than another in such a mission. Rather, the effectiveness of units in peace and stability operations can be analyzed along varying dimensions, which results in different typologies of effectiveness because the objectives vary between peace operations more than they do for conventional military operations. Peace operations vary not only in their context and the type of conflict, but also in the type of mandate, the core objectives, and the conditions under which armies are deployed. In conventional operations, the core objective is to achieve victory. By contrast, in a traditional peacekeeping operation such as UNIFIL II, humanitarian and development projects are more important than controlling territory, because making sure that the population is not supporting Hezbollah is more urgent than securing a territory that is already stabilized. Yet security conditions are so precarious for ISAF that traditional military skills are in greater demand to ensure control of the territory. Nonetheless, control of territory in Afghanistan can also be pursued through humanitarian instruments, such as humanitarian aid delivery. Thus, indicators of effectiveness in peace operations vary in importance in different contexts, and the standards of peace operation effectiveness must be adapted to and negotiated for each mission.
I propose a new concept, UPOE, which measures and categorizes the effectiveness of each single unit deployed in its AO. UPOE does not measure the outcome of a mission as a success or failure. Instead, it categorizes and evaluates a single component (force employment—i.e., soldiers’ behavior), which together with other factors will lead to an outcome of success or failure. UPOE is situational and multidimensional, and it lies on a continuum that includes various degrees of attainment and typologies of effectiveness.49 Consequently, there can be various degrees of attainment of different subgoals within the same mission. UPOE has the advantage of producing an evaluation of force employment that allows for comparison. UPOE assesses how well each unit under study scores for each indicator identified. It is located at the unit level because, generally speaking, contingents of different sizes are deployed as units in their respective AO. In the remainder of this section, I derive different indicators from the classical literature on military effectiveness and adapt them to develop the concept of UPOE.
The four indicators used by Brooks and Stanley and Millet and Williamson (integration, responsiveness, skills, and quality) must be adapted to the new context described above.50 In addition to traditional combat abilities, the indicators should include reconstruction, logistical, and humanitarian skills. Soldiers in peace operations may be required, for example, to assist in reconstructing civilian infrastructure, undertaking humanitarian rescue operations, or providing humanitarian support such as the delivery of food, medication, water, and clothing, or launching social or agricultural projects. These activities require a much wider set of military and nonmilitary skills, ranging from empathy to the ability to identify core military and nonmilitary objectives.
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
