Russian and American forces were among those operating without charts in the early 1990s—that is, with the doctrine, training, weapons, and intelligence resources of the East-West confrontation. Both militaries adapted, but not before the United States lost elite forces to rudimentary Somali militias and Russia lost troops to opposition forces in Tajikistan and Chechnya. Both countries suffered substantial political damage in these encounters.

Today, the two militaries not only have considerable experience in the new model peace keeping but have gained much of it together. Formal training, field and command post exercises, and operations on the ground in Bosnia have given thousands of officers and troops direct experience in dealing with devious local political factions, crowds of displaced civilians, fiercely independent providers of humanitarian relief, and randomly planted landmines.

This essay reviews the evolution of these cooperative efforts, looks ahead to how the two countries’ forces might apply what they’ve learned in future collaborations, and looks at the potential breadth and likely limits of such cooperation. It addresses concerns about NATO peace enforcement action voiced in Alexander Nikitin’s paper and in discussions at the September 1998 authors’ review conference. It weighs the potential of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) as an alternative to NATO or Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) management of peace operations in the region. It concludes that while military-to-military contact is extremely valuable, as is joint experience in peace operations, future cooper-ative efforts on the scale of the Implementation and Stabilization Forces (IFOR/SFOR) in Bosnia may in fact be rare. Instead, NATO and the Russian Federation should use the Permanent Joint Council to work out common operational standards and rules of engagement for peace operations in their respective subregions and, in exchange for verified CIS observation of such agreed measures, mutually beneficial arrangements might be made to defray the cost of CIS operations. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Russian governments should make it a point to consistently contribute at least military observers to every peace-keeping mission authorized by the U.N. Security Council—a form of symbolic engagement at low cost—whatever decisions are made on larger operational issues.

THE NEW SETTING FOR PEACE OPERATIONS
While all military operations are guided by political objectives, the new model peace operations are distinctive for being politically sensitive down to the lowest subunit level because they take place within rather than between states. The decisions made by a private or a corporal at a traffic checkpoint or when confronting a crowd or searching a warehouse can have immediate and serious implications for the overall success of an operation. Commanders must pay much closer heed to local politics and culture than they would in traditional military operations. They cannot as readily resort to force to resolve uncertainty, since to do so can jeopardize rather than further the mission. They must induce comparable sensitivities in their troops, who nonetheless must retain the ability to fight when necessary to protect themselves, their mission, or those under their protection. It is a difficult balancing act.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM COOPERATIVE EFFORTS TO DATE
Russian and American forces have conducted two joint field training exercises and have served together in Bosnia for nearly three years. These experiences supplemented a half-century of studying one another’s force structures, operations, and doctrines—familiarity from afar. Lessons in cooperation derived from these experiences are summarized briefly in the following sections.

The exercise highlighted the need for much better language capabilities on both sides, bilingual capabilities being especially important for unit and subunit commanders. Moreover, interpreters were found to need more than language facility; they also needed to understand the concept being translated, implying a need to be familiar with the other country’s military doctrine, methods, and terminology. The greater the frequency with which U.S. and Russian forces expect to operate jointly, the greater the utility of bilingual unit commanders who are familiar with both states’ doctrine and TTPs.

Standardizing on U.N. procedures that both have shaped could avoid the potentially contentious issue of which state’s TTPs to follow in a given situation on a joint operation. Just as the establishment of a common mission language simplifies oral and written communications, standardizing on U.N. field procedures would enable unit commanders to familiarize themselves with just one set of peace-keeping rules and procedures for U.N. and non-U.N. operations. But because U.N. procedures deal mostly with pacific situations, a large and important range of doctrinal and operational issues related to the use of force in coalition operations would still have to be sorted out bilaterally.

The exercise illuminated basic differences in command philosophy for joint/combined operations, with U.S. commanders preferring a single, blended command structure and Russian commanders preferring national command staffs operating in parallel, taking orders from a single overall operation commander. The Russian structure is advisable if language remains a problem but would work well primarily in slow-motion operations where the use of force is neither frequent nor intense and combat conditions rarely arise unexpectedly. The U.S. approach requires much greater language facility (but assumes that most of the bilingual burden would fall upon foreign officers joining an English-speaking command staff). The U.S. approach also requires joint doctrinal compatibility and joint pre-deployment training but would likely produce better coordination in more conflicting and fluid situations.

In a multinational operation, there would be need for effective communications not just between Russian and American units but with other national contingents as well, and by the further need to interact and communicate with the local population. The common language within U.N. operations has long been English, reflecting the dominant political, financial, and operational role of the United States in supporting such operations, until recently. Although Russian, like English, is an official language of the United Nations, it is not likely to be a practical common language for multilateral operations outside the territories of the Commonwealth of Independent States, much as Spanish has been the common language only for U.N. operations in Latin America. The extent to which American officers commanding peace-keeping units should be Russian-English bilingual thus would depend on whether their units are expected to serve in peace operations in Russia’s "near abroad." Command of English by Russian officers would be more advantageous, as it would give their units greater flexibility to serve with U.N. operations in particular, regardless of locale, making contributions to global peace and stability that could be reimbursed at standard U.N. rates.

Operations in the Former Yugoslavia: UNPROFOR. In 1992, Russian military units were introduced to multilateral peace keeping as members of a larger team when they became one half of the U.N. force patrolling the easternmost part of Croatia, known as Sector East to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). The Russian presence demonstrated both the advantages and the hazards of a peace-keeping contingent being from a country close to one of the parties to a conflict. A region of mixed ethnicity before the war, Sector East had been largely purged of its Catholic Croat population by Croatian Serb militias in 1991. Russia’s ethnic and religious affinity with the Serbs had reasserted itself after the Soviet Union collapsed. That affinity made community relations easier for the Russian contingent in Sector East, but also made it easier to look the other way as arms and other contraband passed through Sector East en route to Serb enclaves elsewhere in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (BH).

Indeed, nearly every state contributing forces to UNPROFOR in Bosnia had a national political agenda to advance that was either tied to the fortunes of one or another local fighting faction, or stressed avoidance of more dangerous military intervention. Lacking unity of effort, the operation was a polyglot of national motivations as messy and contradictory as the UNPROFOR official Security Council mandates. Without such unity of effort, UNPROFOR-BH could help feed and shelter the homeless but do little else coherently.

Avoiding casualties. Even before October 1993 in Somalia, U.S. political and military leaders were pre-occupied with minimizing American combat casualties. This pre-occupation tends to make the United States risk-averse and thus prone to display and, if necessary, to use overwhelming force in response to challenges. Risk-aversion at the grand-strategic level (whatever the inclinations of tactical unit commanders) together with the high-firepower, force-protective reflex can undercut the operational advantages provided by decentralized command and control, in that high-level risk-aversion will surely dampen unit commanders’ initiative. Moreover, in some cultures, the forceful, self-protective displays intended to portray toughness may only maintain distance from the local populace that might be bridged with more sparing displays of power and more routine local engagement, which in turn may produce better day-to-day tactical intelligence with which to protect the force and/or pre-empt "spoilers."

Unity of effort requires that at least the major national contingents in an operation share a common "risk ceiling," the maximum amount of risk to troops with which governments feel comfortable. That ceiling may be defined in terms of numbers of casualties of all sorts, numbers of casualties due to hostile action, fatalities due to hostile action, or number of fatalities in any one incident (because heavy losses in one incident have greater public and political impact than a similar total loss accumulated over weeks or months).

It is not clear, based on recent history, that the United States and the Russian Federation share such a common ceiling. Were a combat event to expose serious differences in respective national risk ceilings during a joint deployment, the consequences could be severe, from unacceptable casualties, to unacceptable uses of force against local parties, to refusal on the part of lower level units (following national instruction) to obey high-level commands regarding use of force. Each such instance could have larger political consequences. This is therefore an area that would benefit from detailed doctrinal discussion and agreement on joint norms of operation.

CONTRIBUTING OBSERVERS
In general, the prospect of joint participation of the U.S. and Russian militaries in a peace operation may help to bring unruly local factions to negotiate, or to faithfully implement, a peace accord. There also may be circumstances where troops from one or both powers may be needed to give credibility to an operation where no shots are expected to be fired (as in Macedonia or the Sinai peninsula at present, or on the Golan Heights should Israel and Syria ever conclude peace). In most other instances, military units for basic peace keeping should be drawn from other states, but the United States and Russia should consider sending groups of military officer-observers to every operation that the United Nations mounts. Since the era of large U.N. field operations ended in 1995, most new U.N. operations have involved mostly observer groups. The effectiveness of these missions depends on their moral and political authority, since they have no military punch, and they need representation from the permanent members of the Security Council to enhance their credibility.

Observer missions promote military-to-military interaction on a very small scale, but they require cooperation among officers of a dozen or more countries, which is greater national variety than encountered in all but the largest peace operations where formed units have predominated. Observers also "show the flag" at very low cost financially or in terms of unit readiness. Sending regular detachments of military observers to U.N. missions neither requires nor detracts from the readiness of active duty units, a potentially key consideration for Russia until the basic readiness of its forces is improved. Yet consistent provision of observers would signal Russia’s active interest in keeping the peace, not just on its own borders but in other places as well—an attitude appropriate to a great power with a stake in the welfare of the larger international system. Continuing U.S. contributions of military observers to U.N. operations says, similarly, that the United States remains willing to play a quietly supportive role in addition to the leading roles it has given itself in Haiti, Somalia and, after much hesitation, in Bosnia, despite the domestic political gridlock over paying U.S. back dues to the United Nations.

BUILDING PUBLIC SECURITY
Implementing accords frequently involves security tasks that resemble more closely the job descriptions of police and internal security forces than those of infantry or mechanized army units. Such tasks include deterring banditry by former fighters and re-establishing or maintaining public order in urban and rural areas. While unarmed civil police have been elements of U.N. peace-keeping operations for several years, armed internal security forces also should be considered candidates for international operations.

Units from Russia’s Internal Troops, for example, specially designated and given extra training for international operations, could complement and even in some situations provide security for other states’ military police, civil affairs, and psychological operations units deployed quickly into a zone of operation after a peace accord has been signed. Moreover, border guard forces accustomed to dealing with flows of refugees and displaced persons, not to mention smugglers, could also apply their skills to providing security for operations that involve wholesale return of refugees and displaced persons, or the enforcement of trade sanctions and arms embargoes.

However, domestic demand for internal security forces, border guards, military police, and civil police regularly exceeds the supply. Although Russia has a strong force of internal troops, they may be needed in the near term to keep order at home. U.S. and Russian border patrols are also fully engaged. The United States military has a strong civil affairs capability but much of it is maintained in the reserves. Active-duty civilian police are hard to come by for peace operations in general; most countries maintain the numbers of police they think they need for day to day maintenance of law and order. Unlike regular armed forces in peacetime, civil police are constantly engaged in their primary tasks.

a. U.N. Framework. The U.N. Security Council mandates peace operations under more or less specific authority of the U.N. Charter. The U.N. framework is familiar worldwide and has the advantage that both Moscow and Washington exercise a veto over Security Council decisions to create U.N. peace operations. Security Council authorization is also the legal and political "gold standard" for legitimizing peace operations of all kinds.

Most peace operations have been U.N.-managed (forty-plus since the late 1940s). Contributors serve under the U.N. flag and U.N.-appointed force commanders and/or Special Representatives of the Secretary-General. The U.N.-managed model works well enough in interstate border monitoring and in other situations where the use of coercive force is unlikely. It does not work well in combat situations because the United Nations has little command and control infrastructure and, even if it did, U.N. leaders have very little control over member states’ actions or the actions of peace-keeping troop contingents. As a result, the U.N.-blessed "coalition of the willing," like the one that pushed Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991, has become the de facto model for coercive international operations.

Such operations will, of necessity, involve leadership by powers that are willing and able to provide the logistic support, command and control, intelligence resources, and reserve firepower needed to accomplish the mission. The lead state(s) also must see some benefit in taking the lead, commensurate with the costs and risks involved, and therein lies a dilemma.

If no great power has a stake in the outcome of a conflict or in its rapid suppression, none is likely to step forward to spend the money and take the risks associated with military action. A power that has high stakes in a conflict’s outcome, on the other hand, may volunteer to lead a coalition but its actions may well be partisan in nature and partial to its own interests at the expense of the best interests of the place where it intervenes, or of its people. But that partiality may be more, or less, acceptable to the broader international community, depending on the purposes that it serves. Whether a proposed action by a regional power or coalition merits endorsement by Security Council resolution or the relevant regional security organization ought to depend on: the local factional objectives that would be favored by international intervention; the values that intervention would foster or restore (that is, would it foster pluralistic or oligarchic government? respect for or denigration of human rights, ethnic tolerance, or ethnic nationalism?); and the number of different states, international organizations, and international nongovernmental organizations favoring the operation and expressing willingness to participate in achieving its goals.

I suggest that future coalition operations involving Russian and/or American participation, especially operations undertaken at either country’s initiative, would have the broadest and deepest political legitimacy, and thus the greatest staying power, where they support pluralistic government, respect for human rights, ethnic tolerance, and local factions who espouse these values; where their objectives are congruent with international mandates and international law; and where they are able to attract the endorsements and the active participation of a wide range of other states and organizations, implying political consensus or something close to it in favor of the operation.

The latter philosophy informs Russian writers’ definition of "peacemaking," as noted earlier, but even conflict suppression must be followed by conflict resolution. Otherwise, one’s forces remain the key to peace (as in Bosnia) and thus remain stuck in place. Conflict resolution can take a very long time unless the local culture is prone to forgive and forget. One of the deep dilemmas of humanitarian intervention may be that it is largely the cultures that neither forgive nor forget that create the bloody messes that lead eventually to outside intervention.

Where forces from permanent members of the Security Council participate in U.N.-authorized operations, issues of national prominence in command and control arise. Specifically, they relate to the nationality of the force commander and/or the special representative. In the former Yugoslavia, for example, French and British brigades served under a series of French and British U.N. military commanders after a sequence of commanders from India, Sweden, and Belgium (for the Bosnia sub-command). In Somalia, the U.N. operation was led by a retired U.S. navy admiral serving as Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General. U.S. support and combat forces in the country served under a U.S. general who doubled as Deputy U.N. Force Commander. A U.S. general served as force commander for the United Nations in Haiti, directing both U.S. and other national military units.

Russia has shown greater flexibility on this question to date, serving under de facto NATO-style operational control by American commanders in Bosnia. However, the size of Russian military contributions to multilateral operations, to date, has been modest compared to the total troop strengths of the operations they have joined. Russian contribution of a substantial share of troops to a future operation would likely make overall Russian control of that operation a greater issue for Moscow. Certainly, within the CIS, Russia retains full control of such operations and would not relinquish it; indeed, as reflected in the authors’ conference, Russia prefers that no outside powers be involved in peace keeping within the CIS.

What might be required to create a situation that is the inverse of Bosnia, where an American unit served under Russian operational control? On the Russian side, changes would include completion of force reductions and restructuring, development of an effective expeditionary logistical support system, and reforms in troop leadership that eliminate hazing and delegate greater responsibility to lower command echelons to encourage initiative on the part of subunit officers.

On the American side, the requirements would include greater willingness to second military units at, say, the battalion or brigade level to operations that are not under de facto U.S. operational control. The U.S. record on such secondments is limited: The airborne battalion that serves in the Sinai does so within the framework of an independent international organization that the United States funds. A reinforced U.S. infantry company participates in UNPREDEP, in Macedonia, but until recently, this border-monitoring operation faced little or no prospect of strife.

The issue of whether to commit U.S. forces under non-US command involves not just ordinary national political sensitivity but domestic partisan politics. One U.S. soldier’s refusal to wear a U.N. arm patch a few years’ back became a partisan cause celebre. Thus while a process leading to commitment of forces to a foreign-led peace operation might start with rational consider-ations of relative risk and benefit, it could rapidly escalate into a domestic political storm. From the standpoint of international peace and security, this may be unfortunate, but it is also the likely political reality in the United States now and for the foreseeable future.

The usual debate within Western peace-keeping circles about Russian/CIS operations in the "near abroad" focuses on whether they conform to international peace-keeping norms like local consent, functional neutrality, and nonuse of force. Alexander Nikitin engages this issue in his paper, pointing to forceful NATO actions in Bosnia and U.S. actions in Somalia as evidence that such norms have been augmented recently by new ones more suited to dealing with the fluid, complex, and disorderly settings of internal conflict. Doctrines like the British "wider peace keeping" or the U.S. Army concept of "aggravated peace keeping" reflect that evolution. Such doctrines, he might argue, are not far removed from the Russian approach in the "near abroad" and are better suited to the operational and political environment of the Newly Independent State (NIS) than are the traditional U.N. peace-keeping norms. In short, Russia acts within its de facto sphere of influence as the United States and NATO act within theirs.

Much like Washington, Moscow would like to pay less for peace operations without losing control over those operations closest to home and/or most relevant to its national interests. Unlike Washington, Moscow does not seek to hand off the end-game to the United Nations or other international actors. Russia would like to have the costs of tending its back yard defrayed by the neighbors but it doesn’t care to see other gardeners mucking about advising on weed management, especially freelance gardeners with power tools.

If NATO can make independent choices about where and how to apply coercive force, it is argued, the organization may choose to apply it uncomfortably close to Russian borders, without Moscow’s assent. Threats to Persian Gulf oil have been major catalysts for Western military operations in the last two decades. As Caspian oil resources come on stream in the future, may not the temptation to intervene in that region to protect Western access and investment grow apace? Nikitin has proposed a "new Yalta," de facto 21st century spheres of influence that amount to mutual military no-go zones, to buy time and space for Russia to recover politically, psychologically, and perhaps militarily from its traumatic transition from totalitarian rule. This buffer, Nikitin argues, would foster the democratic changes within the former Soviet space that are key to the long-term stability of the region and to mutually constructive relations between those states and the rest of Europe.

Contemporary "democratic peace" theory—which notes that democracies have not, thus far, warred against one another—provides, in other words, insufficient reassurance of Western forbearance and insufficient counterpoint to long social memory of invasion and near defeat. Moreover, a number of Russia’s neighbors or near-neighbors are not now democracies, and even if they make the transition, the shift itself may be fraught with instability. Ad interim, the Russians see that they are stuck with the Caucasus, stuck with Central Asia’s instabilities, and stuck with roiling Islamic fundamentalism on their southern flank in the form of the Taliban and their potential appeal in the predominantly Muslim states of the CIS.

On the other hand, there is no indication from the West that NATO is champing at the bit to intervene in conflicts in the Caucasus or Central Asia. Nor even, to date, has there been a NATO consensus response to serial crises in the Gulf, the latest of which (November 1998) found Washington and London acting alone to force Iraqi compliance with U.N. weapons inspections. NATO has indeed hung around Bosnia longer than initially anticipated, but no reasonable analyst of Balkan politics expected its task to be done in twelve months, the deadline having been set largely for American domestic consumption. Everywhere else, Washington has been keen to exit foreign operations as soon as possible, and sometimes sooner than advisable. Long-term American military presence overseas was a product of the Cold War and the perceived necessity for long-term, close-up deterrence of the Soviet Army. The security habits of Europe and East Asia, meanwhile, have grown around that presence like ivy ‘round a topiary, such that American presence cannot be removed without destroying present European security structures (and unbalancing East Asia). Continued U.S. presence has become a matter of general regional reassurance, although NATO expansion eastward is less than reassuring to many in Russia.

Is there a regional reassurance-cum-supportive measure that might have more appeal in Moscow? Russia has troops to keep the peace but little money for the task, while the West has what appears from Moscow’s perspective to be ample funds to help Russia make or keep the peace in the former Soviet space. The West has, moreover, a growing interest in regional stability as its oil exploration, production, and transport infrastructures mature. Western governments are, however, in all likelihood uneasy about the methods that Moscow uses and unsure whether buying into Russian operations would not make them partners in another Chechnya.

One way to produce a convergence of interest and mutual reassurance might be to negotiate common standards for peace operations in areas of tension and internal conflict: standards for training, for field operations, and for treatment of local populations, as well as agreed rules of engagement. To monitor implementation of the standards, international monitoring missions would continually observe the actions of Russian field operations and report back to the OSCE. (To be consistent, OSCE missions would also monitor NATO operations.) Similar U.N. observer missions in Georgia and Tajikistan have little leverage because the organization declined to provide funding in support of Russian operations there. The proposed regional observation initiative would gain leverage from just such financial support, derived in part, perhaps, from internationally agreed surcharges on Caspian region oil and gas production and transport.

While monitoring and funding might best be conducted through the regionwide OSCE, the negotiation of standards might best be conducted between peace-keeping entities, namely NATO and the Russian Federation. The Permanent Joint Council would be a good venue for reaching agreement on standards and on modalities for their implementation, including the monitoring missions. If peace, stability, and democratic transitions are in all OSCE members’ interests, then they are worth paying for. If payments for peace operations go toward effective operations, ably led and equipped, behaving according to regionally validated standards, all members benefit. If we are to think in terms of European security writ large, then we cannot dismiss such a notion out of hand.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Military-to-military cooperation between the United States and the Russian Federation has intrinsic value, as recognized by officers, analysts, and politicians from both countries. There remain large differences in how the two countries’ militaries go about their business, in their command and control structures, troop-leading systems, recruitment, training, and retention. But there are also broad areas of agreement on the value of operational interaction. Peace operations offer opportunity for such interaction, indeed, the only venue, other than purely humanitarian work, outside the training arena.

That having been said, future opportunities for interaction in the field on the scale of the operation in Bosnia are likely to be limited. Some of the limitations are operational and some are political. Geography and de facto spheres of influence also play roles. U.S. forces would be very unlikely to join international operations near the territory of the former Soviet Union without an invitation from the Russian Federation. Nor are Russian forces likely to appear in Western Hemisphere peace operations without the explicit agreement of Washington. And were there to be an invitation from Moscow to join a new international operation to keep the peace in, say, Georgia, not only geography but domestic politics would likely constrain U.S. participation.

For all these reasons, it may well be the case that Russian-US cooperation in peace operations may find its fullest future expression, at least for the near future, in joint participation in military observer missions. Periodic joint training for more complex missions should continue, as the Security Council’s shyness about major new peace operations may not last, but the global international community’s will and capacity to undertake such operations in all but the smallest of the world’s states are at present extremely limited. On the other hand, both Russia and the West have growing stakes in the stability of Russia’s southern flank. Russia already operates forces there; the West does not want to. Russia has troops; the West has money. There may be a marriage here, if we can just get the pre-nuptials right.

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