The latest mission for the U.S. military

Humanitarian, peacekeeping operations begin debate on the role of the military

By Douglas S. Wood
CNN Interactive

ATLANTA (CNN) -- Operation Provide Comfort, the 1991 mission in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War to aid Iraq's Kurdish population, was the first in a string of recent humanitarian and peacekeeping missions involving the U.S. military. And while the military has been involved in these types of missions before, it has never been to this degree. Consequently, the trend begun with Operation Provide Comfort has opened a debate on the role of the military outside of combat.

The use of the military in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations is not new, said Curtis Morris, a retired Air Force colonel. Morris cites the 1948 Berlin airlift, the 1983 Marine operation in Lebanon and various military aid to humanitarian disasters as historic examples. But he has seen a change recently.

"The peace operations, particularly during the past 10 years, have been at a much higher tempo," said Morris, now a program officer at the U.S. Peace Institute, a nonpartisan federal institution created by Congress to strengthen the nation's capacity to promote the peaceful resolution of international conflict.

With the end of the Cold War, the United States, both under the Bush and Clinton administrations, has used the military for humanitarian missions, often under the mandate of the United Nations.

Morris believes the military has the logistical capability to execute these types of operations and has done them well, creating training courses and studying them at military colleges. He noted that there hasn't been an "eagerness" to take peacekeeping and humanitarian assignments on but "the reality has been the military has had to accept these missions."

In fact, the use of the military for missions outside of combat is part of the post-Cold War readjustment of U.S. international policy. When the Cold War dominated U.S. policy, the nation chose not to use its resources to aid populations in crisis, said Dan Smith, a retired Air Force colonel who is chief of research at Center for Defense Information, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that monitors military issues.

Missions receive criticism

Yet the deployment of the military to places like Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo has garnered criticism over the past 10 years. Republicans in Congress have been strongly resistant to the idea of peacekeeping deployments. President-elect George W. Bush has criticized the Clinton administration for overdeploying forces and purportedly refusing to outline clear missions and roles for those forces that have been sent overseas.

But Smith said there is growing acceptance in the military that these types of missions are going to continue and the service branches, especially the Army, are adjusting their policies.

"I think the military is finally coming around to the viewpoint that humanitarian peacekeeping activities, or support to humanitarian activities, now must be considered part of their mission, just like war fighting is," he said.

Smith said there are benefits to these types of operations. Troops and commanders in smaller units like companies and platoons gain "immense experience" that cannot be found at training centers in the U.S. Pentagon statistics also show that soldiers and other service members who participate in these types of mission often re-enlist at higher rate unless they are assigned to back-to-back deployments, he said.

A 1999 study of U.S. generals by the Washington, D.C.-based Peace and Education Through Law Fund also found that many generals thought these missions were helpful.

The report quoted retired Army Gen. George Joulwan, NATO commander during the 1995 U.S. troop deployment to Bosnia, as saying the doctrine that peace operations distract from the central military mission of fighting and winning major wars is a "bankrupt strategy."

The assumption that the military exists solely to fight ''the big one,'' Joulwan said, ''means we are strategically irrelevant. ... You are not shaping the environment. You're sitting here waiting for the big one to start.''

What is the military's role?

Morris said these missions have added expertise to the military and given U.S. forces new tools to work with. But he added the missions do come at a cost, saying the view of many people is that the military is overextended.

"There's a lot of stress," he said. "It's a real issue."

Indeed, the generals quoted in the Peace and Education Through Law report also said that peacekeeping operations, deny-flight missions and short-term military actions can and often do harm military readiness by siphoning funds from combat training into noncombat patrol operations.

But others believe the military should not be involved at all in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations. Frank Gaffney, the founder and director of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., disagreed that the military is coming to favor these types of operations.

"As a general proposition, most people in the military think this is not what they signed up to do and this is not what they should be doing because this is not an appropriate mission for the United States military," he said.

Gaffney said these missions have hurt morale, affected re-enlistment rates and redirected the military's budget toward operational costs while maintenance and modernization issues have been ignored. If these missions are going to be done, they should be paid for outside of the defense budget, he said.

"The Pentagon budget should not be regarded as a slush fund for these kinds of programs," Gaffney said. "First of all, it doesn't have the resources it needs to do what it's supposed to and second of all, I don't think this is what it's supposed to do. It has become a convenient way for the U.S. government to launch into these things by just telling the military to go do it."

Gaffney also said that these missions have weakened the military and U.S. power and prestige around the world, which could embolden the nation's enemies. "That's the really scary thing," he said.

But Smith says the United States cannot simply use military force only when national interests are involved.

"We can't be the policeman of the world and we shouldn't be," he said. "But there are certain principles which underlie our whole way of life in addition to the more traditional, so-called national interest, which we have to look out for, that will demand action that will include the U.S."

Is the U.S. a 'global hall monitor'?

Gaffney, however, said the United States should practice what he called "strategic peacekeeping," by maintaining forces capable of deterring major international conflicts from starting, instead of tactical peacekeeping. "That's what we do very well and nobody else in the position to do it at the moment," he said.

He said those who support these missions see the United States as a "global hall monitor," stopping conflicts in which one group is oppressing another. The problem, he said, is that doesn't address the root causes of the conflict nor does it hold accountable the people behind human rights abuses.

"It's rather simply to put our guys on the ground and separate the people who are being beastly and the people they are being beastly to, and do that until hell freezes over," he said.

He cited Bosnia, where he said the first Bush administration failed by not sending a clear message to former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic that his behavior would not be tolerated. But he said the Clinton administration exacerbated the problem with the peace agreement it negotiated because it helped legitimize and prop up Milosevic, "the guy who was the prime mover behind much of beastliness."

"I would much rather see us take the position is that we're not going to tolerate the people who being beastly to other people ... but that means going after the individuals who are responsible," he said.

Smith said he supports the concept of U.S. humanitarian and peacekeeping missions if the intervention takes place before a volatile situation explodes into warfare or if the U.S. can help in enforcing a peace agreement.

"That in fact is a lot less expensive, a lot less risky to our armed force than staying out and then having to really pick up the pieces," he said. "Ideally, you're talking about prevention. At the extreme, you're talking about reconstitution and nation-building. But again, the more stable we can help other countries become, the more stable our own security is."

The issue is not likely to die down, as President-elect Bush campaigned on a promise to initiate a top-to-bottom review and assessment of the entire U.S. military, including an audit of the many ongoing international troop commitments like the peacekeeping arrangements in Bosnia and the Yugoslav province of Kosovo.

But during a meeting with congressional leaders on defense issues in January, senators said Bush may be reluctant to make large changes to overseas commitments as he takes on the role of commander-in-chief.

Sen. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat, said Bush sounded "a little more cautious" about whether the U.S. should play such a large peacekeeping role in the Balkans.

Smith said Bush may soften his rhetoric as he begins to deal with the "realpolitik" of U.S. troop commitments overseas. While the U.S. military provided the bulk of fighting in the Kosovo conflict, 85 percent of the peacekeeping is being done by European nations, he said.

"We miss the ball if we look only at the United States as the sole nation that can carry this kind of thing off," he said.