3 - Warriors Who Don’t Fight

Summary

This chapter examines post–Cold War debates in the United States over the US Army’s participation in peacekeeping operations. Peacekeeping missions may have been a central concern of the US Army in the 1990s, but they also exposed deeper fissures within the Army and broader American society about the organisation’s proper role and the sort of attributes that American soldiers would need in the twenty-first century. Army leaders and personnel deployed on peacekeeping operations struggled to articulate which martial values best applied to peacekeeping. Political commentators tended to be much less ambivalent about peacekeeping, with some neoconservative observers enthusiastic about using such operations to practice ‘soft’ skills that would be useful in later wars, while most conservatives displayed a deep antipathy for such interventions, arguing that they corroded valuable warfighting skills and were symptomatic of an Army that had lost its way. For the few liberal commentators engaged in debates over Army policy, peacekeeping operations represented an opportunity to showcase American values and even to promote a deeper connection between the US military and broader American society.