#3 National Caveats:
Potential to Constrain the Full Spectrum of
Military Personnel & Operations
– Dr Regeena Kingsley
Constraining Military & Civilian Personnel
National caveats may be imposed on national deployments of military armed forces across all the Services – Army, Air Force and Navy as well as Special Operations Forces (SOFs) and Intelligence – and can consequently apply to ground, air, sea, SOF and Intelligence personnel and operations, regardless of their diverse geographic and operational environments.
In fact, certain service personnel deployed to a Multinational Operation may even operate under additional Service-specific caveats imposed to specifically cover their operations in a theatre of war, e.g. Air Force caveats relating to air reconnaissance, surveillance or combat operations conducted by national Air Force personnel in theatre.
Governments may sometimes also issue restrictive rules to constrain the activities of civilian government officials participating in a multinational operation, for instance those involved in reconstruction, development, governance or humanitarian assistance work.
In this way, governments may impose national caveats to constrict the activities and functions of all types of national security and stability forces deployed to a multinational operation.
Constraining Humanitarian and Security Missions
Furthermore, caveats can be imposed and enforced on military forces regardless of the type of work conducted by military personnel. Indeed, they can be applied to any kind of operation, whether a conventional military operation or a humanitarian operation, thereby constraining the conduct of traditional as well as non-traditional military tasks.[1]
Humanitarian operations might involve the insertion of medical emergency and/or medical evacuation teams to a conflict zone, or purely civilian reconstruction deployments. Alternately, they might involve joint Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) missions in the form of Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) deployments, whose military and civilian personnel together seek to reconstruct and develop war-torn areas (e.g. through engineering assistance to reconstruct essential buildings and infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, roads and bridges), while often simultaneously seeking to promote good governance practices.[2]
In such humanitarian operations, governments may choose to impose tight restrictions not only on their military personnel, but also on civilian government personnel or other nationals participating in the mission. In these cases, these civilians are said to operate under “civilian caveats” as opposed to “military caveats”.[3] These civilian caveats have been argued by Brophy & Fisera to be ‘crippling’ to interoperability within civilian humanitarian operations, to be inimical to the Operation Commander’s command and control responsibilities, and to lead to waste and uncoordinated use of resources within humanitarian missions.[4]
More commonly however – and of greater concern and focus here in this research – are national caveats imposed on national military forces deployed to a multinational security operation to constrain their functions and operational role. National caveats may be imposed to constrain every kind of activity engaged in by national military forces on an international security mission.
To illustrate, caveats may restrict:
(1) exactly where geographically national forces can deploy or operate within any given conflict theatre, Multinational Operation (MNO), mission sector, district or prescribed Area of Operations (AO);
(2) what specific military and non-military activities they are allowed to conduct, and whether or not national forces may participate in important combat/combat support, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and/or counter-narcotics operations with the mission, in addition to security patrols, riot control operations, reconnaissance operations, surveillance and intelligence gathering operations, or reconstruction and development operations etc.;
(3) who may be regarded as “Enemy” fighters, and whether they may be lawfully targeted with lethal force;
(4) whether or not lethal force may be used for mission accomplishment including the defence of civilian life and/or civilian property, as well as for individual and/or unit self-defence, and – where lethal force is permitted – the degree of lethal force that may be employed in each capacity (see blog “#10 Rules of Engagement & National Caveats: “Self-Defence” & “Mission Accomplishment” Instructions”);
(5) which precise weapons may be utilised to deliver lethal force, and in what manner or with which tactics;
(6) the precise ground force numbers, or alternatively the precise number of aircraft, ships, tanks, Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), vehicles or other military equipment, that national forces must always deploy from base with or operate with during any military sortie or operation;
(7) which allied foreign or native local forces they may or may not operate alongside, cooperate with, or give medical aid or medical evacuation transport to;
(8) which allied foreign or native local forces national forces may or may not share surveillance or reconnaissance intelligence with;
(9) which weather conditions, ground terrain, and air altitudes are or are not acceptable to execute military operations in (e.g. in ‘winter conditions’ such as during or after snowfall, over mountainous or difficult terrain, and in high air altitudes etc.); and
(10) on which days – or even during which period of time during the day or night (including vital manoeuvre periods around dawn and dusk) – national forces may or may not execute their assigned tasks.
Constraining Combat Operations
Most significantly, these military caveats are often imposed on combat troops to restrict a national contingent’s combat role. In these instances, combat caveats restrict the operational or tactical capacity of a nation’s combat forces according to factors such as geography, tactics, logistics, weaponry, command status, or time of day.[5]
As a result, combat troops may be restricted from:
- Planning or executing combat operations at all (with deployed combat forces often deliberately diverted to reconstruction and development tasks);
- Participating in any offensive war-fighting combat operations, as opposed to defensive operations for the purposes of self-defence and force protection;
- Engaging in combat support operations, especially those conducted by allies;
- Using heavy weapons such as artillery during combat with Enemy forces;
- Undertaking combat operations after nightfall or at any time under cover of darkness (despite the fact that, as in Afghanistan, the forces involved in raids and combat operations against Enemy fighters often position themselves and execute their missions before dawn under cover of darkness);
- Engaging the Enemy in bad weather, such as during or after snowfall or thunderstorms; or even
- Departing from the military base at all in order to conduct combat operations or any pre-operation reconnaissance and/or surveillance activities.
These kinds of government-imposed combat restrictions seem often to be non-sensical – even ludicrous – relating as they do to combat forces trained and deployed to conduct combat against Enemy forces.
Indeed, as shown in Afghanistan over the past decade, such combat caveats can produce a number of negative effects by working to severely minimise the combat power of combat units, deprive the Operation Commander of valued fighting forces, counteract any counter-insurgency or counter-terrorist strategy in place at Operational Command, and compel national combat forces to operate in a contradictory fashion that counters the original intent of the deployment under their own national mandate as well as the international mandate governing the Multinational Operation.
Consequently, as seen in this brief overview, government-imposed national caveats can impact upon the full range of military operations, from low-risk humanitarian aid operations at one end of the spectrum, to high-risk offensive war-fighting operations at the other.
*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] J. Brophy & M. Fisera, ‘“National Caveats” and it’s impact on the Army of the Czech Republic’, Univerzita Obrany, 29 July 2007, pp. 1-2, http://www.vabo.cz/stranky/fisera/files/National_Caveats_Short_Version_version_V_29%20JULY.pdf. (accessed November 18, 2009).
[2] Ibid., p. 2.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] ‘International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)’, Institute for the Study of War (ISW), 15 April 2009, http://www.understandingwar.org, (accessed 30 June 2009).