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PUSHING THE PENTAGON TO PREVENT GENOCIDE
Nathan Hodge
Wired News
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/pushi ng-the-pentagon-to-prevent-genocide/
May 4 2010
When the Pentagon released its master strategy document earlier this
year, the document contained an interesting phrase: The military
needed to focus on "preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities
or large-scale natural disasters abroad."
The insertion of that line into the Quadrennial Defense Review
marked a paradigm shift: Previous versions of the strategic plan
included no such references to stopping "mass atrocities" as a
military imperative. It was a quiet victory for advocates of a new
vision of U.S. national power that would make genocide prevention a
military priority.
And while genocide-prevention hasn't been fully embraced by every arm
of the military, it's building momentum. In an event tomorrow at the
U.S. Institute of Peace, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the
Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability
Operations Institute (PKSOI) will unveil the Mass Atrocity Response
Operations military planning handbook, a step-by-step guide written
by and for military planners that outlines how to stop a genocide.
How, exactly, would it work? Ideally, the handbook's designers have
argued, you stop a genocide before it happens, through diplomatic
action, political pressure or pre-emptive deployment of a protective
force. But sometimes you may have to go in heavy. Scott Feil, a retired
Army officer who is a member of the project's core planning group,
has argued that a 5,000-strong task force from a modern military
would have been sufficient to stop the killing in Rwanda.
It's part of a larger effort by the Carr Center and PKSOI to sell
the concepts of genocide prevention within the Pentagon and the
national-security establishment. As an earlier planning primer
noted, the words genocide and mass atrocity have long been absent
from military planning documents, but the Carr Center and PKSOI
have lobbied to include these concepts in documents like the QDR. In
parallel, they've also worked to introduce their "annotated planning
framework" to the people who matter most: The military's powerful
regional combatant commands.
Why is this important? For starters, it could become the launching
point for future military interventions. In delivering an annual threat
assessment to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director of
National Intelligence Dennis Blair said: "Looking ahead over the next
five years, a number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant
risk for a new outbreak of mass killing. All of the countries at
significant risk have or are at high risk for experiencing internal
conflicts or regime crises and exhibit one or more of the additional
risk factors for mass killing. Among these countries, a new mass
killing or genocide is most likely to occur in Southern Sudan."
In other words, the U.S. government needs to be prepared for -- and
perhaps militarily plan for -- intervening to stop mass killings. That
doesn't necessarily mean U.S. boots on the ground: Intervention,
broadly speaking, could include a diplomatic offensive to prevent an
outbreak of violence. Or it could mean convincing regional security
organizations -- the African Union, for instance -- to deploy their
own peacekeepers. But as the earlier MARO primer noted, U.S. combatant
commands are likely to end up as "first responders" in some capacity
if such an incident happens.
The "G word" is still politically fraught. Most recently, President
Barack Obama had to dance around the subject in a statement to mark
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which commemorates the mass killings
of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
Nathan Hodge
Wired News
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/pushi ng-the-pentagon-to-prevent-genocide/
May 4 2010
When the Pentagon released its master strategy document earlier this
year, the document contained an interesting phrase: The military
needed to focus on "preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities
or large-scale natural disasters abroad."
The insertion of that line into the Quadrennial Defense Review
marked a paradigm shift: Previous versions of the strategic plan
included no such references to stopping "mass atrocities" as a
military imperative. It was a quiet victory for advocates of a new
vision of U.S. national power that would make genocide prevention a
military priority.
And while genocide-prevention hasn't been fully embraced by every arm
of the military, it's building momentum. In an event tomorrow at the
U.S. Institute of Peace, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the
Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability
Operations Institute (PKSOI) will unveil the Mass Atrocity Response
Operations military planning handbook, a step-by-step guide written
by and for military planners that outlines how to stop a genocide.
How, exactly, would it work? Ideally, the handbook's designers have
argued, you stop a genocide before it happens, through diplomatic
action, political pressure or pre-emptive deployment of a protective
force. But sometimes you may have to go in heavy. Scott Feil, a retired
Army officer who is a member of the project's core planning group,
has argued that a 5,000-strong task force from a modern military
would have been sufficient to stop the killing in Rwanda.
It's part of a larger effort by the Carr Center and PKSOI to sell
the concepts of genocide prevention within the Pentagon and the
national-security establishment. As an earlier planning primer
noted, the words genocide and mass atrocity have long been absent
from military planning documents, but the Carr Center and PKSOI
have lobbied to include these concepts in documents like the QDR. In
parallel, they've also worked to introduce their "annotated planning
framework" to the people who matter most: The military's powerful
regional combatant commands.
Why is this important? For starters, it could become the launching
point for future military interventions. In delivering an annual threat
assessment to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director of
National Intelligence Dennis Blair said: "Looking ahead over the next
five years, a number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant
risk for a new outbreak of mass killing. All of the countries at
significant risk have or are at high risk for experiencing internal
conflicts or regime crises and exhibit one or more of the additional
risk factors for mass killing. Among these countries, a new mass
killing or genocide is most likely to occur in Southern Sudan."
In other words, the U.S. government needs to be prepared for -- and
perhaps militarily plan for -- intervening to stop mass killings. That
doesn't necessarily mean U.S. boots on the ground: Intervention,
broadly speaking, could include a diplomatic offensive to prevent an
outbreak of violence. Or it could mean convincing regional security
organizations -- the African Union, for instance -- to deploy their
own peacekeepers. But as the earlier MARO primer noted, U.S. combatant
commands are likely to end up as "first responders" in some capacity
if such an incident happens.
The "G word" is still politically fraught. Most recently, President
Barack Obama had to dance around the subject in a statement to mark
Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which commemorates the mass killings
of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.