Perhaps the most inviting target for defense cuts in recent years has been that catchall activity described, usually derisively, as "peacekeeping." The most controversial peacekeeping effort has, of course, been in Bosnia. Republicans have consistently opposed the introduction and maintenance of American ground forces in Bosnia as an unnecessary drain on military resources for what they insist is less than a "vital" national-security interest. Critics made much the same case about the two other high-profile operations of the Clinton years, in Haiti and Somalia. They deride peacekeeping as a form of "international social work," to borrow Michael Mandelbaum's popular soundbite; any reassessment of American strategic priorities, they say, would rank peacekeeping very low. The job of American forces should be to protect vital interests, and vital interests alone. As former army officer and defense analyst John Hillen pithily put it, " Superpowers don't do windows."
The case against peacekeeping has been powerfully advanced. But it rests on some faulty calculations and dubious strategic assumptions.
First, we should ask: What is peacekeeping and how can we calculate its actual costs to military readiness and the U.S. Treasury? In truth, the cost of peacekeeping has been widely exaggerated -- and so have the savings and benefits that could be gotten by doing away with military operations like the one in Bosnia.
A recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal claimed that the United States has carried out "more than 200 such operations since 1990." Two hundred? On closer examination that bizarre figure turns out to include: the dispatch of American troops to southern Florida to help local communities recover from the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in 1992; the evacuation of U. S. citizens from Sierra Leone after its government fell in 1992 and then again this spring; an operation, never actually carried out, to evacuate Americans from Albania earlier this year; and a host of other, similar missions aimed only at aiding and rescuing Americans in harm's way at home and abroad.
One doubts that critics of peacekeeping would eliminate the rescue of Americans abroad from the list of our military's obligations. But they have nevertheless used these operations to inflate artificially the number of peacekeeping missions the United States has engaged in.
Other alleged misuses of American troops include the tiny U.S. contingent that has been peacefully stationed in the Sinai for almost two decades in fulfillment of the Camp David peace agreement between Israel and Egypt; the peacekeeping force in Macedonia, which numbers a grand total of 300 soldiers, none of whom has seen a shot fired in anger since leaving the U.S. mainland; and the much larger U.S. force stationed in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which, like its counterparts in Europe and along the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, has deterred an otherwise certain invasion costing untold thousands of American lives and billions of taxpayer dollars. Would the critics put these operations on the chopping block, too? Presumably not.
So what are we talking about when we talk about peacekeeping? When we focus more honestly on the costlier and riskier commitments undertaken in recent years -- the operations that bring peace where there was war or that promote regional and global stability by putting U.S. troops in potential danger -- we find relatively few. The operations that involve maintaining no-fly zones (over northern and southern Iraq, and Bosnia) and enforcing peace (in Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia) can be counted on the fingers of two maimed hands.
And that means the savings we can squeeze out of them are minimal. Cutting peacekeeping from our operational repertoire might conceivably have merit if it offered some hope of narrowing the gap between our defense strategy and the resources we have allotted to it. But it doesn't. If all the money programmed for keeping our troops on the ground in Bosnia and our aircraft flying over northern and southern Iraq in next year's budget were reallocated, we would save $ 2.5 billion. That is not an insignificant amount in an era of tight budgets, but it will make no real dent in the shortfall the Pentagon now faces between its own plans and projected levels of defense spending -- a shortfall of tens of billions of dollars.
To be sure, when the public thinks it sees vastly diminished foreign threats, it is fair enough for experts to remind us of all the U.S. military still does and how expensive it can be. And some peace operations have, indeed, proved enervating and harmful to our military's conventional capabilities. Between 1991 and 1995, 800,000 of the Air Force's total flight hours went to protect Somalis from starvation, Rwandans from tribal massacre, Iraqi Kurds and Shiites from Saddam Hussein, and various Bosnian ethnic groups from one another. Our army's Southern Command is deeply involved in counternarcotics operations in Mexico and Colombia, while the European Command has thousands of troops in Bosnia. At a time when U.S. forces have been cut 40 percent from a decade ago and procurement of new equipment is stalled, these sorts of operations will wear out aircraft, airmen, and soldiers.
Nor should we be surprised that many in our armed forces dislike these kinds of missions, which they have given an unlovely name -- MOOTW (pronounced "moo-twa") for "military operations other than war." These operations don't resemble the old textbook, cross-border wars our military has always preferred to prepare for. On the contrary, they remind many of the bitter experiences of Vietnam and the October 1983 disaster in Beirut. After these debacles, the military tried to adopt a rigid set of guidelines to keep them out of such conflicts. First it was the Weinberger Doctrine, later refined as Gen. Colin Powell's Doctrine of Overwhelming Force. The loss of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in 1993 created new doctrines outlawing "mission creep" and "mission swing" and "nation-building" -- all shorthand for any activity other than fighting a fixed battle against another army. "Remember Mogadishu!" has been the military's rejoinder to any civilian demand that it do more to arrest war criminals or aid in refugee resettlement in Bosnia.
MOOTW has the added disadvantage, from the military's point of view, of increasing the role of civilian leaders in shaping military operations. Peacekeeping entails more restrictive rules of engagement, closer political oversight, and tighter civilian-military communications than conventional wars -- all of which are anathema to a military hierarchy that increasingly believes the job of civilians is to keep their noses out of the military's business. "Operations other than war" invariably require quick responses to rapidly shifting circumstances on the ground, which broad political guidance given before the start of such operations cannot possibly foresee. Then there's the problem that peacekeeping operations rarely result in a clearly defined victory, which some military leaders, getting Clausewitz exactly backward, see as a violation of fundamental principles of war.
One can have more sympathy for the military's complaints than for the disingenuous calculations of defense experts. But neither should be allowed to shape American grand strategy, for the simple reason that peacekeeping and MOOTW are going to be part of the U.S. military's business for some time to come. Carrying out these kinds of operations is part of what it means to be a superpower in today's world, and we cannot click our heels three times and simply wish away these messier aspects of global leadership.
There are two reasons. One is that the present international environment has been and will continue to be rife with low-level conflicts, which require "operations other than war." Since the end of World War II, internal conflicts, rather than wars between autonomous states, have caused over 80 percent of the world's casualties. Since the end of the Cold War (from 1989 to 1996) there have been 96 armed conflicts, but only five of them have been between states. There were no interstate conflicts at all in 1993 and 1994 and only one in 1995 -- the border skirmish between Ecuador and Peru. The end of the Cold War has shown, moreover, that internal war is not a malady unique to the Third World. The largest increase in such conflicts has occurred in the heart of Europe, where an ever-growing number of national minorities, long submerged by Cold War constraints, have been claiming their right of self-determination, sometimes violently.
Then there is the problem of proliferating dangers from criminals and aggressors operating below the level of the nation-state. It is a cliche that power has been migrating in recent years from nation-states to subnational actors. But while it would be a mistake to overstate the trend, it is true that every one of the world's great powers these days has to confront mafias, drug cartels, militia groups, and terrorist organizations that know no national boundaries. These groups have access in the international arms bazaar to an unprecedented amount of advanced weaponry, which means that local police forces are outgunned and only national armies can deal with them. But many of the world's nations are actually too weak to maintain their own sovereignty in the face of this rising subnational challenge. This means that the maintenance of a decent international order, where everything from travel to commerce can be carried out in a fairly safe and stable environment, must fall to the great powers.
This is not a matter of washing windows in places where no American national interests are at stake. As the center of the international trading system and the leading force behind the international communications revolution, the United States has proportionally the most to lose if the world becomes an increasingly dangerous place to do business. After all, as the Financial Times recently pointed out, "The U.S. has the lion's share of those companies equipped to exploit global markets. It also supplies the bulk of the technology that knits those markets together." Don't we have a clear, tangible interest in defending the international order as best we can against the depredations of aggressors and outlaws?
Critics who insist we focus only on the nation's so-called vital interests have simply refused to see how quickly the spread of smaller conflicts can come to endanger those vital interests. The war in Bosnia showed conclusively how a supposedly peripheral conflict can shake the foundation of America's alliance system, how it can invite greater conflict between major powers that are drawn into such a conflict, and how it can provide opportunities for aggressors to take advantage of the lethargy and timidity of the United States. Even during the Cold War, most American policymakers understood that neglect of many lessthan-vital interests could cumulatively lead to the undermining of our global standing. In the post-Cold War era, the "vital interests" test excludes consideration of what should form the basis of our national military strategy: how best to perpetuate the current relatively benign state of international security.
Finally, the fact that Americans have been willing to get involved in some of these smaller conflicts says something positive about our collective character. We do not happily see ourselves as a nation of window-closers to the screams of an international Kitty Genovese. When some international horror makes the American public burst out in a collective "No! We should do something!" peace enforcement is often the only response possible to what our moral sensibilities tell us must be done. It is a great good thing that a nation should have such sensibilities. We ought not to blunt them by cultivating moral callousness as our prime directive in foreign affairs.
Superpowers that want to stay superpowers should not march to the drum of antiquated thinking but to the requirements of changing reality. We do not have the option of avoiding "military operations other than war." Rather than trying to rid ourselves of this obligation, we should take the steps necessary to ensure that we can carry out peacekeeping operations without, in fact, degrading the military's ability to fight larger wars. The civilian leaders can and should direct our armed forces to develop the capabilities, doctrine, operations, and technology they require to confront new circumstances. We may want to designate some portion of manpower in each service to peacekeeping. Or we can give the peacekeeping mission to one service -- say, the Marines. We can equip the service with the necessary weapons, training, and resources, while leaving the other services to cover cross-border threats.
Above all, supporters of adequate defense spending on Capitol Hill need to stop looking at peacekeeping as a pot of gold that can close the increasing gap between strategy and resources. They need to stand up and ask for enough money for the military to carry out all the many kinds of operations that the modern world demands.
Alvin H. Bernstein is a research professor at the National Defense University. The author's views are not those of any government agency.