Pooling resources to deter external threats to security and to safeguard common interests is as old a phenomenon as organized warfare (Parker 2005). Still, alliance politics have always been pervaded by coordination problems because sovereign states interacting to realize some public good more often than not have both shared and diverging interests (Snidal 1985). Even within the same polity, inclinations may be ambiguous and interests only partially congruent. Difficult collaboration is very much part of the human condition.
The shared perception of some common threat is the principal glue of security alliances. Crucial is also the integrating capabilities of the alliance-leading hegemonic power , whether it leads through attraction, persuasion, or command. The centrifugal forces in alliances relate to the existence of conflicting, individual self-interests among alliance partners concerning what should be the purpose of the alliance, how to run it, and how costs, risks, and gains are distributed among alliance members in a particular coalition context. Depending on the robustness and flexibility of the security alliance and the coalition forces in question, such intra-alliance policy conflicts may reduce the credibility of the coalition, as well as its military efficiency and capacity to serve political goals. Over time, intra-alliance contradictions as expressed in less than successful coalition operations may undermine the relevance of the security arrangement.
The Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz , had the first-hand experience from how alliance dilemmas at the collective and individual level play out on the field against better organized, led, and motivated French forces. He survived to tell about it as military theorist:
It would all be tidier, […] if the contingent promised – ten, twenty, or thirty thousand men – were placed entirely at the ally’s [the Force Commander ’s] disposal and he was free to use it as he wished. […]. But that is far from what happens. The auxiliary force usually operates under its own [national] commander [who] is dependent only on his government and the objective the latter set him will be as ambiguous as of its aims. (Von Clausewitz 1976 [1832]: 250)
Clausewitz is drawing attention to a theater of war in which what is politically feasible to agree upon among alliance partners, does not allow for the full use of pooled military resources for political purposes. Dual chains of command and only partially shared operational commitments create uncertainty and make it difficult for coalition Force Commander to utilize national contingents in meaningful ways. We see this deficit of what is politically feasible to agree upon played out also in contemporary Western burden-sharing debates, and in command—and control issues discussed in connection with the establishment and running of coalition forces (Driver 2016; Frost-Nielsen 2016, 2017).
Restrained participation in coalition operations come in two main shapes, short of nonparticipation. One is the provision of a limited number of personnel in noncombatant functions, such as military medics and staff officers. Miniscule and symbolic contributions may also take the shape of modest logistical or financial support from governments wanting to demonstrate some political support. For the risk-averse, lukewarm, or skeptical ally, another kind of restrained participation is available for consideration. The option is the attachment of conditions—“caveats”—as to when, where, and how its substantial military contingent be used by coalition Force Commander in the theater of war. This phenomenon is the focal point of the present study. For now, we shall proceed on the conception that caveats are national reservations on the use of force in a coalition context (Frost-Nielsen 2016: 14–16; 2017: 3–4). Several topical research questions come to mind: How may the application of caveats on national military contingents affect coalitions? How widespread is the use of national reservations on the use of force? How may Force Commander and political decision-makers manage and compensate for the negative impact of caveats, if at all? What conditions governments’ use of caveats in coalition operations? How may we go about to better understand the politics of caveats? The latter question is about how to approach and design research on the politics of caveats, and is the main concern of the present study.
The Inconvenience of Caveats in Coalition Operations
Since the end of the Cold War, NATO , the United Nations and ad hoc “Coalitions-of-the-Willing ” have engaged forcefully in conflicts in Kosovo , Afghanistan , Iraq , and Libya , to mention but some of the most broadcasted interventions. Besides the fundamental problem of enforcing political solutions in countries pervaded by ethnic cleavages , economic underdevelopment, corruption , and weak political institutions, the multitude of national restrictions on the use of force applied by coalition partners in International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), Afghanistan 2001–2014, contributed to the less than successful implementation of the mission’s political goals (Auerswald and Saideman 2014).
There are reasons to believe that the use of caveats in coalition operations have been significant in the post-Cold War era. At one point, NATO generals in Afghanistan put together an eighty-page document describing 70 instances of national reservations on the use of force in the coalition operations in this particular theater of war (Bergen 2011: 189). David P. Auerswald and Stephen M. Saideman (2014) found on their count some 50 caveats applied in the coalition operations in Afghanistan, and Otto Trønnes (2012) discovered tenfold of instances of caveats in Norway’s behavior as a coalition partner in various multinational military operations. In a comparative study of caveats in the coalition operations in Libya 2011, Per Marius Frost-Nielsen (2017) found the Netherlands to apply heavy restrictions on the use of airpower. Germany used restrictive caveats on how their forces could be used to limit domestic political risks at the expense of the operational effectiveness of the coalition forces in Afghanistan (Lombardi 2008).
Among coalition Force Commanders, caveats are seen mainly as a severe impediment to military flexibility and efficiency , and thus to the successful implementation of the political mandate of coalition forces. Referring to coalition-force Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) in Iraq 2003–2010, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld pointed to the use of national caveats as “a quite complex problem for the [force] commander” to cope with (US DoD 2005). The question of caveats again appeared high on the agenda of the NATO Summit in Riga in 2006 (NATO 2006), thus confirming caveats as a continuous challenge to the effective use of coalition forces (Clark 2001). Furthermore, the imposition of national reservations on the use of force in the Stabilization Force (SFOR ) in Bosnia , in 1990s, was less diplomatically described as “cancer that eats away at the effective usability of troops” (Johnson 2004) by limiting “the tactical commanders’ operational flexibility ” (Jones 2004).
The UN operation in Somalia in the early 1990s (UNOSOM ) may serve to illustrate the point. In this operation, several governments frequently intervened in the UN chain of command to make sure their military contingents were kept out of harm’s way. In 1993, the UN took action and dismissed the Italian Force Commander because of his failure to obey direct orders from UN headquarters in New York (Von Hippel 2000: 75). Research indicates that the Italian case of insubordination—a matter of split loyalties—was not exceptional. Similar instances of deviant practicing of coalition’s common rules of engagement (RoE) have been revealed in several other UN operations (Feldman 2008; Chopra et al. 1995: 72; Findlay 2002: 178, 183; Hirsch and Oakley 1995: 63–66, 75–76, 82–83), including United Nations Interim Force (UNIFIL ) in Lebanon, and United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR ) in the Balkans (Findlay 2002: 117–118, 134–135). Furthermore, during NATO’s 1999 air operations against Serbia in the conflict over Kosovo , some go...