness stemming from civil-military integration cannot be taken for granted and that there are harmful consequences stemming from blurring the lines between civilian, humanitarian and military actors. There is, in other words, a need to better specify and explain the causal mechanisms that lead to effectiveness in complex peace support operations.
Notes
1. CitationSmith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World, xii.
5. CitationForster, ‘Breaking the Covenant: Governance of the British Army in the Twenty-First Century’, 1045.
6. CitationEtzioni, Security First: For a Muscular Moral Foreign Policy, 3.
7. CitationFortna, ‘Interstate Peacekeeping: Causal Mechanisms and Empirical Effects’, 482.
13. CitationMetz, ‘Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq’, 26–8; CitationRicks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 191.
14. CitationKrulak, ‘The Strategic Corporal: Leadership in the Three Block War’.
15. CitationKrulak, ‘The Three Block War: Fighting in Urban Areas’, 139–42.
16. CitationKelleher, ‘US Military Humanitarian Efforts Planned for 99 Nations Forces respond to disasters and deliver longer-term aid overseas’.
17. CitationOlson, ‘Fighting for Humanitarian Space: NGOs in Afghanistan’, 15.
19. UK MoD, The Comprehensive Approach, 1-1.
21. US Forces Joint Command, Effects-Based Operations, 5.
22. US Joint Forces Command (2001)
24. CitationDerblom, Egnell and Nilsson, The Impact of Strategic Concepts and Approaches on the Effects-Based Approach to Operations: A Baseline Collective Assessment Report, 9.
32. CitationEgnell, ‘Explaining US and British Performance in Complex Expeditionary Operations: The Civil-Military Dimension’, 1050.
33. CitationDuyvesteyn, ‘The Effectiveness of Intervention Instruments in Armed Conflict: Conflict Resolution is the Only Solution?’.
34. CitationGordon, ‘Military-Humanitarian Relationships and the Invasion of Iraq (2003): Reforging Certainties?’.
35. CitationFortna, ‘Does Peacekeeping Keep Peace? International Intervention and the Duration of Peace After Civil War’, 288; CitationSmith, Utility of Force.
39. IRIC, ‘Code of Conduct’, 1.
40. CitationTerry, Condemned to Repeat: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action, 26.
41. IRIC ‘Code of Conduct’.
45. CitationWinslow, ‘Strange Bedfellows in Humanitarian Crisis: NGOs and the Military’, 113–28.
46. CitationWinslow, ‘Strange Bedfellows in Humanitarian Crisis: NGOs and the Military’, 116.
50. CitationBrigety, ‘From Three to One: Rethinking the “Three Block War” and Humanitarian Operations in Combat', Conference on Professional Ethics, Springfield, VA, 29 and 30 January 2004.
59. CitationShaw, The New Western Way of War: Risk Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq, 75. The difficult choices faced by Western states in an era of increasing humanism, and humanity in warfare are also described by CitationCoker in his Humane Warfare.
61. CitationEgnell, ‘The Missing Link: Civil-Military Aspects of Effectiveness in Complex Irregular Warfare’, 36.
63. CitationFry, ‘Expeditionary Operations in the Modern Era’, 62.
65. CitationRaj Rana, ‘Contemporary Challenges in the Civil-Military Relationship: Complementarity or Incompatibility?’, 586.
68. CitationCornish, ‘No Room for Humanitarianism in 3D Policies: Have Forcible Humanitarian Interventions and Integrated Approaches Lost their Way?’, 12.
72. CitationGuttieri, ‘Humanitarian Space in Insecure Environments: A Shifting Paradigm’.
73. CitationTripodi, ‘Peacekeepers of the Twenty-First Century: A Comparison between Professional Soldiers and Draftees in Peace Support Operations’, 71–2.
74. This assumption is based on traditional civil-military relations theory that states that professional armed forces are influenced by a functional and a societal imperative. See for example CitationHuntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations, 2.
78. Interview with Capt. Heywood, 26 January 2007. Many of her comments are published in CitationHeywood, ‘CIMIC in Iraq’, 36–40.
83. See CitationDocherty, Desert of Death: A Soldier's Journey from Iraq to Afghanistan, 185–92.
85. CitationDandeker, ‘On the Need to be Different: Military Uniqueness and Civil-Military Relations in Modern Society’, 4–9.
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