I just published an article in the collection “Focus Stratégique” edited by the French think-tank IFRI, focusing on the challenges of coalition warfare. I reproduce the abstract below.
“Contemporary multinational military operations occur in a strategic context characterized by the domination of limited conflicts for Western states. As such, those interventions are marked by a tension between the military logic of integration as a condition of effectiveness and the political logic of state autonomy. This situation leads to a number of specific dynamics, such as the imposition of restrictions on the use of force (“caveats”), the difficulty to achieve the unity of purpose and the unity of command, and the search for an increase of international legitimacy through the number of participants to the intervention. This article analyses the dynamics of contemporary multinational interventions, and explores potential ways to manage the difficulties related to the dialectic between integration and autonomy.
Olivier Schmitt 