The Threat Environment in Peace-Related Operations

by Alan R. Goldman, Ph.D.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the National Ground Intelligence Center, the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

The disintegration of the bi-polar world order, the globalization of Western culture and ideas, growing worldwide economic interdependence, and the information explosion are transforming the international environment and creating a general crisis of legitimacy for governing elites. The breakup of the Soviet empire has unleashed long-suppressed nationalistic impulses and added to the turmoil arising from ethnic and tribal conflict throughout much of the less developed world. Governments worldwide will continue to experience mounting demands for social justice, employment, the protection of lives, property and values, and even nationhood. While these demands are not likely to overthrow the nation-state as the locus of decisionmaking power on security affairs, they will create instability and occasional anarchy resulting in the erosion of state authority and the creation of new mini-states.

Fortunately, there are currently no threats to Western civilization as serious as those responsible for igniting World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. However, there is always the danger that local conflicts will engage the vital interests of the major powers and set the stage for far greater conflicts. It is certain that the major powers will confront different threats than those they found most pressing for most of this century. These emerging threats will inflict violence on American civilians and servicemembers, and at times impinge upon the stability and security of the United States.

Subnational conflicts will often turn violent, and when they do they will provide daunting and novel challenges to U.S. military forces that have successfully waged war against the various threats from potential hegemonic powers. The transition to the present domestic and international multipolar order will spread the kind of turmoil previously associated with such places as the Andean nations of Latin America, Central America, the Middle East, and Africa. Conflict around the perimeter of the former Soviet Union at the national and subnational level already stretches from the Balkans into the Caucuses and Central Asia and north to the Korean Peninsula. Indeed, ethnic, racial, tribal, class, and religious conflicts will likely be growing global phenomena.

In the future, even the most remote and deprived populations around the world will be able to arm themselves in order to take advantage of changing circumstances, or to fend off threats to their status and way of life. As the intermixed domestic and international order seeks a new equilibrium, the necessary conditions for conflict will exist in virtually every society and nation, and especially where democratic institutions and practices are weak or nonexistent.

Modernity, Change, and Conflict

The pace and magnitude of global change will continue to shock and reshape foreign and domestic politics. For the time being, Western institutions and values define modernity and success, including freedom and free enterprise, and by easy access to multiple sources of information. Modernity also implies the triumph of the city over the country, industry and technology over agriculture and pastoralism, and secularist opinions and life-styles over traditionalism. Post-modernity implies the pervasive power of information that is fast becoming everyone's birthright; no longer the dominion of just the few. Influence in the information age will continue to gravitate toward those with the access and knowledge to master and manipulate the communications media in all its proliferating forms. However, there will also be a seizure of power by newly aware, propagandized and partially informed groups and leaders who are driven by often inchoate fears, but increasingly well-articulated grievances born of a rising sense of victimization and injustice.

Because modernity fosters the questioning of traditional values, it will also continue to generate a violent backlash from those threatened by modernism such as the mullahs of Iran, the elite classes of Latin America, ex-communists and new fascists in Europe, and eventually perhaps the majority of the middle class in the West. Paradoxically, it is now arguable that we are witnessing both the end of history and the reemergence of it. With the breakup of the bipolar order, it is likely that the traditional forces of fragmentation, ethnicity, backlash, and conflict will be even stronger than newer competing trends toward multiculturalism, integration, interdependence, and harmony.

Rapid, visual, undirected, or tenuously controlled change to the domestic and international order creates unusual turmoil and insecurity, and fosters in its wake a search for stability, order, familiarity, roots, and ethnic identity. Governments in the less developed world will continue to respond to popular and often frantic and fanatic demands and challenges to their rule with a confusing mix of forceful crackdowns and experiments with more participatory democracy. Government leaders are unlikely to find any antidemocratic model that works, although Asian countries as disparate as China and Singapore may be the exception that proves the rule, especially if anarchy and violence come to be associated with Western culture and behavior.

Progress and Conflict

With ever-greater effectiveness, individuals and groups will target corrupt, venal, and stultified bureaucratic elites. In parts of the Islamic world there is a pincer assault on the ruling order from frustrated college graduates demanding suitable jobs and from displaced religious elites who have lost much of their old authority. Articulate antiestablishment figures and popular demands in South Korea, Italy, and Mexico are forcing wrenching changes in the domestic political order in the direction of more openness and participation. However, in the Balkans, where the fault lines of faith and history run deep, the destruction of the bipolar status quo and the breakup of Yugoslavia have resulted in anarchy, ethnic- and religious-based violence, and an atmosphere of fear, hatred, insecurity, revenge and despotism.

In general, the disequilibrium and anarchy inherent to the breakup of the old order will be exacerbated by the explosive spread of information and knowledge at a time when the income gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Modernism instructs the populace about inequities, raises popular expectations, and provokes greater demands from the disenfranchised. When the people perceive the elites as unresponsive, self-serving, corrupt, and unable to provide tolerable and equitable levels of material and psychic rewards, the tinder for conflict spreads out of control.

When Conflicts Turn Violent

In his book The Causes of War, military historian Michael Howard wrote one can divide it [the world] into those status quo powers for whom the existing international order is on the whole satisfactory, and those revisionist powers for whom it is not: who regard it on the whole oppressive and unjust, and who have no way of obtaining justice through the normal processes of peaceful negotiation. For whom the only way to obtain such justice may appear to be to fight

Howard also said that groups can effectively threaten peace when their armament is initially almost negligible, as often as not purloined from the armories of their opponents.

Violence will very often accompany the transition to a new global equilibrium. There is no indication that organized mass murder on the scale perpetrated by Hitler, Stalin, or Mao is in the offing, thanks in large part to a more informed, enlightened and tolerant public. Nevertheless, the post-Cold War world order promises to be divisive, chaotic and highly conflictual. When social disintegration occurs alongside national dissolution (as in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia with its many ethnic and religious divisions), the necessary condition for conflict is present. The sufficient condition for violent conflict exists when armaments of all types are readily available.

When a people such as the Serbs perceives itself in decline and losing control over its future safety and well-being, it is likely to seek emotional outlets against scapegoats or "enemies" who may be real or imagined. The interrelated conditions of adverse power shifts result in a growing sense of personal insecurity. Social and national disintegration create a tangible environment of fear in which even a single incident such as an assassination or a political act such as the recognition of an independent Croatia or Bosnia can spark periods of prolonged violence and retaliation. Once engaged in a cycle of violence, the combatants will adopt and adapt their objectives, tactics, organization and material to suit the political and physical situation. However, one can make some broad generalizations about the milieu and motivations of rivals who take up arms against one another.

The rivals live contiguously, yet there are cultural differences.
Victims of subnational violence are as apt to be noncombatants as militia forces.
Fear and terror can come to grip an entire people. A dread of losing power and possessions to a feared and gaining rival marks the emotional and psychological milieu. There is often an impulse to take preemptive vengeance against ancient rivals who may seem to have become benign, but are actually dangerous because they are gaining strength, different, and not trustworthy. Hardened, brutal, and implacable people motivated by ideals or plunder rise to the top. In other words, an ethic of "do unto others, before others do unto you" prevails.
Externally derived (exogenous) ideals, expressions of support including calls for toleration, fair play, and compromise will be interpreted as weakness, and be met by scorn and defiance from the dominant combatant. In the pathological environment of subnational violence, arguments for peace based on cost-benefit analysis will rarely be persuasive. Only a tangible presence in the battle zone will lend weight to humanitarian appeals.
A group or people that feels sufficiently threatened will obtain arms and in time will find innovative ways to employ force to insure what they perceive to be comes down to a question of their survival.
Results of Violence

Subnational ethnic and religious tensions evoke deep-seated prejudices. These tensions are prone to snap and erupt into protracted, relentless and bitter struggles often with no end. Consider such disparate groups as the armed Serbians, militant Palestinians, Irish Republican Army, and Tibetan nationalists. Each is fighting for a homeland, and each fears a technologically superior rival who shares neither traditions nor religion. Each group would like to gain power, wealth and territory. They would like to experience a sense of security, superiority, and revenge that comes with subduing or destroying a hated rival who in fact will never permanently succumb or go away.
Some peoples such as the Chatelaines, Scots, and Bretons are willing to settle for autonomy or self-government because they have not been grossly victimized or exterminated by those with whom they share the nation-state. For others such as some Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, Muslim Palestinians, and Israeli Jews, there is a living and even immediate memory of atrocities or extermination. For such victims of terror and violence, fear and brutal acts of revenge are not irrational responses to their situation (as is often claimed by more distant and secure spectators). For these minorities there is a strongly felt belief that they can only acquire security, even survival, within the confines of their own nation-state. Therefore, just as the one set of nation-states is undergoing fragmentation and even extinction from unprecedented subnational pressures, people without homelands are creating new nations, also of questionable strength or viability.
A cycle of violence, revenge, and atrocities induces even stronger feelings of rage and insecurity, and more urgent demands for a nation-state capable of self-defense. While territorial adjustments, economic assistance, and peacekeeping operations can be vital for mitigating the intensity of the violence, they alone will not solve the causes of conflict. Minorities who have been subject to ethnic and religious warfare require reassurance, protection and the means for self-defense which often implies territory, sovereignty, and an armed force. At a minimum, threatened minorities must feel sufficiently secure so that they can separate the fear from the hatred; thereby they diminish the emotional intensity that often characterizes inter-ethnic warfare. This will be a tricky, trying, and dangerous proposition since militant nationalists, irredentists, and fundamentalists, as well as indigenous security forces, will all have access to increasingly lethal weapons.
Peacekeepers' Dilemma

Soldiers in peace-related operations will often be immersed in a confusing and very cruel psychological environment. Their military chain of command will ask them to witness murder, rape, and mayhem without taking sides or intervening. However, that chain of command will have a global audience consisting of opinion makers, far from the scene of violent conflict, who will naturally balk at what appears callous and even cowardly official indifference to suffering and genocide. There will be public calls to intervene and to employ force in the service of humanity. Occasionally, these demands will prove irresistible despite cool calculations of national interest to the contrary. The use of counterforce to punish the perpetrators of atrocities will become emotionally satisfying and probably even a short-term military necessity. The same public that wants to help a suffering humanity cannot articulate a vital national interest warranting large risks of casualties; thus an unresolvable tension between ends and means will assert itself.
When peacekeeping forces attempt to resolve these tensions by employing force against just one side, the mission then becomes one of peace enforcement or warfighting with all the attendant risks of higher casualties and a wider war. Adopting indigenous tactics of counterterror (such as those used by the French in Algiers) undermines soldier and national morale. The use of conventional military power will also be unlikely to resolve the tension between ends and means. Military use of limited conventional force, which is all the national interest will tolerate, will not subdue a minority which has known atrocities and extermination. The ethnic warriors are even less likely to be overawed in the presence of a superior or prestigious power unwilling to use force.
The terrible dilemma for the peacekeeper is that he often represents the United Nations, which lacks serious military power, or a foreign country that lacks sufficient national interest and therefore the will to commit overwhelming force to subdue a highly motivated and even modestly armed group fighting for a cause, a way of life, or even revenge. Furthermore, even if they could muster overwhelming force, it would probably only add to the object of the force's isolation, insecurity and rage. It could drive the group underground and turn it temporarily to terrorism until it recovers. Yet there is an intrinsic American interest in a stable, democratic, and tolerant world reflective of American values and free of the anarchy and injustices that result in waves of illegal immigration, and racial and ethnic wars that will reverberate in the heterogenous neighborhoods of the United States.
Peacekeeper Objectives

Accordingly, the central objective of the peacekeeper must be to diminish the deep sense of insecurity that feeds the cycle of violence. Comfort, reassurance, insurance and security must be the watchwords of the peacekeeper. When force is used, it should be for self-defense against a party applying military force to thwart the internationally sanctioned mission. Hence personal protective gear and precision weapons such as antisniper rifles are the appropriate accoutrements of the peacekeeper. Once the peacekeeper appears to have changed from an impartial actor carrying out a legal and essentially humanitarian mission to one engaged in war against one or another tribe, the soldier and the mission will have been placed in serious jeopardy. At that point, the force must recalculate the entire strategy, the costs, the ends and means, and explain them convincingly to the public. More and more and for better or worse in the coming age of information (and disinformation), the public will be the final arbiter of what happens next. That most experienced of United Nations peacekeepers, Brian Urquart, probably put it best:
For soldiers peacekeeping can be a thankless and unglamorous task....A peacekeeping force is like a family friend who has moved into a household stricken by disaster. It must conciliate, console, and discretely run the household, without ever appearing to dominate or usurp the natural rights of those it is helping [emphasis added]. [At other] times...the peacekeeping function [is] more like that of an attendant in a lunatic asylum, and the soldiers (have) to accept abuse and harassment without getting into psychological or emotional involvement with the inmates. The feelings and reactions of peacekeepers must always come second to those of the afflicted. Thus they must often turn the other cheek, and never, except in the most extreme circumstances, use their weapons or shoot their way out of a situation. But they must also be firm and assert their authority in violent situations. It requires discipline, initiative, objectivity, and leadership, as well as ceaseless supervision and political directions.
In the opinion of Danish Lieutenant General Hillingso, an officer with extensive experience in peace-related operations, it is necessary to create specific units for peacekeeping operations or to establish a special school for the training of U.S. personnel who serve as peacekeepers. The causes and dynamics of ethnic and other types of violence belong in the curriculum. Coalition politics, uncertain chains of command, and the conflicting interests of the peacekeepers are environmental factors that need to be understood and simulated. Language and culture training, mediation skills, and the attainment of high tolerances for ambiguity, frustration, and nonlethal responses to vicious and violent situations may be the most demanding subjects of all.
Dr. Goldman is Senior General Military Intelligence Analyst at the National Ground Intelligence Center and an MI officer with the U.S. Army Inactive Reserve. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from Brown University. Readers can reach him at (804)980-7664 or DSN 934-7664.