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, the literature on peace and conflict and international relations (IR) in general tends to understand effectiveness as actual impact on the ground.34
Weighing the impact of military organizations against other explanations of the success and failure of peace and stability operations is beyond the scope of this book. My book instead draws on the literature on military effectiveness to provide a partial, nonsatisfactory answer to the question of why force employment matters in peace and stability operations.
As a logical step forward, one can wonder what might be the impact of force employment on the general success of peace missions. This book does not offer a definite answer to that question, but explores and proposes a way to comprehend the role of military organizations in relation to the general success of peace and stability operations. Because of the fundamentally different ways in which the security studies and peace and conflict literatures have understood and conceptualized success, we need a bridging concept that can evaluate peacekeeping practices, while at the same time serve as a stepping stone toward understanding what kind of impact force employment might have on the level of violence. To do so, I introduce the UPOE concept, and tease out criteria to be able to assess and categorize the characteristics of different armies’ force employment.
UPOE
As Biddle recalls, “Military effectiveness matters chiefly because it shapes military outcomes.”35 Given this book’s focus on military organizations, I start by surveying the plethora of scholars who have dealt with military effectiveness in order to determine which dimensions might be relevant for UPOE. Four strands of literature have attempted to disentangle the concept of military effectiveness: political science, military sociology, military operations research, and military history. Political scientists tend to engage in macro-level analysis and consider the possible factors affecting military effectiveness at the state level. Stephen Rosen, for example, has looked at the impact of society on military effectiveness.36 Similarly, Dan Reiter and Allan Stam focused on the effects of regime type on military effectiveness, while Biddle and Zirkle looked at differences in civil-military relations in society.37 As such, this strand of literature conceptualizes military effectiveness as “the capacity to create military power from a state’s basic resources in wealth, technology, population size and human capital.”38 But only focusing on strategic, political, and societal factors misses what happens in practice at the tactical level.
Military sociologists, historians, and military operations researchers have, by contrast, emphasized the importance of getting the tactics right for military effectiveness. For these military scholars, it is not only about the projection of military power but also the tactical execution. While my argument draws on the political science literature, it nonetheless borrows this tactical focus from the military sociological literature.
Sociologists have systematically explored the ideational characteristics of effective armies. For example, for Janowitz and Shils, high levels of unit cohesion, such as “interpersonal bonds among soldiers,” are typical of effective armies.39 In contrast, Bartov considers that high levels of indoctrination to the Nazi ideology explain the “barbarisation” of warfare conducted against the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa between 1941 and 1945. The Eastern Front ended with a Russian victory, but the indoctrination of German soldiers largely explains German military effectiveness at the beginning of the war.40 Similarly, Castillo posits that individual initiative, discipline, courage, and nationalism explain a nation’s determination—and, hence, effectiveness—in war.41 More recently, King has identified professionalization as a crucial factor to understand cohesion.42 The “individual and small-unit behavior” focus of sociological explanations is useful for my study of tactical behavior.43 Such explanations tend, however, to adopt an overly narrow focus on one or two factors and to conflate cohesion, military performance, and effectiveness, three concepts usually considered distinct by positivist security studies scholars.44
Military operations research, in contrast, provides a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of military effectiveness, focusing on the tactical level of war, although its emphasis on hard assets neglects important organizational and ideational dimensions.45 Military historians provide a partial solution to this issue. While often criticized for being overly contextual, Millet and Williamson support their conceptualization with a comprehensive theoretical model that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of different armies. They combine a formal model to evaluate strategic, operational, and tactical military effectiveness with relevance attributed to the context.46
Political scientists Brooks and Stanley built on Millet and Williamson’s work in their Creating Military Power and identified four important sets of indicators of military effectiveness at the tactical level: “level of integration of military activity within and across different levels; level of responsiveness to internal constraints and to the external environment; level of skills (such ‘as motivation and basic competencies of personnel’); and quality of assets deployed (meaning ‘calibre of state’s weapons and equipment’).”47
These indicators offer a valuable starting point for analyzing soldiers’ force employment at the tactical level. However, the context of peace and stability operations differs significantly from traditional military operations, and thus may require some adaptation in three main areas. First, there are limited opportunities to use force in peace operations: since peacekeepers are not a party to the conflict, they are not supposed to fight belligerent parties, but instead to operate within the limits imposed by the mandate. Mandates often entail activities, such as reconstruction work or humanitarian aid, that go beyond strictly military, combat-oriented skills. Second, the objective of peace and stability operations is not military victory through the defeat of an enemy, but rather “establishing conditions in which the outcome may be decided,” to put it in General Sir Rupert Smith’s words.48 Third, in contrast to traditional military operations, it is not possible to establish a single “type” of effectiveness for peace and stability operations: there is no single set of characteristics one can use as a metric to determine that
