MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF 

UNITED NATIONS 

PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS 

Edited by 

WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

N,z,,-i-IQN.&L_ DEF:EiNSE UNIVERSITY 

McNa~r Paper Seventeen 
A popular Government, 

without popular information or the means of 

acquiring it, 

is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or 

perhaps both. 

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; 

And a people who mean to be their own 

Governors, 

must arm themselves with the power which 

knowledge gives. 

JAMES MADISON to W. T. BARRY 

August 4, 1822 
THE INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES 

MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF 

UNITED NATIONS 

PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS 

Edited by William H. Lewis 

NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY 

McNair Paper Seventeen 

June 1993 

For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office 

Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328 

ISBN 0-16-041972-7 
NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY [] President: Lieutenant General Paul G. Cerjan [] Vice President: Ambassador Howard K. Walker 

INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES [] Director." Stuart 

E. Johnson 

Publications Directorate [] Fort Lesley J. McNair [] Washington, D.C. 

20319-6000 [] Phone: (202) 475-1913 [] Fax: (202) 475-1012 

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Cover Design: Juan A. Medraalo 

William H. Lewis is a Professor, The Elliott School, George 

Washington University. Previously, he was a Senior Feflow, Institute 

for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. 

From time to time, INSS publishes short papers to provoke thought and inform 

discussion on issues of U.S. national security in the post-Cold War era. These 

monographs present current topics related to national security strategy and 

policy, defense resource management, international affairs, civil-military relations, military technology, and joint, combined, and coalition operations. 

Opinions, c~mclusions, and recommendations, ewressed or implied, are those 

of the attthors. They ~h~ not necessarily reflect the views of the National Defense 

University, the Departnwnt of Defense, or any other US. Govertmwnt ageru:y. 

Readers are invited to submit (nonreturnable) m,'u~uscripts for consideration for 

publication. Please submit them in WordPerfect 5.1 on 3.5 inch diskettes with one 

printout. 

Portkms of this publictuion may be quoted or reprinted without fi4rther 

permission, with credit to the Institute for National Strategic Studies, Washingt~m, D.C. A courtesy copy (f reviews and tearsheets would be appreciated. 
Contents 

INTRODUCTION 3 

Dr. William H. Lewis, George Washington University 

MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UNITED NATIONS 

PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS 7 

Ambassador Howard Walker, Vice President, NDU 

COMMAND, CONTROL AND COALITION 

OPERATIONS 9 

Richard Connaughton 

An Historical Perspective 10 

The Realtionship between Peacekeeping 

,and Peace Enforcement 11 

Command and the Commander 15 

The Essence of Decision-Making in 

Coalition Operations 18 

A Politico-Military Interface for the Future 20 

Conclusion 22 

Notes 23 

DEFINING A ROLE BEYOND PEACEKEEPING 24 

John Mackinlay 

Limitations of Peacekeeping Prototype 25 

Post Cold War Developments 28 

Problems for the Peacekeeper 30 

Second Generation Operations 32 

Obstacles to Reform 38 

COMMAND AND CONTROL ISSUES FOR THE MILITARY 

PLANNER (Discussion) 41 
CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR 

COMMANDER (Discussion) 53 

John Sewall 53 

General I.C. Douglas 54 

Colonel Bruce Osborn 58 

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Spracher 61 

Major George Steuber 67 

General Discussion 73 

THE [ JN CONTRIBUTION TO 

PEACEKEEPING 85 

The Honorable Thomas R. Pickering, 

Perm,'ment Representative to the United Nations 

US Security Interests After the Cold War 

Multilateral vs. Regional Use of Force 86 

"Legitimacy" and the Use of Force 91 

Article 43 Agreements 92 

Delegation of Enforcement 93 

Security Council Oversight of Military Action 

The UN and Coalition Forces 95 

Enhancing Preventive Diplomacy 96 

Conclusion 98 

THE MILITARY 

INTERNATIONAL 

85 

94 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF 

UNITED NATIONS 

PEACEKEEPING OPERATIONS 
PEACE-KEEPING FORCES AND OBSERVER MISSIONS 

UNPROFOR 

19~ - 

ONUCA 

19~ - 1992 

ONUSAL 

1991 - 

MINUI 

1991 - 

DOMREF 

1966 - 1986 

19~9 - 1990 

MOGIP 

IgI IIUCIflV| 

M 

66 

r i UNOSOM 

UNEF II UNEF I 1~2- 

1973 - 1979 1956- 1967 

UNGOMAP 

1988-1~0 

UNAMIC 

I~I - 1992 

UNTAC 

1992- 

UNSF 

)62 - 1963 

~IIKOM 

B1- 

DF 

.~.o.~..3 U~O.AnONS • .......... BEFORE 1988 • SINCE 1988 

APriL 19~33 
Introduction 

by 

Dr. William H. Lewis 

George Washington University 

THE ACTIONS BY THE UNITED NATIONS Security Council in the matter 

of Iraq's attempt to annex Kuwait have lead some observers to 

conclude that the United Nations is now well positioned to play 

a consequential role in the maintenance of international order. 

The coalition formed to meet Iraq's aggression included thirtyseven member states from five continents. This successful action 

represented a significant precedent for future preventive 

diplomacy and collective security actions by the world body. As 

one senior Canadian official somewhat exuberantly observed, a 

powerful message has been sent: "the United Nations, can as it 

was intended, safeguard world order and security." 

The organization had been playing a stellar role in the cause 

of peace for a number of years. Prior to the 1990-91 Gulf War, 

the United Nations had been accorded recognition for its 

contributions to peace and stability. In September 1988, the 

Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for the organization's efforts in 

the field. At the time of the award, observer forces were in 

Afghanistan and Pakistan monitoring Soviet troop withdrawals 

from Afghanistan; 350 men were on duty in the Gulf to serve as 

a buffer between Iraq and Iran in compliance with a United 

Nations cease-fire resolution; concomitantly, the SecretaryGeneral was organizing a peacekeeping unit for deployment to 

3 
4 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

Namibia, and was preparing for future involvement in conflicts 

in the Westem Sahara, Kampuchea, and Central America. 

The invasion of Kuwait by the forces of Saddam Hussein on 

August 2, 1990 was a qualitatively different situation, however. 

As President Bush noted, it represented the first major crisis to 

confront the international community in the post-Cold War 

period. The crisis would ultimately require the organization of 

massive military efforts to force the expulsion of Iraqi forces 

from Kuwait. 

Even more critically, in the wake of the war, the Security 

Council took several punitive actions against Iraq that could serve 

as precedent in dealing with future acts of aggression. Most 

notable: 

~, Creation of a special agency to monitor the destruction 

of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; 

,, Determination of the circumstances and the conditions 

under which Iraq may export its oil and related products; 

and 

Deployment of monitors to ensure htm~anitarian treatment 

by Baghdad of its Kurdish and Shiite communities. 

These were more than onerous cease-fire conditions; rather, they 

signalled the Security Council's determination to penalize the 

Iraqi regime with terms that were the political and legal 

equivalent ol the Versailles Treaty. On the other hand, the mood 

of high expectation regarding future United Nations performance 

in the cause of peace encountered in the United States was not 

widely shared by other member states. The new-found unity 

among the permanent members of the Security Council has been 

greeted with ambivalence by others, many feeling themselves 

threatened by American "hegemony" or potentially marginalized 

by the "Big Five." 

To address these developments and their implications for the 

US military, the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the 

National Defense University organized a series of conferences 

and special seminars, beginning in October 1991. The meetings 

brought together an outstanding group of senior officials, officers 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 5 

of flag rank, and national security policy specialists. The most 

recent meeting in the series-a one-day seminar convened on 

November 17, 1992-assessed problems confronted by United 

Nations military leaders as they engaged in peacekeeping 

missions. Their observations, frequently candid, provide useful 

insights regarding problems of effective command and control. 

To make the results of these meetings available to a wider 

audience, we are re-publishing the previously published 

proceedings as a McNair Paper. In this new edition, we've added 

the keynote address by Ambassador Thomas R. Picketing, then 

United States Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 

given at the opening conference held on October 9, 1991. This 

addendum is particularly valuable given the current difficult 

policy issues and choices confronting the US Govemment in the 

field of intemational peacekeeping and conflict resolution. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 7 

Military Implications of United Nations 

Peacekeeping Operations 

Ambassador Howard Walker 

Vice President, NDU 

IT IS MY GREAT PLEASURE on behalf of General Cerjan, the 

President of the University, to welcome you to this third in a 

series of workshops sponsored by the National Defense 

University's Institute for National Strategic Studies on "Future 

Security Roles of the United Nations." Since our last workshop 

on this subject in September when Ambassador and former UN 

Under Secretary, Ron Spiers, talked to us, interest in that 

subject has grown in the US, partly as a result of President 

Bush's speech at the United Nations in which he committed the 

United States to increased support for UN peacekeeping. Interest 

has grown at a time when the consequences of UN peacekeeping 

have exploded in cost and in complexity of operation. We see 

in Bosnia and Somalia today civil wars that are brutal and that 

are difficult to control. Injecting UN peacekeeping operations into 

those situations has far-reaching human and material costs. 

Equally important for us at this time in our history and for other 

countries, intervention has uncertain consequences and outcomes 

that affect the willingness of some govemments and their citizens 

to participate. That makes it all the more important that we 

understand as fully as we can the nature of peacekeeping 

operations and the consequences for the US of military 

involvement. 

We are very fortunate to have with us today to lead the 

discussion on this subject two gentlemen with impressive 

credentials. 

Mr. Richard M. Connaughton was educated at Duke of 

York's Royal Military School, at Sandhurst, and at St. John's 

College at Cambridge University where he took a Master of 

Philosophy Degree in Intemational Relations, and was also a 

Defense Fellow. He was commissioned in the Royal Armed 

Service Corps in 1961 and spent seven years in the Far East 

seconded to the Brigade of Ghurkas. He commanded squadrons 
8 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

and regiments in Germany, thereafter served as instructor at the 

British and Australian Army Command and Staff Colleges. He 

was head of the British Army's defense studies program. He 

retired as colonel two months ago and is currently working as a 

consultant in the field of national and international relations. Mr. 

Connaughton is the author of a number of publications on the 

subject of military security. 

The other panelist is Mr. John Mackinlay who is senior 

research associate at the Thomas J. Watson Institute for 

International Studies at Brown University. After finishing 

Sandhurst, he joined the army in 1964 and retired a year ago. He 

developed his interest in intemational military cooperation while 

on the staff of the commander of the Multinational Force and 

Observers in the Sinai. He was the author of The Peacekeepers, 

an assessment of peacekeeping operations at the Arab-Israeli 

interface which compares UN and non-UN peacekeeping 

operations from both military and political points of view. He is 

currently researching new guidelines for multilateral military 

operations in the post Cold-War era. This Ford Foundation 

project, which Mr. Mackinlay directs, is entitled: "Second 

Generation Multinational Forces." 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 9 

Command, Control and Coalition Operations 

Richard M. Connaughton 

MY TASK IS TO DISCUSS ASPECTS of Command, Control and Coalition 

Operations. Coalition Operations as a plausible means of 

collective security is a fact of life. Whereas responsible states are 

unlikely to declare unequivocally their eschewing of unilateral 

military action, the interplay of economic and political 

ramifications alone would indicate that multilateral military action 

will be the norm for the future. In the ending of the Cold War 

we have rediscovered tile possibility of employing military power 

as a positive instrument of foreign policy. This paper is 

deliberately directed at UN-type operations rather than at 

multilateral ad hoc arrangements. 

I have often thought that the coupling of Control to 

Command -- and here I mean it in its military sense -- implies 

a parity between the two functions. It suits my purpose today to 

contest that assumption. Command concerns the direction, 

coordination and control of military forces. Control is therefore 

but an adjunct to the function of command; it is impossible to 

command successfully without exercising control. Control is 

essentially a mechanism through which the commander, assisted 

by his staff, directs, organises and co-ordinates those forces for 

which he is responsible. I propose to concentrate this short study 

upon multilateral military command. 

The other side of the Command and Control coin is the 

political face. But here the relative importance between the two 

functions is the reverse to that seen in the military dimension. 

Political command is essentially an American phenomenon, 

therefore being a national rather than multinational consideration. 

That is not to say the exercise of national command has no 

international implications. The great grey area which warrants 

serious study is the political control of military coalition 
10 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

operations. 

Our topic has been finessed to examine military command 

and political control of coalition operations. The five parameters 

elected to form the basis for this short analysis and future 

discussion are: 

,-An Historical Perspective. 

,,The Relationship between Peacekeeping and Peace 

Enforcement. 

• Command and the Commander. 

• The Essence of Decision-Making in Coalition Operations. 

• A Politico-Military Interface for the Future. 

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE 

If we had seen the end of history, what is happening out there in 

the world today must be something of a revival. Coalition or 

Alliance warfare has been a recurring feature of past conflicts. 

Perhaps I should add that a coalition differs from an alliance 

principally in degree; the latter tends to be more formal and 

longer lasting. The great 'British' victory of 1815 over the 

French at Waterloo was achieved by Wellington with only thirtyeight percent of his force originating from the British Isles. 

In the previous century, Winston Churchill's ancestor, the 

Duke of Marlborough, rarely recruited more than a quarter of his 

army from Britain. In those days it was traditional to hire troops 

from the minor states of Europe for a campaigning season which 

fitted in between the Spring and Autumn. Successful generals 

were invariably successful diplomats as well as being politically 

astute. Marlborough was a past master in the manipulation of the 

kings and princes of Europe as well as controlling and 

commanding his representative foreign generals. It was no easy 

task, requiring exhaustive diplomacy. In the close season, he 

worked with the political committees in London to ensure that he 

would want for nothing when the improving weather presaged the 

resumption of hostilities. As ever, good quality intelligence was 

a primary consideration. Marlborough had succeeded in 

obtaining the services of a spy within Louis XIV's inner circle -- 

le Conseil d'en Haute, an all-informed group of no more than a 

dozen of France's most influential courtiers and diplomats. The 

existence of the Versailles mole is a reminder to us of the 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 11 

importance of so-called human intelligence and that inadequacies 

here will undermine the effectiveness of the military operation. 

The problem is that generals of Marlborough's quality only 

appear once or twice in a century. What we must studiously 

avoid is the recommendation and putting in place of a structure 

which only a Marlborough can make work. 

So we can tick off a number of enduring prerequisites, as 

important today as they were then. Pedmps what we should be 

asking ourselves is, what weight should we attach to historical 

example'? We have to understand that history does not really 

repeat itself. There will be similarities between events, but those 

will be balanced by dissimilarities. It is too simplistic to assert 

that coalitions are not new, without pausing to acknowledge that 

the circumstances in which they took place in the past were 

invariably different from today. A state of war would usually 

have existed, there were probably agreed missions, agreed 

preliminary plans, a known enemy and specified objectives. 

What history does is to provide us with the challenge of 

achieving as many of the above objectives as possible through 

abstract peacetime planning. 

There is an important role for historians to play in the 

decision-making process. The aforementioned revival of history 

will serve to emphasize that ethnic, religious and national groups' 

behavior will often have a rationale rooted deep in their past. 

History is an arrow in the quiver of appraisal. One part of that 

balanced appraisal is to divorce ourselves from our western 

preconceptions, to step into the shoes of those whom we need to 

comprehend, and to observe the world from where they stand. 

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PEACEKEEPING 

AND PEACE ENFORCEMENT 

Normally, a few definitions would be in order, but I fear that this 

is an area notoriously difficult to define. In his paper Agenda for 

Peace, the UN Secretary-General, Dr. Boutros-Ghali made a rare 

attempt, for one within the UN, to define peacekeeping and its 

associated activities. Unfortunately, the result has been to further 

cloud the issue. So much so, for exoanple, that the term 

'peacemaking' has been rendered so ambiguous that it is 
12 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

recommended that its use be discontinued. To be fair, many of 

today's UN peace-inspired operations are resisting template 

categorization and this is a trend which will continue to be a 

feature of the future. The safest pity is to adopt a functional 

approach to the peace-associated business. 

The first function is Peace Enforcement, or Military 

Intervention. The victorious allies who had crafted and unveiled 

the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 had made a conscious 

effort in Chapter VII of the Charter to address the principal 

weakness of the Covenant of the League of Nations--the absence 

of an enforcement mechanism with which to defeat aggression. 

However, their subsequent conduct emphasized the point that 

these had been nations united in war against a common enemy. 

With the enemy defeated, there was no longer a bonding agent. 

Competing ideologies developed, and east and west went their 

separate ways. With them went the prospect of achieving a 

collective enforcement regime, frozen out by the Cold War. 

Instead, and over a period of time, there emerged something 

not provided for within the Charter and our second function, 

traditional peacekeeping. The fundamental difference between 

the enforcement/intervention and peacekeeping functions has been 

described by Alan James: 

Yet when compared with military intervention, there is a distinction 

between the two (which) was seen to lie in their attitudes towards 

the ,associated issues of force and consent, collective security 

relying, ultimately on the mandatory use of force, while 

peacekeeping eschewed force, except in self-defense, and required 

the consent of the host state for the admission of UN personnel. 

For convenience, peacekeeping settled comfortably under the 

umbrella of Chapter VI of the UN Charier, The Pacific 

Settlement of Disputes. Peacekeeping developed into the field of 

specialism of what tended to be the smaller and non-aligned 

states. 

Strangely, only in the Congo, 1961-63, has the understanding 

that weapons are to be used purely in self-defense been 

comprehensively prejudiced. However, we are undoubtedly 

moving towards an uncertain, more violent future where the 

lightly trained but willing conscript will prove unequal to the 

task. We have the evidence of the limitations of conscripts from 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 13 

conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Recently, the Finnish 

commander at UNIFIL, General Haggltind, stressed that the 

concept of enforcing peace should not be opposed: 

...it simply requires different forces ,and a completely different 

concept. An intention to deter ,and enforce require forces 

which ,are as frightening as possible. For this kind of mission 

great-power battalions, professional soldiers and all the means 

at their disposal ,are preferable. 

The combatants in the target country will frankly not be 

impressed by the security guarantees offered by those whom they 

consider to be militarily inferior. This is not to say that 

traditional peacekeeping should not continue where it can 

function. New problems demand new solutions. One new 

solution is the concept of preventive deployment. Here, the use 

of force, if necessary, is implicit. This is therefore our third 

function, what I will describe as aggravated peacekeeping, lying 

somewhere between Chapters VI and VII and what Dag 

Harnmarskjold appropriately described as Chapter VI1⁄2. 

The European coalition operation in Bosnia is not 

intervention, nor what is accepted as traditional peacekeeping. It 

is a new category of humanitarian activity mounted with, in 

theory, the permission of the parties involved. The force's 

response to aimed fire will be less passive than what has 

prevailed in the past. It is for this reason that it has the potential 

to fall within the ambit of Chapter VI1⁄2. 

What the Yugoslavia crisis has done has been to beg serious 

questions of the modus operandi, and to expose a number of the 

negative aspects of the UN. The Organization has found itself 

overstretched ,and, in the case of Bosnia, unable to mount a major 

military operation. The procedure whereby headquarters and 

forces are assembled on the principle of equitability, geographical 

distribution and providing for the employment of up to one-third 

women, has clearly been found wanting. But, in the past, the UN 

has got by, its skimpy military staff relying upon the ad hoc hot 

plan, supported by what Sir Brian Urquhart has described as a 

cobbled together 'Sheriff's Posse.' 

Major military players will expect as a minimum for their 

own troops, the presence of a robust, coherent and practised 
14 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

centre core headquarters. Chapter VI1⁄2 and Chapter VII-scale 

operations cannot be commanded or controlled without a proper 

military structure. Since the European Community is paying the 

Bosnian UNPROFOR 2 'peacekeeping' bill, they have their way, 

but soon the strained civil-military relationship within the UN 

will have to be addressed. 

In the first 40 years of file UN's life, it undertook 13 

peacekeeping operations. In the four years from 1988, it has 

equalled that total. It is not simply the evaporation of ideological 

sparring which has prompted the exponential increase in UN 

peacekeeping activity. It is also a reflection of changing 

international attitudes. For example, it was a sovereign right that 

states were free to act as they chose within the confines of their 

own borders. When opprobrious behaviour was challenged by 

other states, Article 2(7) of the UN Charter was employed as the 

authority to continue to behave badly. The effectiveness of 

Article 2(7) first began to erode in relation to South Africa in the 

1960s. That it has lost much of its psychotic sanctity was 

apparent in 1991 when 20,000 NATO troops were deployed into 

northern Iraq without Iraq's consent and without significant 

protest from world opinion. It would seem that if care is taken 

in the presentation of cases for legitimate military intervention -- 

they will invariably be in support of regional actors -- then it 

need not be seen within the UN's General Assembly as a colonial 

imposition. It is unfortunate that there does appear to be a 

continuing need to remind the major actor that the authority for 

military action has its source of origin in New York and not in 

Washington. 

Underslandably, the increase in both UN commitments and 

the nature of some of those colnnlitinents will be reflected in a 

greater demand for professional forces, particularly iogisticians. 

Those forces will be called upon to intervene in the conventional 

fighting which is a feature of inter-state conflict and the 'brutal, 

ethnic, religious, social, cultural or linguistic strife' described by 

Dr. Boutros-Ghali as the unconventional features apparent in 

intra-state conflict. There will be difficulties in presentation, and 

reserves of diplomacy will be taxed, but if the old order of states 

is to be employed to face the new order's disorder, then it 

requires headroom within the UN for essential contingency 

planning. We should set aside our unreasonable sensitivity in 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 15 

involving the Military Staff Committee in the planning process 

and follow the lead taken by the Westem European Union. 

Diplomacy has to release more responsibility and authority to the 

military. The fact of the matter is that, while soldiers can be 

diplomats, diplomats cannot be soldiers. 

COMMAND AND THE COMMANDER 

Command of a coalition operation will be vested in the 

nominated commander from either a framework state or security 

organization. The framework state will often be the major 

investor in the enterprise, the state normally providing the largest 

national military contribution, a large proportion of the 

infrastructure support, and a significant percentage of the 

operation's costs. I have in mind here a deployed US Unified 

Command and, for convenience, will describe this as the Unified 

Command Model. There is some attraction in relating the United 

States to this model, but these models are by nature general 

rather than specific. We should not assume either that the USA 

will always be the dominant player or that the USA template is 

entirely appropriate to other framework states. 

The military commander is the key ingredient in the working 

of an effective coalition. The award of high command czumot be 

tempered by charity, by the concept of Buggins's turn, for every 

headquarters with the remotest prospect of leading an 

intemational military operation requires at the apex of its pyramid 

the right man at the right time. If coalitions are to survive 

internal and extemal political/military pressure and tensions, the 

hope will be that they are of short duration. In the world wars 

there was time to test the many generals who had risen to 

command positions as peacetime trainers and administrators. 

Those who did not succeed were removed. Coalitions will not 

enjoy this validatory period. Moreover, there are practical 

difficulties in having a general removed who is not one of your 

own nationals, so it is more than likely that the military 

commander who embarks upon the operation will, for better or 

for worse, be there at the end. 

It seems that the modem coalition commander requires a 

minimum of four basic qualities; he has to be adept in the skills 
16 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

of operational decision-making, the science of management, the 

art of leadership, and to possess the gift of intellect. These 

qualities are of course a pemmtation of attributes which go back 

in history. 'Management' is akin to control and it can be taken 

to mean control, but there is a subtle difference which can be 

illustrated with reference to the question of media relations. The 

commander, through his stall will manage those members of the 

press corps amenable to such management, and will control those 

who are not. But the one quality of the moment is that of 

intellect. It is today's prerequisite. Its absence will filter out 

those who in the past would have climbed the ladder of success 

through undoubted qualities of confidence, charisma and natural 

leadership. If a future coalition commander lacks intellect, he 

will be unable to hold his own in a highly charged political and 

diplomatic environment, his essential media image will be 

impaired and he is unlikely to be able to comprehend the abiding 

human aspects in dealing with and tasking with equanimity a 

multiplicity of national representatives - all with their own 

national, political points to score and careers to enhance. And all 

this before we consider the enemy! 

Effective command can best be achieved through a formed 

headquarters with a proven track record. The nominated 

commander's own joint staff are practised in playing a full part 

in the success, or failure, of their commander's plans. They are 

a team which it is difficult to conceive can be improved by the 

introduction within the core of additional, token, representative 

staff officers. I am not referring here to liaison officers. Liaison 

officers should, as a matter of routine, already be in place in any 

headquarters liable to be earmarked to command coalition 

operations. The commander and his staff have the benefit of 

knowing one another, their strengths and weaknesses, and should 

have developed an effective working relationship. One 

instinctively senses when the atmosphere in a headquarters is 

right, aware that internal and external pressures will be addressed 

with quiet confidence and that the staff's entire energy is 

dedicated to the support of their commander. All this is, of 

course, to talk of the ideal. Compromise will be the rule rather 

than the exception. 

If, therefore, I am suggesting that the commander and his 

own Joint Headquarters Staff, or what we shall call the Combined 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 17 

Task Force Headquarters (CTFHQ), are an indivisible entity, 

what should be the relationship between the commander and the 

subordinate, national military representatives (MILREPS)? The 

analogy I shall use in illustrating the Unified Command Model 

is that of a galaxy of national, non-operational headquarters 

whose relative position to CTFHQ is indicative of their 

importance to the operation. In support of the framework state 

will be a secondary state. The relationship between the 

framework state and the secondary state will be determined by a 

number of factors which can be collectively described as 

'empathy.' The function of the secondary state is no sinecure. 

It is essentially the coalition's Union representative, the one voice 

and opinion the Commander must find the time to consider. 

Above all, the commander of the secondary state's forces must 

ensure that the relationship between the framework state and the 

other supporting states remains that of allies, not as a grouping 

of auxilim-ies. The secondary state's national headquarters in our 

hypothetical galaxy is the closest to the core headquarters. 

Indeed, in the Gulf, the British MILREP was invited into General 

Schwarzkopf's CTFHQ. 

Time marches on, but I think it useful to put down a number 

of bullets to describe the command relationship between CTFHQ 

and the national staffs: 

t, CTFHQ and national staffs remain rigorously distinct. 

t, The commander is advised to conduct separate, bilateral 

discussions on specific issues with his constellation of 

national commanders. It is most important that the national 

commanders do have the opportunity to reinforce what they 

feel their capitals want, as well as convey their own personal 

thoughts. If the commander consults his allies individually 

rather than en masse (time permitting), he avoids competition 

for his ears, he can detect problems, nervousness, ,and sense 

political complications. What has to be studiously avoided 

during this dialogue is the generation of a sense of 

favouritism, suspicion and conspiracy. When the round is 

complete, the commander directs his staff to design what is 

in effect a collaborated plan which is then presented by the 
18 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

CTFHQ staff to the assembled national commanders. The 

commander, therefore, has the benefit of knowing the 

answers to questions which might arise and is also conscious 

that he is not presenting proposals which are unacceptable to 

the national commanders. 

t, There are advantages in the subordinate Joint Task Force 

Headquarters (JTFHQ) being formed and commanded by 

representatives of the framework state. It is self-evident that 

the framework state should also be responsible for the tools 

of command -- e.g., communications. 

There is a further model which I shall describe as the NATO 

Model. This model refers to an existing intemational 

headquarters, but one with its won integral, political, regulatory 

council. An obvious example is the Allied Command Europe 

Rapid Reaction Corps (ACERRC). The headquarters sent into 

Bosnia to command British, Canadian, Spanish and French 

battalion groups on Operation UNPROFOR II is a subordinate, 

debaptised NATO headquarters. The variation on the theme is 

obviously necessary due to French participation, particularly the 

nomination of Major General Phillipe Morillon to command the 

force. 

I am not proposing an embryonic UN Headquarters Model 

because I feel it would be unworkable in practice. It is not so 

much the beguiling influence of the UN's composition rules but 

rather the reality that, on occasions, constituent members would 

be debarred from participating due to a conflict of national 

interest. Crises will never be the same. The solution may well 

lie in a menu of on-call, formed national or international 

headquarters, called forward Io command the operation based 

upon that headquarter's suitability. 

THE ESSENCE OF DECISION-MAKING 

IN COALITION OPERATIONS 

I shall not dwell on this subject, but it does require discussion in 

order to construct a foundation for the finale. 

It is crises which spawn coalitions. Coalitions will rarely be 

formed entirely from one of the myriad, regional, collective 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 19 

security organisations. There are two principal, positive I reasons 

for states to throw their hat into the coalition ring. Either the 

crisis impinges upon a vital national interest, or the state sees it 

as its international responsibility to act. Coalitions can only be 

held together when there is unity of purpose, an unequivocal aim, 

and an agreed mission statement. A flaw was apparent in the 

decision-making process during Operation Provide Comfort, alias 

Haven, a 1991 humanitarian operation aimed at providing relief 

to Iraq's Kurds. In this case, the responsible UnifiedCommand 

was US EUCOM, supported by contingents made available from 

other states. EUCOM, however, had a national mission: 

Combined Task Force Provide Comfort conducts multinational 

humanitarian operations to provide relief to displaced Iraqi civilians 

until International Relief arrives. 

Indeed, EUCOM's commander, General Shalikashvili, was the 

Command's deputy who, despite commanding an intemational 

operation, received his orders from his national headquarters. In 

the House of Commons, Prime Minister John Major emphasised 

that without suitable assurances on the safety of Iraq's Kurds, 

British troops would not be withdrawn. It was not operationally 

possible for British troops to remain in Northem Iraq without the 

support of American forces. However, there was a crucial 

disparity between General Shalikashivili's mission statement and 

the conditions John Major deemed to be necessary before British 

forces were to be withdrawn: 

...firstly, ,an effective UN force on the ground; secondly, clear 

warnings to Iraq that any renewed repression will meet the 

severest response; thirdly, a continuing deterrent military 

presence in the region to back up those warnings, ,and the 

maintenance of sanctions against Iraq. Without those we will 

not leave. 

But the American Supreme Commander, his mission statement 

having been satisfied, had begun the initial, partial withdrawal 

from Northem Iraq. The timing was unfortunate because it 

served to undermine the Kurdish leaders' negotiating position 

with Iraq. The point is obvious. The decision-making process 
20 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

is influenced by domestic and external factors which have to be 

collaborated into coalition aims and mission statements. The 

success of future coalition operations should not be dependent 

upon ministers communicating informally with their coalition 

partners on an ad hoc, one-to-one basis. We are ill danger of 

being lulled into a false sense of security. Coalitions will not 

always be as straightforward as those seen in the Gulf and in 

Northern Iraq. In both cases, the adequate though loose 

command and control relationships were not severely tested. 

A POLITICO-MILITARY INTERFACE 

FOR THE FUTURE 

It appears to be an acceptable practice to excuse discordance 

within a coalition as the inevitable manifestation of political 

decisions being made at different times in different places. If 

such a state of affairs is not addressed, then Unified Command 

Model Operations are destined to continue in the manner of the 

worst case UN federal peacekeeping operation. We shall 

continue to observe national defense ministers with 'hands on' 

aspiration, directing their own national formations, sometimes 

unbeknown to the commanders] We shall see rank inflation 

whereby the seniority of the senior representative of national 

teams exceeds what is justified. Such is the perfidy of national 

maneuvering in anticipation of achieving an unjustified position 

closer to or at the coalition high table. There can be little 

argument that there has to be a structure through which 

collaborated and singular, political control can be exercised. 

Foreign political leaders are reassured when they can see that 

adequate political control has been imposed upon a commander 

who is not of their nationality. In addition, the apparent 

collectivisation of the decision-making process has presentational 

advantages. The resultant military action is identified not with 

the administration organisation o~: collective defense agreement 

which mandates the essential authority to the military coalition. 

The singular line of political direction to the coalition 

commander will represent a distillation of the views of the 

national representatives within the coalition. If we adopt a 

NATO-style organization and apply its principles to such ad hoc 

coalitions which emerge in the future then, in theory at least, the 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 21 

politicians will have a forum from which to exert control, leaving 

the conunander free to command, unshackled from past, petty, 

political distractions. Constituent coalition members will be 

represented at ambassadorial level, convened centrally yet at 

some distance from the conflict. 

The line diagram would look something like this: 

• C ~ in Coalition Operations 

Nitimml Ctmm~ of CTFflQ M]LREPS Formatlo~ 

+ 

The line between the Council of Ambassadors to CTFHQ is 

not a one-way street. It is naive to believe that national capitals 

and coalition Ambassadors will not talk to their MILREP; indeed, 

for national decision-making as well as for routine and 

administrative matters such dialogue is essential. There may be 

reason and opportunity to collocate MILREPS with the Council 

of Ambassadors. The function of MILREP is firstly, to represent 

the national military interest, exercising the veto if required and, 

secondly, to maintain the Force in the Theatre including medical 

and personnel matters, national logistics and public relations. 

Operational discussions, however, must go through the chain of 

command. Similarly, national units within formations will wish 

to talk to their MILREPs, but this is not the route for operational 

decision-making. There must obviously be concern that the 

proposed Council might fail to reach agreement due to a conflict 

of national interests. However, the implications of political 

prevarication are such that the absence of a working structure 

such as the one described here, might result in the failure of the 

coalition's military mission. 
22 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

CONCLUSION 

We have an unusual situation whereby we have been discussing 

what is for us a new ball game, yet one for which we have not 

compiled the rules. We have barely acknowledged the necessity 

for purple planning before new horizons of political awareness 

and diplomatic liaison are demanding attention. Sooner, rather 

than later, most here will be drawn into the planning process, 

execution or conflict termination of UN or UN-mandated 

collective security initiatives. Coalitions involve compromise and 

a willingness to concede on issues of national sovereignty. When 

allied intransigence is at its most frustrating, it is as well to 

remember that we too are someone else's ally. 

What is inescapable is the momentum driving the associated 

study of peace-associated military operations. It is all very well 

pointing to the somewhat obvious need for UN reform. The 

challenge lies in the formulation of acceptable procedures for the 

command and control of a new generation of peacekeeping and 

peace enforcement operations. What is more, procedures have to 

be practised. Politicians require to be persuaded of the need to 

raise the political profile, to play their part in coalition crisis 

management exercises, to acquaint themselves with options and 

likely areas where decisions will ultimately have to be made. 

What price WINTEX '94? 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 23 

NOTES 

1. Joining a coalition can also be for negative reasons, such as attempting to 

stop one coalition member dominating the operation, or preventing one set of 

outcomes. 

2. National interference behind commanders' backs comes in a number of 

guises. It is useful to distinguish between micro-management during military 

operations (such as Carter in Tehran rescue bid) as distinct from political 

control over the identification of strategic objectives and interference as a 

consequence of domestic, public opinion regarding either methods used or 

casualties inflicted or received. 
24 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

Defining A Role Beyond Peacekeeping 

John Mackinlay 

AFTER THE COMPARATIVE STABILITY of the Cold War, violence 

is spreading contagiously through Yugoslavia ,and the multiethnic states of the former Soviet Union. Rural and urban 

communities have been tom apart by factional conflict and interethnic hatred, unleashing all the misery of massive population 

displacement and its long term destabilizing effects. 

Political disarray at NATO prevented an effective response 

by the European nations and negative memories of the Soviet 

empire inhibited a wider involvement by Russian forces. 

Although the UN has to some extent been able to overcome the 

political obstacles to an international response, it failed to 

organize an effective multinational force which had the military 

capabilities needed to police fragile agreements on the ground 

and protect isolated minorities from the brutalities of local 

factions. A similar lack of military effectiveness diminishes 

chances of a successful outcome in Cambodia and Somalia. UN 

planning staff in New York have once again applied the ad hoc 

procedures used to assemble a peacekeeping force to situations 

which demand a much more sophisticated approach. Although 

"peacekeeping" relies on pre-conditions which are notably absent 

in these contingencies, in each case UN troops arrived piecemeal, 

in the planning expectation of a best case scenario. 

This paper argues that the concept of peacekeeping as a 

multipurpose conflict resolution device is already overextended 

and cannot be adapted any further to meet the dynamic 

contingencies of the future. In reality the UN peacekeepers have, 

with mixed results, already crossed the threshold of traditional 

peacekeeping operations into a new range of second generation 

tasks. It is now time to spell out these tasks with greater 

definition and develop an internationally agreed doctrine to 

replace the ad hoc methods of the Cold War pcriod. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 25 

LIMITATIONS OF THE PEACEKEEPING PROTOTYPE 

United Nations peacekeeping developed as an instrument of a 

deeply divided Security Council during the Cold War. As a 

result there were important constraints in its application. The 

term "Peacekeeping" has no internationally authorized definition, 

not only because it does not appear in the UN Charter, but also 

because it has taken different forms to meet a number of different 

crises. It has also been misapplied outside the UN context to 

describe non UN multinational and unilateral interventions as 

well as UN operations which do not have any of the accepted 

characteristics of peacekeeping. 

The UN refers to peacekeeping as "an operation involving 

military personnel, but without enforcement powers, undertaken 

by the United Nations to help maintain or restore international 

peace and security in areas of conflict." Under-Secretary-General 

for Peacekeeping Operations, Marrack Gouiding, developed this 

definition: 

United Nation field operations in which international personnel, 

civilian and/or military, are deployed with the consent of the parties 

and under United Nations command to help control and resolve 

actual or potential international conflicts or internal conflicts which 

have a clear international dimension. 

This definition and its related military concept of operations have 

been widely accepted among the major UN contingent 

contributing countries to describe the constrained, mainly 

interpositional, peacekeeping forces which were deployed during 

the period of the Cold War. 

The principles of interpositional peacekeeping are derived 

from the regulations for the Second United Nations Emergency 

Force (UNEF 2) deployed to the Suez in the wake of the 1973 

Arab-Israeli war. They were the product of previous UN 

experience and became the model for operations that followed. 

They gave guidance on: 

t, the need for support by the mandating authority, the 

Security Council; 

t, the requirement that the operation be deployed only with 

the consent of the warring parties; 
26 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

t, the command and control of the Force by the UN; 

t, the composition of the Force; the restriction that force be 

used only in self-defense; and 

~, the need for complete impartiality. 

At all times, the Force had to have the full confidence and 

backing of the Security Council. In practice, this was not always 

forthcoming. A divided Security Council resulted in mandates 

which were sometimes based on a minimal area of common 

agreement, Often, following the deployment of a peacekeeping 

operation, no further adjustments could be made to the mandate 

and this reduced its effectiveness and credibility in the field and 

gave the appearance of weakness. Mandates tended to be 

restrictive in scope and sometimes vaguely expressed to avoid 

disagreement among the permanent members. As a result the 

peacekeepers' operational flexibility was reduced which limited 

their ability to adapt their role to the needs of a changing 

situation..Although the mutually agreed disinterest of the Security 

Council in the day to day conduct of operations gave 

peacekeepers impartiality in the Cold War scenario, it also 

removed from them the operational sophistication needed to meet 

changing situations with an effective military presence in the 

field. 

UN peacekeeping forces tended to operate only with the full 

cooperation of the parties concerned. Peacekeepers did not have 

the military means to enforce a mandate from the Security 

Council. The consent and cooperation of the interested parties 

was therefore essential for success. This meant that a Force 

could only be deployed once the conflict began to stalemate or 

stabilize and a political will prevailed between the parties to seek 

an altemative to violence. Peacekeepers could not operate 

successfully until these conditions were met, particularly in the 

buffer zones where they supervised a strip of 'no-marts land,' 

which prior to their arrival was the site of an intense conflict 

between opposing, but easily identifiable, conventional forces. 

According to the Secretary General's report (3) the "Force 

would be under the command of the United Nations, vested in 

the Secretary-General, under the authority of the Security 

Council. The command in the field would be exercised by a 

Force Commander appointed by the Secretary-General with the 

Council's consent. The Commander would be responsible to the 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 27 

Secretary-General. The Secretary-General would keep the 

Security Council fully informed of developments relating to the 

functioning of the Force. All matters which could affect the 

nature or the continued effectiveness of the Force would be 

referred to the Council for its decision." This principle of 

COilnnand has largely remained intact. 

The "Force would be composed of a number of contingents 

to be provided by selected countries, upon the request of the 

Secretary-General. The contingents would be selected in 

consultation with the Security Council and with the parties 

concerned, bearing in mind the accepted principle of equitable 

geographic representation." By tacit agreement this excluded 

permanent members of the Security Council from participating in 

peacekeeping operations, although there have been exceptions. 

Consequently, peacekeepers were drawn from middle level or 

small powers, some with only a limited military capability. The 

constrained and reactive tasks of peacekeeping did not demand 

more than this. In principle nations with small undeveloped 

military forces could, without threatening the parties involved, 

provide infantry units while nations with more sophisticated 

military powers provide the support units. 

Peacekeepers would not use force except in self-defense. 

Self-defense would include resistance to attempts by forceful 

means to prevent it from discharging its duties under the Security 

Council's mandate. The definition of a defensive weapon was 

not explained which has left the choice open to manifold 

interpretations on a case by case basis. The rules of engagement 

also tended to vary from force to force and in some forces, 

particularly in the early phase of deployment, varied between 

contingents. But the significant factor is the constant assumption 

that the parties to the conflict would comply with the Council's 

decisions, which allowed UN military planners to assume a best 

case scenario at the outset of every operation. Once deployed, 

the UN peacekeepers tended to report on, but not intervene in, 

violent incidents or violations of peace agreements. Escalating 

the response beyond the use of force in self-defence was regarded 

as enforcement. Without the power or authority to take problemsolving action, except at a very local level, peacekeepers had to 

rely more on their symbolic intemational presence and the moral 
28 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

pressures arising from the disapproval of the intemational 

community. 

In view of these limitations there was never much pressure 

on the UN planning staff to develop the capability to deploy or 

conduct an effective military operation. It is even possible that 

the largely civilian staff in the UN's Field Operations and 

External Support Activities Office did not appreciate what 

additional military planning skills were needed to meet a less 

than best case scenario. Although Force Commanders and 

individual staff officers published critical accounts of planning 

failures, particularly in the initial phases of deployment, there 

was no institutional process to capture these lessons and the same 

problems and mistakes occurred again at the initial phase of new 

forces. The sU'ongest reason not to improve the system was the 

feeling in New York that, notwithstanding their short term 

discomforts and lack of effectiveness, the UN military presence 

was marginal to the success of the process. 

POST COLD WAR DEVELOPMENTS 

The end of the Cold War removed some of the political tensions 

in the UN that had limited the scope and application of 

peacekeeping. No longer subject to superpower confrontation 

and competition, the Security Council became increasingly 

effective with an enhanced ability to negotiate peace agreements 

in longstanding conflict zones. Peace forces were deployed with 

more explicit and firmly stated mandates than in the past. 

Changes also occurred in the longstanding indifference of the 

Security Council nations. The United States began to consider 

peacekeeping as a policy option, and has already taken steps in 

the Pentagon to plan for future involvement. The Soviet Union 

reversed its former cautious attitude which had inhibited the 

scope and conduct of some operations and earmarked armed 

forces for intemational peacekeeping roles. Both of these 

national shifts have opened the prospect of direct great power 

involvement in UN multinational forces. 

But as the UN Security Council developed its sense of 

governance and began to address more challenging threats to 

security, the change from a bi-polar to a multi-polar global 

structure generated a new range of conflict. Problems that had 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 29 

been artificially stabilized in the bi-polar world were now 

exacerbated by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition to 

regional conflict, multi-ethnic states began to disintegrate and 

intemal rather than inter-state conflicts proliferated. 

Humanitarian emergencies worsened and fragile governments 

emerged to fill the vacuum created by superpower withdrawals. 

The range of UN tasks had, de facto, been extended beyond the 

recognized limitations of "peacekeeping." In addition to the 

traditional roles of conventional observer missions and 

peacekeeping, UN forces were now involved ill operations where 

the best case scenario could no longer be relied on: supervising 

cease-fires between irregular forces, assisting in the maintenance 

of law and order, protecting the delivery of humanitarian 

assistance, the denial of an air space and the guarantee of rights 

of passage. In many of these operations local factions would 

continue to resist the presence of UN troops in defiance of 

agreements made on their behalf in the distant environment of 

Geneva, Paris and London. 

This surge in demand exhausted the capacity of the middle 

nations which habitually provided contingents, which included: 

Australia, Austria, Canada, Ireland, the Nordic countries, Poland 

and Fiji. Not only was there now a need to expand the pool of 

peacekeepers to include armies with more sophisticated assets, 

but also moral reasons why it was no longer acceptable for the 

major military powers to stand back and allow a group of smaller 

nations pay the price, in casualties as well as national resources, 

for their longstanding involvement in what should have been an 

intemational effort/ 

Prior to the Gulf War, peace negotiating successes in the UN 

were already beginning to outstrip the willingness of members, 

and the capacity of the small secretariat staff, to provide and 

organize adequate multinational forces to supervise these new and 

complex agreements. Within the UN, member nations insisted on 

a ponderous system of authorization and funding that encumbered 

the launching of UN peace forces, to an extent that in some cases 

only leading elements could be made available at the critical 

early stages of a ceasefire/ 

The widening gap between the UN's growing list of 

negotiated agreements and its ability to underwrite them with 
30 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

effective forces was revealed during the early stages of the Gulf 

confrontation. Although the UN had become the focal point at 

which the international community coalesced its support for some 

form of effective military action against Iraq. It soon became 

clear that there was no way in which the Security Council could 

direct or the UN Secretariat conduct a dynamic military campaign 

on the scale required. The collective membership, in some cases 

under pressure from the United States, had set aside their national 

and domestic interests to authorize the use of collective force 

under Security Council Resolution 678, but the coalition of forces 

that fomled never seriously considered the idea of submitting 

themselves to a UN command. Whether or not this reluctance 

stemmed from a desire to impose a pax americana in the Gulf is 

outside the scope of this argument. The bare facts were that no 

vestiges of a command organization, not even a map room, 

existed in the UN which could direct the operations of an 

effective military force. Since the outset of the Cold War the UN 

had abandoned the development of any machinery to execute the 

enforcement measures of Chapter VII, and after years of neglect 

any residual military staff capability, as opposed to the 

organization of peacekeeping events, had long since turned to 

dust. Although "peacekeeping" forces continued to deploy to 

Namibia, Cambodia, Somalia and Croatia under the same 

planning assumplions as before, in reality there was now a much 

greater need for them to be militarily effective. 

PROBLEMS FOR THE PEACEKEEPER 

The absence of an effective response-doctrine for these new 

contingencies encouraged a new vocabulary, "peace-doing" 

epithets and buzzwords. These concealed a lack of any logically 

developed concept of military operations which could be 

appropriate to file rapidly changing situation. Words like "peacemaking" and "peace-enforcement," used freely without any 

underlying doctrinal agreement as to what they meant, have 

developed opposite meanings in Brussels and in New York. 

Blurred by overexposure, the word "peacekeeping" had lost its 

former definition. In addition to its institutionally accepted 

meaning, it was now being used loosely to describe military 

activities which lay beyond its strictly defined UN parameters. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 31 

Hard and fast principles of consent were crumbling as new 

operations deployed to countries where a UN presence was 

evidently not universally accepted: to Croatia and Bosnia where 

armed local opposition from all parties resisted UN attempts to 

protect threatened communities, and to Cambodia where the 

armed forces of the Khmer Rouge refused to submit themselves 

to the cantonment processes of the Paris Agreement. In addition, 

greater use was being made of existing alliances. In May 1991, 

a Security Council authorized multinational force (Operation Safe 

Haven) flew into Northern Iraq against the wishes of Baghdad to 

assist ,and protect relief deliveries to the Kurds. In fall 1992, the 

Security Council authorized operations to deny the use of 

airspace by the Iraqis over Southern Iraq and in another 

resolution by the Bosnian Serbs around Sarajevo. 

In June 1992, the UN Secretary-General issued a report 

entitled the "Agenda for Peace" outlining proposals for 

strengthening UN peace mechanisms. These included preventive 

measures, as well as a return to the original theme of the UN 

Charter in wlfich agreements were negotiated that provided for 

armed forces to be available "on stand-by" for enforcement 

actions. In the short term the creation of "peace enforcement 

units" would allow the UN to respond to challenges beyond 

peacekeeping. The "Agenda for Peace" was the first step towards 

the development of a UN operational capability that could meet 

a second generation of new tasks. To be capable of exercising 

a wide range of military responses as situations escalate and 

deescalate, future operations would require the assets of major 

powers to enable a more a sophisticated range of response. 

These could be subordinated to an integrated command system. 

On the ground at the violent interface these separate strands 

of development tended to place the peacekeeper (or more 

accurately the UN soldier) in a much more exposed position. He 

was still being deployed under the same ad hoc military staff 

procedures in which essential operational decisions were left to 

contingent level interpretation and the slow arrival or complete 

absence of logistic support in some theaters (for example initially 

in Somalia) prevented the establishment of an effective military 

presence. In the best case scenario it did not matter much, now 

it did. 
32 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

The concept of peacekeeping in the widely accepted but rigid 

form of the traditional prototype cannot be adapted any further. 

An emerging era of multipolar international restructuring has 

brought with it a new range of operational tasks for the UN. 

These are no longer predicated on the logic of universal consent, 

and cannot safely assume the traditional scenario of an 

uncontested UN presence. They constitute a second generation 

of UN activities. 

Second generation operations are already a fact of life. They 

fall between the techniques of peacekeepers and observers, and 

enforcement. The term "Second Generation" operations refers to 

a growing range of contingencies, sometimes incorrectly 

I, " 13"" described as peacekeepm~, in which UN forces face an 

expanded range of tasks. These are distinct from peacekeeping 

because UN forces involved do not necessarily enjoy the support 

of all the parties involved locally and consequently will have to 

take much more rigorous steps to achieve a standard of military 

effectiveness that ensures their personnel safety and achieves the 

conditions required in the mandate. In some second generation 

tasks, authorized under m~ e~fforcement mandate, heavy weapons 

system including armored vehicles, combat aircraft and warships 

may be deployed. 

SECOND GENERATION OPERATIONS 

The rapidity of these developments has opened a doctrinal gap 

which is not covered by an international agreement. There is a 

procedural vacuum on how to translate the bare statements of a 

second generation mandate into a workable operational plan on 

the ground. In the Watson Institute project on Second Generation 

Multinational Operations we have found a growing consensus 

among NATO and national defense staff that the generic category 

of UN operations can now be more accurately sub-divided into 

nine distinct tasks. These can be explained in the form of a 

continuum starting with Observer Missions and Peacekeeping and 

escalating to Sanctions and High Intensity Operations. Below 

they have been arranged in three levels. 

t, Level One (Monitors and Supervision) comprises file welldefined tasks of observer missions and peacekeeping forces. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 33 

t, Level Two (Reinforced Military Presence)describes five 

categories of operation which usually occur in conflict 

between communities within a state, rather than between 

states. Although UN multinational forces will be stronger 

and more effective, they will continue to operate under strict 

limitations of using the minimum amount of force required 

to achieve the immediate objective. This level is 

distinguished from Level One by the higher requirementor 

militarily effective contingents and the presence of some 

heavier weapon systems in the UN force. 

~, Level Three operations (Military Intervention) refer to 

enforcement operations where UN military forces with a 

substantial heavy weapons capability are used to redress a 

major threat to international peace and security. They are 

distinguished from Levels One and Two by the likelihood 

that incidents between UN forces and the sanctioned party 

are likely to occur at a very high level, typically between 

troops formations, combat aircraft or warships and not 

between small groups on the ground. Level Two operations 

are continuing to develop in their characteristics and scope. 

This is certainly the most dynamic area of UN operational 

activity. 

There is unlikely to be a clearly defined boundary between each 

task. Within the authority of a single mandate a UN force may 

carry out several of the tasks defined below. Although the tasks 

in the continuum are shown in their likely order of operational 

intensity and the consequently increasing scale of UN 

commitment, this escalating order is not rigid. For example, it 

may be possible for a Level Two task to amount to a far larger 

and more intensive commitment than a Level Three sanction task. 

Level One Operations 

Observer Missions. A UN observer can be military or civilian, 

usually having the status of an officer, whose principle task is to 

observe and report on a developing situation, or on the execution 

of a peace agreement reached between conflicting parties. 
34 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

Observers are usually unarmed; in some exceptional 

circumstances that may carry personal weapons. In addition to 

their supervisory and monitoring tasks observers may be 

deployed in a early waming role where a nation or ethnic group 

is seriously threatened by the aggressive actions of a neighboring 

party, in this case observers may be stationed at the mutual 

boundary or interface. Their task will be to provide timely and 

impartial information to the intemal community through the UN 

of any threatening moves and developments. In some cases it 

may be necessary for the observers to act as a "trip wire" that is 

linked to a multinational deterrent force, lying outside the 

immediate area of tension which tacitly underwrites their 

presence. 

Peacekeeping. A peacekeeping operation, as defined by the 

UN Secretariat and leading contributor nations, refers to the 

operations of multinational forces, usually authorized and 

organized under the auspices of the UN, to help maintain and 

restore intemational peace, without recourse to enforcement 

action. In relation to the parties in conflict peacekeeping forces 

are usually small and lightly armed. To be successful, they must 

rely on the consent of the parties and effectiveness of the political 

agreements which underwrite their presence and function in the 

peace process. They cannot rely on their military strength if the 

agreement breaks down, or a significant element of the opposed 

parties refuses to cooperate. 

Level Two Operations 

Preventive Deployment. Preventive deployment refers to the 

action by a UN multinational group or force at the interface or 

zone of potential conflict where tension is rising between parties. 

The use of preventive deployment does not rely first on a truce 

or peace plan having been agreed between the parties. Although 

UN contingents or observers will deploy with the consent or at 

the request of, one or all parties involved, it is unlikely that their 

specific task will have been agreed except in principle between 

parties. A preventive interpositional deployment may be 

organized from several national contingents on the same principle 

as a conventional peacekeeping force. Contingents may carry 

weapons necessary for protective tasks as well as self-defence. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 35 

The force will not be strong enough to resist a deliberate attack 

by one party or another, or restore territory unlawfully seized. 

Here the intemal boundary or likely interface in dispute may be 

overrun in conflict. It is not, therefore, desirable to deploy UN 

assets which cannot be swiftly removed. 

Internal Conflict Resolution Measures. These are the actions 

taken by a UN multinational force to restore and maintain an 

acceptable level of peace and personal security in an intemal 

conflict. Their successful application relies first of all on a 

substantial level of local support for some form of conflict 

resolution to take place. UN forces involved in internal conflict 

resolution will be called on to provide a wide number of tasks 

that will vary considerably in each case. The following tasks are 

common to most situations: 

~, Provide Liaison between Parties 

t, Oversee Multi Party Ceasefire 

~, Cantonment 

t, Disarming 

~, Custody of War Supplies 

t, Supervising the Reconstitution of Host Nation Police and 

Defense Forces 

Military Assistance to an Interim Civilian Authority. The 

provision of military assistance to an interim civil authority 

usually follows a successfully conducted ceasefire. Once a "safe" 

ceasefire has brought hostilities to a level which allows the 

resumption of civil order, the tempo of military activity will alter. 

The intense military activities related to the assembly and 

disarmament of the parties will move into a less dynamic phase 

in which the UN forces' military capability may be subordinated 

to the requirement of an interim civil authority. The overall task 

of the UN military force will be to supervise or police the 

provisions of a peace agreement and ensure the lead up to an 

election or transfer of power is conducted in a free and fair 

manner. UN forces involved in military assistance to an (interim) 

civil authority will be required to provide ,an extremely wide 

variety of support. The following tasks are common to most 

situations: 

~, Assist in the maintenance of law and order 
36 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

t~ Assist in the provision of security prior to, and during, an 

election 

t, Help to maintain the smooth rurming of essential services 

(power, water, communications, etc.) 

~, Assist in the planning for, reconstitution of, the national 

defense forces 

~, Assist in the relocation and rehabilitation of displaced 

elements of the population 

~, Supervise and assis! in the clearance and removal of 

unexploded ordnance and mines 

Protection of Humanitarian Relief Operations. Most 

humanitarian relief is delivered safely and effectively without 

military assistance. Even in countries where conflict threatens 

delivery, supply is largely continued by negotiated agreements 

between local parties and the supervising agency responsible for 

coordinating relief. In some UN operations, humanitarian 

supplies are delivered with the ad hoc assistance of military 

aircraft and logistic vehicles. The protection of humanitarian 

relief referred to in this section concerns the organization of a 

multinational military relief protection force. The scale of 

response often dictates the need for a stand-alone operation, as in 

the case of Northern Iraq (1991). In every relief protection 

operation it is expected that the delivery of supplies will be 

contested locally and that the normal process of lead agency 

negotiation has proved inadequate, necessitating that a joint 

multinational task force be organized for delivery. These 

activities focus around three primary tasks: 

Setting up a mounting base 

Providing security for victim population at delivery site 

Secure tactical delivery. 

Guarantee and Denial of Movements. International operations 

may be authorized by the Security Council to guarantee or deny 

movement by ships, aircraft and vehicles in particular areas and 

routes. They may involve the coordinated presence of warships 

and combat aircraft in the disputed region. Operations to 

guarantee rights of passage may be mounted to ensure the 

freedom of ships to pass through a threatened sea lane, or for 

aircraft to reach an encircled city or community. International 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 37 

operations to deny movement usually focus on the denial of air 

movement to a regime or government. The concern of the UN 

may be to prevent the harassment of an unprotected population 

by the use of combat aircraft or to prevent the delivery of 

weapons or explosive ordnance onto a civil target. In both cases, 

these operations may involve highly sophisticated and capable 

warships and combat aircraft. The safe operation will require the 

coordinated offensive use of electronic emissions, as well as 

regular high level intelligence assessments. Their day-to-day 

deployment will need to be decided by an intemationally 

comprised joint force HQ. It is likely that substantial elements 

of the force will be provided from an existing military alliance. 

Operations in this category are distinguished from Level Three 

Sanctions by their shorter duration, more defined local focus and, 

therefore, less need for a region-wide consensus. 

Level Three Operations 

Sanctions. Sanctions, as referred to in the UN charter, usually 

concem denial of supplies, diplomatic and trading privileges and 

freedom of movement to an identified aggressor. They are 

usually only applied when diplomacy and less confrontational 

methods of coldlict resolution have failed. Used on their own 

without other restraining or coercive measures, sanctions do not 

usually cause an aggressor to reserve or withdraw from an illegal 

or war-like activity. However, if applied successfully, sanctions 

can reduce the war-fighting capability of an aggressor. To 

achieve a significant level of effectiveness, sanctions must be 

imposed with the consent of a widely based group of nations 

including the unanimous support of the regional and neighboring 

states of the aggressor. 

High Intensity Operations. High intensity enforcement 

operations, as referred to in the UN charter, are the ultimate 

sanction of the UN Security Council to counter a serious threat 

to intemational security. They are only used when all other 

means of conflict resolution have been exhausted. They may 

involve a major operation of war against an identified aggressor 

state. The most powerful combat aircraft, warships and fire 

support capabilities in service may be deployed, but only the 
38 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

minimum offensive action consistent with achieving the 

enforcement objective may be used. 

OBSTACLES TO REFORM 

In the climate of post-Cold War instability, Level Two operations 

will continue to be the most dynamic in scope and an 

increasingly important commitment for defence planners. 

However they lie in a wholly uncharted dimension of military 

activity; at present, it is not possible to do more than distinguish 

them conceptually from Level One and Level Three. 

The importance of having an effective military presence in 

Level Two contingencies in two-fold. Firstly, it cannot be 

acceptable to the intemational community, in particular to the 

Security Council, to have their collective writ thwarted locally by 

small, unrepresentative schisms acting selfishly or even for venal 

masons, particularly when this threatens a widely agreed peace 

process. Secondly, UN contingent-providing nations will not 

allow their troops, aircraft and warships to be vulnerably exposed 

in ad hoc military actions, tenuously coordinated on the 

assumption of a best case scenario, when that assumption is no 

longer valid. 

Establishing an effective military presence does not mean 

lowering the threshold for the use of force; it is not a proposal to 

fight for peace. The benefits of an effective military presence lie 

in operational flexibility. A traditional peacekeeping force 

invariably has the characteristics of a military garrison, operating 

from static administrative bases from which it can only deploy in 

small numbers, for a short duration, in a limit and relatively 

unsupported operational role. The weakness of this modus 

operandi is that when the mandate of such a force is unlawfully 

opposed, even at a very local level (for example a boy beside the 

track halts the column with his AK-47), it is left with few options 

except to become dangerously confrontational, or back off. As 

the elements move further away from their administrative base, 

their options are reduced. To overcome this inflexibility, a more 

effective military force must be capable of: 

,~ Operating in small patrols for several days out of base at 

platoon and company strength 

,~ Providing requisite transport, logistics, communications 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF kIN PEACEKEEPING 39 

and medical cover for these extended out of base operations 

Concentrating swiftly in locally superior strength 

Hardening the base areas to sustain random sniping 

attacks 

Coordinating out of base operations with the activities of 

other UN agencies, NGOs and foreign national assets also 

present 

,~ Calling on high level political support in a local 

confrontational situation 

With these capabilities, an isolated UN patrol faced by the 

boy beside the track can now: 

,a Be quickly reinforced if necessary 

Be logistically sustained in situ for as long as necessary 

Bring in political or military representatives of the 

obstructing party's own affiliation to talk down the impasse 

Escort electoral and aid agencies to unlawfully cut off or 

threatened communities 

All the above capabilities, far from relying on the use of 

armed force, make it a less likely option by giving the isolated 

patrol commander greater flexibility of response. They also 

ensure a much more rigorously policed peace agreement which 

has a chance of standing up to local evasion and sabotage. 

However, to make any significant headway in achieving such 

a capability will first require the UN Secretariat and the leading 

contributor nations to improve or radically alter: planning and 

preparation procedures, contingent selection criteria, command 

trod HQ staff selection criteria and logistic flexibility. One of the 

chief obstacles to this desirable revolution in their operating 

standards is the absence of a concept development capability in 

the UN Secretariat. Few senior officials, whose formative 

experience is derived from the contingencies of peacekeeping in 

the Cold War era have sufficient knowledge of military 

practicalities which would enable them to see the dangers of the 

impending situation. This is aggravated by a caucus within the 

UN which maintains that the institution already has these 

capabilities and that the experiences of the Congo, Lebanon and 

Cyprus equip them to take on Level Two operations or disregard 

them as a special requirement. Beyond the Secretariat, there is 

the institutional unwillingness of members to pay for sufficient 
40 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

effective military forces to take part in anything more than a best 

case scenario. 

In conclusion, we are left with the disturbing prospect that in 

view of the intractable official attitude towards improving the 

effective standard of military operations and the increasingly 

harmful consequences of ad hoc planning, we are more likely to 

witness a major debacle, costing UN lives and damaging UN 

credibility, than a determined effort to improve operating 

standards. If this happens, it may through sustained public 

outcry, fortuitously achieve the much needed revolution in the 

UN's military efficiency; but, conversely, it may start a public 

reaction against the UN, in favor of unilateral military action,* 

and set back the development of a UN response to the contagion 

of intrastate conflict for many years. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 41 

Command and Control Issues for 

the Military Planner 

THE FOLLOWING IS A DISCUSSION of the two papers 

presented in Session I: 

QUESTION: Mr. Connaughton, very early on in your 

presentation, you used the word "intelligence", I believe the UN 

was very nervous about the word "intelligence" because it 

implied, traditional peacekeeping would be seen as less neutral by 

being in the intelligence acquisition game and thereby servicing 

war plans. As a legacy of the past, do we need to bury it and 

face the need for "intelligence" to meet the needs of future 

operations? 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: What we have to achieve within 

the coalition is perhaps a healthier sharing between states of their 

intelligence. In the past, one used to concentrate on learning 

about one's enemies, whereas now I think we're going to have to 

be canny in working out who our future coalition partners are 

going to be. Therefore, you want a fair amount of intelligence 

on your friends as well as your enemies. If you go back in time 

to look at someone like E.H. Carr, who wrote The 20 Years 

Crisis, he said the problem of collective security requirements is 

that people say you need them but they never tell you how and 

why it is to be achieved. I think, today, we can say we 

understand how and why it can be achieved. One of the problems 

within the United Nations is that we've had an awful big fund of 

intelligence, communication, and logistic capabilities under the 

umbrella of the Security Council's Penn Five, but, in the past, it 

had been unacceptable to use. Now, we should have a much 

more conclusive environment within the United Nations for 

sharing intelligence. 
42 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

QUESTION: Richard Connaughton talked about command and 

control and John Mackinlay raised issues of the conceptual 

approach to what has been so far called peacekeeping operations. 

I wholeheartedly agree with many of their remarks, though I see 

there are several difficulties. I should like to present the 

political side of the coin. The first issue is the question of 

command and control. I think that it is far easier to organize on 

a regional basis than it would be on a UN system. I see 

enormous difficulties for the United Nations to accept the kind of 

arrangements which Richard Connaughton has suggested, which 

suggestion is based on the experiences of the Korean Campaign 

as well as Desert Shield and then Desert Storm. I wonder if 

either experience is applicable to the UN? Secondly, on John 

Macinlay's statement on the changing role for the UN, what he 

is doing is introducing a new concept of operations in the UN. 

Who is going to manage these operations'? The Security Council 

is not able to handle it. The Security Council has to be altered. 

What needs to be done with the Security Council to improve its 

management of these operations? They have not proved to be 

very agile in managing what is called traditional peacekeeping. 

They rely entirely on the UN Secretary-General, who together 

with his staff, are very heavily occupied. At the military advisor 

level, who is going to manage this? Who is going to make input 

in management of operations, both at the Security Council and 

Secretariat levels? How is the Secretary-General going to run 

this office? My own submission is that it is worth serious 

questioning that the UN, which is primarily a political body, will 

be able to adjust itself to be able to manage the middle level of 

operations. I would submit, strongly, that we consider the choice 

of regional arrangements which I believe should be preferable 

and should be the first to which we should tum. Finally, I think 

it is extremely questionable whether we could change troops 

trained for regular peacekeeping in the middle of an operation to 

assume secondary tasks. 

JOHN MACKINLAY: I agree with you. The United Nations 

as an institution is not yet capable of managing a Level-Three 

operation. I also agree with you that the Security Council which 

is a political body is quite unsuitable to direct military operation. 

You have to have a consensus and you need then to translate that 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 43 

consensus into a plan which staff officers can make some sense 

of on the ground. That machinery is not there. I think I would 

build on your own point that it is in the mid-level of operations 

where the UN is, after all, already swimming in this water-with 

what success I think it is a bit early to say. I think it is in this 

area we need to build up capability. I think President Bush's 

recent remarks to the General Assembly were very positive and 

I hope those remarks survive the U.S. election process. I think 

there is some evidence in the Pentagon and in the National 

Security Council that there is a plan to go forward from there. 

The answer to your question is this--how you are going to do 

it--you build from what you've got, you improve what you've 

got, you make your military element, which is already in the 

United Nations, far more effective by introducing staff officers 

from capable military armies who have necessary experience. 

Build up that element inside the UN so that you have in effect a 

little replica of the NATO headquarters. Then you can turn to 

them and translate political decisions into something which 

amounts to a military plan, which is not something that can be 

done at the moment. 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: You raise the subject of 

regional systems and getting them involved. I think in principal 

we've got to go along with the regional systems and the bigger 

powers have got to have some bilateral/mulitlateral agreements 

whereby we can bring into those regions--very much as the U.S. 

unified command does the political and military power which 

that region lacks. Increasingly, we've got to look at presentation. 

What you have to studiously avoid is the impression that we are 

exporting the North "Brezhnev Doctrine" to the South. And I 

think that is a very important point which we need to focus on. 

You talk about management of operations, there is machinery out 

thcre--the Military Staff Committee. The fact is the MSC is in 

the Charter of the United Nations. The membership of the MSC 

is anachronistic, but the Charter does provide for the co-opting 

of interested parties on the Committee. There is no earthly 

reason why the MSC should not be tasked to provide the 

Secretary-General the essential information he needs to make 

meaning~l decisions. The Security Council is going to work; 
42, WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

it's a fudge, but 1 think that once the will is there within the UN 

to make it work, what you've got to do is the same that we in the 

British Army have got to do in looking at the nature of future 

conflict and that is forget what we've got, forget what equipment 

we've got, forget what manpower we've got and start with a 

fresh piece of paper and start designing what we need for the 

future. 

QUESTION: My question is on the Military Staff Committee. 

The instrument is there and it would appear that this would be a 

useful vehicle to do the mundane things that soldiers need to 

have done for them before they are committed operationally. 

Coming up with common symbology for maps, references, 

certain basic logistic contingency requirements, all of these 

mundane firings of soldiering that tend to be overlooked when a 

crisis arises and politicians create a military force, ad hoc. You 

have obviously thought a great deal about the Military Staff 

Committee, but you seem to assume it is an anachronism. 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: I think you are right, but it 

comes back to the will of states. If we have a change of will of 

the major states, then I think we could probably pick up the ball 

and run with it. We are aware that the British and the French 

and the Pentagon have a view that they don't wish to embrace 

the possibilities that are afforded by the Military Staff 

Committee. The major hang-up is the question of command. 

Operations, I think, divide the three functions: the preparation, 

the action, and the aftermath. What we need to do is use the 

MSC at the beginning, in terms of preparation and contingency 

planning. But I do believe the positions which were taken 

perhaps six months ago, may well now today have to be 

reviewed and revised to see if we cmmot use the Military St',fff 

Committee effectively to help us deal with looming problems 

ahead. 

QUESTION: John do you feel the same way about the 

potentials of the military Staff Committee? 

JOHN MACKINLAY: No. I really failed to encounter a 

convincing statement of support from the five embassies who 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 45 

would be most instrumental in resuscitating the MSC. I think its 

grown to be a bit like the Beefeaters in the Tower of London 

who are an extremely attractive tourist item, but their real 

function, militarily speaking, has disappeared. It will now be 

extremely difficult to resuscitate the MSC, almost as difficult as 

to resuscitate the Beefeaters in the Tower of London, And I 

think rather than trying to, let's go for something which is alive 

and build on something which is functioning. 

QUESTION: First, I want to draw attention to naval 

cooperation in the UN context. I think that's a vastly overlooked 

subject. Second, yesterday the Security Council authorized 

nations to establish a naval blockade in the Adriatic. The CSCE 

is a UN-recognized regional organization, and it could have 

called upon the EC, NATO, or the WEU to direct the operations 

since the Helsinki Summit identified these three organizations as 

ones that could be called upon for peacekeeping. Third, the UN 

could direct forces for peacekeeping operations. I personally 

believe the NATO naval on-call mediterranean force could 

become the naval on-call force for UN. This could be 

accomplished without getting to the standing force idea. I 

wonder if John Mackinlay had given any thought to this in 

developing spectrum of different missions that the UN military 

undertake. 

JOHN MACKINLAY: On naval operations, first of all, this is 

an expanding area and you'd be pleased to know that in 

Providence, Rhode Island, not very far, after all from Newport, 

we arc actually collaborating very closely with the Naval War 

College on these things. It is a very interesting area which is 

going to become much bigger than it is at present. As to 

delegation options, we have examples of this already. It is not 

an option the UN readily will embrace. As we saw in the 

resolution that was handed to the United States for Desert Storm, 

it is still an extremely unpopular political option, especially in the 

General Assembly. Now, I think it is something that we will see 

happening in Level-Three and the back end of Level-Two 

operations where the United Nations simply hasn't the needed 

military personnel. It simply writes a blank check and hands 
46 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

responsibility to another organization--hopefully not the CSCE, 

because I don't think you'll get much of a change from them. 

The point about on-call forces, I agree with what you are saying, 

but there is one point that is worth considering. When a country 

sends its contingent, that is a highly political affirmation of that 

operation. If the British send a contingent to Bosnia, that is a 

very strong signal of support. If you remove that option from 

countries who are members by saying you've all got to pay us 

subscriptions anyway and there's none of this business about I'm 

going to support A but not B, I think that will create a lot of 

political anxiety among leaders who may very well wish to 

support an operation in Bosnia but not one in South America. 

That is always going to be the problem with on-call forces and 

standing forces where you just snap your fingers at a country and 

anticipate they will make forces available without any argument. 

QUESTION: I think we should clarify thought about the 

fundamentals of the UN Charter and the terminology we use. 

We need to recognize the fact that in Korea and in the Desert 

Storm operations the UN did not authorize anything; the source 

of authority for the actions that were taken was Article 51, which 

is also in Chapter 7. Those were operations of collective 

self-defense blessed by the Security Council and the blessing was 

not at all necessary. I think we should be very careful not to mix 

up actual enforcement actions undertaken by the Security Council 

and directed by them--which is the conception underlying the 

Charter--and actions of self-defense most of which never have 

any UN blessing but which are perfectly legitimate. I also agree 

with those speakers that have said that the Security Council and 

the Secretariat are quite incapable of managing military 

operations beyond the peacekeeping level. We should 

concentrate our thinking and forward planning on the institutions 

which have worked and can work rather than deceiving ourselves 

and our publics in trying to whip up an enormous tidal wave of 

approbation, which is a charade. 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: It is an environment of shifting 

sand m~d you must deal with choices that are appropriate to that 

moment. It was appropriate in Desert Storm to give the United 

States a blank check and let them direct the operation. I don't 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 47 

think you are going to get a blank check again. It is better to 

appreciate that world opinion may well not again allow the 

United States to run a military operation such as Desert Storm. 

QUESTION: But remember the United States and other major 

powers can make the decision that their security is threatened by 

developments say in Yugoslavia and no approval is required by 

the Security Council. 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: I think the problem with 

Article 51 is that it's been so blatantly abused in the past; but 

under the Charter, having taken Article 51 action, the states 

themselves are obliged to report back to Secretary-General as to 

what action they have taken. 

RESPONSE: That's purely informative. The Security Council 

can't stop an operation of self-defense except by proclaiming that 

it's become a breach of the peace, violation of the peace and that 

takes a veto. 

QUESTION: I would like to raise a question with regard to 

command and control and the need for a clear statement of 

objectives in terms of future United Nations operations. I've 

been very much attracted to some of the suggestions by the 

speakers, but let's take a hard case, Somalia. In terms of UN 

intervention how would you establish a clear mandate of 

objectives when the majority of UN members are only interested 

in a humanitarian or relief operation at a time when it is clear 

that there is anarchy? There is no government in control, and a 

peace enforcement action is needed to control the environment. 

How do you get the political side of the house and the military 

side of the house agreeing on overall objectives and a reasonable 

plan for implementation? 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: I think we should not assume 

that states will automatically intervene in world affairs, because 

you see in the PasL we've looked at intervention in terms of 

justification and that really, I think, is the reason why so many 

interventions have failed. Justification by itself does not go far 
48 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

enough. Interventions have to be launched from a rationale which 

comes from the brain rather than from the heart. 

JOHN MACKINLAY: I can understand the problem of 

Somalia, but the question is, where can the UN successfully 

operate? Was it possible to successfully operate militarily within 

Somalia where we have seen a reversion to warlordism? Would 

we have to go in there and fight the whole array of tribes and 

warlords? I think really if you do analysis, you may well come 

to the conclusion that you could not achieve anything militarily 

in Somalia and, therefore, what you've got to do is look at 

alternative sets of coercive measures. I personally believe that if 

no one can make a case for setting up a UN protectorate, then 

Somalia was the case. But it does seem to me that the world can 

only really digest perhaps one major crisis at any one time and 

I'm afraid that Somalia coincided with a lot of what's going 

wrong in the world. Somalia, I suppose, doesn't have any oil, 

it's got some rather horrifying pictures but where does the clout 

come? I think Europe has really awakened to the importance of 

Yugoslavia and, by Jove, I think we are now beginning to look 

at Yugoslavia and the Yugoslavian problem with some renewed 

interest and vigor. I would, however, say that I think 

Boutros-Ghali's comments pointing fingers at the West saying 

"You're looking at Yugoslavia, you're not really looking at 

Somalia," was I think unfair, because certainly Western Europe 

had brought down a Curtain of indifference about what was going 

on in Yugoslavia until, I think, the penny dropped. Here, we 

might have a real domino effect sucking into the implosion, states 

like Greece and Turkey. So I suppose that's a round about way 

of saying that I think, on occasion, you've got to accept that 

intervention is not going to work. 

JOHN MACKINLAY: I understand that another element of 

your question is really how do you interest nations in security 

issues, when their real interest is in the humanitarian side. I had 

to preach this message in the rather stony fields of Thatcher's 

Britain. Trying to interest people in the Ministry of Defence in 

sending British soldiers to countries which have absolutely no 

foreign policy interest is a pretty difficult thing to do. And it's 

equally difficult to do in this country. I don't know how a 
MILITARY LMPLICATIONS ()F UN PEACEKEEPING 49 

politician is going to persuade "Joe Six-Pack" who apparently 

runs a garage somewhere in Arkansas, how he is going to want 

to be involved in a country like Cambodia. I presented this 

question to an Austrian ambassador, a country which is torally 

dedicated to this sort of activity, and he had a very good 

explanation for it, but it wasn't the sort of elevator word-bite that 

you could use in discussion here today. 

The answer to your question, I think, is two-fold. One is that the 

education process has to start in defense staffs. It is, first of all, 

a political problem. You can't do much about that, but I think 

the media, actually is highly instrumental in triggering off a 

country's response to a situation like the Kurds perched up on 

their hills in the Turkish border. And then the defense staff and 

this is happening already. 

The fact is that there is no other way to intervene in these places 

except under the aegis of the UN. In reality, your country and my 

country really are not lawfully mandated to do this any longer, 

and the sooner people in the defense planning area understand 

that and start thinking very seriously about the fact that they have 

to assign defense planning to participation in these very messy 

international operations. The third point is that you are talking 

about security and not humanitarian relief. You are going to 

have to become involved ill this process with a different set of 

nations because the people who have the capability to respond 

really very well, like the Nordic nations, to the humanitarian 

element of these problems are not always the same people who 

can provide you with the military infrastructure to meet security 

requirements. 

QUESTION: You said you were sowing these seeds on very 

rocky ground during the Thatcher Administration at the time the 

British army was also under great pressure to reduce the budget. 

Did any in the army staff see peacekeeping as an opportunity to 

maintain a relevance in the budgetary battles that every nation 

faces? 

JOHN MACKINLAY: No. Because, the reduction had just 
50 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

occurred in the British army and was driven by a need to reduce 

defense spending, whereas most people who write about these 

things prefer to reduce an mmy commensurately with declining 

interests in foreign policy issues. Obviously, you have a list of 

tasks and you have a list of troops who have to carry them out, 

and you can't adjust the right hand column without adjusting the 

left-hand column. That really has not been done. And so the 

argument never even got there. And you if you went into the 

Ministry of Defence, Britain was the one country in the whole of 

the NATO alliance where, until about three months ago, you 

could go and ask for the UN desk or spend a long time 

burrowing through the Ministry of Defence directory and never 

f'md it because there wasn't one. The argument never reached 

the sophistication of your question. It just wasn't a question. 

QUESTION: Mr. Colmaughton talked about the skills a 

commander would have to have in the field to implement 

operations, and in taking that with Mr. Mackinlay's second level 

activities, which strike me more as policing functions rather than 

traditional military operations, a major question arises: How do 

military officers coming out of conventional training have skills 

to manage these kinds of operations? Neither of the speakers has 

said anything explicitly, but it seems that, implicitly, the role of 

command is to separate the belligerents and remain passive in the 

face of the dynamics of the conflict. Is this an appropriate role 

for traditional military commanders or are they, in fact, on a 

continuous basis conflict mediators for the belligerents at a local 

level? And if so, where do they get the training to do this. Is 

this the responsibility of the sponsoring country? Is this a 

function of the United Nations? Where do these military 

commanders get the skills to deal with an essentially 

non-traditional military situation? 

JOHN MACKINLAY: Is this a military role'? Yes, coming 

from the army that I come from, it certainly is. But in the U.S., 

it probably isn't quite so clear cut because yours is an army 

where the infantry do the infantry things and the cavalry do the 

cavalry things and they don't have to go to Northern Ireland once 

every three years where they have to clear their mind about some 

of these ideas and have to function on the ground. I think that 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 51 

in the case of the U.S., you have a problem. 

Nevertheless, it is a military role, and I would advise people in 

the Pentagon who are interested in preserving the size of both the 

infantry and the cavalry to become a little more flexible, because 

its a very useful second string to have on your bow. Another 

reason why it is a military role is because who else are you going 

to send to that God-forsaken "pitch up" against the Thai border 

in Cambodia to patrol with your blue flag along those tracks, 

which could very easily be mined. And if you're going to tell 

me it's the police, I want you to nominate for me a police force 

that we all know that is capable of sending constables that could 

survive under those conditions and behave in the correct way. I 

don't know of a police force in my country that could possibly 

deploy policemen into that situation. 

How to train them? Well you could train a military officer to do 

almost anything. The fact is you've got to start off by wanting 

him to train. I think that if President Bush's suggestion to the 

General Assembly about converting Ft. Dix into an area where 

these things could be done practically, that is the sort of direction 

we should be taking. Why haven't we got a United Nations staff 

college? We've got a staff college for practically every alliance 

and former military activity there is, but it seems so obvious that 

we should have one to train staff officers. When the officer has 

that qualification you know the man is fit to take part on a UN 

staff. We should have schools which go into the Level-Two and 

Level-Three areas because both are really much more difficult. 

RICHARD CONNAUGHTON: In terms of using military force 

in the manner in which you are suggesting, either it is intuitive 

or you have to train for it. I think you have also to address the 

aftermath. And one thing that the military services can assist 

with is the humanitarian side of operations. I think for 

governmental organizations this is relatively easy. There is no 

reason why today we shouldn't be looking at govemment 

organizations to give them the infrastructure and military support 

they need. The problem area is going to be Non-Governmental 

Organizations (NGOs), you know, the well intentioned people 
52 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

who took a lot of medical support and, actually, in terms of 

raising follow-on funds, have to seem to be untarnished. I would 

agree with John that the British have a Iradition of being 

involved in this area. And it is an area which any other state 

could actually start to begin working on. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 53 

Critical Considerations for 

the Military Commander 

THE FOLLOWING DISCUSSION FEATURED the insights and 

comments of military officers with personal experience in 

carrying out UN peacekeeping operations: 

JOHN SEWALL: The focus in this session will be on 

implications for military planners who are asked to undertake a 

peacekeeping mission for the UN--whether it is an individual 

observer operation, in the traditional ideal world of peacekeeping, 

or one involving small size units or even larger size units in what 

has been described this moming as Level-Two or Level-Three 

operations. Permit me to introduce the members of the panel. 

Brigadier General Ian Douglas is currently the Canadian Military 

Attache here in Washington. BG Douglas has had experience at 

the practitioner field level when he was involved in a 

peacekeeping operational tour in Cyprus. He has commanded 

three mechanized commandos of the fourth Canadian mechanized 

brigade group in Germany. He has also commanded the 

Canadian airborne regiment in "Petawawar." BG Douglas was 

Chief of Staff of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Central 

America from December '89 until December '90, and has served 

as peacekeeping advisor in military headquarters ill Ottawa. 

Alos on the panel is Colonel Bruce Osbom, who is with the 

Australian Mission to the United Nations in New York. In terms 

of UN experience, Bruce was posted as the land staff officer in 

the Directorate of Joint Operations of Headquarters of the 

Australian Defence Force and was, in that capacity, responsible 

for management of Australian participation in both policy and 

operational aspects of UN peacekeeping operations. He has most 

recently (January '91) been posted to New York as the military 

advisor to the Australian Mission to the United Nations. 
54 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Spracher is a Foreign Area Officer or 

"FAt," which is a specialty in the United States Army that 

concentrates on training and schooling in regional specialties. 

You will find that a good percentage of US observers in 

peacekeeping have been, in fact, FAt officers. He is a military 

intelligence officer who has also been an instructor at West Point. 

Bill spent a lot of time in Panama. As a Latin America 

specialist, you might wonder why he ended up in the Western 

Sahara. That may indicate something about US planning, which 

we hope to correct. At any rate, he was military assistant to the 

force commander, United Nations Mission for the Referendum in 

Westem Sahara, MINURSO. 

Major George Steuber is currently a student at Ft. 

Leavenworth, at the US Army Command and General Staff 

College. He also is a Foreign Area Officer whose specialty is SE 

Asia. He went to the Royal Thai Anny Conunand and Staff 

College and spent a considerable amount of his career in the 

Pacific region. Most recently, he was in SE Asia with the United 

Nations advanced mission in Cambodia and the UN Transitional 

Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). He was an operations officer 

for Team Delta, the military liaison detachment established at the 

Khmer People's National Liberation Armed Forces Headquarters, 

and then he moved to Phnom Penh. Lastly, he became Lt Gen 

John Sanderson's personal representative in Kamponton Province. 

With these brief introductions let me tum to our first panel 

expert, General Douglas. 

GENERAL I.C. DOUGLAS: None of what I heard this 

moming from tile academic side of the house disagreed in any 

way, shape or form, seriously, with what I had experienced. 

Therefore, I would hope to offer you some practical observations 

which we can apply to the rather more academic solutions that 

were put forward this morning. I will try to be frank without 

being rude because some of the problems we encountered in 

setting up the new mission in Central America were caused by 

individuals in the United Nations in New York. New York has 

many good people; they also have some not so good people, 

which is the same with any bureaucracy. But what you don't 

have in UN missions is the military hierarchy needed to make the 

decisions for you when it affects the soldier in the field. You 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 55 

have got to go along with what is fundamentally a civilian 

hierarchy. This sometimes flies in the face of the military 

requirement. 

I will go over very quickly and generally the chronology of 

what I saw as we deployed down into Central America, how our 

mandate changed and we went from being a level-one mission to 

a level-two mission without any appreciation of the differences 

by Headquarters New York. That should become clear as we 

talk about some of the problems we faced as we went from a 

simple observer mission to one that had to interpose itself 

between the Contras and the Sandinistas, who didn't talk to each 

other--indeed who were still shooting each other in some 

places--and try to bring some sense to the whole situation and 

eventually to demobilize the Contra army. The reconnaissance 

for ANOOKA was carried out by an ad hoc team, and if there is 

one word to describe UN operations as far as I saw it was "ad 

hocery". The military staff was not capable, based on their 

numbers. They were overwhelmed by the jobs in front of them. 

Initially, you had reconnaissance teams made up of members 

from different countries who went down to study the situation. 

They came back and formulated the plan which was rubber 

stamped by headquarters staff. The staff themselves were not 

capable of formulating what I would call a proper military 

estimate. The mandate which we were given was "mission 

impossible". It was to patrol and prevent the crossing of frontiers 

of the signatory states for military purposes by either side, 

including the movement of weapons and military equipment 

across the borders. Any one who has looked at the borders of 

those two countries will know that is impossible unless you have 

an army of some 50,000 to 100,000 men. The idea of putting a 

mission in there, I think, was a calculated risk and absolutely 

right. In other words, you had the five Central American 

countries who had agreed to the efforts, and the UN decided to 

put the mission in there regardless of how impossible it was with 

a view ultimately of demobilizing the Contras, which indeed 

worked out. 

We went down there and started setting up the organization 

as best we could, setting up headquarters, setting up observation 

posts along the border, setting up our network with the Contras, 
56 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

who indeed controlled a good part of the border, and with the 

Sandinistas. We never did, in my tour of duty, come to grips 

with the problem on the Salvadorean border which has 

subsequently been resolved by other missions. When we became 

aware of the fact that the demobilization of the Contras was to 

take place, we were told that we, the observer mission, would 

have to do it, and if we really needed it, the UN was prepared to 

give us a platoon of military policemen to accomplish it. This 

was a civilian estimate. We did a very rough military estimate 

and decided it would take at least one and probably two 

reinforced battalions to do what was required. It needed a 

logistics organization which didn't exist in the observer mission, 

and it needed fantastic amounts of helicopter support. 

The UN's response when we said we needed logistics was, 

"Well you observers are getting $65 a day, why don't you just 

buy what you need?" This was a complete misconception of how 

you have to support something which has gone from an observer 

mission to putting battalions and companies of soldiers into the 

field. Headquarters in New York never did comprehend that. 

What we had to do was completely ad hoc the logistics 

organization, which was to steal observers who were of a 

logistics persuasion, get a contracting officer out of the UN, and 

set up our own organization. My fleet of trucks was a fleet of 

banana trucks, which I leased from the Great Pacific Banana 

Company in Honduras. The helicopters, we rented. Everything 

was ad hoc, trod we made it with the skin of our teeth. In one 

particular site in the Nicaraguan jungle, every observer came 

down with a parasite that was potentially fatal; it would take at 

least a year for them to be cured and, indeed, some of them are 

still suffering from it today. We're just lucky we didn't lose 

some men to the parasite. All of this is to say the structure to 

support the military in the United Nations, be it from an 

operational military point of view or from a logistics view, is not 

there. That problem has to be resolved. 

The solution, as I would see it, lies in the restructuring, 

remandating of the military advisory staff to the SecretaryGeneral. The analogy I make is to an organization called AMFL, 

the Allied Command Europe Mobile Force, which has existed for 

40 years in NATO. The idea of the large standing UN force has 

been discussed ad nauseum and has been rejected over the years. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 57 

I don't think you can have a large division or indeed corps-sized 

force that stood ready for UN operations, but what you do need 

is a properly constituted, experienced and mandated miliary staff 

that can do a number of things. It can do the planning, it can 

look after the staff lists, it can look after the skeletal SOPs, it can 

look after the training of the units which are earmarked in 

different countries for UN operations. It might be a brigade 

sized force with fifteen countries volunteering to contribute to it. 

Perhaps some would not be suitable to a particular country; 

maybe that particular country would not wish to go into a 

particular operation. You establish sufficient flexibility in the 

numbers of units you have established to meet such a 

contingency so that you do not have to ad hoc everything from 

the bottom up. I think that an organization of some 26 to 30 

military people could organize that. Now perhaps they wouldn't 

deploy as AMFL brigade headquarters, but they would be able to 

do the planning and to brief the brigade and/or division 

headquarters getting ready to go into any area of the world. I 

think that such an arrangement is essential if you are going to 

improve whatever we are going to get out of the SecretaryGeneral's staff, which at the moment is ad hocery for every 

mission. 

There are training requirements that we have for UN forces. 

The best qualified UN type organization is a general purpose 

military unit. You can take a well-trained unit that's ready to go 

into operations in NATO, if you will, and you can turn them 

into a peacekeeping force very quickly. You cannot do it the 

other way around. You can't develop a peacekeeping force and 

then tum it into a general purpose force without extensive 

retraining and re-equipping. That is one of the tenets on which 

we have established our UN contribution over the years. We send 

trained combat-ready forces. Notwithstanding that, you will need 

some training, but not very much. You have to train in your 

staff colleges to make sure your officer corps is ready to take off 

that warrior's perspective or viewpoint in life, and put on that of 

the peacekeeper, of the mediator or whatever the situation calls 

for. We figure we can do that in our staff college with a weeks' 

course; before observer missions, we have a two-week program 

which we feel is sufficient to bring the individual up to standard 
58 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

on such things as sensitivities of the area, area studies, that sort 

of thing. Beyond that, of course, you have language studies, but 

the training requirement as opposed to what has been suggested 

by others that we have peacekeeping academies, peacekeeping 

universities, is not seen as needed in the Canadian army. The 

bottom line is that the units have to be ready to go to Level-Two 

and Level-Three operations which involves your general purpose 

training and equipped organizations. 

COI,ONEL BRUCE OSBORN: I thought it might be useful 

to look at this from the New York Headquarters perspective. I 

suspect, as is always the case, a number of perspectives on this 

peacekeeping business exist and I think it totally proper to 

consider this subject from all angles. One thing is clear--all our 

perceptions of peacekeeping have changed dramatically. Firstly, 

it is abundantly clear to me that, since 1988, the world around 

us has changed dramatically in every shape and form. Who 

would have predicted where we would be today four years ago. 

Yet, in many respects, the United Nations really has not changed. 

This is no direct criticism of those who lead the UN, but is a 

reflection of the fact that the UN is a bureaucracy. To change 

the system is going to take some time. 1 also do not wish to 

danapen anybody's enthusiasm, but my own view is that it's 

going to change incredibly slowly. The one thing that impressed 

me after I got to New York was to find out how political the 

United Nations was. It is wrong for any nation to think it can go 

to New York because of who they are and change the system 

overnight. There are 179 member states, soon to become 180, 

who all go to the United Nations it seems to me, to look after 

their own vested interests. They very much have an interest in 

the world and they'll pursue those interests, but to a large extent 

they are pursuing them for their own benefit. Now that in itself 

is not wrong. I see my country pursuing the same course, but the 

reality is that you are working in a political organization where 

decisions are made through committees, that is by consensus. 

Now you don't have to be terribly intelligent to realize that the 

system is very slow. Decisions normally end up being watered 

down to something which is diluted. 

The United Nations, since the end of the Cold War, I would 

have thought would have been terribly open and transparent. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 59 

Instead, you would believe that the Cold War is at its height at 

the present time in the United Nations. The things which we 

would expect to be readily available to us in terms of information 

is not available--just the opposite is the case. It strikes me that 

the principal problem is that many of those who were part and 

parcel of the old United Nations are still there, and they haven't 

been able to adapt to the realities of the new world. You notice 

I didn't say "New World Order". 

If I might quickly address the Agenda for Peace--and I'm 

sure some of my colleagues might have different views--I 

represent my country in the Special Committee on Peacekeeping 

Operations, a committee of 34 nations which really, in a 

practical way, considers peacekeeping perhaps more than any 

other organization in the UN. Most recently, as late as 

yesterday, the Special Committee was considering the item of 

peacekeeping, and I might offer some impressions as to where 

the Agenda for Peace report is going. In the area of preventive 

diplomacy, there is broad support for enhanced preventive 

diplomacy. Indeed, it is the most popular part of the SecretaryGeneral's report. I think it is popular because people see the 

prospect of finding a solution to a problem, before it becomes a 

conflict, as the way to go. My own view is there will be 

progress in that area. But it is going to be slow because for the 

Secretary-General to have a capability to make independent 

assessments ,and decisions on a timely basis requires enormous 

resources. He is not going to have adequate resources to provide 

the information, and he, therefore, is going to rely on member 

states. Nevertheless, he is still going to need some sort of 

independent assessment capability to make those decisions. 

In the area of peacekeeping, there is broad support for 

enhanced peacekeeping capabilities within the United Nations. 

There are many subareas in this report, but by and large there is 

support for funding arrangements to be made more readily 

available. In the area of preventive deployment, there is 

lukewarm support. Many countries, and particularly the 

non-aligned countries and those countries who see themselves as 

being the object of preventive deployments are concemed about 

issues of national sovereignty. There is also a question amongst 

the membership at large relating to the neutrality of the United 
60 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

Nations in various situations. My own view is--listening to my 

colleagues in and around New York---that it might work in 

certain circumstances. For example, if another Saddam Hussein 

comes along, I think that's a set of circumstances where military 

action will be acceptable. 

But let us discuss another more clouded area, the question of 

enforcement action under Article 43. Here, the reality is that the 

majority of the membership, as I see it, is opposed to that sort of 

activity at the present time. I suggest that it is not going to go 

anywhere for some considerable period of time. Now, I know 

that's a very bold statement, but that's the reality of the current 

political environment. It may change dramatically if 

circumstances change. 

I just wanted to briefly touch upon Headquarters planning. 

The reality is that planning for peacekeeping operations does not 

occur in the United Nations. At best, we have developed a 

concept, and that concept becomes the basis on which things 

happen. But, in the real sense of planning, it just simply does not 

occur. I personally, and many of my colleagues, see this lack of 

proactive planning as being the fundamental problem which the 

United Nations faces, and in my view, it is costing enormous 

sums of money and, indeed, putting service personnel's lives at 

stake. The Security Council, on the 29th of October, recognized 

something which the Committee of 34 had been calling for over 

many years, namely, that there needs to be some enhancement of 

the planning capability. But yet having said that, there remains 

great resistance to it. At a time when we are talking about 

expanding the capabilities of the United Nations, it seems to me 

that in the case of Somalia, and in the case of UNPROFOR (that 

is Yugoslavia) the members of the United Nations were not 

willing to provide the needed resources. And I mention that 

because I thilxk the membership has reached saturation point in 

terms of what it is prepared to support. I know that, for instance, 

my country and many others, at a time when our defense forces 

are downsizing and our defense budgets and overall budgets are 

being reduced, are asked to do more and more in terms of 

deploying for peacekeeping. The reality is that many of us 

cannot afford to do much more, and that's an important point to 

take on board. 

The other point is that it is obvious to many of the 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 61 

developing countries that the United Nations--sorry, the stronger 

members of the United Nations---are prepared to deploy 

peacekeeping forces to countries in their region to deal with 

problems that affect them directly. I guess the people being 

discussed see it as a "rich man-poor man" approach. The other 

re',dity in terms of resources is simply that none of us have any 

spare logistics sitting on the shelf, except perhaps for some of the 

larger countries. I mean the reality is we just do not have spare 

logistics units in Australia. They are civilianizing us to the 

greatest extent possible. We just do not have the sort of 

organization which Somalia calls for. Somehow, the United 

Nations has got to deal with that problem. And the final point 

I'!1 make is that many members of the United Nations are critical 

of the Security Council, because they see it increasingly making 

decisions without consultation with the rest of the UN 

organization. I will simply put it up the flagpole that at a time 

when we're trying to change things, these other countries are 

more and more concerned that the Security Council is acting as 

the sole decisionmaking body of the United Nations. 

LIEUTENANT COLONEL BILL SPRACHER" I plan to give 

you a fairly recent perspective from ground level in a small 

mission that probably epitomizes all the kinds of problems we are 

talking about and some others that are unique to it. I will try to 

steer away from political issues, but in my role as the military 

assistant to the force commander in the Western Sahara, I could 

not avoid politics. UN Mission for the Referendum in Western 

Sahara (MINURSO) is a very small and not very well known 

mission of the United Nations. It was established in September 

of 1991, and initially it was a limited observer mission, to be in 

the field for a few months. The peace process was expected to 

move along fairly expeditiously. The peace process has not 

moved along as anticipated and MINURSO remains a limited 

observer mission. And that goes at the heart of a lot of the 

problems I wish to address. Initially, it was envisioned that 

MINURSO would have a military force of 1,695 personnel, 550 

of whom would be military observers. As of the time I left at 

the end of July 1992, we had around 350 military, 230 of whom 

were military observers. The military component was given the 
62 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

mandate to monitor and verify the cessation of hostilities between 

Moroccan and Polisario forces, the withdrawal of Moroccan 

forces and the confinement of Polisario forces as agreed upon by 

both parties. This was in a peace plan signed in 1988. And, 

finally, to establish a climate of confidence, security and stability 

conducive to the holding of a referendum. 

Briefly, Morocco, which is one of the parties to the conflict, 

considers Westem Sahara as another of its provinces. Moroccans 

just refer to it as "Sahara". Morocco effectively occupies the 

westem two-thirds of that territory. The Polisario guerrillas, 

basically Saharawi indigenous peoples, who had been fighting for 

the independence of the territory, occupy the eastem one-third of 

the area. It is almost like a World War I situation; the 

Moroccans have built a berm, 2,000 kilometers long right down 

the center of the territory. They occupy it much like a Maginot 

Line with a little less technology perhaps from the World War I 

time frame. So, in one way, this is a very primitive type military 

set-up. Nevertheless, there were a lot of military clashes over the 

years, most recently immediately before the cease-fire went into 

effect, i.e., in September of 1991, when the Moroccans conducted 

air strikes against Polisario in an attempt to establish good 

positions before the cease-fire. Since the MINURSO military 

force has been deployed, small though it is, it has been 

successful in preventing an outbreak of hostilities. There have 

been no casualties as a result of fire, most of the casualties have 

been a result of land mines. So even though it is a limited 

deployment, and even though the mandate is very ambitious, for 

that portion of the mandate that this limited military force was 

established to meet, they have been very successful. 

Initially, a referendum was to be held as early as January 

1992. I got there in the middle of February. I said "Well how 

did the referendum go?" They said "It didn't," and it still hasn't 

been conducted--although as I understand since I departed there 

has been some progress, mainly from the New York end rather 

than on-site. 

There are 26 countries represented in the small MINURSO 

military force. This force has the distinction of being the first 

UN military force that has observers from all five permanent 

members of the Security Council. We also had the distinction 

of being the first UN mission that was charged to not just 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 63 

monitor elections but actually to organize and implement a 

referendum. Now that was not our objective as a military force; 

we were deployed to create a climate of confidence so this could 

happen. We think we did the job, but, for whatever reasons, we 

had not progressed as fast as we would have liked. I was the 

senior US military observer. We had a contingent of 30. Three 

countries were tied for the largest contingent, the other two being 

France and China. We had all four Services of the US 

represented. The Army was the executive agent, and of half of 

those thirty, 15 were from the Army and five each were from the 

other three Services. All were individual observers. All were 

fanned out to one of the ten team sites or one of the three sector 

headquarters, and a handful worked in the force headquarters. 

This is not the kind of mission where we had actual infantry 

battalions on the ground. The only contingents that operated a~ 

national contingents were our good friends the Australians, who 

had an outstanding signals contingent of approximately 45 folks. 

They've been in the peacekeeping business a long time, and they 

were invaluable in helping us new guys on the block figure out 

how to survive in a desert environment. 

The Canadians had not only the force commander at the time, 

but also when I got there all the clerks and movement control 

personnel. The largest contingent, interestingly, was the Swiss 

medical unit, which, when I arrived, had about eighty folks 

building several clinics. Switzerland is not a member of the 

United Nations, but for those kinds of humanitarian efforts, they 

participate--and they were first class. The medical support was 

the best kind of support we had over there. 

Problems: I do not want to be pessimistic, so I will give the 

bad stuff first and end up with the good stuff. I was part of the 

second contingent of Americans to arrive. This is a new 

experience for Americans. There were a lot of lessons to be 

leamed on the training, equipping, preparing, pre-briefing and all 

that sort of thing. The US Army has figured it out now, and I 

think we've got a good system in place. I do not think some of 

my fellow observers knew where the Westem Sahara was until 

they got off the plane. They were by and large volunteers, and 

they learned very quickly. Those things are getting fixed. Not 

only were the Australians helpful, but also the Canadians, who 
64 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

were there in large numbers--we borrowed heavily from their 

little booklets on peacekeeping operations. They had equipment 

recognition manuals, all these kinds of things. So we plagiarized 

from them; now we're starting to produce our own. That's the 

kind of thing that is essential for observers to do their jobs well. 

MINURSO had no air conditioning in the force headquarters. 

We were in a modified elementary school and it was pretty 

miserable. There was no air conditioning anywhere when 

arrived. I am happy to say I spent a large portion of time there 

working on living and working conditions. The Canadian 

company, Weather Haven, brought in shelters and we spent about 

three months emplacing those. The site folks went out on mobile 

patrols riding in Nissan four by four vehicles, grading violations 

on both sides. These were primarily unauthorized overflights, 

unauthorized movements, and the most serious during the first 

few months I was there, unauthorized fortifications----berm 

construction by the Moroccans. 

I will echo what has been said before. Logistics was the 

biggest problem. I was briefed before I went over there that 

logistics was the Achilles heel of MINURSO; when I departed 

six months later, it was still the Achilles heel. In the initial plan, 

there was supposed to be a Polish logistics battalion. We fought 

for months to get that, and it never arrived. It got to the point 

where we would have liked to have had a Polish logistics squad, 

just a couple of truck drivers, but we could not get them, I 

know that the UN is stretched thin, and I know there are political 

considerations, but we had a Canadian two-star general who 

pulled his hair out trying to convince New York that without 

effective logistics you cannot do your job. So, what did we 

have? We had individual observers who were "humping" fuel 

barrels, who were escorting trailers carrying fuel, who were 

spending probably as much time doing logistics duties just to 

support their own team site as they were assuming military 

operational duties. That cannot continue. We were very 

innovative. We could do things on our own initiative, but you 

cannot do that on a permanent basis and still do your operational 

mission. 

I won't get into problems with cooperation by the various 

parties to the conflict because that's really a political issue. 

However, that also affects the mentality of observers when they 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 65 

are reporting violations and they are left with the perception that 

these things are going into a dark hole somewhere and no one at 

either UN Headquarters or in the Security Council is taking note 

of these. Now, we were sort of in a vacuum; we did know a 

great deal about what was going on in New York, and I guess 

from a purely objective military standpoint that was all to tile 

good. But, I think it would help observers if they knew a little 

bit more about the policy implications of what they are doing, 

and if they knew at least something about what their own 

country's position is regarding a particular conflict. I think they 

could do their job better. The military force, which was the only 

game in town--and I think pretty much still is unfortunately, 

got blamed by the parties for some of these political failures. 

When you are out there talking to a Polisario leader or a 

Moroccan general and you're wearing a blue beret and they 

perceive that the UN is not objective, they blame you. 

Many times my boss had to explain to them, "I have a 

narrow military mandate. This is what I'm here to do, that's 

what I'm doing, and just transmit your concems about the 

political impasse back to New York". 

Finally, we had numerous mine incidents. There are mines 

in the Western Sahara left over from the days when the territory 

was a Spanish colony. There were mines emplaced by the 

Moroccans around this berm; there are mines emplaced by the 

Polisario, who sneak up and steal the Moroccan mines and 

replant them without marking where they are located. The 

problem was that we did not know where tiaey were, and the 

Moroccans did not share minefield data they had. One of our 

vehicles ran over an anti-tank mine and, if anybody wants to see 

what an anti-tank mine does to a Nissan four by four, I've got 

some pictures up here I can show you. We have an Air Force 

officer walking around with a purple heart as a result of that 

incident. We were very lucky, and I'm pleased with that. 

Finally, we end up on some good points. I think this mission 

was sort of the epitome of what can be done in a post-Cold War 

environment. Here we have former antagonists working together. 

We were flying in all-Soviet aircraft, purchased on contract; we 

had helicopters flown by Soviet crews; we had cargo planes 

flown by Romanian crews, and VIP aircraft flown by 
66 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

Czechoslovakian crews. I asked why we had all these "Eastem 

bloc" aircraft, and they said those countries were the lowest 

bidders and had a lot of aircraft they were trying to get rid of. 

The aircraft worked very well. 

I want talk a little bit about professional development to 

wrap-up. I think a tour like this, no matter how many 

frustrations are experienced, is outstanding training for a line 

military officer. I cannot really say I'm a line military officer. 

I'm more of a pol-mil person, a Foreign Area Officer, and 

General Sewall is right some of the Foreign Area Officers who 

were in the Sahara did very well because they were trained in 

dealing with national sensitivities, cultural awareness, languages 

and all that kind of stuff. But we had a large number of folks 

who were just line officers, and it was hard to find enough 

personnel who spoke Arabic, French, and Spanish. That's how 

I got there, by the way, as a Latin America specialist who had 

worked for a Peruvian general who spoke French and Spanish 

quite well, but who could not speak not much English, although 

that was the working language of the mission--so I got some 

good Latin American training there in the Westem Sahara. I also 

would say with respect to special forces personnel that, they do 

very well in this kind of assignment because they're used to 

being deployed in small numbers or individually to foreign areas. 

They have the necessary skills; they have the little manuals tied 

down in their pants pockets-you know, little phrase books, all 

that kind of stuff. Little things that, had we been in the 

peacekeeping business a long time, we would have figured out. 

I think the US is now on the road to being very good at this type 

of activity. From a professional development standpoint, 

however, I said I was there six months, and the reason this was 

a six month TDY tour was partially because of the uncertainty 

regarding the future of this particular mission. I think for 

continuity purposes it should have been a one year tour, and I 

told my bosses that I, as a bachelor, would have loved to spend 

one year in the Sahara. Some of the young officers who were 

married and were loaned by Ft. Bragg were ready to go back to 

their regular units after six months. 

I asked my personnel assignments officer for an evaluation 

when I retumed. I said what does a UN assignment do to a 

guy's career; he said, "Well, one time probably wouldn't hurt 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 67 

any, but I wouldn't do it on a repetitive basis." That's the kind 

of mentality we have to deal with when we attempt to get good 

folks who have this experience and want to go back for 

additional UN assignments. Now, I am not saying that we 

should do like some countries (like Ireland), some of whose 

military personnel have concentrated their entire careers from one 

mission to the other. But I think we have to educate our 

leadership at least here in the United States that this is the future, 

this is the kind of thing that militaries are going to do in the 

foreseeable future. It is better to send 30 military personnel out 

than an entire brigade or an entire division. A final note: the 

morale of our people in MINURSO, despite the frustrations, was 

high because we kept stroking them, and asking them "Have any 

of our folks been killed by mine incidents'?" We came close a 

few times, but the fact that the ceasefire is holding, I think, is 

reason for patting our people on the back and saying a limited 

military observer mission can do some very good things. 

MAJOR GEORGE STEUBER: Well, having served six 

months on one of those Level-Two peacekeeping operations with 

a low level of military competence, I can say that there are some 

major problems that, if not resolved, are going to have some 

grave consequences for UN missions in the future. I think the 

first thing that needs to be addressed when you have a UN 

mission of the comprehensive scope of Cambodia is that the IJN 

political and military leadership needs to decide what they are 

going to do to achieve success. It was not done in Cambodia, 

and, by the sound of it, has not been done in most of the other 

UN missions. That is absolutely crucial. What do you do when 

a representative of the Australian army is shot at while flying in 

a United Nations helicopter (bright white with black United 

Nations over it and blue UN flags) and you pinpoint who has 

done it'? What happens when the Khmer Rouge keeps stalling 

a peace settlement that they have signed and nobody is willing to 

take the political and economic sanctions necessary to stop that? 

These have to be addressed before you ever put anybody on the 

ground, and they obviously have not been addressed. 

Coordination between United Nations agencies: Our mission 
68 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

in Cambodia as UNAMIC, United Nations Advanced Mission in 

Cambodia and United Nations Transitional Authority in 

Cambodia, UNTAC, was literally to take over the country: to 

stop four fighting factions from continued fighting and take over 

the ministry of foreign affairs, the ministry of the interior, the 

ministry of finance, and everything else and run a country until 

national elections were held, and Cambodia could become 

Cambodia again. 

To accomplish this, we had to take four fighting 

factions--100% of them, some 220,000 soldiers--regroup them, 

canton them, disarm them, and demobilize 70% of them. And to 

do this, we were given 11 infantry battalions spread throughout 

the country, in a country that no longer has an infrastructure, 

does not have telephones, does not have roads, does not have 

railroads, does not have anything. Rather a large order. And 

again without consensus on how to achieve this, it is rather 

difficult to do it. 

Planning: There was no planning to speak of for UNTAC. 

I got to Cambodia on the 8th of December 1991, one month after 

the initial group had come into country, and I deployed to my 

field site on the Thai-Cambodian border on the 22nd. In 

between, we played musical headquarters. We changed 

headquarters three different times because the civilian component 

couldn't agree with the military component on where we should 

put a headquarters--that's after they had already been there for 

a month. 

Logistics: We got there and they said, "Well, you're getting 

subsistence allowance, why should we support you? Go buy it." 

Well, that's fine if you've got a place to buy it, but Cambodia's 

been at war for 20 years and the places to buy things are very 

limited. The things you can buy are even more limited. That 

presents a bit of a problem. There really was no planning. We 

deployed on the 22nd of December to three team sites (we were 

just observers at the time), five members to an observer team 

plus three Australian communicators and support. By the way 

I'd like to put in a plug for the Australians. If the Australians had 

not been in that mission, UNTAC and UNAMIC would have 

failed in January at the latest, rather than having plugged along 

minimally successfully for one year now. The Australians saved 

our butts, they provided us with security; they sent medics with 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 69 

each one of the teams, so if we had stepped on one of the three 

to four million mines emplaced out there, somebody would have 

been able to take care of us, because the UN mission obviously 

could not. 

They deployed us without maps. Now I'm here to tell you 

that if you go into an area, it would be nice to know where you 

are. It would be nice to know where you are going to site these 

camps to canton some 220-odd thousand people. I tried for two 

months to secure maps and, finally, I had to go back down to 

Phnom Penh and man-handle the S-3 and literally threaten his 

life so that I could get money to buy them on the black market. 

They were not available through UN channels. That's ludicrous 

to say the least. A little bit of planning would have been nice 

going in. Logistics did not get any better when I left at the end 

of six months. The last thing I did before I left was get in a 

commandeered Toyota four-by-four, load 18 five-gallon water 

jerrys in the back and drive 240 kilometers to my team site so 

that I could give them the first water they had had in two weeks. 

That's not good after six months. 

The Staff: The staff was really unique. We had a chief of 

staff who spoke Polish, and some very broken French, but no 

English. Needless to say, he was not really in charge of the staff. 

My team leader was an Argentinean officer whom I admired 

greatly. He taught himself to speak, read and write English in 

the six months that he was there, but to start out, he spoke none. 

One of my Australian's parents were Chilean, and he spoke a 

little Spanish at home, so we used him to speak to my team 

leader. Again, it does not make for really good crisp execution 

of a mission if you cannot speak to your team leader. 

Now we overcame those sorts of things, but staff planning is 

critical. As long as you have a staff that is made up of 

politically appointed officers, there is no way of establishing 

responsibility for executing the mission, and that's a critical item 

as you may well imagine. That need not happen. 

I'm here to tell you that General Sanderson, the commander 

of the UNTAC mission, was absolutely hamstrung by the 

inability to appoint the people that he needed for critical staff 

functions. The other thing is this: just because a gentleman 

walks through the door and has a specific rank on his shoulder 
70 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

and holds a specific position within his military does not mean 

that he knows a damned thing about a military operation. There 

are some people out there who are totally incompetent. It is not 

their fault. They mean well and, for their own operations, they 

might even do a good job. 

We are talking about a 20,000-person operation in Cambodia 

spread out over an entire country. That is a large undertaking 

and it demands that the people in key staff positions be 

competent. One way to get around that is through staff training. 

I think it is crucial that a school be established that will train UN 

staff officers. I believe that, because I am currently at the 

Command and General Staff College--and I believe we turn out 

a good product--most of the other staff colleges represented by 

the officers here today turn out good products. We have many 

hundreds of foreign officers that attend such colleges. 

That does not mean that a foreign staff officer is going to be 

on a UN mission. It does mean that somewhere in his military 

career, he will be in a functioning position. If you have a UN 

staff training school, hopefully, the UN will also prepare some 

doctrine on how it will conduct its field operations. That doctrine 

needs to be taught at a UN staff college so that when a mission 

goes into an area, that staff can function effectively. In 

Cambodia we have a signals mission. The Australians provided 

the national contingent. We have engineers; the New Zealanders 

came in and did that mission. The French provided us with our 

initial airlift. Those were national contingents. Give me a 

national contingent headquarters; they will at least have common 

operating doctrine and know how to do things, and I can then put 

a staff officer from another nation at the head of it. Two 

different ways to meet the need, but it is absolutely essential, that 

those things be done. 

Execution: Again, as long as you have political people in 

senior staff level positions that are not held accountable for what 

they're doing and cannot be fired by the commander for 

incompetence, you will have very poor execution. The three 

types of people I encountered on a UN operation were: those 

that knew how to do the job and were motivated to do the job; 

those that would have liked to do the job, but lacked the tools; 

and those that, quite frankly, did not give a damn and were 

drawing $110-$145 a day to go back to their country rich. Now 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 71 

that's a terrible indictment, but, that's what's going on out there. 

That needs to stop. If the United Nations becomes a competent 

military organization, you can stop that. If you provide that 

military force with good logistics, and a good workable plan, I 

won't need to pay an observer $145 a day. And quite frankly, 

that's not necessary anyway, because in Cambodia at $145 a day 

I could own large portions of Cambodia. You know it only takes 

about $15.00 a day maximum if you want to live like a king in 

Cambodia, unless you're living in Phnom Penh~which, by the 

way, is where the UN headquarters happens to be, and that's why 

it is at $145 a day. 

These things are not necessary. If I have a good functioning 

military organization, I can take care of my people without 

paying those kinds of dollars. And those kinds of dollars distort 

the economy. We do more harm in Cambodia and other small 

countries by paying these people these exorbitant sums. Take 

Kompong Thorn province. You have an Indonesian battalion 

there now; they aren't being paid $145 a day, but their normal 

pay plus the increment that they get from the United Nations 

would make them millionaires in Cambodia. As a result, you 

cannot buy chickens on the market anymore and you cannot buy 

rice. So what do the Cambodians get? They get the cracked 

broken rice that nobody else will buy; they get the scrawny 

chickens they raise or that nobody else will take. You create 

another problem by just deploying a United Nations force. The 

IMF was looking at this problem. Unfortunately, because of a 

lack of coordination between agencies, nothing ever got done 

about this. These are some really key problems that go with a 

United Nations mission. That's why it is imperative that 

planning go on before you ever commit anybody to this type of 

operation. 

Training: The United States has a pretty good training 

program for Foreign Area Officers. When I went to the Thai 

Command and General Staff College on the Thai border, most of 

the people in the military commands along the border were 

classmates of mine, at least at the junior and mid-officer level. 

It helped greatly with coordination. I worked with the Khmer 

Peoples National Liberation Armed Forces initially. They are 

located on the Thai border, and all speak Thai. Not a problem. 
72 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

I didn't need an interpreter. There aren't any interpreters in 

Cambodia anymore. Pol Pot destroyed the educational system. 

The only people you'll find there that are bilingual are those 

of the older generation. They speak French, and some that had 

associated with Americans speak English; but the whole middle 

level of population---all your junior leaders--speak neither 

French nor English. So somebody, if you're going in as an 

observer team, had better have access to good interpreters or be 

able to speak the language. That's really key in training. 

As far as major units, I absolutely agree, a well-trained 

infantry or armor or mechanized infantry unit can go in and do 

any mission you want them to do. And they can do so easily 

with a minimum amount of training. They need to know the 

historical background of the conflict so they do not do stupid 

things, as well as the motives of the factions that are in the 

conflict. They need to know a little bit about the local culture, 

so they do not do culturally unacceptable things. 

For example, at Battambang, a freak wind came up. The 

United Nations team suddenly heard small arms fire breaking out 

at the far end of town. Battambang is not a very secure area and, 

as this small arms fire increased in intensity and started rolling 

towards the team location, they believed they were under major 

ground attack. They started to get on the radio, were ready to call 

for an extraction, when some of the folks on the roof of the hotel 

where they were located looked outside and saw in fact that the 

Caanbodizms were just firing up in the air to "stop the wind". 

That's a normal Cambodian practice. When it is windy, when a 

storm approaches, they shoot in the air and the wind stops, 

hopefully. 

Such a practice can cause problems. If you have untrained 

UN people in a situation like that, they may respond with firing 

of their own. So the cultural sensitivities need to be part of 

training for mission participants. You need to have your people 

understand that they are going into an austere environment. One 

of the things that UNTAC did was they deployed some police 

along the border between Cambodia and Vietnam. And after 

two weeks of one policeman crying his eyes out every single day, 

they decided that maybe that was a bad idea and repatriated him. 

You take any police officer out of a major metropolitan area and 

tell him he's got to do these sorts of things in the wilds of 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 73 

Cambodia, or the wilds of Somalia, it poses major problems. An 

Australian constable from the "out back" would probably be able 

to do that sort of thing--and, in fact, they do that sort of training 

in other areas--but you have to think about who you are trying 

to put in what situation and then again this goes back to 

planning. What forces are applicable and where should they be 

going'? What should their jobs be? I think that President Bush's 

speech to the United Nations, in which he said that the United 

States would be very happy to provide a training center and to 

try and establish a school for training United Nations staffers, is 

a very necessary thing and I applaud that. I hope that the United 

States goes forward with that. 

One final conunent. Cambodia has three to four million 

mines in it. One of the essential things that you need to teach 

people is to watch where they step. We lost a number of 

Bangladeshis out of the UNTAC mission almost every other day. 

I was putting Cambodian civilians in my Nissan and rushing 

them to the nearest medical facilities because they had stepped on 

mines. It is a horrible problem. All sides have been planting 

mines for 20 years. You can no longer assume that just because 

an area is a nice grassy knoll, there aren't mines underneath that 

grass. Secondary growth also impedes mine clearing operations. 

Mine clearing is absolutely critical, and mine awareness is even 

more so. 

GENERAL DISCUSSION 

THE CHAIR: I do want to just put a little note of balance here. 

There is a certain tone, suggesting we are beating up on the llN. 

This was not the purpose of the presentations made, But I think 

even those who are here from the UN would probably admit that 

there is a reform process underway and that it is needed. Fair 

enough. The institute for National Strategic Studies is interested 

in what the United States needs to do to improve its own 

performance, to contribute better and to make UN peacekeeping 

or peace enforcement or Level-Two or Level-Three more 
74 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

effective. I think those of you who have read Chairman Powell's 

comments know his preference. I do not want to misquote him, 

but certainly we learn in our United States schools the need for 

overwhelming force for achieving decisive results. We have a 

cultural problem, I would submit, in terms of adjusting the 

manner in which we operate to be more effective in this sort of 

political-military environment. I would foresee us doing more in 

the future. 

QUESTION: I am from the Department of Peacekeeping 

Operations, so it has been very interesting for me to listen to the 

discussions. I am responsible, among other things, for training 

in the United Nations. The issue has been raised a number of 

times--that training is very essential for future 

peacekeepers--and I agree with that. But let me offer some 

additional points. When we talk about United Nations 

peacekeeping, we are talking about United Nations' operations. 

In fact the operational issue in a country is rather limited, 

because when the forces are there, what are we going to do? We 

are dealing with supervision, monitoring, escorting, etc. In fact, 

what we need is planning for the deployment of the force. The 

logistical planning is essential for us-- indeed, it is crucial. The 

other point I would mention is the standby forces. When we are 

talking about standby forces, it depends on the contributors. If 

I am talking about standby forces from Sweden, it means 

something else for me than if you're talking about standby forces 

from the United States. We have standby forces within the 

Nordic community dealing with peacekeeping that can be made 

available within 14 days. But, in the US, we are talking about 

24 hours, 48 hours or 72 hours. I think also the culture of 

various countries differs quite a lot. If we have infantry battalion 

from a country somewhere other than Westem Europe, and we 

have an infantry battalion from the Western Europe, there is a 

difference. 

I think it is important for us within the UN to think about 

how standby forces can reach a certain operational level. It 

means for infantry battalions saying they have to do the 

following things: equipment attached to the battalion, 

communication equipment, vehicles, and units must be 

self-contained for approximately two weeks. It is very difficult 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 75 

for us to get these kinds of units today. It is easy for us to get 

units if they are coming just with the uniforms. But it is most 

important to get medical units and logistics units, air wings, the 

air transport and so on. I think we have to plan for what I call 

differing models of standby forces. This has implications for 

training. First, we can never confine training only to the military 

people. We need to provide training to the civilians, as well. 

Because we need to remember today peacekeeping forces are a 

combination of civilian and military components. One of the 

difficulties within existing peacekeeping operations,is that 

civilians do not always understand the military approach to an 

operation and vice versa. The other point is that we always say 

that we need to train the troop-contributing countries that are 

going to provide the United Nations with forces, but we have 

also to train the host country. It is important to train these 

people, to inform them of the objectives of peacekeeping the 

force. I do not know how many times I heard from one of the 

countries: "What is the purpose of the peacekeeping force? Is 

it an occupation force?" People do not understand peacekeeping 

forces are not a true military force. It is a military unit used in 

a political context. We cannot develop peacekeeping curricula for 

the United States and send it to Nigeria. But we can provide the 

nucleus, and they have to fill in the blanks. There are today 

several training institutions around the world dealing with 

peacekeeping. We have them in Europe, some in the Nordic 

countries, as has been mentioned. We have them in Austria, we 

have them in Poland, and we have Canada and Australia. And 

I think what we have to do, if not to unify the training, at least 

talk the same language. 

Concerning new missions, you do not know what has been 

done so far when we talk about Somalia. We present training in 

two ways. First, what we do is to send to the advanced party in 

the country a disk with the training program. They have to alter 

the training program in accordance with the local conditions, 

because we are not sure about them up in the Headquarters. At 

the same time, the contingent's commanders, when they come to 

UN Headquarters, are briefed about the mission and at the same 

time they are briefed how to train their people. It is not 

necessary to train well-educated staff officers, battalion 
76 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

commanders, etc. The key persons in all the training, particularly 

in these kinds of peacekeeping operations we are dealing with 

today, are platoon and squad leaders because they have to take 

the most difficult decisions in the field. There are six videos in 

development. These videos deal with training. The point was 

that we found out a lot of countries know nothing about 

peacekeeping and even less about training. The first video deals 

with the causes and roots of a conflict; the second deals with the 

historical evolution of peacekeeping; the third deals with how 

you can use an original center for training; the fourth, with how 

to train the UN soldier; the fifth, with how to train a UN 

observer; the sixth, with how to train all election monitor. 

Hopefully, these six videos will have been completed by the end 

of the year, and we can get some money to have them translated 

into French and Spanish. As you can see, training is very 

essential for us, and I think we have done something to enhance 

it. 

CHAIR: Thank you very much for your comments. I might just 

ask the panel whether they might wish to respond. 

RESPONSE:If Again, in a context of a balanced perspective, I 

would like to make the point, my remarks might have sounded 

like UN bashing, but it is not. What I felt I did in Central 

America was the most positive thing I have done in my life, bar 

none. From getting people like Dr. Ortega together with 

Commandante Franklin, to get them working on a peace process, 

to demobilizing an entire army, to destroying 20-odd-thousand 

weapons. It was very positive and it could not have happened 

without the United Nations. Your point on the military 

component, what seems to be missing is what we in the military 

see as essential in any of these operations as we go from LevelOne to -Two to -Three; you must have those principles of unity 

of command which is not necessarily there. And when you get 

to a sort of Level One operation, perhaps such as the elections in 

Haiti and what have you, where the military commander was 

subordinate to the mission commander, fair enough. But when 

you go above that to Level-Two and -Three, unity of military 

command must be present, or we're going to lose soldiers and 

lose the operation. Your point on training is well taken. Senior 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 77 

officers training, staff officers training, are essential. We think 

we can handle this in the context of our normal officer 

development training, and we must do it. We Canadians haven't 

done it terribly well, but we are improving upon it. Your 

observer training especially, a thing which must be done for a 

week or two weeks depending on the background of the officer 

and the mission, that also has to be done. We do not see the 

requirement for a Can',~lian peacekeeping academy, which is 

being pushed by some people in Canada. I see us continuing to 

participate in the higher level academy leaming for would-be 

chiefs of staff, force commanders and that sort of thing. It is 

quite important. If, indeed, in the case of the United States, it is 

required to make a political statement to underscore the point that 

a peacekeeping academy or a special organization is required, I 

certainly would understand that. But I do not think with the 

professionalism that exists in the United States Army as I know 

it you need a special peacekeeping academy. 

SECOND RESPONSE: I wouldn't disagree, but there is just 

something I would like to add. One of the problems the UN 

faces is getting forces into the field quickly. One of the real 

problems, of course, is not only getting the military into the field, 

but getting the UN in the position to where it can second its 

military staff so that it begins to perform essential headquarter 

staff functions. One of the problems with the UN having 12 

missions currently in the field--soon to be 13, of which two of 

those missions are the second and third largest ever 

mounted--the reality is that the United Nations has diluted its 

expertise in many of it's specialized logistics areas in the 

Secretariat because it was required to send it's experts to the 

field. There is great sense, in my view, to rotating key staff from 

various countries through all of the positions in the United 

Nations Secretariat dealing with peacekeeping. Whether it be 

finance, logistics, or operations, it makes sense to me that all of 

us provide people. I think many of us are willing to do so. 

THIRD RESPONSE: I'd like to cover the civilian training side 

of the house. One of the problems we had was our civilian staff 

rotated too often. In the time I was in the field, we had three 
78 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

chief procurement officers and four chief finance offÉcers. You 

cannot get any continuity as a result. A lot of these 

folks--because the UN was stretched thin---were on their first 

field assignment. They had no background training on the area 

whatsoever. Complicating that was what was mentioned earlier 

about unity of command. I know the UN is not a military 

organization, but they need to establish clearly, who is in charge. 

When you have a situation as we had in the Western Sahara 

where the military forces were doing their thing, all those other 

support groups existed only on paper. George [Stueber] talked 

about the problems with police. We had no problems. We had 

a police chief who was the chief of nothing. He was there all by 

himself. Then we had an assistant special representative who was 

resident for two weeks, then he went to train up the new special 

representative. 

From a military perspective, the senior man was our force 

commander. But the civilians look at that sort of thing in a 

different way. When we went to a lower level acting force 

commander, regular general level, we had an assistant special 

representative who was roughly at the same pay grade and a chief 

administrative officer who was just a little bit below that pay 

grade--and no one really said who was in charge. Now I know 

what UN wiring diagrams say and all that, but to try to explain 

to some young military officers who are accustomed to knowing 

who is in charge and who you go to if you have a problem is 

difficult when the concept is "put all these guys in a room, lock 

the door, and see who comes out on top." This is not a very 

good way to run things. The civilians need to train, the military 

need to train; and one of the things that needs to be in the 

curriculum is how to deal with each other, how to use your 

powers of persuasion rather than just giving an order and 

expecting somebody to carry it out. Our Ibrce commander had a 

policy: when new observers came in they would serve a 

minimum of thirty days out on a team site before they would get 

a job in the force or sector headquarters. I know you cannot 

afford to do that when you're looking at a platoon leader who 

gets a short notice requirement to go out and take a Kalashnikov 

away from a 16 year old Cambodian teenager or something like 

that, but we were in a different situation and planning was done 

for us. We did our own staff training, or we would have been 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 79 

very hard pressed to graduate from Level-One to a Level-Two 

operation largely because the political planning was based on the 

false assumption that political successes would be achieved. 

FINAL RESPONSE: Two comments. First, on civil-military 

staff training. As currently configured, a military operation that 

has a military headquarters supported by a civilian staff is 

unworkable. It is unworkable for a couple of reasons. First, the 

civilians have different rules. They work until maybe nc~n 

Saturday and then they go home for Saturday and Sunday. When 

you are out in the field you need support 24 hours a day, seven 

days a week. Second, civilians do not know military "things". 

I had a secretary from Switzerland; she was just a sweet lady, but 

she didn't know about military vocabulary, about operations or 

anything else, and she was holding down what would have been 

a position for a master sergeant in an operations cell. There were 

operations that weren't planned in UNTAC because there was a 

lack of experience and expertise there. Third, let's say you start 

out at Level-One and things get nasty. How are you now going 

to deploy those civilians into a Level-Three operation? More 

importantly, they have absolutely no expertise running a LevelThree type operation. That needs to be cured at the UN 

Headquarters level, and it needs to be done quickly, because there 

are a lot of Level-Twos out there that could become nasty. The 

next question involves training. The training that I am 

advocating for staff is not to bring Canadians and US officers 

and other people up-to-speed on how to do staff work, because 

we already do a pretty good job on that. But when you are going 

to deploy a staff on a military operation, it is bad policy to get 

them on the ground where they meet for the first time. I would 

much rather have a place where once you have identified that 

you'll have a mission going out, you have identified what that 

mission is to accomplish and what they are allowed and not 

allowed to do. I would like to send them someplace--maybe 

Fort Dix--where I can give them simulation training so that they 

can work together as staff groups to produce the staff products 

required--the intelligence products, the logistics planning 

products, the operational product--before they get on the ground, 

and they have all the real life alligators biting them so that they 
80 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

do not know what they are doing. I think that's absolutely key. 

More importantly, I think this is an easy one to solve. Often you 

see that there are north-south antipathies. If you have a staff 

training school, that brings officers up to speed regarding good 

staff procedures, that is a professional carryover that can be used 

when they go back to their nations. 

QUESTION: My question concerns MINURSO. I didn't actually 

go to MINURSO myself, but my colleague Jack Chopper who 

works with me did. And he did actually testify to the Senate and 

at the General Assembly on his findings. He has quite a story to 

tell. He visited the Polisario through Algeria, and he visited the 

Moroccan side at the request of the Norwegians after the caucus 

we had in Morocco. On the latter journey,he was arrested twice 

in the area, and he returned with the impression that the UN 

observers are a boxed-in force, comparatively speaking. He cites 

the fact that the hotels they live in are actually prescribed areas, 

and he wasn't able to enter them and tell that you lived on the 

Moroccan side because it is fenced off by the police. You cannot 

fly a UN flag. You have a fault with your violation reports 

which do not actually reach the percentage of actual reports that 

come into public scrutiny. It is vastly less than the number of 

violation reports that you wrote. So I have two questions. Are 

they really boxed in? Or is this our imagination? Do they really 

enjoy the freedom of movement which is granted to them under 

the mandate? 

RESPONSE: I cannot speak for what has happened since I left 

the end of July, but you are right, we are somewhat boxed-in by 

one side of the conflict. I did not want to get into a "who shot 

John" comment, saying one side is cooperating with the United 

Nations and the other is not. Those kinds of comments have been 

raised to New York, and for whatever reason, we are still 

constrained by the Moroccans. It is true, they probably wouldn't 

let that fellow into the hotel. You see the Moroccans do not 

consider, what they call D-Day as having occurred yet. They 

treat the UN force there as being a guest. And for a guy like me 

from the United States I resented being monitored all the time, 

having people go through my hotel room wlfile I'm at work. 

These sorts of issues have been raised to New York. What is 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 81 

being done about it, I do not know. We are moving just about 

everywhere we want to go except the Moroccans do not let us 

into their strong points along the berm, and the general who is in 

charge of those forces, told our force commander: "I will 

personally escort you into that strong point as soon as my king 

gives me permission to do so." Now,that's above tile level of our 

military force to resolve. We also talked about the mine 

problem. Despite the fact that the Moroccans say that they are 

sharing minefieid data with the UN Observer Force, we were 

pretty well convinced that we were not getting a lot of minefield 

data that they do have about the mines they put out, even though 

some of them may have shifted in the sands over the years. They 

are also not sharing information about the total disposition of 

their forces. These problems have all been made known to New 

York, but the perception of the observers on the ground is that 

there is not a whole lot of arm twisting going on back at the 

Security Council level. 

I know it is very debilitating when you spend a lot of time 

preparing draft Secretary-General's reports for the military force 

inputs that talk about logistics problems and movement 

restriclions, and then the final product is a very watered down 

thing. The last one that came before I left didn't even contain 

the word logistics anywhere in the entire report. Which, to me, 

if I was an ambassador at the United Nations and I read this 

thing or sat in on Security Council deliberations trying to decide 

whether to approve that report or not, I would say: "Hey! things 

must be hunky dory in MINURSO." Yes, we are somewhat 

boxed in by one side over there. For whatever reason, and it is 

not as though we've accepted that and laid down and rolled over 

and said, "well that makes our job easier we do not have to do 

as much patrolling." We have tried to deal with that with some 

limited success. I do not know what the situation is at present. 

ADDITIONAL COMMENT: The situation you describe is 

analogous to the situation in Cambodia. When we deployed one 

team to a site, they were kept under armed guard, virtual house 

arrest. They were allowed no contact with any of the 

Cambodians. They were never allowed into the headquarters of 

the Khmer Rouge. They have no idea if that is really the HQs 
82 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

for the KR; it most probably is not. They did not allow any UN 

helicopters into the area for two months. My team went into the 

area under the auspices of the "CIANOOK" faction and were told 

by the commander of the Khmer Rouge 616 division that he 

would kill me and my entire team. There was never any action 

taken by the United Nations conceming this incident. This goes 

back to my initial point. Before a mission goes in, the United 

Nations leadership needs to decide how they propose to achieve 

the mission's goal. What economic, political, and military 

pressure will they exert? And they also have to spell out what 

is failure. When do you cut your losses and say the organization 

is not going to be able to achieve the mission, and anything else 

we throw at it is a waste of resources'? That again, has not been 

done. I raised those questions with General Sanderson early on 

in the mission when it was painfully obvious that the KR had no 

intention of cooperating with the peace agreement and before we 

had deployed 11 battalions and 15,000 people. Decisions on how 

to fulfill the mission and criteria for success and failure should 

have been made. So it goes back to the planning, the real 

concept of what the mission is going to achieve and how it will 

be achieved. 

FURTHER RESPONSE: To substantiate the two examples that 

were made, you are always faced with this problem. We had 

them playing games with us and our freedom of movement, 

which was agreed to by all concemed but was not granted. We 

had to press, cajole, educate them, and finally over all 

protestations, take a militarily calculated risk to get into the 

Imales Valley, which was the home of the Contras, who didn't 

want us to go there. Anyway, when we came back we had 

complaints all over the place from the United States Embassy. 

Our mission was not in concert with what they wanted, but we 

pushed and made a military decision, and took a calculated risk 

which was described by some as being foolhardy. But once that 

was done and contact had been made, it all unfolded from there. 

You've got to keep pressing and that's where the military 

estimate process and the ability and the desire and the necessity 

of taking risks comes in. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 83 

THE CHAIR: Let me try briefly to indicate our conclusions for 

US military planners in signing up to a UN operation--whether 

it is level-One, Level-Two, level-Three, individual observer, 

small size unit, or large size unit. 

First, well trained US units do not need a major reorientation 

of their training program in terms of predeployment training, but, 

they will need sensitivity training or cultural training to get them 

immersed in the social, cultural milieu into which they will 

deploy. 

Second, you certainly have to know what kind of mission it 

is-whether it is Level-One, Two-, or Three-. Training alone is 

not going to satisfy Level Three. We probably need to buttress 

our approach to education about UN operations in our 

professional military education. We do a little bit of it at present, 

but I do not think we do it terribly well. We need to enhance it 

in the Command and General Staff College, because majors and 

lieutenant colonels are going to be out there doing the job as 

individual observers or whatever. We must do it at the War 

Colleges, as well, because their graduates may be the force 

commanders or key staff officers, etc. I believe it was General 

Douglas who mentioned the importance of reconnaissance. The 

UN technical surveys should be done jointly. The nations that are 

going to participate should go on the technical survey with the 

UN officials, so that there are no unresolved issues between the 

nations that are going to contribute forces and the UN. 

We, the United States, want to make sure that we have this 

reservoir of skills and talent. I know the Army does it in the 

FAO program, but we need to make sure all the Services are 

developing a similar reservoir. As a result, we will know who 

we've got, where they've been, whether they can be called on 

again, etc. But, it has to contribute to a person's career. And 

that probably means the United States military has to go through 

a little acculturation. Participation in peacekeeping operations 

should be rewarded and should contribute to a one's career. If 

we say that, but do not do it, nobody's going to want to sign up 

for a peacekeeping mission. 

As to selection of people for peacekeeping missions, I do 

not know whether you need a psychological profile, but I can see 
84 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

some situations as very stressful, which means that you've got to 

have the right person there. I am also struck by the need for a 

professional UN staff officers' course. I think our President 

suggested that in his speech. Personally, I think we can build on 

the approach. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEI~.PING 85 

The UN Contribution to 

International Security 

Ambassador Thomas R. Pickering 

US Permanent Representative 

to the United Nations 

THE FUTURE SECURITY ROLE of the UN is, to put it mildly, 

a speculative topic. In reality it requires three separate forecasts: 

one, about the dominant security concems of the coming years; 

another conceming the use of multilateral security tools relative 

to regional or unilateral ones; and a third regarding the specific 

contributions the UN might make. 

Triple forecasts are better assignments for futures traders and 

risk averse diplomats, for whom the act of speculation always 

quickens the pulse. But when, as now, the world is in upheaval, 

you need a certain amount of speculation just to get to the end of 

each day. Unfortunately today it looks like I will be starting 

early. With that comment I will venture some thoughts on the 

very intriguing subject you have chosen, with the understanding 

they will be treated as personal musings with no official status. 

US SECURITY INTERESTS AFTER THE COLD WAR 

Over the last two years it has grown increasingly evident that the 

end of the Cold War removed from the international political 

system its central organizing principle. In his speech to the 

General Assembly last month, and in statements prompted by 

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and the UN's response, President Bush 

offered a replacement. The essence of the President's vision is a 

New World Order. He has described it in the following words: 

The New World Order does not mean surrendering our sovereignty 

or forfeiting our interests. It really describes a responsibility 

imposed by our successes. It refers to new ways of working with 

other nations to deter aggression and to achieve stability, to achieve 

prosperity and, ,above ,all, to achieve peace. It springs from hopes 

for a world based on a shared commit ment to a set of principles 

that undergird our relations - peaceful settlement of disputes, 
86 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

solid,'uity against aggression, reduced and controlled arsenals, and 

just treatment of peoples. 

What are the security implications of a transition from the 

Cold War to the kind of New World Order the President has 

described? If one looks at US post-Cold War security interests 

through a tiN window one way to describe the view is to talk 

about two adjacent circles separated by a rather permeable 

border. In the first circle are core US security interests: 

protection against direct attack; protection of US citizens abroad; 

aid and support of allies; maintenance of unmolested international 

communications and commerce; assurance of access to vital 

resources; insulation of essential interests from the effects of 

foreign wars - such as the tanker escorts late in the Iran-Iraq 

War;, and so on. 

In the second circle are the general and broad goals, values 

and principles which are the essence of that civil international 

society whose vision President Bush invokes by speaking of a 

New World Order or a "Pax Universalis". It embraces the rule of 

law, non-aggression and the pacific settlement of disputes, 

respect for sovereignty, defense of human rights, control of 

arsenals, curbs on proliferation and in general a disciplined, 

cooperative approach to common security. This morning I want 

to explore a narrow but extremely important question at the heart 

of the UN's role in strengthening and enforcing those principles, 

that is, the UN authorized use of force. 

MULTILATERAL VS. REGIONAL USE OF FORCE 

As a point of departure let me say that the centrality of the UN 

Security Council to the shaping and legitimizing of the response 

to Iraqi aggression has raised expectations, hence political 

pressure, for a comparable Council role in other crises. 

Expectations that the UN will swiftly act on the Haitian coup, the 

civil wars in Yugoslavia, aald in Liberia last year, illustrate the 

point. In many such crises, UN action may indeed be appropriate 

and helpful (particularly where, as in Haiti, its prior involvement 

clearly makes it an interested party. But the larger point is that 

the Charter never intended the Security Council to be its only or 

full time court of first resort. Indeed, Article 52 explicitly 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 87 

mandates regional efforts to resolve or redress threats to peace 

and security before resort to the UN. And that is a good thing. 

The forceful and immediate OAS response to the overthrow of 

the Aristide government in Haiti, and the constructive 

engagement of the EC and CSCE in the Yugoslav situation, 

suggest cohesion and solidarity arising from shared regional, 

political and cultural interests permit a wider scope for action. 

Even in Liberia, where the ECOWAS effort to bring peace has 

not been aided by regional Anglophone-Francophone divisions, 

the recent Yamasoukro 111 agreement is a major step toward 

ending hostilities and bringing new elections. 

Having said that, it is best to remember that none of these 

situations is resolved and the future is likely to bring crises that 

are not regionally containable, reinforcing the need for a selective 

approach to Security Council crisis management. One value of 

regional groups in this respect is that their greater willingness 

to act eventually bolsters the Security Council's role at such time 

as it may become necessary. 

One of the things that drives this global/regional question is 

the character of conflict itself. Readers of the daily summaries 

prepared by the intelligence community know that most entries 

describe conflicts within states not between them. In the post 

Desert Storm period that is an instructive fact. It reminds us that 

threats to regional stability will not result primarily from the 

miscalculations of expansionist powers. As the Middle East and 

Yugoslavia daily demonstrate, regional stability after the Cold 

War--as it was before it--is largely shaped by essentially 

parochial concerns of an ethnic, religious, political, economic and 

social character. This may cause some nostalgia about the 

neatness and clarity of the Iraqi threat, which from both a 

political and a strategic perspective was more a caricature of the 

Cold War with a legal overlay and an ostentatious villain than a 

useful metaphor for the untidy challenges and conflicts ahead. 

A daily dilemma facing the UN's security rule in this context 

is that, while the rule of law and the role of order are more 

comfortably complementary after the Cold War, they are not 

equivalent. Our humanitarian and political interest in seeing an 

orderly resolution in Yugoslavia may not conflict with, but it 

certainly exceeds any responsibilities conferred by relevant 
88 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

intemationai law. Similarly, intemational law has little positive 

and nothing dispositive to say about the responsibilities of other 

states in the event of coups and anarchy or bloodshed within a 

neighbor's borders except to the extent that a potential for 

spillover arises. In fact the rule of law would permit-though it is 

unpleasant to ponder - a world convulsed by extraordinarily 

destructive but utterly legal co~fflict. (The OAS Santiago 

Declaration about the non-acceptability of governmental change 

by coup represents an important exception and step forward 

DOW under test in Haiti). 

This dilemma is not helped by the tact that the common law 

of states as well as the covenants and treaties agreed between 

them permit competing and conflicting claims. Nowhere is this 

more evident than when the international community is forced to 

choose between the rights of states and the rights of peoples. As 

you know, Security Council resolution 678 authorized action to 

enforce Article 2 of the UN Charter's prohibition against the use 

of force against another state. As you also know, resolution 688 

found that persecution of Iraqi Kurds posed a danger to 

international peace and security, a finding which in the majority 

s view superseded another principle of the same Article 

(paragraph 7), prohibiting intervention in the domestic affairs 

of member states. 

Yet the fact that 688 was very difficult to negotiate, 

notwithstanding both the genocidal issues and the presence of 

the "spillover threat" effect, and the subsequent resistance to very 

forceful resolutions on Yugoslavia and Haiti suggests two things 

to me. First, therc is work to do before the Security Council is 

ready regularly to serve as global crisis manager, much less 

tribune of the New World Order; ~md second, that we must 

remain open to alternative regional and even unilateral tools to 

serve the "order" as well as the "law and justice" agendas 

expressed by the President. 

In a sense this approach to security leads us back to first 

principles. Part of the "work" we have to do is the same that 

our membership in the UN and other international institutions has 

always required. It is the toilsome task of nurturing an 

intemational society of common values, to inform and vitalize the 

orderly world the President calls for and which we all wish to 

live in. Civil order in the US benefits from the absorptive power 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 89 

of shared values and a common culture which can dull 

differences, lessen rivalries and make most of us stake-holders in 

the status quo. 

The absence of a parallel culture internationally, however 

tolerable during the Cold War, is now a source of frustration, as 

attested by the Council's recent failure to adopt a strong 

resolution calling for the restoration of Haitian democracy out of 

concem for the non-intervention doctrine in the hemisphere. 

While the collapse of communism has eliminated the major 

global clash of values it has had an opposite effect on other 

nationalist, tribal, religious, economic and ettmic conflicts that 

have been there for some time and may even reenergize 

North-South economic discord. For this reason, we are unlikely 

to see the rapid elaboration of international law or Security 

Council practice to provide assured external guarantees for 

minority rights, democratically elected governments, or hungry 

people caught in a civil war when a significant number of 

Council members do not see such principles as leading to order 

but subversive of it, at least subversive of an order based on firm 

doctrines of state sovereignty and non- intervention. 

For an evolving but ambitious global security system I think 

the answer to this problem is to be pragmatic: that is, we try to 

bridge the gap between "order" and "law" when we can: we seek 

to fill it in on the infrequent occasions when that is possible; and 

when neither approach suffices, we look outside the UN for 

another forum or tool. Let me give an example of each 

approach. For the first response, the case of the Kurds and 

resolution 688 points in the right direction. The resolution did 

not explicitly mandate Operation Provide Comfort. Instead, it 

declared that the situation constituted a threat to international 

peace and security and called for member states to give assistance 

to the Secretary General's humanitarian efforts. With these two 

elements and the fact that Iraq was a country already under 

subject to Chapter VII enforcement, 688 was enough to open a 

legal space for the coalition to provide relief and support for the 

Kurds, a space which was not challenged by those Permanent and 

other Council Members otherwise opposed to a more frontal 

approach on non-intervention grounds. 

Regarding the second approach - bridging the gap between 
90 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

the wider goals of a New World Order and the more modest 

requirements of current international law - a very helpful start 

would be early Congressional ratification of the lntemational 

Covenant of Legal and Political Rights. Given the very large 

number of signatories already, United States accession to that 

treaty would strengthen the standing of the democratic, civil and 

minority rights embodied in it. A similar but possibly more 

difficult undertaking would be to examine ways to strengthen 

such weaknesses in international humanitarian law as the fights 

of afflicted peoples for access to humanitarian relief during 

wartime. 

On this question of norm-building and its relation to security 

it is revealing to look again at regional organizations. For 

ex,'unple, the OAS now has a legal instrument authorizing strong 

action, including use of economic and diplomatic sanctions, to 

reverse coups against democratically elected governments. Of 

course, the UN lacks anything comparable, but so does the CSCE 

s Paris Charter, the EC's Rome Treaty, the Western European 

Union's Charter nor even NATO. Yet the notable thing about 

Europe is that failure to agree on a security identity has not 

prevented it from acting in an increasingly coherent, 

increasingly forceful way towards Yugoslavia. The "watch what 

we do not what we say" quality of Europe on Yugoslavia, and 

the Security Council on Iraq and to a lesser extent the OAS on 

Haiti all leads to the not very surprising discovery that in the 

development of new security system, necessity is the primary 

mother of invention. 

The third response to the limitations of the UN is to 

understand when it may still be necessary to bypass it. Neither 

the exercise of our rights under Article 51, of careful engagement 

in support of the principles of the New World Order require us 

to act under explicit UN authority. Nor is it difficult to imagine 

circumstances where either the fast-breaking nature of the threat 

or the inability of the Security Council to reach a decision argue 

for rapid unilateral or regional action. 

Nonetheless, the Security Council now has a more credible 

and central status. We have done much to bring this about. We 

have done so in the belief that in the post-Cold War world, given 

the marginal nature of most threats to our wider environment, we 

have a great deal to gain from an effective and influential 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 91 

Security Council. It strikes me then that we should strive to 

shape our policies and their expression to protect that investment. 

With the exception of the Korean War, the subject of UN 

authorized enforcement actions and their legal and practical 

features is an unwritten text. Nor is the job of writing that text 

aided by the fact that the threats we must deal with fit awkwardly 

into any imaginable UN based structure. And neither will the 

UN - however strengthened - easily embrace the potentially wide 

security mission of a New World Order. So we should look to 

the UN to deliver a part of the solution at best. The regional 

organizations will add their part, backed up by the Security 

Council if necessary. And we must, as I have noted, keep open 

the door when necessary for national actions. 

On the other hand, two key elements of a new approach to 

security will be legitimacy and flexibility, assets robustly 

developed by the UN in its management of the Iraqi challenge. 

"LEGITIMACY" AND THE USE OF FORCE 

As a starting point, we need to understand what constitutes 

"legitimacy" for an armed action hoping to secure its political 

flank. For ourselves and our allies, Resolution 678 authorizing 

"all necessary means" to secure Iraq's immediate and 

unconditional withdrawal, was close to an ideal formulation. It 

gave a UN license for the use of force without restriction as to 

its manner or extent, or terms for its cessation ,both important 

military and political considerations. 

Not surprisingly these same attributes gave discomfort to 

many other UN members. The Secretary General himself has 

commented that while the war against lraq was "made legitimate 

by the Security Council" it "was not a UN victory" since that 

could have resulted only from "hostilities controlled and 

directed by the UN". One need not share Perez de Cuellar's 

view to appreciate his point: the most iron- clad legal justification 

may not buy us that more evanescent political commodity called 

legitimacy. For example, the ambiguity of the phrase "all 

necessary means" meant that actions necessary for Desert Storm's 

success might in the view of the Council majority have exceeded 
92 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

the intent of 678. While that did not occur it created an 

uncovered risk. Another consideration is that broadly licensing 

a few countries to use force in the Council's name enables 

detractors to argue that the action is the project of a few 

governments unrepresentative of the world community. 

For military action comparable in scale to Desert Storm, there 

does not seem an obvious answer to this problem since any 

significant degree of UN direction and control could have 

imposed disabling constraints. On the other hand, we hope and 

believe that the scale of Iraq-Kuwait is unlikely to be repeated in 

the foreseeable future, nor are immediate US interests likely to be 

so directly and vitally engaged. Moreover, Council cohesion 

nurtured by the lraq experience could carry over to other issues. 

If this proves true, there may be scope for enhancing the Security 

Council's role in future peace enforcement. 

ARTICLE 43 AGREEMENTS 

One way the Charter offers to do that is by negotiation of 

Article 43 agreements between the Security Council and 

countries it selects. Paragraph I of Article 43 quests 

member states to: 

Undertake to make available to the Security Council, on its call, 

and in accordance with a speci,'d agreement or agreements, armed 

forces, assistance and facilities, including right of passage, 

necessary for the purpose of maintaining peace ,and security. 

My own reading of Article 43 suggests several relevant points: 

First, the conclusion of such an agreement need not confer an 

automatic, mandatory obligation to provide troops to the Security 

Council, but could instead simply state their availability subject 

to certain terms or procedures. 

Second, Article 43 is silent on command arrangements: the 

phrase "on its call" does not necessarily mean "at its direction." 

Third, by specifying "assistance and facilities" the language 

permits members to satisfy their obligations by means other than 

provision of combat troops - a useful flexibility. 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 93 

Fourth, paragraph 3 specifies that agreements shall be at the 

initiative of the Security Council, a helpful limiting factor that 

ensures selectivity. 

Finally, paragraph 3 also states that agreements may be 

between the Council and individual members or groups of 

members, offering a potential basis for associations between the 

Security Council and regionally based alliances. Since alliances 

offer a more functional basis for concerted military action than 

a chance grouping of UN member states, this too could be a 

useful feature. 

DELEGATION OF ENFORCEMENT 

A vital question about '43' is whether, and what kind, of 

command arrangements it implies. In my view 43 agreements 

are not incompatible with signatories exercise of wide military 

latitude when those agreements are invoked. In this sense that 

agreement might be less a format for direct Council control than 

an expression of its general capacity to enforce decisions and 

hence a means of deterrence. In fact, agreements with powerful 

members or groups of members might have a psychological 

impact similar to a classic mutual assistance pact, strengthening 

respect for decision under Articles 39 (power of 

recommendation), 40 (provisional measures) and 41 (embargoes, 

diplomatic and other sanctions) and by extension, for statements 

of the Secretary General or the Council President. On the other 

hand of course, the reality of the Permanent Member veto would 

remain a factor in this as in any other effort to extend the 

Council's scope. 

As we consider different approaches to the UN we need to 

bear in mind that the notion of such delegated enforcement is not 

alien to the Charter but explicitly anticipated in three places. 

Article 48 empowers the Council to determine which members 

shall conduct the action required to carry out its decisions "for 

the maintenance of intemational peace and security". Article 53 

permits the Council to utilize "regional arrangements or agencies 

for enforcement action under its authority". Finally, Article 106 

authorizes the victorious World War II allies to consult with a 
94 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

view to joint action necessary to maintain peace and security, 

although as a practical matter 106 is widely regarded as an 

outdated anachronism and an eftbrt to revive it would be both 

impractical and divisive. 

SECURITY COUNCIL OVERSIGHT OF 

MILITARY ACTION 

Notwithstanding the legality of delegated enforcement, we should 

allow for the possibility that the Council will not absent itself so 

completely from command and control as it did in resolution 678. 

As you know, Chapter VII provides vehicles for Council 

involvement: 

Article 42 permits it to act by air, sea or land forces to give 

effect to its decisions when Article 41 measures are deemed 

inadequate; 

Article 46 calls for the Council to develop plans for the 

application of armed force with the assistance of a Military 

Staff Committee (MSC); 

Article 47 details the MSC's terms of reference, which 

include advice to the Council on arms control, readiness 

planning, general matters of command as well as strategic 

direction of forces. 

Any move in this direction will raise concerns among troop 

contributors. The chapter's emphasis on the MSC is especially 

problematic: no state whose troops are engaged in hostilities is 

likely to allow their direction by a group to which it does not 

belong or whose members have necessarily also contributed 

troops. This is also the need to ensure that committed troops are 

not subject to life-threatening surprises by changes in the political 

parameters governing their use, or by a breach in security or by 

other factors arising from activities which might be implied by 

the words "strategic direction". Thirdly, unless the reference to 

strategic command (47.3) is interpreted in some static sense, the 

technology of modem warfare probably makes it obsolete: it 

requires flexible, decentralized decisionmaking and instantaneous 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 95 

communication - neither is well suited to decision by UN 

committee. 

Yet there may by ways of partially employing Articles 42 

and 47 while inoculating them against their most intrusive 

potential and these may be worth exploring particularly in the 

context of small scale or low intensity conflict. For example, a 

more explicit articulation of war aims may sometimes be 

desirable. More specific goals do not mean more modest one, 

but they do make the Security Council more accountable for 

actions to secure them. A war aims statement might also specify 

minimum terms for cessation of hostilities - as distinct from 

terms for an overall settlement. A general statement of 

pemlissible means would add legitimacy by further distinguishing 

peace enforcement from other use of force, though such 

pronouncements would only be advisable to the extent they did 

not expose troops to additional risk. We may also wish to 

explore arrangements whereby peace enforcers could report 

regularly and in person to the Council itself or a sub-group of the 

Council. While not altering command relationships, such a 

consultative link could be a helpful tool for preserving consensus. 

THE UN AND COALITION FORCES 

One of the questions our security community will need to 

consider is the issue of colmnand and operational 

integration of the forces which might be employed to give 

effect to a Security Council decision. This requires a 

trade-off between the need to avoid over-identification with 

a few countries, and the exigencies of the unity of 

command, rapid deployment, coordinated movements, and 

so on. Before going beyond the level of joint action 

employed in Desert Storm, in many substantive respects a 

NATO operation, are we persuaded that there are militarily 

and politically satisfactory answers to many unanalyzed 

questions about non-NATO coalition warfare? It was this 

sort of appreciation for the unexpected that prompted this 

comment from George C. Marshall in 1938: 
96 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

With us, geographical location and the international situation make 

it literally impossible to find definite ,'mswers for such questions ,as: 

Who will be our enemy in the next war; in what theater of 

operations will it be fought; ,and what will be our national objective 

at the time? 

But today's planners have a tougher task: not only do we not 

know the identity of our future adversaries, neither do we 

necessarily know who are our friends--in the sense of coalition 

parmers--will be. Yet joint arrangements for defeating a capable 

foe will require substantial unity of command and control, and 

the standard peacekeeping command format--decentralized 

command across national sectors--may not suffice under the 

fluidity of combat conditions. A technologically advanced but 

weakly united UN force might even be at a disadvantage against 

a Iow-tech but well directed opponent. Such considerations 

suggest that a significant level of interoperability may be needed 

for UN-authorized military operations. Between forces of vastly 

differing capabilities with no history of cooperations, which 

would seem to require achieving a sort of "UN standard" 

paralleling that of peacekeeping. It could involve such things as 

doctrine, rules of engagement, training and joint exercises, 

command and control, IFF systems, intel-sharing, language; 

logistic support and so on. Achieving all of this would mean 

unheard of levels of military openness and may be difficult for 

governments to accept outside an alliance context. A further 

detailed look at most of these issues in house would be a useful 

beginning step to help flesh out the contours of the new order we 

seek. 

ENHANCING PREVENTIVE DIPLOMACY 

At your request, these remarks have focussed on the use-of-force 

aspects of the UN's security roles. Let me conclude by returning 

to more familiar ground: The UN and conflict avoidance. In the 

communique of the London Summit the G7 leaders committed 

themselves to shoring up the basis for UN preventive diplomacy-- 

a theme the President revisited when he addressed the General 
MILITARY IMPLICATIONS OF UN PEACEKEEPING 97 

Assembly last month ..... 

To fulfill this goal the institution will need to shift to a 

higher gear. Useful steps could include: 

1. Informal information sharing, by ourselves and other 

member states, to keep the Secretary General fully informed 

of existing or potential situations which could lead to 

intemational friction; (this is now occurring within the 

context of resolution 687's Iraqi NMD inspection program). 

2. Requiring disputants or potential disputants to keep the 

Secretary General and through him the Security Council, 

fully informed of "all pertinent facts; 

3. Supporting the enhanced use of special representatives in 

good offices and quiet diplomacy missions to help resolve 

issues which may lead to conflict; 

4. And finally, inviting the Secretary General and the 

Council to give early consideration to the use of UN forces 

as a means of forestalling conflict before hostilities occur, 

such as by deployment to the borders of a threatened state. 

This may well involve elements of traditional peacekeeping 

and of peace enforcement as well. 

On the subject of peacekeeping itself, as you know we are in 

a major growth phase. The UN has undertaken more missions in 

the last three years than in its first 43. The scope and variety of 

functions has grown as will. It is time to strengthen the 

organized structure of peacekeeping planning and management in 

order to keep up with the heavier workload. 

It is also time to put peacekeeping financing on a more stable 

longterm footing commensurate with its importance to global 

security--and our won. A step in the right direction within the 

US would be to take a hard look now at creating a substantial 

peacekeeping account possibly within, or in relationship to, the 

Department of Defense budget, in recognition of the clear 

security purposes of peacekeeping expenditure. 
98 WILLIAM H. LEWIS 

CONCLUSION 

From time to time as history turns remarkable comers, writers 

use the term "annus mirabilis", or "miraculous year" to express 

their amazement. These are indeed amazing times. They are not, 

however, from a security point of view, miraculous. There is no 

shortage of causes which human beings will kill or die for. Nor 

will we now retire all of the classic tools for pursuing and 

defending our interests. Nor will others. But I would submit 

that the UN's capacity to serve common security concerns has 

never been greater nor more susceptible to constructive thinking 

or influence. 
McNair Papers 

The McNair Papers are published at Fort Lesley J. McNair, 

home of the Institute for National Strategic Studies and the 

National Defense University. An Army post since 1794, the fort 

was given its present name in 1948 in honor of Lieutenant 

General Lesley James McNair. General McNair, known as 

"Educator of the Army" and trainer Of some three million troops, 

was about to take command of Allied ground forces in Europe 

under Eisenhower, when he was killed in combat in Normandy, 

25 July 1944. 

1 .Joseph P. Lorenz, Egypt and the New Arab Coalition, February 1989. 

2. John E. Endicott, Grand Strategy and the Pacific Region, May 1989. 

3. Eugene V. Rostow, President, Prime Minister, or Constitutional 

Monarch?, October 1989. 

4. How~trd G. DeWoif, SDI and Arms Control. November 1989. 

5. Martin C. Libicki, Wtu.tt Makes Industries Strategic:, November 1989. 

6. Melvin A. Goochnan, Gorbachev and Soviet Policy in the Third 

World. February 1990. 

7. John V,'m Oudenaren, "The Tradition of Change in Soviet Foreign 

Policy," and Francis Conte, "Two Schools of Soviet Diplomacy," in 

Understanding Soviet Foreign Policy, April 1990. 

8. Max G. Manwaring and Court Frisk, A Strategic View of 

lnsurgencies: Insights from El Salvador, May 19°A). 

9. Steven R. Linke, Managing Crises in Defense Industry: The 

PEPCON and Avtex Cases, June 1990. 

10. Christine M. Hehns, Arabism and Islam' Stateless Nations and 

Nationless States, September 1990. 

I 1. R~tlph A. Cossa, lran' Soviet Interests, US Concerns, July 1990. 

12. Ewan Jamieson, Friend or Ally? A Question for New Zealand, May 

1991. 

13. Richard J. Dunn III, From Gettysburg to the Gulf and Beyond: 

Coping with Rew~lutionatw Technological Change in Land Warfare. 

14. Ted Greenwood, U.S. and NATO Force Structure and Military 
Operations in the Mediterranean, June 1993. 

15. Oscar W. Clyatt, Jr., Bulgaria's Quest for Security After the Cold 

War, February 1993. 

16. William C. Bodie, Moscow's "Next Abroad": Security Policy in 

Post-Soviet Europe. June 1993. 

17. Willi~un H. Lewis (ed.), Military Implications ~" United Nations 

Peacekeeping Operations, June 1993. 

18. Sterling D. Sessions ~md C~u'l R. Jones. lnteroperability: A Desert 

Storm Case Study, July 1993. 

19. Eugene V. Rostow, Should Article 43 ~" the United Natk)ns 

Charter Be Raised From the Dead? July 1993 

20. Willi~un T. Johnsen and Thomas Durell-Young; Jeffrey Simon; 

Daniel N. Nelson; Willi~un C. Bodie. ~md James McCarthy, European 

Security Toward the Year 2000, August 1993. 

21. Edwin R. Carlisle, ed.. Developiag Battlefield Technologies ia the 

1990s, August 1993. 

22. Patrick Clawson. How Has Saddam Hussein Survived? Economic 

Sanctions, 1990-93, August 1993. 

9 

ISBN 0-16-041972-7 

II! o llill !III!!I!L!I[I]I llilililiii 
]B3 

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