#1 Introduction:
The Problem of “National Caveats” within Multinational Operations
– Dr Regeena Kingsley
The desirability of fighting wars in concert with allies, and yet the difficulty of doing so unitedly, effectively and successfully, is not a new idea. Indeed, the leading champion of the Second World War waged against the expansionist Axis powers from 1939-45, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, once commented that there was only one thing worse than fighting with allies – and that was to fight alone without them. [1]
In the modern era, however, the difficulty of allied multinational warfare has reached new, unprecedented and alarming proportions. This is especially the case given the confusing maze of bureaucratic “red-tape”, which is increasingly imposed by national governments on the armed forces they have contributed to multinational security campaigns, and which national forces are now frequently obliged to interpret and 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 additional limitation and prohibition rules, contained within the lawful politico-military-legal Rules of Engagement (ROE) of national force contingents, which restrict where these armed forces may deploy and what tasks they may perform while participating in a multinational security mission. The negotiation of these national caveat 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.
In fact, restrictive ROE 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 military mission against an Enemy, fought together with allies in a coordinated and cooperative manner, into a divided and less focused fight with and against those same allies – instead of the true Enemy – in the midst of an already friction-fraught war campaign, with an accompanying loss of cohesion, unity, effectiveness, time, and ‘unity of purpose.’
In both political and military terms then, diverse national caveat constraints can be political, operational, and even strategic dynamite: the very cause of allied division, self-sabotage and self-destruction, that repeatedly results in unfocused, ineffective or failed security missions.
Nevertheless, widespread and heavy imposition of these national caveats has become an increasingly common – if alarming – norm within Multinational Operations (MNOs) authorised by the international community today.
Caveat Constraints: A Growing “Norm” since 1991
When the global Communist Empire led by the Soviet Union economically, militarily and politically imploded and collapsed between 1989-1991, it signalled the end of the ideological Cold War confrontation between the Moscow-led Communist bloc of Party-controlled “Socialist States” and the Washington-led Democratic bloc of pluralist-Party “Free States.”
However the collapse of the Iron Curtain, that had aggressively and confrontationally divided both Europe and the world since the end of the Second World War in 1945, also sparked multiple civil conflicts within Nation-States, that had for decades been suppressed and ruled by a Marxist-Socialist dictator with an iron-first and iron forces – and in which the civilians of ethnic nations had been denied basic freedom to mention, discuss or debate their core issues, grievances, needs, desires or aspirations.
In some countries, in which there was one predominant ethnic nation of people, the former Communist “satellite” State transitioned peacefully and successfully into a free and democratic Nation-State (e.g. Hungary or Poland). In other countries, these internal civil struggles or wars between various groups within the internal civilian population resulted in the division or disintegration of one, massive, multi-ethnic State, and the formation of a number of new, population-representative, and democratic Nation-States in its place (e.g. the division of the former Communist State of Yugoslavia into the more truly population-representative Nation-States of Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia).
In a few States, however, internal civil conflict among newly-freed ethnic nations of people deteriorated into the commission by weakening governments or armed civilian groups of (i) acts of genocide, (ii) crimes against civilian humanity, and/or (iii) ethnic cleansing campaigns against rival ethnic nations – all of which have been considered categorically illegal globally since the end of World War II, and the drafting and ratification of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and their 1977 Additional Protocols.
In these cases, and on multiple occasions, the UN or NATO led multinational “Humanitarian Intervention” operations into the States, to prevent or stop the abusive killing of certain ethnic nations or targeted groups of civilians within these societies (e.g. the targeted Tutsis in Rwanda, the independence-seeking Bosniaks in Bosnia, and the Albanians then minority Serbs in Kosovo), believing that the international community had a “Responsibility to Protect” civilian nations from being deliberately persecuted, abused or exterminated by their own governments (as 6,000,000 Jews once were throughout the various Nation-States of Europe, at the instigation and under the control of Hitler’s “National Socialist” German Empire, from the early 1930s until the end of WWII in 1945).
Yet it was in these very important multinational security operations, led by the UN or NATO, that national caveats first began to be imposed by governments contributing armed forces to the international effort. Paradoxically and confusingly, many of these government-imposed caveat rules have counter-productively countered the mission aim, by forbidding national armed soldiers deployed to these dangerous and active conflict theatres from engaging in any offensive war-fighting operations, from using lethal force for mission accomplishment, from firing their weapons at all except in unit of individual self-defence (“force protection”), or even from acting to protect native civilians in their own designated sectors or AOR localities from being attacked or killed before their eyes, or to prevent the homes, business or livelihoods of these targeted civilians they have had “responsibility to protect” from being bombed, destroyed, or razed to the ground with fire.
[For more information, please refer to the following blogs: ‘#14 An Alarming New Norm: National Caveat Constraints in Multinational Operations’; ‘#18 Caveats Endanger & Caveats Kill: National Caveats in UN Operations in Angola, Rwanda & Bosnia-Herzegovina’; ‘#19 Hindering Escape during an Emergency: National Caveats & the UNAVEM II Operation in Angola’; ‘#20 Betrayal & Barbarism in Bosnia: The UNPROFOR Operation, National Caveats & Genocide in the Srebrenica UN “Protected Area”’; ‘#21 Srebrenica Aftermath: Serb Guilt & Dutch Liability for the Genocide in the UNPROFOR ‘Safe Area’ in Bosnia’; ‘#22 Recommended Viewing: The UN, National Caveats & Human Carnage in Rwanda’; ‘#23 Caveat Chaos in Kosovo: Divided Allies & Fettered Forces in NATO’s KFOR Operation during the 2004 “Kosovo Riots”’; and ‘#33 The Problem of “National Caveats” in NATO Operations around the World, 1996-2016’.]
It is of very great public concern, internationally but also especially among the civilian nations of the Free World, that this practice of caveat imposition by governments to severely restrict or constrain the ability and actions of their own deployed national contingents of trained and armed military forces, has become a growing “norm” within multinational security operations prosecuted all over the world since the early 1990s. A norm, moreover, that has been practiced in all kinds of MNOs, in all kinds of conflicts and conflict theatres, and no-matter whether the security campaign was led by the UN, NATO, the African Union (AU), the European Union (EU), or indeed any other international operator of peace-enforcement or peace-keeping military operations.
And it is of even greater concern, that this counter-productive caveat practice has escalated even further following the 9/11 terrorist attack on the USA and the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that has ensued. Once again, as in many other MNOs in many other parts of the world, these government-imposed national caveat “fetters” reappeared in ROE instructions to ‘bind or ban’ troops contributed to operate within the voluntary Coalitions of Willing Nations engaged in the global campaign against terrorists. First of all, in Afghanistan, within the punitive Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) coalition war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as its subsequent counter-terror Operation Freedom Sentinel (OFS) campaign, then subsequently appearing in each of the parallel democracy-building and NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Operation Resolute Support (ORS) operations, from the year 2001 until the U.S.-led allied withdrawal in 2021 (resulting in the collapse of the young Afghan Democratic Republic and the reestablishment of the Taliban “Terror State” and its global terrorist training grounds). And secondly, appearing yet again – and in a truly disturbing and divisive way – in the pre-emptive Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) coalition war, democracy-building and counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq, from 2003 until the U.S.-led allied withdrawal in 2011 only eight years later (also resulting directly in the partial collapse of the young, democratic, stabilising, and anti-terrorist Iraqi State, and in the black and hellish rise of the murderous, enslaving, empire-seeking and terrorist network of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, commonly known as ISIS or IS, out of the former ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ cell).
[For more information, see blogs ‘#13 National Commanders: Caveat Mediators’, ‘#38 ISAF National Caveats in Afghanistan: Summary of Research Findings’, ‘ISAF – COIN APPENDIX 2 – Counter-Insurgency (COIN) Warfare: Definitions, Political Nature, 5 False Expectations, Necessity & Lessons from Vietnam & Iraq for Afghanistan’, ‘#39 Farewell Fallen Friend: Democratic Afghan Republic, 2001-2021’, ‘#40 In Videos: An International, Multilateral, Political & Strategic Failure – the Fall of Kabul & the Lamentable Loss of the Anti-Terror & Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, 2001-2021’, and ‘#41 Operational “Caveat Cancer” in Afghanistan: The Development of the Caveat Crisis in the NATO-led ISAF Mission, OPLAN Phases I-II’.]
The 2003 War in Iraq
‘The war in Iraq was a very important battle in the war on terrorism. Unfortunately, due to political subterfuge, subversive federal and state department bureaucracies, leftist media, and the seditious pop culture both here and abroad, the battle for Iraq was lost even though we won the war…The most important loss in Iraq was the loss of the truth. Material manufactured for the purpose of killing large numbers of people (weapons of mass destruction, or WMD) was found by soldiers, like me, all over the place in Iraq. However, the people tasked with looking for WMD so narrowly defined what they considered WMD, that no chemical made in Iraq would ever have fit their description. Iraq had more than a year to extricate or hide everything else…
Everything you have been told about the Iraq war is wrong. Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Al Qaeda and other international terrorist organizations did find refuge in Iraq under the protection of Saddam Hussein. The problem with what you’ve heard about Iraq and what actually happened there is that the intelligence bureaucracy sent to Iraq to find WMD was dead wrong on all of its prewar intelligence assessments…Having been told by the Iraqi people so much information, which contradicts what the government and the media are saying, I have put pen to paper to relate my experiences and thoughts to help all of us understand what happened in Iraq…
Saddam understood that we knew what he had been doing in the 1990s and prior to 9/11, after the 9/11 attacks (from September 2001 to September 2002), Iraq underwent a major cleanup of its WMD stockpiles and precursors. The CIA knew about all of this WMD-related activity. This is where they got it so wrong. The CIA thought that Iraq was deploying WMD around the country in case there was going to be a force-on-force military engagement between the west and Iraq. This was the CIA’s first mistake! My Iraqi informants told me that all of Iraq’s WMD were hidden before the United Nations weapons inspectors were even let back into Iraq (in September 2002). Iraq took almost exactly one year to clean up and conceal their known WMD by taking them out to the deserts and dumping them, burying them, or transporting them out of Iraq. This was plan A for Iraq to get the UN sanctions lifted, so that they could proceed with production of [more and newer] WMD unfettered by UN oversight. This activity was as plain as day to the intelligence analysts at the CIA…They didn’t hide this WMD for future use; they hid it in faraway places, difficult to even find let alone recover. They concealed it for the purpose of deceiving the UN weapons inspectors…The “declared” WMD that the UN was looking for were secretly destroyed between September 2001 and 2001. However, the WMD that the UN didn’t know about were not concealed, destroyed or extricated from Iraq until shortly before the war began in March 2003. Iraq got rid of this material with the help of the Russians whose spy in US Central Command was telling the Russians our every move…The Russians also played a major role in assisting Iraq with concealing as well as extricating its WMD from Iraq…The problem with the CIA is not that they didn’t see Iraq’s WMD concealment activity but that they misinterpreted Iraq’s strategic intent.
The second problem with the CIA’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s WMD was its assertion that Iraq was going to deploy WMD to stop us and win the war on a tactical basis when/if it happened…I found out from an informant deep inside the Al Fallujah insurgency that Saddam knew that if he could discredit the war by concealing his WMD and not using them, and if he could outlast the United States in [his plan B] war of attrition, then he could come back to power as he had done twelve years earlier…A major problem we had in Iraq was that instead of correcting its prewar intelligence assessments to coincide with what actually happened there, the CIA concluded that Iraq had never had any WMD and blamed the whole mistake on President Bush for “pressuring” them. In essence, they threw the baby out with the bathwater.The intelligence that was being provided by field intelligence collectors (like I was) indicated that Iraq had a very active WMD program right up until we invaded Iraq in 2003…The CIA’s conclusion that Iraq didn’t have any WMD freed them from their obligation to risk life and limb to search for something they convinced themselves didn’t exist. In order to hold to their newfound conclusion, they had to manipulate, omit and/or ignore all of the intelligence reports from field agents on the ground in Iraq. They carefully selected intelligence reports that supported their conclusion, wordsmithing reports to bolster their assertions…The same bureaucrats who failed to stop the 9/11 attacks [by not listening to their own field agents], have moved up through the ranks where they continue to fail the people of the United States…
Because of President Bush’s resolve, for the first time in two generations, the United States did not turn tail and run from a major military conflict. This is an extremely important fact that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda did not expect because it hasn’t been since World War II that the United States has shown such resolve… President Bush’s greatest failing as president was his failure to fire [incompetent or politically-biased middle management] bureaucrats and federal appointees who desperately needed it…On 9/11, we saw how broken our intelligence apparatus was. Field agents knew every detail of the 9/11 plot long before it happened but were helpless to do anything about it. That’s why, even as we witnessed the carnage, we knew that day exactly who was responsible.
Iraq was a threat to the United States and its interests…[International terrorism expert Yossef] Bodansky, who literally wrote the book on Osama bin Laden before September 11, 2001, had this to say about Iraq: “There is no doubt that America had a viable, urgent imperative to go to war against Iraq when it did. The primary reason was the ongoing cooperation between Saddam Hussein’s intelligence services and Osama bin Laden’s terrorists, which began in earnest in the early 1990s” [The Secret History of the Iraq War, 2005, p. 1]…Bodansky reports on things from the strategic level that supports what I found as a tactical army intelligence collector, not the least of which was confirmation that there was “ongoing cooperation between Saddam Hussein” and Al Qaeda. Evidence of this cooperation was abundant on the ground level…The problem (which I elaborate upon in subsequent chapters) was that what we knew on the ground level had to pass through several layers of incompetent intellectual bureaucrats, who muddled our intelligence to the point that it was of no use to those who could have done something about it. This was the problem in the 1990s and on September 10, 2001, and it continues to be a problem in the war on terrorism.
The problem with the intelligence apparatus in the United States of America is incompetent intellectual bureaucrats who isolate themselves from reality based upon what they think (for example political correctness) not what we who were their eyes and ears on the ground told them. This intellectual isolation may work in a Power Point presentation or on a university campus, but where the “rubber meets the road” and people are capable of killing you, listening to the ground-level intelligence collectors, and setting aside preconceived notions, is what saves lives. This is one example of how 9/11 could have been prevented and how they can say that there were no WMD in Iraq.’
– Mike Pratt (former Senior Special Agent for U.S. Army Counterintelligence), A Just War, 2013, pp. 10-24.
Prevailing Caveat Secrecy
Nevertheless, despite this increasing norm for governments to impose national caveat constraints on their forces, whenever national contributions are made to multinational security 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. This has meant that the issue of national caveats has not ever been methodically addressed or analysed in an academic capacity. (See blog ‘#15 Highly Classified: National Caveats & Government Secrecy (Official & Unofficial Caveats)’ and ‘#26 Time to Study National Caveats: The “Caveat Gap” in Academic Research’.)
In fact, governments and government organisations such as the United Nations (UN) and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (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 UN-led MNOs conducted in Rwanda and Bosnia during the early 1990s, and the NATO-led MNO in Kosovo in the 2000s.
This prevailing international cloak of secrecy surrounding the issue of government national caveat constraints, has prevented defence scholars from conducting any kind of rigorous examination of either: Rules of Engagement generally; the long-abiding problem of diverse and conflicting sets of national ROE between allies contributing military forces to multinational missions; or “national caveats” specifically, as a class of especially restrictive ‘limitation’ or ‘ban’ rules within these sets of ROE, that have been often deliberately and “politically” imposed on national contingents participating in international security campaigns.
Additionally, secrecy about caveats has also prevented academic scholars from analysing the many effects of these national caveats within multinational security missions in which they are present, or from assessing the overall impact of diverse national caveat restrictions on the operational effectiveness of multinational coalitions and missions as a whole.
In sum, for over 30 years, there has existed a large “caveat gap” and a dire lack of understanding of this crucial issue within academic defence literature.
The ISAF Mission in Afghanistan: Caveat Turning-Point
Heavy caveat imposition within the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, however, a multinational security assistance mission prosecuted by a Coalition of the Willing from 2001-2014, and led by the North American-European NATO alliance from 2003, has resulted in a lifting of this veil of secrecy.
Specifically, a series of negative security incidents and developments within the mission during the critical year of 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 multinational mission problems and security disasters within other MNOs in former years – most notably within UN operations in Rwanda and Bosnia, in addition to NATO operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, it was the caveat realities within the NATO-led ISAF mission in Afghanistan, which 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, created a unique opportunity by which the issue of national caveats within Multinational Operations could, for the first time, be examined and analysed in-depth in an academic capacity.
Military Caveats
This website is devoted to publishing research, information, and analysis on this crucial modern issue of national caveat constraints within the ROE of national forces deployed to take part in allied or multinational security missions.
Most of the blogs (or ‘articles’) that follow on this website are taken from academic doctoral research, undertaken in the domain of Defence & Strategic Studies, that I conducted on this very issue of national caveats in multinational security operations, which I conducted over seven years between 2008-2014. (See blog ‘#27 My Research: National Caveats in the ISAF Operation in Afghanistan & their Impact on Operational Effectiveness, 2002-2012’.)
Specifically, this in-depth analytical research focused on a crucial decade of war that took place in Afghanistan between 2002-2012, and sought to examine, determine and analyse: (1) the extent of the “caveat problem” within the ISAF Coalition and Operation in Afghanistan; and (2) the tangible effects of these allied caveat constraints on (a) ISAF security forces conducting the most critical security operations against anti-government Taliban and terrorist forces, and on (b) the effectiveness of the overall campaign to give the new democratic government of Afghanistan real “security assistance,” by first securing and then stabilising Afghanistan.
The research is my contribution towards filling the dire “caveat gap” that has existed in defence scholarship since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s.
With this research, I aim to provide answers, information, understanding, and analysis that may assist all those who are engaging in important allied security operations, today or in future years, to prevent caveat-generated operational fiascos and consequent human security disasters that jeopardise the success of military missions, and threaten the lives of military personnel and civilians, in conflict theatres all over the world.
*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:
https://mro.massey.ac.nz/items/8f42598a-bac3-4fb5-82d4-6ab471549160/full
Endnotes
[1] ‘There is at least one thing worse than fighting with allies – and that is to fight without them,’ cited in ‘Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill Quotes’, Military Quotes, http://www.military-quotes.com/churchill.htm, (accessed 13 February 2017).