The new face of peacekeeping: military services refocus attention on stability operations tactics.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

For the 1,800 or so U.S. troops mostly Marines--who deployed to Haiti in March, it was, in many ways, back to the future.

The Marines occupied the country from 1915 to 1934. In the mid-1990s, more than 22,000 U.S. military personnel returned as part of an international peacekeeping operation.

Now, U.S. forces are back again. Their mission, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Pentagon news briefing, is a familiar one: "contribute to a more secure and stable environment ..., help support the constitutional process, protect U.S. citizens, facilitate the repatriation of any Haitians interdicted at sea, help stand up a multinational interim force and create conditions for the arrival of a U.N. multinational force." By the end of March, the U.S. forces had been joined by 1,500 troops from France, Canada and Chile.

In the past 12 years, the United States has taken on such assignments in half a dozen other countries, including Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo--and as operations move from combat to post-conflict reconstruction--Iraq and Afghanistan.

"In each of these instances, local police, courts, penal services and militaries were destroyed, disrupted, disbanded or discredited and were consequently unable to fill the post-conflict security gap," James Dobbins, director of the Rand Corporation's International Security and Defense Center, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. U.S. military services were ill prepared to cope with these problems, he said.

Although the Defense Department spends billions of dollars on training forces for combat, Dobbins said, it has made no comparable investment in its ability to conduct post-combat stabilization and reconstruction operations. The reason, officials said, is a combination of cultural biases against peacekeeping operations under U.N. control and previous failures, such as the 1993 operation in Somalia.

Some military officers, however, argue that the United States has a long history of peacekeeping. "If you look at what's going on in Afghanistan, it follows the pattern of American frontier wars," said Army Col. David R. Gray, who served with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan. As in the 19th century American west, U.S. military forces in Afghanistan spend much of their time patrolling to protect settled populations against marauders, he told a conference on peace and stability operations at George Mason University, in Arlington, Va.

During much of the first part of the 20th century, Gray...