CHAPTER 1
Force Employment, Unit Peace Operation Effectiveness, and Military Cultures
Col. Brian Christmas served as US Marine Corps Force Commander under NATO command during the battle of Marja in Southern Afghanistan, one of the most famous battles fought by Western troops against the Taliban. When I asked him to tell me more about his experience there during an interview in the fall of 2013, he started by discussing the vast differences in approaches between his own soldiers and the British soldiers they fought alongside: “Our cultures are so different, and it matters so much.”1 Similarly, when I visited the Italian Force Commander of the Regional Command Capital in the fall of 2009, he told me that one could clearly distinguish between Latin and Anglo-Saxon cultures based on the way soldiers behaved.2 Field commanders are often well aware of the differences between (and the importance of) the operational styles and military cultures of different armies. These characteristics inform the way commanders plan coordination across contingents; the tactical and operational planning for launching a battle, which might involve two bordering AOs (as was the case for Col. Christmas); or simply the expectations about the security situation in a specific AO. More importantly for this book is that military contingents are deployed along national lines with, in general, limited contacts with military contingents in different AOs and an even more limited sharing of information. This makes comparing operational styles an important area of research in order to understand and explain various military units’ behavior. While there is recurring anecdotal evidence that national contingents behave differently in peace and stability operations than in other types of deployments, the issue of variation in behavior across contingents has received little attention from scholars writing about peace operations, and has been dealt with only implicitly in the security studies literature.3 This chapter presents the main theoretical building blocks of the book in two steps. The first step is to extrapolate concepts from the existing literature, develop a theory of force employment in peace and stability operations, and use differences in force employment to categorize different kinds of UPOE. The second step is to present the core theory of the book, which focuses on explaining variations in force employment, with reference to military culture as a main factor influencing how soldiers implement their mandate. The theory outlined in this chapter is then tested empirically in Chapters 2–4.
Conceptualizing Military Behavior in Peace and Stability Operations
The Issue with Success in Peace and Stability Operations
The peace and conflict literature has developed sophisticated ways of studying the impact of conflict dynamics on conflict outcomes. With an overall greater emphasis on quantitative approaches, peace and conflict scholars have mapped, analyzed, and tested the dominant components that affect different kinds of conflict-related dependent variables, ranging from conflict termination to conflict outcomes.4 Explanations of the success and failure of peace operations have been labeled as “structural.”5 In line with the broader peace and conflict tradition, such structural explanations have focused on variables that affect the durability of peace or the level of violence against civilians, such as the nature of hostilities, local and international capacities, and the characteristics of the troops deployed.6 Recent works have used the number of battle-related deaths to measure the effectiveness of UN peace operations.7 Through quantitative approaches sometime combined with case studies, scholars have isolated the positive effect of specific factors on a well-specified outcome.8 While all these structural explanations seem to confirm that “external interventions tend to increase the chances of establishing a durable peace,”9 these works have failed to explore the conditions, or causal mechanisms, that lead specific characteristics of a phenomenon (or a particular behavior of specific set actors) to result in peace operation success. In addition, they have only assessed success and failure at the aggregate level.
A smaller set of explanations, called “agent driven,” has partly addressed this problem by looking at specific actors involved in those operations, such as belligerents, UN agencies, and NGOs—usually describing their main traits. Unfortunately, however, such studies do not prioritize the measurement of the actual impact.10 Only Séverine Autesserre, in her recent book Peaceland, has analyzed the impact of the everyday politics of intervention on peacebuilding effectiveness. In what she identifies as an “empirical shift,” she advocates for a much deeper analysis of the on-the-ground dynamics of external interventions.11 Such analysis is crucial for understanding how certain agencies’ practices affect the effectiveness of various operations, and the mechanisms that ultimately lead to what (at the aggregate level) peacekeeping scholars call success.
The Big Absence: Military Organizations
Neither structural nor agent-driven explanations have studied foreign military organizations in depth.12 The peace operations literature has surprisingly never debated the conditions under which military organizations operate, whether behavior varies across national militaries, or whether specific patterns of military behavior affect peacekeeping success. Yet military organizations’ role in peace operations is eminent, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Quantitatively, military contingents constitute the bulk of most deployed peacekeeping missions. Qualitatively, in most peace operations, military units are assigned to specific AOs and are in charge of implementing the mandate in those areas—centralizing core responsibilities such as maintaining control of the territory, as well as quintessentially political decisions such as deciding where to distribute humanitarian aid, or how to interact with local institutions.
Despite their crucial role in peacekeeping, the peace operations literature has overwhelmingly neglected to consider military organizations’ role, behavior, or effectiveness. Some peacekeeping scholars have identified relevant material factors that influence success, which are to some extent tied to the military, such as equipment, vehicles, weapons, munitions, and financial support for humanitarian projects. Yet even these studies fail to study foreign military organizations as actors with some measure of agency.13 Fortna’s influential work, which partially recognizes the important role of military organizations in peace operations, analyzes the size of the host government’s army, but does not consider the size of foreign peacekeeping forces.14 And in general, most authors largely omit military organizations—national or international—as an object of study. For instance, Doyle and Sambanis offer a sophisticated explanation of peacebuilding success that is based primarily on the nature of the conflict (ethnic/ secular/ religious), the level of economic development and resources available to the host country, and whether the country has a UN peacekeeping operation or financial assistance package.15
Even an important recent work by Hultman et al.—which finds that deploying troops, rather than military observers or police, has a positive effect on the protection of civilians—does not take military organizations and their complexity into account.16 Their research relies on the assumption that the mission type and mandate determine force employment, and does not consider soldiers’ interpretation of the mandate or their behavior as variable factors potentially affecting the implementation of the mandate. Thus a review of the peace operations literature leads to the conclusion that the characteristics of military organizations (as an important actor with agency), as well as their behavior and effectiveness, have been neglected.
Following Autesserre’s call for an empirical shift, I argue that we can make peace operations more successful—in their ability to save lives, protect civilians, and avoid mass atrocities—by better understanding the on-the-ground dynamics.17 In particular, I will study the role of military organizations in peace and stability operations and their effectiveness. When I first went to the field working for the UN’s reconstruction mission in the Central African Republic in 2006, I was struck by all those soldiers in uniforms from different countries patrolling together with their blue helmets. Sarah, my supervisor within the Human Rights Section, immediately recommended