More than 4 years of war turned the once-beautiful Yugoslavia into a living nightmare, and into one of the bloodiest battlefields in Europe's recent history. The realities of the situation were seen daily on the television and in newsprint. There were images of homes, villages, and parts of cities destroyed, refugees carrying children and suitcases, war-wearied elderly women, and crying soldiers.
Like Rome, the Balkan crisis wasn't built in a day and it's difficult to understand. Although the conflicts have deep roots, the recent war can be immediately traced to the events of 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared independence from the former Yugoslavia. The Serb-dominated Yugoslav government allowed Slovenia to leave, but the Serb minority in Croatia rejected secession and fought to keep its homelands in that country. In 1992, similar Serb rebellions erupted in Bosnia. The Serb revolts were fortified with arms and forces from the Yugoslav government.1
The United Nations attempted to mediate between the warring parties, and over time placed more than 45,000 peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia. Dozens of cease-fires were worked out by international mediators but broke down. The Bosnia civil war culminated in the Dayton Peace Agreement (see summary in Appendix A) and the subsequent deployment of a NATO-led multinational military force into Bosnia and Croatia. The NATO-led force was called the Implementation Force—or "IFOR"—and the operation, which began on 16 December 1995, was code-named Joint Endeavor.
City Damage (Sarajevo)
Country Damage (Mostar)
IFOR was a 60,000-person, 36-nation coalition force. Many of the national forces earmarked for IFOR, largely the French and British, were already in Bosnia as part of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). The United States, which had no ground units in Bosnia before December 1995, began to deploy its initial units (e.g., reception units, advance headquarters) on 6 December, although the bulk of the 28,000 troops, mostly Army personnel stationed in Germany, deployed after D-Day. The U.S. deployment involved the movement of approximately 18,000 personnel, primarily from the 1st Armored Division, into Bosnia to form the core of the framework Multinational Division (North)—MND(N). Another 10,000 U.S. personnel were deployed into Bosnia, Hungary, and Croatia as part of various NATO organization elements and as the U.S. National Support Element (NSE) for the U.S. forces in Bosnia.
Operation Joint Endeavor provided a unique opportunity to capture experiences and lessons from NATO's first-ever ground force operation, its first-ever deployment "out of area," and its first-ever joint operation with NATO's Partnership for Peace partners and other non-NATO countries, especially the Russians. The book brings together a broad range of experiences to tell the IFOR story and to share some of the lessons learned by NATO and the U.S. and other military forces that supported the operation.
The operational deployment of complex command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems in support of the NATO-led peace operation in Bosnia provided a unique opportunity to collect coalition C4ISR experiences and lessons learned. It also provided an opportunity to perform an analysis of the effectiveness of such complex command arrangements and supporting C4ISR systems. In recognition of this unique opportunity, Mr. Emmett Paige, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence (ASD(C3I)), tasked the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP, formerly the Center for Advanced Concepts and Technology (ACT)) at the National Defense University (NDU) to perform such a study. On February 15, 1996, the director of CCRP was tasked to undertake this project in his role as the ASD(C3I)'s executive agent for the CCRP.
The CCRP charge was broad and covered both the effectiveness of command arrangements and the effectiveness of the supporting C4ISR systems. The study addressed all of the classic issues of C4ISR, including structures, functions, capacities, doctrine, and training. Furthermore, an attempt was made to pull together the related ongoing C4ISR community activities and build a coherent C4ISR story, including lessons learned. The Joint Staff endorsed the effort and the J-3 was designated as their point of contact for the study.
CCRP was sensitive to the need to be unobtrusive and to minimize demands on military organizations in the theater of operations. In-theater travel and visits, while necessary for some aspects of the study, were limited to those required to support a quality product. Research activities were initiated in February 1996, and it was expected that they would continue for at least 6 months after the exit of major U.S. forces from Bosnia. With the transition of IFOR to the Stabilization Force (SFOR) on 20 December 1996, the NDU effort was adjusted to focus on putting the IFOR story together as a first priority. The collection of SFOR experiences and lessons learned continued but at a much lower level of effort.
Operation Joint Endeavor was well underway before the NDU study effort was initiated and it was quickly determined that a number of other organizations had initiated efforts that would provide important information that the NDU effort did not need to duplicate. Therefore, CCRP made identifying all related efforts its first priority. These included lessons learned activities, research efforts, and assessments of C4ISR performance in Bosnia.
The roundup of all relevant efforts was a key element of CCRP's four-part, highly leveraged plan for accomplishing the mission of assessing C4ISR effectiveness and collecting lessons learned. CCRP employed a strategy based upon attention to four principles: coordination, collaboration, integration, and focused research. Key findings of the study will be provided to the doctrine developers in the joint community and the services. In addition, study insights and results will be used to develop professional military education (PME) materials, such as this book, for use at all levels of professional schooling.
This book summarizes the NDU study findings, insights, and lessons from the Bosnia experience. It is based upon NDU study team members' experiences and analysis derived from visits to the theater of operation, from interviews of key personnel who participated and supported the operation, and from research of the vast material developed on the Bosnia experience. Several participants2 in the IFOR operation, including some members3 of the NDU team, made chapter contributions based on personal experiences, insights, and lessons learned. The book is structured to tell the story of the NATO and U.S. involvement in a way that shares both the successes as well as those things one would do differently the next time around. Where lessons learned have been clearly observed, they are so identified.
Chapter II sets the stage for Operation Joint Endeavor with a brief overview of the Balkan environment and the players. This discussion is then followed by a summary of the UN and NATO actions leading up to the deployment of the NATO-led Implementation Force (IFOR).
Peace operations (operations other than war) tend to be ad hoc coalitions of the willing with politically driven command structures. IFOR was no different. The Dayton Accord established three structures for implementation (with no one in charge of the overall operation): an Implementation Force for the military aspects, a High Representative to coordinate civil tasks, and Donors Conferences to stimulate reconstruction. Chapter III introduces the unusual and somewhat complicated C2 structure put together to implement the military aspects of the Dayton Accord.
Intelligence operations in a coalition environment are difficult. Intelligence is also one of the hardest things to share, since each partner has a natural tendency to mask his/her intelligence capabilities and to retain control of product dissemination. An attempt to unravel the mystique of coalition intelligence operations in the Operation Joint Endeavor environment is presented in Chapter IV.
For NATO, civil-military cooperation was a new experience, and represented one of the more interesting challenges faced by the military. Chapter V is devoted to this unique aspect of the IFOR operation. Differences in NATO and national approaches are covered, as well as the associated dealings with the international organizations (IO), non-governmental organization (NGO), private voluntary organizations (PVO), and other civil organizations.
Annex 11 of the Dayton Accord requested that the UN establish an International Police Task Force (IPTF) to assist the parties in discharging their public security obligations. Chapter VI addresses the establishment of the IPTF and its relationships with the military.
Many military officers are now convinced that victory is determined not just on the ground but also in the media reporting and the use of information to achieve public support for the military operation and to influence the behavior of the warring factions. Chapters VII (Information Activities) and VIII (Tactical PSYOPS) address various aspects of the IFOR media operations and the IFOR Information Campaign (IIC). Given the high level of importance placed on force protection and the key role that human intelligence plays in peace operations, Chapter IX focuses on the Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence support to the ground force commanders. Chapters VIII and IX reflect the firsthand experiences of military personnel who were there on the ground in Bosnia accomplishing the mission in the Task Force Eagle area of responsibility (MND(N)).
While no outside observer can acquire the in-depth knowledge possessed by the soldiers who lived the IFOR operation, one can get some interesting perspectives from observing and interviewing soldiers in action at many levels during selected field and aviation operations. Chapter X provides some firsthand, on-the-ground observations of a U.S. military officer who participated as a senior NATO observer in the Task Force Eagle area of responsibility from May 1996 to July 1996. His snapshots from the division to the foxhole provide interesting insights into the command and control problems experienced at the tactical level, with a particular emphasis on the impact of information technology.
The extension of NATO C4I systems and national C4ISR systems into the Croatia and Bosnia areas was a real challenge for NATO and the IFOR framework nations (the United States, United Kingdom, and France). NATO had an extremely limited ability to deploy forward and the warring faction fighting and NATO air strikes had destroyed a large portion of the Bosnia telecommunications infrastructure. The IFOR CJ6 goal (strongly supported by United States Army Europe (USAREUR's) 5th Signal Command, the major provider of tactical communications infrastructure for the operation) was to provide a single, integrated multinational network for IFOR. The "federated" NATO-national C4ISR network realized was the most complex and extensive ever put together by a military force. The challenges of implementation, integration, interoperability, and operation and management are covered in Chapter XI.
Chapter XII addresses the NDU study approach and shares its experiences in attempting to leverage the community lessons learned activities through the use of coordination, collaboration, integration, and focused research. Particular emphasis is given to the unique collaborative arrangement established between the Supreme Headquarters Allied Power Europe (SHAPE) sponsored IFOR Joint Analysis Team (JAT) and the NDU team to share findings and lessons learned. The use of a "Bosnia C4ISR Roundtable" to encourage the U.S. community to share and cooperate and the use of NDU as a clearinghouse for lessons learned activities are also emphasized. A by-product of the NDU study was "lessons learned about lessons learned." Chapter XIII addresses this subject and concludes that the U.S. process is broken. The IFOR JAT came to a similar conclusion for the NATO process and an initiative it proposed to fix the NATO system is addressed as well.
According to the Center for Army Lessons Learned, "A lesson is learned when behavior changes." Chapter XIV summarizes the findings and observations of the NDU study and presents a number of IFOR-related experiences that have the potential for becoming lessons learned.
| Bosnia Index | Foreword | Acknowledgments | Preface | I. Introduction | II. Bosnia—Setting the Stage | III. Command and Control Structure | IV. Intelligence Operations | V. Civil-Military Cooperation | VI. The International Police Task Force | VII. Information Activities | VIII. Tactical PSYOP Support to Task Force Eagle | IX. Counterintelligence and HUMINT | X. Information Operations in Bosnia: A Soldier's Perspective | XI. C4ISR Systems and Services | XII. NDU/CCRP Bosnia Study | XIII. Lessons Learned About Lessons Learned | XIV. Summary | End Notes | Appendix A: The Dayton Peace Agreement Summary | Appendix B: Chronology of IFOR Events | Appendix C: References | Appendix D: Acronyms | About the Contributing Editor | About the Authors