Proposals for the creation of an international security force were actively discussed at the time of the establishment of the League of Nations and were returned to in the period leading to the creation of the UN. The UN Charter contains explicit undertakings in the area of peaceful settlement of international disputes, and various instruments emerged over time as the UN sought to give operational meaning to the peace and security principles in the Charter. We analyze the experience with peacekeeping operations and the lessons that can be drawn from their mixed success. We then analyze the extent to which there has been dramatic erosion in the effectiveness of the uses of warfare to achieve particular national strategic objectives and argue that the current system of global security is absurdly costly in relation to the meager security benefits it confers. We present a proposal for the creation of an International Peace Force, to be established in parallel to a process of comprehensive international arms control. A number of operational issues that emerge when considering the establishment of such a Force, many of them based on an assessment of several decades of experience with peacekeeping, are discussed.