#1 Introduction:

The Problem of “National Caveats” within Multinational Operations

 

– Dr Regeena Kingsley

 

The difficulty of fighting wars in concert with allies is not a new idea.  Indeed, Winston Churchill once commented that: ‘There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies –and that is to fight without them’.[1]  In the modern era, however, the difficulty of allied multinational warfare has reached new and unprecedented proportions.  This is especially the case given the maze of bureaucratic red-tape which is increasingly imposed by national governments on armed forces contributed to a military coalition, and which national forces are now frequently obliged to negotiate daily in the course of executing operational missions in the midst of an already friction-fraught war-zone.  This red tape is comprised of restrictive politico-military rules of engagement, or more specifically, “national caveats” or “national exemptions”.  

 

National Caveats

National caveats are limitation and prohibition rules, contained within the rules of engagement of national armed force contingents, which restrict where forces may deploy and what tasks they may perform while participating in a multinational security mission.  The negotiation of these national caveats constraints, by commanders and soldiers alike along the full chain of command, has rendered multinational military campaigns exceedingly complex and strenuous, to a much greater degree than would otherwise be necessary.  Within highly-complex multinational campaigns that are asymmetrical in nature and involve counter-insurgency warfare, such as those conducted by coalitions in Afghanistan or Iraq over the past fifteen years, the added layers of difficulty caused by caveat-imposition not only create unnecessary hurdles for military personnel, but can also hold very costly and grave consequences for the outcome of the campaign itself.

Restrictive rules of engagement can become such an impediment to effective warfare that they can fracture the coalition or alliance conducting the military operation, dividing allies and even turning nations against one another in the midst of the campaign.  In this way, national caveats can be the catalyst for transforming a purpose-driven operation against an Enemy in concert with allies on a military mission, into a less focused fight with and against those same allies instead of the Enemy in the midst of the campaign, with an accompanying loss of cohesion, unity, effectiveness and time.  In both political and military terms then, national caveats can be political and operational dynamite.  Nevertheless, widespread and heavy imposition of these national caveats has become an increasingly common – if alarming – norm within multinational operations authorised by the international community. 

 

Prevailing Caveat Secrecy

Despite this growing norm for governments to impose national caveats on their forces whenever national contributions are made to multinational operations, government secrecy and sensitivity surrounding the issue have remained firmly in place.  ‘Classified’ has for many decades been the word most closely associated with the notion of national caveats.  In fact, governments and government organisations such as the UN and NATO have remained tight-lipped about caveat-imposition even in spite of a rash of security disasters in which caveats have demonstrably played a major role, for instance within multinational operations conducted in Rwanda and Bosnia during the early 1990s and Kosovo in the 2000s.

This prevailing secrecy has prevented defence scholars from conducting any kind of rigorous examination of either rules of engagement generally and the long-abiding problem of conflicting sets of national rules of engagement within multinational missions, or national caveats as a class of especially restrictive rules within these sets of national rules of engagement imposed on military contingents participating in international security campaigns.  Likewise, scholars have been prevented from analysing the effects of these national caveats within multinational missions in which they are present, or from assessing the overall impact of diverse national caveat restrictions on the operational effectiveness of multinational missions as a whole.  The result has been a large “caveat gap” within academic defence literature.

Consequently, while caveat imposition has, since the early 1990s, increasingly become an established norm within multinational operations, the issue of national caveats has not ever been methodically addressed or analysed in an academic capacity.

 

The ISAF Mission in Afghanistan: Caveat Turning-Point

Heavy caveat imposition within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mission in Afghanistan, however, a multinational mission operated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and prosecuted from 2001-2014, has resulted in a lifting of this veil of secrecy.  A series of negative security incidents and developments within the mission during 2006, arising directly from caveat restraints imposed by the mission’s Troop Contributing Nations (TCNs), led to unparalleled public condemnation of national caveat imposition within the Afghan mission by NATO, ISAF and even national government officials.  As more and more revelations regarding ISAF caveat restraints leaked into the public sphere over the passing years – through both official and unofficial channels – public frustration and anger swelled within the international community to reach a boiling point in 2008. 

This anger was especially prevalent within the governments of a small group of countries (Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and the United States) whose ISAF contingents – by reason of their freedom from the caveat restraints and bans – were being forced to conduct the lion’s share of the heavy fighting against the Afghan insurgency in the southern and eastern sectors of Afghanistan.  Unequal and unfair burden-sharing within the ISAF mission became the catch-cry of the day, especially as casualties escalated among the forces of the non-caveated few.  Both the success of the ISAF mission to secure Afghanistan from Islamist extremism, and the credibility of NATO as a leading operator of multinational peace and security missions, seemed to have been placed in jeopardy by the caveat restrictions.

Consequently, while national caveats have certainly created security problems within other multinational operations in former years – most notably within UN operations in Rwanda and Bosnia, in addition to NATO operations in Bosnia and Kosovo – it has been the caveat realities within the NATO-led ISAF mission in Afghanistan which has caused the issue of national caveats to be suddenly and unexpectedly cast into the international spotlight.  This heated international controversy, combined with the unprecedented release of detailed caveat-related information by means of the worldwide media, has created a unique opportunity by which the issue of national caveats within multinational operations can, for the first time, be examined and analysed in an academic capacity.

 

*This blog is an excerpt taken from Dr Regeena Kingsley’s original doctoral research in Defence & Strategic Studies (2014) entitled: “Fighting against Allies: An Examination of “National Caveats” within the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Campaign in Afghanistan & their Impact on ISAF Operational Effectiveness, 2002-2012”. 

Dr Kingsley’s full Thesis and its accompanying volume of Appendices can be viewed and downloaded from Massey University’s official website here: http://mro.massey.ac.nz/xmlui/handle/10179/6984

 

Endnotes

[1] ‘Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill Quotes’, Military Quotes, http://www.military-quotes.com/churchill.htm, (accessed 13 February 2017).