The politics of multinational military operations

ABSTRACT

Today, few countries fight alone; most fight as allies or partners in multilateral campaigns. The end of the Cold War opened a window of opportunity for multinational military operations (MMOs). These have seen varying degrees of participation, enthusiasm, and success. This special forum is devoted to the politics of multilateral warfare including their formation, maintenance, and durability. The introduction sketches past research and derives some key questions of continuing relevance. The contributions shed light on the domestic and international politics of MMOs, focusing on the implementation of national restrictions and their repercussions for MMOs, party politics of military intervention, the conditions under which states decide to defect from military operations, and the role of junior partners in MMOs. In sum, this forum offers a fresh look at the politics of MMOs, including conceptual contributions to the study of national restrictions, domestic constraints, and coalition warfare.

KEYWORDS:

• Alliances
• armed conflict
• coalitions
• domestic politics
• intervention
• multilateralism

One country may support another's cause, but will never take it so seriously as it takes its own. A moderately-sized force will be sent to its help; but if things go wrong the operation is pretty well written off, and one tries to withdraw at the smallest possible cost. (Von Clausewitz, 1984 [1832], p. 603)

The classic Clausewitzian dictum is that war is politics by other means. The same applies to multinational military operations (MMOs): The politics within and between coalition partners continue as the fighting goes on. Yet we do not have a good grasp of the politics of MMOs as most of the work on alliances and coalitions focuses on their formation (Walt, 1987; Wolford, 2015), their duration (Bennett, 1997; Gartzke & Gleditsch, 2004; Leeds & Savun, 2007; Thies, 2009), or their effect on the outbreak of war (Snyder, 1997). Only recently have scholars started to turn to how alliances and coalitions operate during conflicts and how politics at home and at headquarters shape the conduct on and near the battlefield (Auerswald & Saideman, 2014; Dijkstra, 2010; Saideman, 2016).

This topic is of great importance as very few countries can fight on their own, and nearly all conflicts today are conducted by alliances, coalitions, and international organizations—21st century war is almost always multilateral. While many factors determine whether a particular war or campaign is successful, dynamics within national capitals and within organizations can greatly shape the effectiveness of multilateral military efforts. This special forum addresses politics and processes that make coalition warfare both possible and problematic. As the individual contributions within this special forum demonstrate, cooperation in battle among even like-minded countries is difficult, yet, with much effort and learning, cooperation does occur.¹

The starting points to the debate about the politics of MMOs are: (1) countries do not give up their sovereignty when they join a coalition or alliance; (2) democracies do not give up civilian control of their armed forces when they deploy as part of a multilateral effort; and (3) foreign campaigns implicate domestic politics and vice versa. First, the reality of alliance warfare is that countries may transfer control of their contingents to the actors leading the military campaign, but that transfer is conditional and temporary. It is not a surrender of authority, as each contingent will have someone authorized to say “no” if they are asked to do something that is immoral, illegal, contrary to the national guidance, or just plain stupid. The so-called “red card” is always available to be played, so those commanding the multinational force have to be aware that they simply cannot treat every military unit as if they were all from their home country. Indeed, for some countries in some operations, those wearing the hat of the multinational organization may not even be authorized to command troops from their own country.²

Second, civilian control of the military is a fundamental attribute of modern democracy (Burk, 2002). Consequently, democracies must retain some control over their forces when they participate in multilateral efforts. However, democracies vary substantially when it comes to political oversight of the military and, more generally, parliamentary involvement in security matters (Mello & Peters, 2018). Recent studies show that parliamentary war powers can have a tangible constraining influence on government use of military force (Wagner, 2018). Yet, there can also be unintended consequences of parliamentary involvement, which can have a debate-dampening effect and lead to elite collusion (Lagassé & Mello, 2018).

Third, when countries transfer control of a unit to a multilateral force, as much as they might like, they do not transfer responsibility. Leaders will be held accountable for what their planes, ships, and soldiers do abroad, whether that is killing combatants or non-combatants or becoming casualties. Democratic publics and opposition parties may have selective attention, but they will call on the government to answer questions when the forces that have been deployed abroad make the news for good or ill. Whether the mission abroad becomes central to political debates at home varies, as more than a few democracies have managed to implicate opposition parties in these campaigns.³ However, such efforts to quell criticism still require sustained effort.

Because of constitutional and political requirements, politicians will generally be careful and reluctant: They will not always agree to join a multilateral military effort; when they do, they are likely to impose conditions on how their forces are used (Frost-Nielsen, 2017); and they may be quick to leave if the effort is not worth the political costs back home (Davidson, 2014; Massie, 2016).⁴

How do groups of democracies manage to fight their foe as they compete at home and within the coalition? Not always that well. The Kosovo campaign taught the United States, at least the Bush administration, to avoid using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and try relying on coalitions of the willing (cf. Clark, 2001; Daalder & O’Hanlon, 2004). But as the patterns of both national restrictions and defections proved in Iraq, the dynamics within NATO do not go away when one moves to a less institutionalized environment because ad hoc coalitions or “coalitions of the willing” often include countries that vary in how willing they are to accept risks (cf. Shaw, 2005).

Contribution of this special forum

Much of the study of alliances at war tends to focus on the leading countries, especially the United States (Kreps, 2008, 2011; Weitsman, 2003, 2004, 2014) although there are, of course, exceptions (Mello, 2014; Schmitt, 2018; Von Hlatky, 2013; Von Hlatky & Trisko Darden, 2015). The contributions to this special forum address this gap by considering the factors that cause countries to join American-led multilateral efforts and how they define the terms of their participation. Alliance obligations go only so far as countries may choose not to join an American-led military campaign, they may choose to go but only fight under specific conditions and in specific ways, and they may choose to leave before the Americans want.

The contributors to this special forum focus on overlapping underexplored dynamics that shape who participates in MMOs. One of the challenges in this area is that scholars have leapt in without establishing the basic concepts. So, the first two contributions directly address some of the core ideas that are applied by those who study coalition and alliance efforts. Mello (2019) develops a typology of the rules countries impose on their own contingents—structural, procedural, and operational—providing a clearer basis for future work in this area. Similarly, Fermann and Frost-Nielsen (2019) help to clarify a key concept—caveats—that is often used by military officers, policy-makers, and academics, but with inconsistent meanings.

The article by Von Hlatky and Massie (2019) addresses a country that likes to think of itself as a consistent ally, Canada, whose performance actually varies significantly from operation to operation. The article shows how alliance politics and domestic constraints interact with government ideology in unexpected ways. Fonck, Haesebrouck, and Reykers (2019) seek to understand when the restrictions discussed by the first two conceptual articles are imposed. Their study uses the case of Belgium to further assess the claims of the existing literature about the impact of ideology and develops some nuance about the conditions under which opposition parties can influence the restrictions imposed upon contingents joining multilateral efforts.

The question of national restrictions in MMOs leads naturally to a follow up–how useful are these coalition partners? Schmitt (2019) examines what it means to be a useful partner in a multilateral military operation and considers the factors shaping the utility of smaller players. Finally, McInnis (2019) addresses why some countries leave earlier than others. Going beyond a binary understanding of coalition defection (states being either in or out), her article develops a typology of defection strategies, illustrated with examples from the Iraq War coalition. In sum, the articles in this special forum address the variations we see in countries joining, participating, and leaving multinational military operations. Together, they address the connections between the politics of MMOs back in the national capitals and performance on the battlefield. The conceptual papers help to bridge the others addressing the start of operations, their conduct, and their ending.

The politics of multinational military operations: A research agenda

The articles that comprise this special forum are useful starting points for further research on the dynamics of multilateral military efforts. Yet, this collection is limited in several ways, beginning with its focus on the involvement in recent American-led wars. So, the first step in the next generation of research is to consider whether the lessons in this work apply to other multilateral efforts, including United Nations peacekeeping missions or operations under the auspices of regional organizations such as the European Union or the African Union (cf. Reykers & Karlsrud, 2017).

Second, the contributions to this special forum draw mostly on single country case studies, so future work should endeavor to apply other methods such as large-N statistical analyses or comparative research designs to determine which factors matter more generally. Third, the focus on very recent conflicts faces a significant hurdle—that national restrictions and their observation are often classified. Historical work, with more declassified records, may help to uncover some of the political dynamics at play. For instance, one of the greatest challenges to studying national restrictions and alliance behavior is that we know far less about what Special Operations units are doing and where they are deployed by whom. However, there is some indication that governments are increasingly reliant on such units, both because of the nature of the current conflicts and precisely to avoid political oversight. Fourth, the burden-sharing debates both within NATO and in the scholarly literature should engage questions raised in this forum about the complexity of multilateral military operations. Spending more does not mean doing more. Fifth, much of the current work, including that presented here, assumes that doing something, even token contributions, provides some influence and checks some boxes, so we need to study how coalition leaders respond to the varying efforts of their partners. Do countries that have fewer restrictions actually have more influence? What do they get from their increased tolerance of risk? Are countries really punished for doing less? How long does any country, especially the United States, remember and value the contributions made by allies? Did allies that left early face a significant price for exiting Iraq or Afghanistan?

Despite alliances and coalitions having a long history in International Relations, we are only getting started on examining how they operate in wartime. These articles answer some questions but raise many more.

Acknowledgements

For valuable comments the authors would like to thank Hylke Dijkstra and the contributors to this special forum of Contemporary Security Policy as well as the audience at the International Studies Association's 59th Annual Convention in San Francisco.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Patrick A. Mello is Interim Franz Haniel Professor at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He is also a Research and Teaching Associate at the Chair of European and Global Governance at the Technical University of Munich. His research focuses on international security, foreign policy analysis, and qualitative research methods, especially fuzzy-set QCA. He is the author of Democratic participation in armed conflict (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and his articles have appeared in the European Journal of International Relations, West European Politics, the British Journal of Politics and International Relations, the Journal of International Relations and Development, and others.

Stephen M. Saideman holds the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs. His most recent books are NATO in Afghanistan: Fighting together, fighting alone (with David Auerswald) and Adapting in the dust: Lessons learned from Canada’s war in Afghanistan. He tweets at @smsaideman and blogs at saideman.blogspot.com.

ORCID

Patrick A. Mello http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0751-5109

Stephen M. Saideman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3845-3967

Notes

1. Whether learning happens in alliances and how is an important topic, but not one we address here. See Hardt (2018).

2. When Canadian Lt. General Rick Hillier commanded NATO forces in Afghanistan in 2004, he would have to ask a Canadian colonel for permission to deploy the Canadian forces (Auerswald & Saideman, 2014, p. 129).

3. Lagassé (2010) argues that parliamentary votes can be used to launder responsibility. And it is not just a Canadian dynamic (Lagassé & Mello, 2018).

4. On coalition defection, see also McInnis (2019) in this issue.