Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations
Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations
Afghanistan and Lebanon
Chiara Ruffa
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2018 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ruffa, Chiara, author.
Title: Military cultures in peace and stability operations : Afghanistan and Lebanon / Chiara Ruffa.
Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017056084 | ISBN 9780812250183 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Peacekeeping forces, Italian—Lebanon—Psychology. | Peacekeeping forces, Italian—Afghanistan—Psychology. | Peacekeeping forces, French—Lebanon—Psychology. | Peacekeeping forces, French—Afghanistan—Psychology. | Strategic culture. | Lebanon—Military relations. | Afghanistan—Military relations.
Classification: LCC JZ6377.I8 R84 2018 | DDC 956.9204/521—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017056084
CONTENTS
1. Force Employment, Unit Peace Operation Effectiveness, and Military Cultures
2. French and Italian Military Cultures
3. French and Italian Units in Lebanon
4. French and Italian Units in Afghanistan
Military Cultures in Peace and Stability Operations
Introduction
Fatma is from Bar-al Canoon, a small village in Southern Lebanon, where more than 18,000 soldiers are deployed under the United Nations flag. At the end of my first interview with her in 2007, she asked a striking question: “Why, Chiara, do we need all these soldiers to bring peace?”
While this book may not be able to answer Fatma’s seemingly simple but ultimately complex question, it does recognize the crucial role that military organizations play in international peace and stability operations, and tries to better understand the dynamics that influence military behavior on the ground.1 At the time of writing, more than 100,000 soldiers are deployed in UN peacekeeping operations worldwide. Another 300,000 are deployed under the auspices of regional organizations, such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Soldiers in these missions are important actors, with significant responsibility for implementing peace and stability operations—and a corresponding influence on the goals and impact of peacekeeping missions. Yet we know surprisingly little about the factors that influence soldiers’ behavior. In an attempt to address this gap, this book examines the behavior of military organizations in peace and stability operations.
Soldiers deployed in multinational peace and stability operations are typically assigned to a specific area—called an Area of Operations (AO) or Area of Responsibility in military parlance—along with other soldiers from their country of origin. In their AO, soldiers are expected to implement a specific mandate to keep or enforce peace, in accordance with their rules of engagement (ROE). Usually, they are equipped with weapons. They may also have some responsibility for delivering humanitarian aid and maintaining control of their assigned territory. Their day-to-day tasks can vary widely, and could include, for example, conducting patrols, neutralizing improvised explosive devices, delivering humanitarian aid, organizing meetings with the village chief, launching programs to benefit vulnerable groups, and conducting combat operations against specific targets. Mandates and standard operating procedures (SOPs) must be interpreted and executed. In contrast to conventional military operations, which have precise tactical objectives such as fighting or holding terrain, soldiers in contemporary peace and stability operations have a wider range of responsibilities with significantly greater room to maneuver.2
Given the relative autonomy of action of national contingents in peace operations, it is perhaps unsurprising to find that different national contingents interpret and implement identical mandates in a given mission in very different ways. Despite strong anecdotal evidence of such differences in interpretation, the factors that influence and impact soldiers’ behavior have never been systematically studied in the literatures on peace operations or in the field of military studies.3 The existing literature on peace operations has indeed analyzed the different conditions under which peace operations can be successful, and has elaborated sophisticated ways of measuring what influences durable peace, but it has neglected the variable of soldiers’ or contingents’ behavior. This lack of attention is particularly pertinent in light of the recent finding that deploying troops, rather than military observers or police, in a peacekeeping operation affects the protection of civilians.4 Similarly, soldiers’ behavioral variations may have important consequences on the level of violence against civilians, the local population’s perceptions of the mission, soldiers’ propensity to coordinate with other actors, and eventually the prospects for conflict resolution.
That different armies behave differently in war is a recurring classical theme in military studies.5 More recently, sociologist Joseph Soeters has launched a new research program that systematically examines cross-national variations.6 Anecdotal evidence also suggests that different armies behave differently in the same peace operation. For instance, in the UN mission in Lebanon, operating under the same regional command and implementing the same mandate, Indian troops conducted foot patrols and organized popular yoga classes, while the Korean units used high force protection