Us Intervention Policy And Army Innovation

This book examines how the US Army rebuilt itself after the Vietnam War and how this has effected US intervention policy after the Cold War.

This book explains how the US military reacted to the 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA), and failed to innovate its organization or doctrine to match the technological breakthroughs it brought about. Many called for the transformation of the US military in the years after the end of the Cold War, seeking the changes in organization and doctrine that would complete the RMA innovation and offer the US the capability to perform a wide variety of missions cheaply and effectively. This volume describes the origins, uses, and limits of the RMA technologies, examines how each of the five US armed services (categorising the Special Operations as a separate service) made their adjustments both to the technologies and the use of force, and how the role of the civilian officials and the defense industry altered in this process of change and avoidance of change. The book examines the internal politics of the services as well as civil/military relations to identify the external pressures on the services for significant change in their doctrine and weapons. Many have noted the failure of the services to innovate in what can be called the 'Second Inter-war Period' (the years after the Cold War). This book offers explanations for this failure and arguments about the possible range and desirability of military innovation in the post-Cold war era. This book will be of great interest to students of strategic studies, US defence politics, military studies, and US politics. Harvey M. Sapolsky is Professor of Public Policy and Organization in the Department of Political Science at MIT and former Director of the Security Studies Program. Benjamin H. Friedman is a Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Studies at the Cato Institute and a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at MIT. Brendan Green is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at MIT and an affiliate of the Security Studies Program.

Richard Haass traces the evolution of thinking about force from medieval times to our own, taking into account new technologies, new states, new weapons, and new ideas about sovereignty and intervention. Using twelve case studies drawn from recent experiences - including Bosnia, Somalia, Panama, Grenada, Haiti and the Gulf War - he sets forth realistic political and military guidelines for U.S. military interventions ranging from peacekeeping and humanitarian operations to preventive strikes and all-out warfare. Haass then discusses how past interventions could have turned out if these guidelines had been observed. Last, he assesses where and how the United States should be prepared to use force in the future - in the Persian Gulf, the Korean Peninsula, Eastern Europe and in other situations around the world where strategic or humanitarian interests warrant.

This book provides an authoritative account of how the US, British, and French armies have transformed since the end of the Cold War. All three armies have sought to respond to changes in their strategic and socio-technological environments by developing more expeditionary capable and networked forces. Drawing on extensive archival research, hundreds of interviews, and unprecedented access to official documents, the authors examine both the process and the outcomes of army transformation, and ask how organizational interests, emerging ideas, and key entrepreneurial leaders interact in shaping the direction of military change. They also explore how programs of army transformation change over time, as new technologies moved from research to development, and as lessons from operations were absorbed. In framing these issues, they draw on military innovation scholarship and, in addressing them, produce findings with general relevance for the study of how militaries innovate.

Military intervention in a conflict without a reasonable prospect of success is unjustifiable, especially when it is done in the name of humanity. Couched in the debate on the responsibility to protect civilians from violence and drawing on traditional 'just war' principles, the centralpremise of this book is that humanitarian military intervention can be justified as a policy option only if decision makers can be reasonably sure that intervention will do more good than harm. This book asks, 'Have past humanitarian military interventions been successful?' It defines success as saving lives and sets out a methodology for estimating the number of lives saved by a particular military intervention. Analysis of 17 military operations in six conflict areas that were thedefining cases of the 1990s-northern Iraq after the Gulf War, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosovo and East Timor-shows that the majority were successful by this measure. In every conflict studied, however, some military interventions succeeded while others failed, raising the question, 'Why have some past interventions been more successful than others?' This book argues that the central factors determining whether a humanitarian intervention succeeds are theobjectives of the intervention and the military strategy employed by the intervening states. Four types of humanitarian military intervention are offered: helping to deliver emergency aid, protecting aid operations, saving the victims of violence and defeating the perpetrators of violence. Thefocus on strategy within these four types allows an exploration of the political and military dimensions of humanitarian intervention and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each of the four types.Humanitarian military intervention is controversial. Scepticism is always in order about the need to use military force because the consequences can be so dire. Yet it has become equally controversial not to intervene when a government subjects its citizens to massive violation of their basic humanrights. This book recognizes the limits of humanitarian intervention but does not shy away from suggesting how military force can save lives in extreme circumstances.

“Small Wars is unique in its complexity and breadth. This book would be of great interest to both military and diplomatic historians, and those that teach Recent America.” —Nancy Gentile Ford, author of Issues of War and Peace Today, conventional fighting waged by massed, industrial armies is nearly extinct as a viable means of warfare, replaced by a broad and diverse array of conflicts that consume the modern American military. Fought in sprawling urban areas of the underdeveloped world or in desolate border regions where ethnicity and tradition reign, these “small wars” involve a vast and intricate network of operations dedicated to attacking the cultural, political, financial, and military layers that surround America’s new enemies. In this intriguing study, Michael Gambone explores America’s approach to small wars since Vietnam, providing a fascinating analysis of the basic goals, missions, conduct, and consequences of modern American conflict. Going beyond a simple comparison of Vietnam to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gambone thoroughly tracks the continuous evolution of U.S. intervention between these events, revealing a dramatic shift in the role of the American military to covert operations that require fluidity, creativity, and ingenuity. He examines in detail the many different forms of military intervention that America has taken in the last forty years, including actions in Central America in the 1980s, the first Gulf War, airstrikes in Kosovo in the 1990s, and the war on terror, as well as the Iran-Contra affair, the drug war in Columbia, and the role of private military contractors such as Blackwater. After the Cold War, Gambone shows, American military missions served a wide variety of tasks—peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, counterterrorism—that significantly departed from conventional missions, a trend that continued and expanded after 9/11. By exploring the history and assessing the effectiveness of the small wars fought since Vietnam, Gambone reveals the importance of these smaller actions in modern military planning and operations and clearly traces the development of American warfare from the massive military machine of World War II into a complex hybrid of traditional and innovative techniques. MICHAEL GAMBONE, a professor of history at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania, is the author of The Greatest Generation Comes Home: The Veteran in American Society and editor of Documents of American Diplomacy: From the American Revolution to the Present.