At the beginning of 1993, the Secretariat decided to establish a special planning team to develop the Standby Arrangement System (SAS), to have a precise understanding of the forces and other capabilities a Member State would have available, should it agree to contribute to a peacekeeping operation, General van Kappen said. The key element is the exchange of detailed information to facilitate planning and preparation for both the participating Member States and the United Nations. As of now, 62 Member States have agreed to provide standby resources, 40 per cent of which can be ready for use in the mission area within 30 days or less.
Response time
The first aspect that can speed up the deployment of peacekeeping
operations is the reduction of the response time between a decision by
the Security Council to establish an operation and the arrival of troops
and equipment in the mission area. "I would like to speed up the process
of decision-making. Even when the answer is no, you would rather have
that answer quickly, because then you know that you have to ask another
Member State to participate", the Military Adviser explained. Since
contributions to the SAS are voluntary, the arrangement does not
constitute an automatic obligation on the part of the participating
Member State, and it cannot be assumed that all resources will indeed be
made available when so requested.
'Strategic lift'
It is possible that a Member State wants to participate, but does not
have the capacity to transport its standby forces and depends on the
United Nations to take care of the "strategic lift", the General
continued. "In my opinion, it is important that the rules and
regulations should be updated to make it possible to require sea and
airlift in a shorter time period than it is now. Today, the only way to
provide efficient strategic lift is on a Letter of Assist basis. That
means that you ask a Member State to do the lift for you. But there are
not that many Member States that have that capability," he observed.
Logistic support
The third factor to enhance the Rapid Deployment of peacekeeping
operations is the logistic support. "Logistic support for a
multinational force is always difficult, because you have to work with a
lot of different types of vehicles, different types of tanks, and you
have troops that are trained differently. This all makes it a rather
complicated affair," General van Kappen explained. "If you look at NATO
(North Atlantic Treaty Organization): at NATO they shy away from
logistics; at NATO they say that logistics is a national responsibility.
An organization like NATO doesn't touch it, and for very good reasons.
In the United Nations, it is a UN responsibility. Why? Because we have
to work with 185 Member States and some of those Member States just
don't have the capacity to do it themselves. If you would impose upon
Members that logistics are a national responsibility, you would de facto
exclude the participation of a lot of Member States in peacekeeping
operations and we don't want that. So the UN takes the responsibility
for logistics."
Making it effective
A lot remains to be done to enhance the three main factors -- response
time, strategic lift and logistic support -- that determine the rapid
deployment capacity. If such capacity is improved, the SAS will be an
effective means that can rapidly deploy needed resources to new or
current peacekeeping missions. The information available under the
standby arrangements has already proved most helpful in the planning for
and subsequent deployment to peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Angola
and the former Yugoslavia, and will certainly do so in the future.
"The trouble in the field normally is that you have units from different nations coming together in an operation area", General van Kappen said. "And the staff, the Command and Control element -- which has to control all those units -- normally is constructed at the same time from officers from different States. So, by the time you have a working headquarters that really can exercise the command and control, you're a couple of months down the road. To improve that, the idea is to have a standing, existing mini-headquarters that can be deployed from New York to a mission area, augmented by people who are on a stand-by basis. This idea of a rapid deployment headquarters is already pretty far advanced, but we still have the problem of who is going to pay for this.
"One of the things is training. Training is extremely important, because peacekeeping operations are multifaceted and require special training. My favourite quotation is from Dag Hammarskjöld who said peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but they are the only ones who can do it. I would add the word 'unfortunately', because a soldier is not trained for peacekeeping operations; a soldier is trained for fighting a war. Peacekeeping is not fighting a war, but it has military elements. And there are also a lot of nonmilitary elements. It is a multifaceted operation. Basically you need to retrain the soldiers. And I think one of the aspects that we are working very hard on, and quite successfully, is to try to coordinate and harmonize training all over the world for peacekeeping troops.
"One thing is for sure. We have discovered what the limitations are of peacekeeping. There is a whole spectrum of operations that we can undertake. But it is all defined within Chapter VI of the Charter, which is basically peacekeeping. As soon as you cross the line to enforcement, which is Chapter VII, for us, the military, that means that you must have a war-fighting capability.
"We also have developed our procedures further than the classical United Nations military operation, with lightly armed troops. So basically the planning of peacekeeping operations is the ultimate challenge for the military. A lot of the military say 'it can't be done, it is crazy'. And especially at the United Nations, as soon as the mandate is there, they want you to be there yesterday. We always have to start from zero. Each and every operation that we start, we start with nothing."