Among the Partnership for Peace states that participated in the Implementation and Stabilization Forces in the Balkans, the experiences of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Romania provide a rich summary of the collective lessons learned through these operations. Each of these four states: experienced strains and distortions in their defense budgets found it difficult to stand up their battalions and concluded that it would be necessary to establish pre-standing units for future peace support operations learned that military officers' language training needed to be improved determined that communications equipment and training needed to be changed saw IFOR/SFOR as a laboratory for deepening interoperability with NATO.
Civil-military unity of effort has been an essential yet frustrating elusive requirement for success in post-cold-war peace operations. The need to coordinate, collaborate, and share information between civilian and military entities is on the rise and deemed essential requirements for success. Today’s information and communications technologies serve to facilitate the exchange of information among the disparate players of peace operations but the ability to actually realize open information sharing in real-world coalition operations remains problematic. The integration of relevant information and the timely dissemination of the processed information to interested parties in the field is well within the realities of today’s technology. Increased civil-military involvement in peacekeeping and humanitarian operations around the world is matched in part by the rise in the number and complexity of these situations. There are many more actors on today’s peace operations landscape with competing as well as common interests and expectations. The need to improve cooperation, coordination, and more open information sharing is on the rise. Efforts to improve and facilitate more open working together and information sharing among the disparate participants must overcome a continuing lack of trust among the civil-military actors, obsolete national and international policies, unrealistic legal and funding constraints, and outdated organization cultural traditions and behavior patterns. Additionally, all actors need to better understand each other and the roles they can and should play in an increasingly complex operational environment. In order to obtain closure and improve the future situation, the actors must develop relationships based on mutual trust, and there must be a clear understanding that cooperation, coordination, and information sharing is a two-way street. In reality, inefficiencies are inherent in any multilateral activity, and competing interests and fear of loss of power and prestige make unity of effort a desired objective, but also one that will be difficult to achieve. Furthermore, information is power and can be an effective means to an end, but only if it can be interpreted, shared, and used effectively for military, political, or civil use. Information can also help reduce uncertainty and provide those that possess it a decided advantage in the decisionmaking process. There continues to be a general lack of trust among the players, coupled with the lack of a shared understanding of the added value through more open and improved information sharing. Information sharing among the actors on the peace operations landscape continues to be largely a manual process. These obstacles need to be recognized and, to the extent possible, practical recommendations developed for ameliorating them. Application of new technology must go beyond simply modernizing existing practices and capabilities. The civil-military community needs to look at new ways of doing business and how the rapidly advancing information technology can be used to leverage the power of information to help achieve timely and appropriate success of peace operations. The patterns of conflict for the post-cold-war environment are changing and so are the approaches to military command and control. Advances in information technology have enabled organizations and individuals to more effectively leverage the power of information; yet for coalition operations where information sharing is essential to meet mission needs, it continues to be problematic. The issue is not technology, but largely the will on the part of organizations and individuals to make it happen. There is also a number of policy, doctrine, C4ISR systems, cultural, and environmental challenges that influence the ability to achieve more open sharing of information in coalition operations.
First published in 1998, this volume is a record, both by detailed statistical analysis and by personal account, of lessons learned. These lessons are only useful if they are shared to ensure that they are not relearned the hard way. Any soldier or statesman who is involved in Peacekeeping Operations and anyone involved in the future of peacekeeping in the United Nations would be well advised to use this exceptionally insightful and informative work as one of their essential reference books. It contains a rich store of analysis and sober conclusions that makes it an indispensable guide and should serve as a source of inspiration and reflection, but even more it should serve to provide guidance for future action. Biermann and Vadset have made a major contribution to the analysis of UN field operations and an important source book for the study of UN and NATO operations.
This handbook elaborates clear status provisions for military and civilian personnel of foreign armed forces in a receiving state. It provides an up-to-date commentary on applicable status law provisions.
"This book makes an extraordinary contribution to broadening and deepening understanding of the complex range of relations in modern peacekeeping operations, including interactions between national contingents and their respective chains of command and their relations with other contingents in the field, as well as with regional authorities, scores of NGOs, and the Its findings help to identify ""points of tension"" in peacekeeping operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where, for the first time, contingents from more than 35 countries had to cooperate, each of which had their own, quite different, This volume provides both descriptive and analytical insights based upon these experiences that are applicable to contemporary international peacekeeping operations all over the world. J. Callgahan, H. Born, T. op den Buijs, Ad Vogelaar, E. Johansson, B. Boene, J. Y. Yanakiev, I. A.Razumtsev. "
Why were El Salvador's FMLN and Peru's Shining Path able to mount such serious revolutionary challenges in the 1980s and early 1990s? And why were they able to do so despite the fact that their countries' elected governments were widely considered democratic? These two guerrilla groups were very different, but both came close to success. To explain why, the author examines the complex interplay among political and economic factors, the nature of the revolutionary organization, and international actors. McClintock emphasizes that the end of the Cold War does not mean the end of revolutionary groups, and that the United States can play an important role in determining the outcome of future confrontations. The book concludes with practical policy options for the U.S. government as it looks to foster peace and democracy in the western hemisphere.
Russian military capacity remains a major consideration for global security even in the post-Soviet era. This book assesses today's Russian military and analyzes its possible future direction. The contributors—experts on the subject from both Russia and the West—consider not only how Russia has built its military capacity but also the policies and doctrines that have shaped Russia's defense posture. They discuss such topics as the downsizing of the Russian military, Russia's use of military power in regional conflicts, and the management of Russia's nuclear weapons. For more than a decade, Russian leaders have struggled to formulate security and defense policies that protect Russia's borders and project Russia's influence. The contributors to The Russian Military find that the choices Russian leaders have made have been significantly influenced by the military reforms Russia has attempted to implement since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The protracted and intense debate over military reform has been—and will continue to be—decisive in shaping Russian military capacity.
Many of the recent Balkan conflicts have been temporarily halted through emergency crisis-resolution actions. These emergency actions, though, have not focused on the interrelated sources of these conflicts, and have not thus far led to a real, lasting regional solution. The European Union (EU) and West European Union (WEU) remain "blind" to many of the region's countries and their problems. Unfortunately, some of the actions these organizations have taken may have had a negative effect on the region's stability. Regional expectations about what NATO (and the United States) can actually achieve far exceed NATO's collective will, political-military capacities and the realities of the United States' limits. Yet, almost all attention has been focused upon NATO intervention. Hence, regional expectations are likely to remain unfulfilled with adverse implications for NATO's prestige and U.S. influence.
