Comments on: Military Missions, cont. http://blog.psaonline.org/2007/02/05/military-missions-cont/ Wed, 08 Feb 2012 08:45:45 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 By: Daniel Levine http://blog.psaonline.org/2007/02/05/military-missions-cont/comment-page-1/#comment-27339 Daniel Levine Tue, 06 Feb 2007 17:36:27 +0000 http://blog.psaonline.org/2007/02/05/military-missions-cont/#comment-27339 Within the general question of "(how) should militaries protect civilians?" I think it might also be helpful to distinguish between protection against relatively large-scale, fairly centralized violence and more "distributed" sorts of violence. As you know, I care a lot about Darfur, but I suspect (hope? fear?) that the violence there, where you have a significant component perpetrated by a halfway coherent group with government direction and backing, may be a remnant of an "old school" kind of genocide. More civilians are killed in situations like the DRC, where there are multiple battle lines, no clear "bad guy" to defeat, and the largest threat is disorganized violence and side effects of conflict (e.g., starvation, disease, etc.). Similarly, many of the 600k deaths the Lancet study of Iraq estimated are not the result of "military" violence but uncoordinated reprisals and the like. The reason I mention this is that it strikes me that the tactics one might use to counter the two threats will likely be very different. An approach that models itself on war-fighting may be more appropriate for the first type of threat, while tactics antithetic to war-fighting, such as cooperating/coordinating with the "bad guys" (so as to blunt the civilian impact of their fighting, as was done to some extent during the UNOSOM I/UNITAF era in Somalia; or, to co-opt leaders and rein in their more extreme supporters), may be more helpful in the second than trying to defeat everyone. Within the general question of “(how) should militaries protect civilians?” I think it might also be helpful to distinguish between protection against relatively large-scale, fairly centralized violence and more “distributed” sorts of violence. As you know, I care a lot about Darfur, but I suspect (hope? fear?) that the violence there, where you have a significant component perpetrated by a halfway coherent group with government direction and backing, may be a remnant of an “old school” kind of genocide. More civilians are killed in situations like the DRC, where there are multiple battle lines, no clear “bad guy” to defeat, and the largest threat is disorganized violence and side effects of conflict (e.g., starvation, disease, etc.). Similarly, many of the 600k deaths the Lancet study of Iraq estimated are not the result of “military” violence but uncoordinated reprisals and the like.

The reason I mention this is that it strikes me that the tactics one might use to counter the two threats will likely be very different. An approach that models itself on war-fighting may be more appropriate for the first type of threat, while tactics antithetic to war-fighting, such as cooperating/coordinating with the “bad guys” (so as to blunt the civilian impact of their fighting, as was done to some extent during the UNOSOM I/UNITAF era in Somalia; or, to co-opt leaders and rein in their more extreme supporters), may be more helpful in the second than trying to defeat everyone.

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