The Peacekeepers

four-man patrol of U.S. peacekeepers shuffled in the early morning cold recently at Camp Monteith, Kosovo, as thousands of unseen birds in the darkened canopy of branches raised a chorus to the coming dawn. One soldier cursed as bird droppings hit his headgear, and another raised his eyes ruefully toward the deafening noise. "The Serbian air force," he joked, as the troops headed out the front gate and locked-and-loaded their M-16 rifles. It was easy to believe the shrieking birds were somehow mocking the American interlopers.

Yet the Army's KFOR (Kosovo Force) patrol-from the 1st Armored Division based in Germany-was greeted with smiles, waves and shouts from the children on the streets. Soldiers stopped in the alleyways to check on old men among the Serbian minority, heard complaints from a resident that his generator had been stolen and mediated arguments between an Albanian businessman and his Serbian workers about late paychecks. They escorted children on their way to school. In general, they worked to staunch the ethnic feuds and cool the hot nationalism that have devastated this region over the past decade. In the process, they are trying to provide a people weaned on Communism with the essential brick and mortar needed to build a civil society.

That is exactly the kind of "nation building" that President George W. Bush rejected in his election campaign, putting the Balkans in general-and peacekeeping in particular-at the epicenter of a contentious debate over the efficacy of such operations. Bush has promised to pull U.S. peacekeepers out of the Balkans and to launch an immediate review of troop commitments in dozens of countries, with an eye to strictly limiting peacekeeping missions. "There may be some moments when we use our troops as peacekeepers, but not often," Bush said in the final presidential debate.

In stating during the campaign that, "I'm worried about an administration that uses 'nation building' and 'the military' in the same breath," Bush gave voice to widespread skepticism among many Republicans and some Democrats in Congress about the proliferation of peacekeeping and nation-building operations over the past decade and their impact on U.S. armed forces.

Yet many western leaders and military experts are convinced that peacekeeping operations and the crises that spawned them are an unhappy fixture of the post-Cold War era. Last year, a National Intelligence Council study identified at least 23 countries undergoing humanitarian crises, and cited nine others that were likely to develop crises. Already, international and national military forces are transforming themselves to adapt to this unpredictable environment. For its part, the Defense Department has focused on implementing in Kosovo the hard-won lessons from its myriad peacekeeping operations over the past decade. To varying degrees, the armed services have adjusted their personnel and unit rotation policies, training regimens, force structures and peacekeeping doctrines to reflect an evolution toward full-spectrum capabilities that range from humanitarian assistance and peacekeeping on one end, all the way to high-intensity warfare on the other.

"Without getting into policy debates, as we look forward into the future, we understand this is the kind of world we live in. And if we continue to be given these types of missions, the military is going to work real hard at doing them right," Army Brig. Gen. Dennis Hardy, commander of U.S. Task Force Falcon in Kosovo, said in a recent interview in his office at Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo. As a result of lessons learned in past peacekeeping missions in places such as Somalia and Haiti, and after five years in Bosnia especially, Hardy says the military has improved its peacekeeping training, adjusted rules of engagement and reshaped command relationships with the United Nations and nongovernmental organizations.

New World Disorder

The remarkable odyssey of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) in the spring and summer of 1999 helps explain how the demands of the post-Cold War era have transformed the U.S. military. From a forward-deployed force primarily focused on fighting major wars, the military is evolving into a more expeditionary force that views keeping the peace and responding to smaller crises as integral to its operations and professional ethos. On a single six-month deployment last year, the 2,200 Marines from the 26th MEU landed in Macedonia to provide security at refugee camps for Kosovars fleeing Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic cleansing campaign; joined the fight in the Kosovo air campaign with the unit's Harrier fighter jets; and became the peacekeeping force that initially entered Kosovo to provide security in the American sector for returning refugees. And then, just before returning home, the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit was diverted to Turkey to provide humanitarian relief after a devastating earthquake struck that country.

"What was notable about the 26th MEU was that they didn't get to go back home between missions to regroup. The same unit that was fighting in the air war and then keeping the peace in Kosovo had to immediately transition to a humanitarian relief mission in Turkey, with the same equipment and training that they deployed with," says Gen. Terrence Dake, who recently retired as the assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. "So the Marine Corps sees no mission along the continuum between humanitarian relief and high-intensity warfare that we don't need to be capable of performing." The degree to which the armed services are already transforming their organizations, doctrines and force structures to reflect that new reality was largely lost in the recent presidential debate about the impact of peacekeeping on military readiness. The belief that the U.S. military is culturally ill-suited to peacekeeping or peace-making operations-and that such missions dilute the military's warfighting ethos and squander military resources-was widely shared among military leaders in the early 1990s. Such "window cleaning" operations were seen as a threat to the military's readiness to conduct its primary mission of fighting and winning the nation's wars when vital strategic interests are at stake. A generation of senior officers who had come of age in Vietnam needed only the bitter experiences of Beirut in 1983 (where 241 Marines were killed in a terrorist bombing during a peacekeeping mission) and Somalia in 1993 (where 18 soldiers were killed in a single firefight with the forces of a Somali warlord) to remind them of the danger, political ambiguity and open-ended nature often inherent in such operations.

"When we went into Bosnia in 1995, the U.S. military leadership was suffering from post-Somalia syndrome, and there was great reluctance and concern about mission creep," says retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the former supreme allied commander in Europe who organized NATO's entry into Kosovo and helped draft the Dayton Accords for Bosnia. "But when events continued to move so quickly in the early and mid-1990s, the military found itself left behind in terms of doctrine. Political leaders took the actions they thought were necessary, and they expected the military to adapt. And while the U.S. military has been slow to adapt, it has adapted."

NEW Mind-Set

After a steady stream of major peacekeeping deployments to Northern Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and most recently Kosovo, many senior military leaders have concluded that the United States has little choice but to engage in such peacekeeping and stability-enhancing operations. Not only are these operations now widely seen as key to continued U.S. leadership of alliances such as NATO, but they also are viewed as a prime tool in keeping regional tensions from igniting into full-blown wars.

"The United States' global leadership role, with our inherent worldwide interests, continues to demand a broad range of military activities from engagement to warfighting," Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a Dec. 14 speech at the National Press Club. "However, we must be mindful that long-term commitments to achieve nation building, and the like, place our readiness at risk." Shelton's comments are echoed by the service chiefs and U.S. regional commanders around the world, who are often the most vigorous proponents for military engagements, peacekeeping operations, and other activities intended to keep tensions in their regions from boiling over.

"I firmly believe that the global engagement strategy we have today is a sound strategy, though it's sometimes hard to put your hands around the exact return we get from it," Adm. Vernon Clark, the new chief of Naval Operations, said in a Dec. 5 interview with defense reporters. The Navy, he noted, has 105 of its 315 ships deployed around the world. "Fundamentally, for globalization and world markets to work you need stability, and the places the U.S. Navy tends to go are more stable than the places we don't go. That's why the [regional] commanders-in-chief have a higher demand for my forces than I can meet right now."

Bernard Rostker, who served as undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness in the Clinton administration, says military thinking on peacekeeping has evolved substantially over the past decade. "I think what military leaders are now telling you is that they prepare for war but hope for peace, and if we can keep the peace by involving our forces in an appropriate way in these operations, that certainly makes sense," Rostker said in a recent interview with defense reporters.

Military Transformation

That change in mind-set among military leaders is reflected in the forces they command. In fact, in ways both dramatic and subtle, the U.S. military is in the midst of a fundamental transformation as a result of its myriad peacekeeping, peace enforcement, humanitarian relief and other "operations other than war."

Because their forces were already expeditionary and organized around regular six-month deployments abroad, the Navy and Marine Corps have had an easier time adapting to the new strategic environment than the other services have.

In its seminal 1992 doctrinal document "From the Sea," however, the Navy signaled that it was transforming itself from a "blue water" force focused on fighting other navies in high-intensity combat at sea, to a more "brown water" force capable of projecting power to the coastlines around the world. On major peacekeeping operations to both Somalia in 1992 and to Haiti in 1994, the Navy put that doctrine into practice. The Navy has also routinely worked alongside the Coast Guard in recent years enforcing embargoes as part of peace enforcement operations in places such as the Balkans and the Persian Gulf. In a precedent-setting exercise last summer, the Navy's Third Fleet sponsored a humanitarian assistance exercise in Hawaii that included participants from the United Nations, the American Red Cross and other nongovernmental agencies that are often thrown together during humanitarian relief and peacekeeping missions.

As the designated "911" force of choice, the Marine Corps was also well-positioned for the chaos and regional crises that came to characterize the 1990s. In tailoring and training its expeditionary forces for likely contingencies, however, the Marine Corps also has shifted somewhat from its former focus of conducting wartime amphibious assaults to preparing for the entire spectrum of operations.

"The nature of warfare is shifting from the force-on-force, high-intensity side of the spectrum more toward these operations other than war," Lt. Col. Paul Brygider, deputy commander of the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, said in an interview during a recent exercise in Croatia. From last year's extraordinary deployment, Brygider and his fellow commanders learned that a unit could encounter virtually the whole gamut of missions it trains for on a single deployment.

After spending most of the Cold War preparing essentially to fight in place from forward air bases and staging areas, the Air Force and Army faced a more difficult

transition in preparing for more peacekeeping, peace enforcement and expeditionary combat missions. In 1999, however, the Air Force began reorganizing into 10 Air Expeditionary Forces. That move followed signs of serious personnel strains as the Air Force sent troops on successive deployments to support peacekeeping operations in the Balkans and peace enforcement duties in Northern and Southern Iraq. The reorganization is designed to introduce more predictability into those operations by limiting any single service member to one three-month deployment every 15-month cycle. And an Army designed primarily to fight high-intensity tank battles on the plains of Europe faced perhaps the most difficult transformation of all-to a more mobile force able to deploy rapidly for a full-spectrum of missions.

After Clinton's original one-year exit deadline passed for withdrawing Army troops from Bosnia in 1996, for example, the service merely tinkered with changes in adjusting to its new mission. First, it reduced the length of rotations to the Balkans from one year to six months to ease the strain on personnel, and then it started rotating stateside units to Bosnia to relieve the Germany-based units of constant peacekeeping duties. The Army also is considering a permanent standing headquarters in the Balkans like those in Germany and Korea, to which troops could rotate individually as opposed to the more disruptive practice of rotating whole units. "You can argue that the Army has been the slowest service in adapting to these new roles, but that's partly because the political signals it has been sent have been lousy," says an expert on the Army who works for a prominent think tank in Washington. "You have a President who has sent them on these missions but insists they not shed an ounce of blood, which sends the signal that these missions are not very important. You have a Congress that keeps signaling that they will be pulling U.S. troops out of the Balkans, which keeps the Army from establishing a permanent headquarters there. And now, after the Army has finally launched a major reorganization to better cope with these responsibilities, you have President Bush saying peacekeeping is bad and the Army should go back to just focusing on fighting big wars."

When the Army proved just how slow and cumbersome it would be to deploy heavy mechanized units to Kosovo last year, the service launched an ambitious plan to transform a significant portion of its force structure into lighter, more mobile forces. The Army's 70-ton tanks and heavy tracked vehicles are also ill-suited for the narrow streets and bridges and day-to-day patrolling inherent in Balkan peacekeeping.

While the primary driver of the reform is to increase strategic mobility, Army officials have clearly designed its transformation with an eye to other post-Cold War missions. The service thus plans to field eight "medium-weight" brigades that can deploy anywhere in the world within 96 hours. Late last year, the Army selected a new, light armored vehicle that travels on wheels instead of tracks for use in the rapid-reaction brigades, and it plans to spend roughly $4 billion over the next several years to acquire 2,000 of the vehicles.

"Our objective is to create a force that we can not only move faster, but that can respond to the full spectrum of conflict, from lighter to heavier. And if we can get to the scene faster, hopefully we will act as a deterrent so a crisis doesn't become war," Gen. John Hendrix, commander of U.S. Army Forces Command, said in a recent interview with defense reporters.

Redefining the Reserves

Perhaps no segment of the military has been more transformed by the demands of peacekeeping and other small-scale contingencies than the National Guard and Reserves. While the Reserves faced only two presidential call-ups during the Cold War (for the Berlin Airlift and Vietnam), for the first time in history Clinton called up the Reserves to active duty three times-for Bosnia, Kosovo and no-fly zone operations over Iraq. Meanwhile, the number of annual duty days Reserve forces contribute to ongoing operations has multiplied by 13 over the past decade (from an average of 1 million duty days during the 1980s, to 13 million in the last four years), despite Reserve troop cuts of 300,000 during that time. Recently, the Texas National Guard's 49th Armored Division completed a historic tour in command of the U.S. sector in Bosnia, marking the first time since the Korean War that a National Guard unit was given headquarters command over active-duty troops. Another Guard unit is scheduled to assume command next year.

In the process, the National Guard and Reserves have been transformed from insurance policy organizations designed for mass mobilization in the unlikely event of World War III, to fully contributing members of a total force actively engaged in day-to-day peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations around the world.

"In the roughly 30 years I served in the Reserves, the reserve community generally believed they would not be called up unless there was a major military event like the Soviets pouring through the Fulda Gap," says Charles Cragin, principal deputy assistant secretary of Defense for reserve affairs in the Clinton administration. "Today I know reservists who have been called up four times in the past decade. The reality is the active duty force can't do anything without relying on the Reserves." Reserve officials are increasingly concerned that the National Guard and Reserves, and their employers, may be approaching a saturation point in terms of absorbing new peacekeeping and contingency operations. Last month, the Pentagon sent questionnaires to more than 100,000 reservists and their spouses to gauge the impact of increased deployments on families, finances and employers. A study of employers released last September found that while most supported the reserve service of their employees, many complained that Reserve call-ups were too long and unpredictable.

As is the case with active duty forces, however, Reserve officials have discovered that troop retention and reenlistment actually increase in units that deploy for peacekeeping missions. The visible participation of reservists in these arduous operations has also largely put to rest past tensions between active-duty forces and what they once derided as "weekend warriors."

"The way the military is configured today, many of the skills especially critical to peacekeeping operations and smaller contingencies reside almost exclusively in the Reserves," says Cragin. For instance, he says, the reserve component is home to 97 percent of the Army's civil affairs forces; 82 percent of its public affairs forces; 81 percent of psychological operations forces; 66 percent of military police; and 85 percent of medical brigades. "The numbers illuminate a central fact about America's post-Cold War military: namely, that we cannot undertake sustained operations anywhere in the world today without calling on Reserve assets to get the job done."

tailored training

The military's emphasis on peacekeeping also has changed its training regime over the past decade. For instance, the Army, which has borne the brunt of long-term peacekeeping duties in the Sinai and the Balkans, has instituted an intense two-week peacekeeping "mission rehearsal exercise" at its Combat Training Center in Hohenfels, Germany, and for stateside units at its Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Polk, La. In a mock-up of an urban setting, soldiers who have been steeped in the "kill or be killed" absolutes of the high-intensity battlefield learn about conflict resolution, group dynamics and graduated levels of force in response to various provocations.

The need for such tailored training was highlighted by an Army investigation into the rape and murder of a young girl in Kosovo by a soldier from an elite 82nd Airborne Division battalion. Army officials found that other soldiers in the unit had harassed, threatened and even assaulted civilians during a five-month deployment to Kosovo that ended last spring. Four of the unit's officers and five enlisted members were eventually disciplined.

The investigation pointed to a failure of leadership as the primary problem, but noted that because the battalion's deployment orders came late in its training cycle, the unit did not receive the peacekeeping mission rehearsal exercise. Thus, the report found, the soldiers "experienced difficulties tempering their combat mentality." On Dec. 1, the Army ordered that all units undergo the specialized training and mission rehearsals before deploying on future peacekeeping missions. "The peacekeeping training we received at Hohenfels was important, because our young leaders and soldiers learned to deal with their worst day out on the streets," says Lt. Col. Michael Cloy, a regiment commander in the 1st Armored Division who recently finished a tour of duty in Kosovo. "They experience a situation where someone is in their face, another person is crying out for assistance in a different language, and our guys have to sort through the problems while applying escalating levels of force depending on the circumstances. In the process, we've learned that the common thread linking high-intensity war-fighting and peacekeeping is the discipline required of our young troops."

Some experts believe the threads between warfighters and peacekeepers have become too entangled. That argues, they say, for creation of a specialized peacekeeping force within the military force structure. "Because they have known nothing but peacekeeping, officers from major on down have no problem with the mission," says Don Snider, a professor at West Point who has written on the subject. "What is fraying is the sense among officers that they can excel at both combat and peacekeeping missions. That's why I've argued for the creation of a constabulary force to allow the rest of the U.S. military forces to focus on experimenting with fighting big wars."

The U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, an independent panel created by Congress in 1999 and co-chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, also sparked debate about the potential need for such a specialized force. In its April 2000 report, the commission said that because such "stability" operations are likely to increase in the future, the military needs rapidly deployable units capable of assuming humanitarian relief and constabulary duties. The commission did not explicitly propose creating a separate peacekeeping force, but even the suggestion that the military should focus more on such operations drew the ire of conservatives in Congress. "I fundamentally disagree with those who advocate shifting the composition of our armed forces toward peacekeeping and humanitarian operations at the expense of warfighting capabilities," said Rep. Floyd Spence, R-S.C., former chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, in a letter to the Hart-Rudman Commission.

Service leaders say creating a separate peacekeeping force would drain scarce resources and weaken force structure. After a decade of experience, military leaders also believe that with the proper training and preparation, combat troops can effectively become peacekeepers. The combat prowess of U.S. forces is also seen as a critical deterrent to potential adversaries in peacekeeping situations.

"We've seen in places like Somalia how the level of threat can rapidly escalate into intense combat, and for that reason I think it would be difficult to take the peacekeeping mission away from trained combat troops," said Gen. Hendrix of Army Forces Command.

Ripple Effect on Readiness

The issue of whether peacekeeping operations degrade warfighting readiness is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the military's ongoing transformation into a multi-spectrum force. Throughout the 1990s, common wisdom held that successive peacekeeping operations were largely responsible for a decline in warfighting skills, a readiness crisis and for recruiting and retention problems.

Few would doubt that peacekeeping, peace enforcement and related operations other than war have taken a toll. The Navy, for instance, has backtracked on its early 1990s assumption that it could prudently shrink to a 230-ship force largely because of the unexpected demands of such missions. Army officials are now arguing that they need between 40,000 and 60,000 more troops given a 300 percent increase in contingency deployments during the 1990s, many for peacekeeping operations.

Certainly the impact has probably been greatest on an Army and Air Force that for years delayed making structural and organizational changes to alleviate the strains of successive peacekeeping deployments on their personnel. The wear of peacekeeping operations also contributes to the aging of the military arsenal, and to a pace that has strained all of the services.

"The Army is still struggling to understand the full impact of peacekeeping operations, but our research suggests that the costs are significantly higher than the relatively small number of troops involved would imply," says Thomas McNaugher, deputy director of Army studies at RAND Corp. Because the Army has to cherry-pick specialized units from all over its force structure to augment its major peacekeeping forces-be they reconnaissance elements, combat support, civil affairs or psychological operations units-such operations tend to break up the established hierarchy of the Army, which is still organized around combat divisions and the conventional warfighting mission.

Through reforms such as the Air Force's Air Expeditionary Forces and the Army's shift toward lighter forces, shorter tours and a greater reliance on the Reserves, the services believe they are making significant progress in spreading the burden of peacekeeping and peace enforcement deployments. For much of the 1990s, peacekeeping funds were not generally included in the regular budgeting process, so the services were forced to absorb the costs out of existing operations and maintenance accounts, hobbling readiness, training and base maintenance until supplemental spending bills could be passed by Congress late in the fiscal year. Beginning in fiscal 1997, however, Congress began allowing the Pentagon to fund ongoing operations such as those in Bosnia and Kosovo out of an "Overseas Contingency Operations Transfer Fund," alleviating the need to raid readiness accounts.

Peacekeeping Positives

On the broader issue of whether peacekeeping and peace enforcement missions have harmed the U.S. military, however, the reviews are decidedly mixed. "Many commanders think that operations other than war causes degradation in the combat readiness of their units," concluded a February 2000 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which distilled the views of 12,500 U.S. service members surveyed around the world. "A synthesis of many comments has been that 'We are doing some good work for these people, but I joined the Army to be in a combat-ready unit, not to be a policeman.' " On the other hand, the report found that "some units report that participation in peacekeeping operations provided solid training for their primary missions. Some Army units in Bosnia, for example, reveal strong spirit, good cohesion and considerable satisfaction in performing an important task."

In fact, qualitative and anecdotal evidence suggest that when carefully managed, peacekeeping deployments can actually increase morale, unit cohesion and important aspects of warfighting readiness. "The 1st Armored Division was a much better division when we came back from Bosnia than when we went," retired Maj. Gen. William Nash, commander of the initial U.S. peacekeeping force to Bosnia in 1995, said in the 1999 report "A Force for Peace."

The Pentagon has also long noted that reenlistment rates for units deployed on peacekeeping operations-both active and reserve-are significantly higher than the service averages. According to senior officials, reenlistment rates for the U.S. Army Task Force Falcon in Kosovo is a full 10 percent above the Army average.

"While our forces are stretched thin, the retention levels in our most heavily deployed units has always been very good, and I think there is a positive message in that," said Gen. Hendrix.

Making a Difference

A tour of military forces assigned to Task Force Falcon in Kosovo reveals why many commanders in the field believe that peacekeeping operations can actually enhance warfighting skills. Young sergeants leading patrols out on the streets first brief their missions using the same methods and protocols that they would adopt in combat, and they carry live ammunition. Commanders are in charge of their troops 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with none of the family and other distractions that typify military life at home garrisons. Many rear-area support, logistics and airlift units comport themselves on peacekeeping operations almost exactly as they would for a combat operation. Soldiers routinely work with troops from other nations in the kind of multinational operations that they could expect to encounter in an era of coalition warfare.

"I don't think we can replicate in any training center or military school the leadership development that our young officers receive here," says Hardy, the commander in Kosovo. Capt. Tom Hairgrove, commander of isolated Outpost Sapper on the tense border between Kosovo and Serbia, is a prime beneficiary of that determination to keep U.S. forces in Kosovo combat sharp. He believes his company is receiving experience that no amount of home base training or exercising could duplicate.

"Everything we're doing here-the procedures we follow, the placement of our defensive positions, the constant surveillance of the border-are exactly as we would do in a defensive position in high-intensity combat," says Hairgrove. In contrast to a training exercise, Hairgrove's Alpha Company has been given its full complement of weapons and ammunition, to include TOW anti-tank and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. They routinely conduct full-up rehearsals where artillery units shoot illumination rounds at night. Squad leaders call in Apache helicopter gunships for reconnaissance flights almost every day.

Despite high morale and reenlistment rates on peacekeeping missions, military leaders know an outbreak of hostilities or the taking of significant casualties could alter the dynamic dramatically. In the meantime, however, there's probably no better explanation for why the all-volunteer force has generally embraced this new mission than Sgt. Vidal Vazquez, a soldier with the elite 101st Airborne Division.

On recent mornings, Vazquez could be found escorting young Serbian children to and from school in the Kosovo village of Cernica, hardly the image of Army life that the elite paratrooper had conjured up from Army recruiting posters and advertisements. "You know, I never could have envisioned myself doing this when I joined the Army," Vazquez says with a shake of his head, before suddenly turning serious. "But I like being here. It feels like we're here for a reason."