Tag: Coalition Warfare

More allies, weaker missions? How junior partners contribute to multinational military operations

My latest paper has been published by Contemporary Security Policy. You can access it online here and in pdf. I reproduce the abstract below.

There is a growing consensus that multinational military operations are often less effective than the theoretical sum of their constitutive parts. Multiple chains of command, restriction on intelligence sharing, and capability aggregation problems can reduce fighting power. However, partners may be necessary to provide legitimacy to an intervention. As such, most studies assume that the state leading a coalition (usually the United States) has to accept a degree of operational ineffectiveness in order to gain political benefits from the participation of junior partners to a multinational military operation. However, such analysis puts all junior partners under the same category, without taking into account the differentiated contributions of those junior partners based on their relative military power and international status. This article explores variation between the junior partners’ contributions and their impact on coalition political and military dynamics. It teases out the implications of adopting a fine-grained analysis of junior partners.

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A War Worth Fighting? The Libyan Intervention in Retrospect

I published a review essay article in International Politics Reviews entitled “A War Worth Fighting? The Libyan Intervention in Retrospect”. You can access the article here or download the pdf, and I reproduce the abstract below.

journal_cover“The Libyan intervention, originally considered a success for NATO in the context of the ‘Arab spring’, is now criticized for creating the political turmoil Libya is currently going through. The three books under review offer different perspectives on the intervention itself, raising important questions about its conduct and its consequences. They also indirectly raise the issue of the difficulty to write about contemporary warfare”.

Unity or strength? Challenges of contemporary multinational operations

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.

 

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“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.