Force Employment and UPOE
The important question when studying militaries’ contributions to peace and stability operations is whether their behavior when applying the mandate affects their effectiveness. In this section, as a first step, I review the existing literature on military behavior and introduce “force employment” as the study’s dependent variable. In a second step, I introduce a new concept called UPOE to assess the effectiveness of different units deployed in multinational operations.
Force Employment
The most obvious starting point for understanding whether the same mandate is interpreted and implemented differently is to look at cross-national variation. While we have anecdotal evidence that different military contingents behave differently, the fact that soldiers from different national militaries behave differently in war has received relatively little attention even in the fields that have military organizations as the most obvious object of study—security studies and military sociology.19 Studies on military behavior, cohesion, and effectiveness in both fields still focus predominantly on “one case, one country,” with the exception of a strand of research initiated by sociologist Joseph Soeters.20 Soeters’s work has studied variations in operational styles during peace and stability operations. Saideman and Auerswald’s work also provides a partial exception: it focuses on variations in the national caveats (exceptions of mandates) of the various troop contributors to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Saideman and Auerswald have not, however, explored behavioral variations at the tactical level.21 The question of how systematically behavioral variations occur among different national militaries (and how to theorize them) has never been the subject of a thorough analysis. In order to study such variations, it is important to find a way to conceptualize, categorize, and measure soldiers’ behavior on the ground.
I turned to the security studies literature to find out how soldiers’ behavior in conventional operations has been conceptualized and to explore whether any of those concepts could be borrowed to study military behavior in peace and stability operations. The classical literature studying military power has traditionally emphasized material factors, assuming that the amount of resources available will directly impact tactical behavior. Similarly to the peace operations literature, these works also overwhelmingly focus on explaining battle outcomes, rather than examining how military organizations work. They identify numerical military preponderance—which is linked to countries with larger populations, more industrialized economies, and greater military expenditure—as the main factor influencing behavior and thus indirectly leading to victory in battle.22 Technology is also often emphasized as influencing military capability.23 However, these two classical determinants of military power—numerical preponderance and technology—do not satisfactorily explain how soldiers behave or why they succeed or fail in battle. They cannot, for example, explain why small, poorly equipped armies have defeated larger and more technologically advanced armies.24 Other variables, such as motivation, cohesion, and leadership, seem to be influencing the outcome. For instance, despite constant increases in resources and troops during the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan, authors have pointed to alternative factors as responsible for improvements in the security situation, such as the Al-Anbar awakening in Iraq, a factor completely independent of US military strategy.25
Only a handful of classical military and security studies works have implicitly argued that the way force is used at the tactical level is an important determinant of effectiveness.26 McMurry, for example, explains the differences in military effectiveness during the American Civil War between the two largest Confederate armies as a factor of how different military actors—leaders, officers, general officers, and enlisted men—behaved during their operations.27 Nonetheless, there has been no systematic study of how soldiers do their work when deployed in military operations until quite recently.
The first author to attempt to theorize this type of tactical-level behavior was Stephen Biddle, in his book Military Power, which has become one of the most influential pieces of scholarship in political science.28 Biddle introduced the concept of force employment, which he defines as “the doctrine and tactics by which armies use their material in the field,” and uses a variety of methods to study a set of conventional military operations to demonstrate empirically that how material resources are used influences battle outcomes.29
Biddle’s work on force employment, while originally intended for the study of conventional warfare, should logically have an even clearer application to low-intensity operations, such as peace and stability and counterinsurgency operations, in which soldiers have a much greater margin of maneuver.
I borrow Biddle’s concept of force employment—that is, the specific ways armies employ their material resources on the tactical level30—and expand it to capture the broader range of military activities undertaken in peace operations, which may include patrolling, humanitarian work, and responding to enemy fire. Studying peace and stability operations also requires considering a range of nontraditional military activities performed by soldiers in addition to (or instead of) their normal military activities. Thus, in the context of peace and stability operations, force employment refers to the ways in which peacekeepers use their weapons, vehicles, and organizational and social structures to accomplish the various goals of the mission, which may be as diverse as providing humanitarian relief, disarming combatants, controlling territory, and conducting targeted combat operations. I operationalize force employment along five dimensions that cover all activities carried out by soldiers in multinational peace operations—patrols (frequency, timing, and level of armaments), interaction with local military forces, interaction with civilians (including through engagement in humanitarian and development work and civil military coordination [CIMIC] activities), extent of force protection, and command and control. While the military and security studies literature has considered behavioral differences between national militaries in war, there has never been a thorough study of how systematically and persistently these variations occur.31 Furthermore, neither the peace operations nor the security studies literature has studied behavioral variations within multinational missions.32
Ultimately, this research considers force employment as the dependent variable, and seeks to understand what influences how force is employed. However, it is also relevant to consider how force employment influences the effectiveness of each deployed military contingent, and ultimately impacts on the success of the mission as a whole. This book enriches agent-driven explanations of peace operations by specifically focusing on military organizations. I mainly study the force employment of military contingents deployed, but I also make a step forward by evaluating their effectiveness. Studying force employment immediately raises the question, “How does it affect the outcome of the mission?”
Although studies of peace operations and military organizations have both addressed these issues, they fundamentally differ in the way they understand the notion of the success of operations and military effectiveness. In particular, there seems to be a misunderstanding about what effectiveness means in each of these two fields. In security studies, military effectiveness traditionally refers to assessing behavior without looking at the actual impact on, namely, victory and defeat; in the peace and conflict literature, effectiveness refers to the impact on the ground. As a consequence, works in security studies have emphasized the concept of military effectiveness that is assumed to have an effect on victory and defeat. Interestingly, however, studies on how such effectiveness actually affects outcomes have been lacking. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan have highlighted the need for observable measures of operational progress. Prior to this, military effectiveness was (and to a great extent still is), in fact, conflated on the behavioral side, “simply” providing ways of measuring behavior.33 By contrast,