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2004-5 United Nations Peacekeeping

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Introduction

You can also conceive of the civil-military relations link as simply one link into a general readiness argument – one way that the plan could undermine military readiness.  This is not the only link to the disadvantage, however.  There are at least two additional links.

Winning the Disadvantage

Links

Overstretch.  Although it seems almost unpersuasive to argue that if the U.S. were to commit just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, peacekeepers to a PKO that it would overstretch the military, but the argument isn’t as far-fetched as it seems.  The Pentagon is seriously stretched for troops.  It has already committed at least 138,000 troops to Iraq until the end of 2005 and has already had to shift 3,600 soldiers from South Korea to do that.  If the U.S. were to commit additional peacekeepers to a PKO, new or existing, the U.S. would have to take those troops away from someplace else.   Withdrawing more troops from a place like North Korea may be a signal of U.S. weakness and risk an North Korean attack.

Training.  Another link into the readiness argument is training. The argument is that when soldiers participate in peacekeeping missions their training and equipment readiness suffer. There was a substantial debate about this in the 1990s and articles continue to be written about it.

Focus.  There is a good link that says that the U.S. can only focus on so many conflicts at one time and if it tries to focus on too many conflicts, particularly ones in places that are “irrelevant” from a national security perspective that it will overstretch itself. Focusing on high priority areas is known as the doctrine of selective engagement. This doctrine was developed during the Clinton administration.

Impacts

The readiness impacts were discussed in the previous essay on civil-military relations.  For a discussion of the military readiness impact debate, see that essay.

Answering the Disadvantage

Answering the link.  If the plan you advocate does not make a material contribution of troops you do not really link to the disadvantage. If you do, you can try to undercut the link by saying that you just contribute a few troops or something along those lines. Given that we just withdrew 3600 troops from South Korea, and the world generally perceives us as over-stretched in Iraq, a couple hundred more troops probably isn’t going to make much of a difference.

There is good evidence to directly answer the link argument that deployment in peacekeeping operations undermines training and equipment readiness. There are good arguments that the significance of the link is minimal at best and that the army has started integrating war-fighting training with peacekeeping operations. 

Answering the uniqueness.  I’d use the two arguments that I just referenced to answer the uniqueness – we’re overstretched in Iraq and we just withdrew some troops from South Korea. To the extent that the negative makes this disadvantage about the perception of U.S. military weakness, you can at least use these arguments to non-unique the perception-based disadvantages. 

Answering the impact. See the civil-military relations disadvantage for suggestions for debating the impact. There is also a discussion of isolationism – the impact in this particular shell – in the multilateralism essay.

Readiness Disadvantage Shell

A. BRINK/THRESHOLD: U.S. FORCES ARE STRAINED

SOUTH FLORIDA SENTINEL, May 3, 2004, p. 1

Brandishing the latest technological firepower, U.S. armed forces proved in Afghanistan and again in Iraq that they have plenty of troops to win conventional wars. These campaigns reaffirmed America's military might, yet they left unexpected burdens with no end in sight, straining the nation's defense resources in the Near East and around the world. With 135,000 troops preoccupied in Iraq and another 17,500 still in Afghanistan, U.S. forces overseas amount to more than a quarter-million soldiers in 130 countries.

B. LINKS

1.  FOREIGN OCCUPATION/STABILIZATION

SOUTH FLORIDA SENTINEL, May 3, 2004, p. 1

"As long as we face a conventional military force, we can engage them from the air with very powerful bombs, and sometimes engage them before they even know we are there," said David R. Segal, director of the Center for Research on  Military Organization at the University of Maryland. "When you are going through streets and houses searching for an enemy that looks like everybody else in the neighborhood, it's a lot more labor intensive. "We are trying to do that and do nation-building and military occupation all at the same the time, often with the same people. We don't have much left to use if something breaks out elsewhere." Through most of its history, the United States spurned the role of empire builder or world cop. Its military was never built for long-term foreign occupation. This is not the Roman Empire, which sent legions to conquer territory and hold it for centuries. Nor is it the British Empire, which launched a vast fleet to connect a network of colonies.

2. PEACEKEEPING PREPARATION UNDERMINES THE DEVELOPMENT OF WARFIGHTING SKILLS

INFANTRY MAGAZINE, September-December 2000, http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IAV/is_3_90/ai_82009553

Certainly the Army today is doing more with less. A recent Congressional Quarterly Report confirmed that a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the military services are busier than ever. These additional deployments have brought a new focus on operations other than war. While some claim that peacekeeping operations do not degrade the warfighting skills of individual soldiers and leaders, the fact remains that units preparing for or conducting peacekeeping shift their primary focus to nontraditional tasks instead of honing traditional warfighting skills.

3. THE U.S. NEEDS TO FOCUS ITS MILITARY ON PRIORITIES AND NOT CONTRIBUTE TROOPS TO NON-VITAL OPERATIONS

Jack Spencer, is Senior Policy Analyst for Defense and National Security in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation, LARGE INCREASES IN MANPOWER NOT NEEDED AT THIS TIME, May 20, 2004, http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg1762.cfm

To bridge the capabilities gap, the United States should focus its military resources on missions that are vital to the nation. Specifically, it must field a force capable of fighting the immediate war on terrorismwhich includes operations in Iraqfighting with little or no warning in unanticipated places, maintaining adequate capability to deter aggression against America's interests and allies, and contributing to homeland defense. Only to the extent that America's capabilities exceed the demands of these essential missions should the U.S. consider contributing military resources to non-vital operations.

C. INTERNAL LINKS

1.  STRAIN ON THE MILITARY CAUSES SOLDIERS TO QUIT

Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Foreign Policy Fellow, Brookings, REBUILDING IRAQ AND REBUILDING THE U.S. ARMY,  June 4, 2004, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/20040604.htm

Because of the intense strains on people, the possibility exists that large numbers of active-duty troops and reservists may soon leave the service rather than subject themselves to a life continually on the road. The seriousness of the worry cannot be easily established. So far the problem has not become acute. Stop-loss orders that prevent some military personnel from leaving the service at the scheduled end of their tours, together with a surge of patriotism after September 11, together with limited awareness to date of just how long the Iraq mission is likely to last, have limited the fallout of overdeployments. But there can be no assurance that this state of affairs will continue.

2.  ONCE PEOPLE START QUITTING THE MILITARY, A SNOWBALL WILL OCCUR

Michael O’Hanlon, Senior Foreign Policy Fellow, Brookings, REBUILDING IRAQ AND REBUILDING THE U.S. ARMY,  June 4, 2004, Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, http://www.brookings.edu/views/op-ed/ohanlon/20040604.htm

While the position of Rumsfeld and Bush is understandable—active-duty forces are expensive, and additional soldiers are probably only needed for a period of a few years—it is not persuasive in the end. It risks breaking the all-volunteer force. That is, it risks making military service seem so unappealing that many in the military will start to leave the service when their existing terms end, and that recruits will dwindle in numbers. Once such a process begins, it can become a vicious spiral, since the only antidote to losing people from the armed forces is to recruit even more, and that may not be possible (even if signing bonuses and pay are further increased).

D. IMPACT:  OVERSTRETCH WILL TRIGGER U.S. WITHDRAWAL FROM THE WORLD, LEAVING FAILED STATES WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Niall Ferguson has been the Herzog Professor of Financial History at New York University's Stern School of Business. He will be transferring to Harvard this summer, ATLANTIC MONTHLY, May 2004, http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-05-25.htm

Lobbing witty salvos at emasculated anti-imperialists (Americans, he says, would rather build shopping malls than nations) Ferguson openly fears that America will retreat from the world the way Europe has. He laments the "ideological embarrassment about being seen to wield power," and the "pusillanimous fear of military casualties." It's not that empires are all good, he says. It's just that the alternatives are worse. Ferguson fears that if the United States can't, or won't, set up proper, functioning governments in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, then no one will. The result could be a return to some form of ninth-century chaos, only this time with nuclear weapons.

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