2 - Civil-Military Decision-makers within Their Theoretical Context

Summary

Introduction

The act of deciding if and how military force ought to be deployed lies at the heart of what is known as the strategic civil-military interface.33 In this interface military operations are designed and directed by a group of senior civil and military decision-makers. These agents and their actions are the focus of the theoretical and empirical puzzle of this book. Yet, one cannot comprehend their decisions without an understanding of the context in which this decision transpires and without an understanding of the prescriptive theories foundational to the roles the actors fulfil.

This chapter explains the theoretical concepts that are foundational to the rule-based international and national environments in which the civil and military decision-makers operate. First, the context of contemporary military interventions is delineated with a particular focus on the concept of stabilisation operations. Above all, this was the dominant concept at the time when the decisions at the centre of this study were made. The concept of stabilisation operations serves as an organising framework and, as such, has ideological utility for the civilian and military decisionmakers at the time under study.

Subsequently, the theoretical underpinnings of Western rules on civilmilitary relations are delineated, followed by a theoretical description of their shared process, which is strategy-making. These two theoretical concepts contain prescriptive models of the way the relations between civil and military actors ought to be organised and upheld and are, in theory, foundational to their respective roles in decision-making and to the process of drafting strategies for military interventions.

The Context: Contemporary Military Interventions

The context of Western military interventions has exhibited considerable variations in terms of its normative dimension. Hence, the pattern of military interventions throughout the last few decades cannot be understood when separated from the changing normative framework in which they occurred and which also shaped the various conceptions of interest. Standard analytical (mostly realist) assumptions about states and other actors pursuing their interests tend to leave the sources and motivations of interests vaguely defined or unspecified.

The end of the Cold War heralded a rapid and dramatic transformation in the practice of military interventions. The majority of interventions were multinational peacekeeping operations instead of unilateral interventions by world powers.