Utopian Goals, Unasked Questions: Reflections on a Proposed Military Planning Handbook for Response to Mass Atrocities against Civilians

The proposed handbook, MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations; A Military Planning Handbook, offers many valuable suggestions about how the military can be prepared for intervention in situations of mass atrocity against civilians. The chief flaw of the document is that it places the military at the center and banishes the political, diplomatic, humanitarian, and reconstructive elements of intervention to the periphery of its focus. As a result, it sets up utopian goals for the military to rebuild devastated societies, fails to ask crucial questions about coordination and decision making in the political and military hierarchies, largely ignores international relations and their possible impact on intervention, creates structures that are excessively complicated, and by emphasizing structure (formal organization) it tends to ignore the vital element of process (the process by which decisions are made and implemented). The authors of the report view genocide and mass atrocity against civilians almost exclusively from the lens of the military. This approach is severely flawed for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that genocide and atrocity do not exist in a military vacuum and that many of the tasks that the handbook assigns to the military are beyond its competence. Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Tampa Library at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact scholarcommons@usf.edu. Recommended Citation Smith, Roger W. (2011) "Utopian Goals, Unasked Questions: Reflections on a Proposed Military Planning Handbook for Response to Mass Atrocities against Civilians," Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 6: Iss. 1: Article 11. Available at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol6/iss1/11 Utopian Goals, Unasked Questions: Reflections on a Proposed Military Planning Handbook for Response to Mass Atrocities against Civilians Roger W. Smith Professor Emeritus, College of William and Mary The proposed handbook, MARO: Mass Atrocity Response Operations; A Military Planning Handbook, offers many valuable suggestions about how the military can be prepared for intervention in situations of mass atrocity against civilians. The chief flaw of the document is that it places the military at the center and banishes the political, diplomatic, humanitarian, and reconstructive elements of intervention to the periphery of its focus. As a result, it sets up utopian goals for the military to rebuild devastated societies, fails to ask crucial questions about coordination and decision making in the political and military hierarchies, largely ignores international relations and their possible impact on intervention, creates structures that are excessively complicated, and by emphasizing structure (formal organization) it tends to ignore the vital element of process (the process by which decisions are made and implemented). The authors of the report view genocide and mass atrocity against civilians almost exclusively from the lens of the military. This approach is severely flawed for a variety of reasons, the main ones being that genocide and atrocity do not exist in a military vacuum and that many of the tasks that the handbook assigns to the military are beyond its competence. The military focus is announced in the first paragraph of the report: lack of thinking about how to use the military to intervene in the face of mass atrocities against civilians has contributed significantly to the failure to act in the past.1 The problem has not been simply a failure of political will, but of military doctrine and planning with respect to humanitarian intervention. The handbook that is offered by the MARO Project ‘‘can help shift the policy debate from ‘whether’ to ‘how’ to intervene to stop widespread violence against civilians’’ (7). The authors’ hope is that it can ‘‘catalyze,’’ that is act as an agent to precipitate and speed up, action during mass atrocities (15). Also in the opening pages, there are already some of the unasked questions that characterize the report. Is it the case that the failure to intervene has been the result of a lack of military doctrine, a calculation of national interest, or sheer indifference? Is the report’s bias toward intervention shared by those in the military who would have to face what the report itself describes as an operation characterized by complexity, contingency, and a high potential for unanticipated consequences? Further, would the military leaders welcome the many tasks that the report assigns to them in the aftermath of the fighting, such as the tasks of nation-building and economical restoration, or view these as outside of the military’s call of duty? And crucially, no criteria are provided to determine when intervention would be Roger W. Smith, ‘‘Utopian Goals, Unasked Questions: Reflections on a Proposed Military Planning Handbook for Response to Mass Atrocities against Civilians,’’ Genocide Studies and Prevention 6, 1 (April 2011): 77–80. 6 2011 Genocide Studies and Prevention. doi:10.3138/