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 that I address only what she referred to as the “right military guys” for pushing our agenda in denouncing human rights violations, as they had “a pretty incredibly different idea about what they are here for and why.”18 Assuming that military organizations will execute the mandate’s orders without interpreting them just because they are hierarchical and fundamentally differ from civilian organizations is simplistic, to say the least. Military organizations’ role and contribution in peace operations must be explored empirically, and understanding how the operating conditions affect military organizations’ behavior needs to be theorized.
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]
