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.
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.
This new volume provides the first thorough examination of the involvement of peace enforcement soldiers in the detention of indicted war criminals. The book firstly addresses why peace enforcement missions need to be involved in detaining indicted war criminals. This discussion includes an analysis of how the securing of justice and transitional justice is incorporated into the UN’s approach to peace-building. It also explores IFOR’s, SFOR’s and KFOR’s activities aimed at detaining indicted war criminals, before turning to an analysis of how the detaining of indicted war criminals is incorporated into peace enforcement doctrines, mandates and rules of engagement. The book then outlines the mechanisms that need to be established in order to enable peace enforcers to effectively arrest war criminals in the areas where they are deployed. It concludes with a discussion of the prospects for the involvement of peace enforcement soldiers in the detention of indicted war criminals, and of what lessons future peace enforcement missions can learn from the experience of IFOR, SFOR and KFOR.
The legal position of visiting forces transcends domestic and international law and is of growing importance in our increasingly globalized and insecure world. 'In area' and 'out of area' operations, both for the purpose of establishing and maintaining peace and in connection with the conduct of other military operations and training, are likely to become more frequent for a variety of reasons. Finding where the applicable law places the balance between the interests, sensitivities and needs of the host state and the requirements, often practical in nature, of the visiting force is a key objective in ensuring that the relationship between hosts and 'guests' is and remains harmonious. All of this must be achieved in an increasingly complex legal environment. This fully updated second edition of The Handbook of the Law of Visiting Forces addresses the issues surrounding visiting forces and provides a full overview of the legal framework in which they operate. Through an analysis of jurisprudence and historical developments, it offers a comparative commentary to the UN, NATO, and other SOFA rules. The Handbook then continues its analysis through cases studies of visiting forces in key countries, including a fully updated chapter on Afghanistan that considers the various stages of the conflict, before offering conclusions on the current state of the law and its likely future development.
The EU's emergence as an international security provider, under the first Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) operations in the Balkans in 2003, is a critical development in European integration. In this book, which relies on extensive interviews with CSDP officials, Michael E. Smith investigates how the challenge of launching new CSDP operations causes the EU to adapt itself in order to improve its performance in this realm, through the mechanism of experiential institutional learning. However, although this learning has helped to expand the overall range and complexity of the CSDP, the effectiveness of this policy tool still varies widely depending on the nature of individual operations. The analysis also calls in to question whether the CSDP, and the EU's broader structures under the 2009 Treaty of Lisbon, are fit for purpose in light of the EU's growing strategic ambitions and the various security challenges facing Europe in recent years.
