Responsiveness, defined as the ability to react to the enemy’s tactics in a conventional context, should be expanded to include the ability to interact with the local population and adapt to their needs and requests. Similarly, integration includes not only integration between the strategic, tactical, and operational aspects of combat activities, but also activities related to humanitarian aid and reconstruction. In addition to adapting the four indicators of military effectiveness to the peace operations context, an additional indicator is necessary—interoperability. Interoperability—having the necessary tools and skills to operate and communicate with other military organizations—is necessary for armies working in multinational contexts, where a single, multinational operational headquarters coordinates the activities of each AO, as is frequently the case for modern peace operations. Thus, the indicators for UPOE are responsiveness, integration, military and nonmilitary skills, quality, and interoperability; and each ranges from low to high.
In practice, each deployed contingent will score differently on the UPOE indicators, either because they perform different activities than other organizations or do some things better than others. A perfectly effective unit serving in a peace operation should be highly responsive; well integrated; have high military, humanitarian, and logistic skills; have high-quality weapons and munitions; and be interoperable with units from other countries to conduct both joint combat operations and joint humanitarian projects. This construct should, however, be understood as an ideal type in the Weberian sense, meaning that it does not necessarily correspond to an empirical reality. According to Weber, “an ideal type is formed by the one-sided accentuation of one or more points of view and by the synthesis of a great many diffuse, discrete, more or less present and occasionally absent concrete individual phenomena, which are arranged according to those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints into a unified analytical construct.”51 In practice, I expect few military units to score highly on all of these indicators, since, for example, strong combat skills are not normally associated with strong humanitarian skills (or at least, armies have to prioritize between the two in practice). The same trade-off exists within kinds of quality and interoperability: the allocation of resources for materiel, such as bulletproof vests, will be different in quality according to how humanitarian and combat roles are prioritized. Similarly, interoperability in humanitarian actions is different from interoperability in combat. Responsiveness and integration can vary from low to high, and they are required at a high level for both combat operations and peace operations. Yet the ability to adapt and implement orders is different in a peace operation versus a kinetic mission. For example, responsiveness might mean understanding what the population needs in terms of humanitarian assistance in a peace operation, while in combat it might be related to the need to adapt to the rapidly changing enemy’s tactics.
Such an ideal type makes it possible to compare the effectiveness of various armies with the ideal type and develop different typologies of effectiveness. The empirical observations of the French and Italian units in my two case studies (UNIFIL II and ISAF) give rise to two different typologies. While in Lebanon it might have been more important for the military unit to be humanitarian effective, in Afghanistan combat effectiveness might have been more important. A unit is humanitarian effective when it is responsive but not well integrated (i.e., considerable leverage is attributed to individual initiatives of patrolling and CIMIC teams at the tactical level), has high humanitarian and logistic skills, dedicates its resources to humanitarian projects, and coordinates well with other armies for joint humanitarian projects. In contrast, a unit that is combat effective will score low in responsiveness—because it would be less adaptable—but high in integration. It has strong (mainly military) skills, good-quality military equipment and munitions, and coordinates well with other armies for joint combat operations. It would still need to present traits that are specific to low-intensity operations, such as contacts and interaction with the locals, but its strengths are more applicable to conventional military effectiveness.
In the two case studies, the French units tended to be more combat effective, and were thus more effective along dimensions such as integration and military skills, whereas the Italian units were more effective in responsiveness and humanitarian skills. Within each typology, each unit had strengths and weaknesses. Thus, the Italian and French units were differently effective, meaning they had different capabilities and strengths in different areas, and in fact different profiles.
UPOE is also inherently mission specific and situation specific. First, it is contingent on the mission’s characteristics: the standards of effectiveness change according to the type of conflict. For example, peace operations aim to use specific instruments to solve particular types of problems—primarily protecting civilians or making sure humanitarian aid is provided, or that the security situation is stabilized. But UPOE is also AO-specific. In Afghanistan, the standards of UPOE required in Regional Command South were different from those required in Regional Command North. Thus, different evaluative standards of UPOE are required. Table 1 summarizes UPOE indicators as well as two potential empirical types of UPOE and the UPOE ideal type.
Table 1. Two Empirically Derived Typologies of Peace Operation Effectiveness
UPOE is a way to evaluate and categorize force employment in order to compare units’ force employment with each other. It seeks to bridge the gap between (1) how well the military does things on the ground and (2) their impact in the field. Biddle stresses that in conventional operations, “other things being equal, ‘effective’ militaries ought to win more often than ineffective ones.”52 Writing about counterinsurgency, Nagl similarly points out that “the army contributes to a large degree to determine whether victory in the campaign is attained and the army contributes materially to the determination of which tasks it can and it cannot do and how and why.”53 This allows us to link what the soldiers do (and how well they are doing it), on the one hand, with the actual impact in the field, on the other hand. UPOE should be consistent with outcome indicators. In the empirical chapters, I try to connect the assessment of UPOE for each unit studied with the available data on the impact of the army studied in their respective AOs.
Explaining Variations in Force Employment: A Culturalist Explanation
In the second half of this chapter, I develop a theory of how military culture influences the observed variations in force employment. I begin by reflecting on how my understanding of military culture relates to previous works on culture. I then discuss the novelty of my contribution and the theory that explains how military culture emerges from domestic political configurations—and how it influences soldiers’ behavior.
The Glorious Past of the Literature on Culture
Though this book focuses specifically on military culture, it builds on a long-lasting tradition of broader studies about culture. Contested and influential at the same time, culture is a notoriously difficult concept to define and study. As early as 1944, Kluckhohn provided eleven different definitions of culture in the Mirror for Man.54 Political scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists have all written about culture. My conceptualization is drawn predominantly from the field of political science, and security studies in particular, but borrows some components from military sociology and anthropology to fit its specific focus on military organizations at the tactical level of operations.
In political science, culture has traditionally been considered an important but fundamentally residual explanation. The debate about political culture flourished in the 1950s, drawing inspiration from the field of anthropology, and then declined in prominence in the