Sea Control - Sea Control 533 - Maritime Peacekeeping with Dr. Ian Bowers

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

Links1. "Exploiting the Water: Naval Involvement in UN Peacekeeping," by Ian Bowers, in UN Peacekeeping Doctrine in a New Era, Taylor & Francis, 2017. 2. Sea Control 231 – Not So Disruptive After All with Dr. Ian Bowers and Dr. Sarah Kirchberger, CIMSEC, March 11, 2021.3. "A First Time for Everything: The United Nations Maritime Task Force in Lebanon," by David Van Dyk, CIMSEC, March 25, 2019. 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Today we have Dr. Ian Bowers back on the program and we'll be talking about Task Force 448, also known as the United Nations Interim Forces Lebanon Maritime Task Force. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarvey. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out simsec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, and check out the Write for CEMSEC tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's Men.

You're listening to Sea Control, posted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Ian Bowers, and we're going to discuss his chapter contribution to the 2017 work, UN Peacekeeping Doctrine in a New Era. His chapter was entitled Exploiting the Water, Naval Involvement in UN Peacekeeping. So, Ian, welcome back. For the listeners, we just recorded a separate podcast with Dr. Deborah Sanders talking about the Korean War.

So, I'm not going to have you do your entire background again, but if you want to tell us what you're currently doing and who you're working for. Sure. I'm a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, where I am working on matters of sea power and Asian security primarily. And it's great to be back again. Well, thanks. And as a reminder to listeners, as always, all opinions expressed today are our own and

not reflective of any of the institutions with which we might be otherwise associated. Ian, how did you get onto the topic of maritime peacekeeping? So I'm going to confess this one. I was actually asked to do it. uh we have i i'm i have quite a good relationship with one of the editors of this volume uh professor chiki oi at tokyo university uh where she specialized a lot in peacekeeping and she was doing this edited volume with some of uh some of her colleagues uh who are based in norway actually and she asked me if i could write a chapter on on the maritime component because they couldn't

actually find anyone who'd written about it before so i i kind of uh agreed to it just because i thought it was an interesting question and halfway through writing it i i kind of regretted it because it was a rabbit hole of UN documents for three months. But it was a good experience. So what is the UN's history with peacekeeping operations in the maritime domain? So this is a really interesting question. So obviously, during the Korean War, you had U.S. naval vessels and coalition naval vessels operating with UN flags,

but they really weren't under the control of a kind of UN peacekeeping operation or something like that. And that should be much more viewed as traditional warfighting operation. And it really wasn't until the early 90s where you saw kind of maritime components added to UN peacekeeping operations. And it should be mentioned, these are primarily like riverine or inland components. So the first one that I found was in the Gulf of Vanesca under Onuka in 1990 to 1992, where you had an Argentinian unit operating four fast patrol boats in Central America to kind of observe the ceasefire that was going on and meet there. And they were really the first ones where you saw a maritime component or a maritime component with vessels painted white, you know, and adjusted for that kind of mission. And since then, what we have seen is a number of different issues in Cambodia, in the Congo, in Liberia, which is a bit of a different case, which I'll get into in a minute, Haiti as well, Mali, the Ivory Coast, and then kind of the most prominent one, Lebanon, under UNIFIL, where we have maritime components operating under the command of a peacekeeping headquarters.

And the reason why I said the question of Liberia is interesting, this was in 2003, where a Dutch amphibious vessel actually fell under UN command once it entered Liberian waters, which is kind of an interesting kind of component of peacekeeping. And it was only there for a little while. It wasn't deployed for long, but its main role was to provide support for forces on the ground, primarily medical support, actually, and transporting troops and equipment to towns on the Liberian coast. And it was a kind of brief indicator of how a large vessel could actually support UN peacekeeping operations, particularly if they're in a littoral country or a country with a large littoral area. So that was an interesting case. In Haiti as well, what we saw was vessels, particularly from the Uruguayan Navy, patrolling the littoral waters of Haiti, essentially, with a very large area, over 30,000 square kilometers. So that was another interesting case in 2008 of kind of UNPKO happening in a kind of maritime area. So it's a very interesting and kind of spotted history where, you know, very specific or case specific applications of capabilities, I would say. What difficulties does maritime peacekeeping pose compared to land operations? so i think you know i'm not an expert in peacekeeping operations at all but my sense

of it is that the primary difficulty the un has in generating force for the land component is exactly the same in the maritime component and i think getting countries to contribute capabilities uh to peacekeeping maritime peacekeeping operations can be very challenging primarily not many countries have roof reinforcers that they can contribute so for those countries or for those missions that require them getting countries to deliver those capabilities can be challenging and then also when you're looking at maybe blue water blue water contributions this is particularly difficult of getting persuading countries to deliver large nationally held and sometimes the most expensive like military asset a country has to a un mission where they are not

under national command could be is quite difficult and i think the un struggles with this and have struggled with this traditionally. So I think that's one of the major, major, major problems. And then the other problems, of course, are issues such as interoperability, how if you have to have lots of countries, and we'll talk about this more a bit later when we talk about UNIFIL,

or how do you have countries from diverse backgrounds, primarily maybe not NATO countries or Western countries, but countries from very, navies from very different countries working together in what could be a complex operational environment is a challenge for the UN, I suspect. And then apart from that, I think it is just embedding a maritime mindset within the UN itself, which is something that's quite new for them, right? And how do you actually do that when you have people planning peacekeeping operations with the capabilities required necessary for peacekeeping operations?

Now, you mentioned these are very case-specific, so I have an idea where you're going to go with this next answer. But what are maritime forces typically doing as part of their peacekeeping operations? so as i said i think the overwhelming uh the overwhelming role they've had is has been monitoring uh monitoring peace let's say or peace agreements within riverine areas i think that's one of the major ones they have done the other the other roles they have played has been transport particularly in literal areas taking over um uh taking over kind of what should be nationally held responsibilities that maybe a country that has problems cannot do itself in the literal areas as well is quite important.

And then providing transport to peacekeeping forces. So it's a wide variety of missions. And actually, when you read UN documents or more recent UN documents about what navies can contribute to peacekeeping operations, it really fits within that kind of very broad literature of that broad, massive spectrum of naval roles. And the UN now doctrinally does not really see, you know, a role a Navy cannot do. Let's put it that way, which is quite an interesting thing in itself. UNIFIL has been an outlier due to the size of the mission and units committed.

Can you explain how that mission came to exist and then how that has evolved over time? Oh, sure. So UNIFIL, for those who don't know, there is a maritime task force or UN-led maritime task force attached to the UNIFIL mission under UNIFIL command. And this is very interesting. So this comes out of the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon. And really what we saw was during that conflict, we saw a large number of navies operating off the coast of Lebanon to provide humanitarian assistance. So you saw an increase in capability or international naval capability in the area, while at the same time, the UN became under significant pressure

to strengthen its peacekeeping operation in the region at the same time. So what essentially happened was, following the passage of the UN Security Council Resolution 1701 in August 2006, was UNIFIL became much, much stronger. And the Italians in particular, you know, delivered their ground forces, so white painted vehicles from US or Italian naval vessels doing a kind of amphibious operation on the beaches of Lebanon, which is very interesting. And following that, as part of the agreement, the peace agreement later, the Lebanese asked the UN to step in and essentially take over a number of functions, primarily to prevent the illegal importation of weapons and other illicit substances into Lebanon. So the UN agreed to do that, and they created this maritime task force in order to do that. Initially, this was not under UN command. This was under a UN-mandated interim task force called Task Force 425, which had forces from Greece, France, and the UK, and it was under the commands of the Italians.

But this then in September 2006, I think, or sorry, yeah, I think it was September, October 2006, transfer to full UN command and the UNMTF came into being. And this then has been basically mainly European led vessels operating in a relatively large area of interest. It's about 12,000 square mile area of interest in the 5,000 square mile area of maritime operations, which is the length of the Lebanese coast. And it stands out to sea for about 48, I think it's 48 nautical miles is the distance from the local coast that it's meant to be working on. And their job is primarily to ensure Lebanese maritime sovereignty in many ways, but it's also to make sure that, as I said, there is no importation of illicit goods, particularly weapons, and also to provide significant levels of capacity building to Lebanese forces. And actually, interestingly, I was just looking it up, quite recently, Lebanon has taken on a significant role. And finally, after quite a long time, they've now reached that point where they can do that. So it has been a major transformation in how the UN approaches maritime operations. And it's been a, I don't know if you can call it a success since they're still there, but it has been a relatively successful example of the use of naval power, I would say. Well, to go back to a couple of conversations you and I just had as we record the other podcast, I do believe that there is a pretty significant naval diplomacy aspect of contributing to that. I participated in UNIFIL on a German frigate back in 2007 with, I want to say it was the second or third iteration of the German contingent that was down there.

So Admiral Bolo was the commander of Task Force 448 at the time, German Navy officer. And we were down there and initially when we arrived, there were a number of German units down there because some of the fast patrol boats were down in sort of the inshore zone as well. But you've also seen other country supply vessels to this, I think, is a way to signal sort of a contribution to a larger operation. So you can see the Brazilians taking command of the task force back in 2016, which I think was kind of a first for them. But have you read anything about sort of lessons learned from operating from a coalition perspective as part of this task force? Again, to go back to the conversation you and I just had about coalition navies. Well, I think from a kind of tactical operational level, tactical way of thinking about it, I think the major lessons learned, you know, come from that question of interoperability of how do we work with these forces?

And as I said a bit earlier, the reports I read, particularly coming from the German Navy, stated that when, you know, European vessels are working together or NATO vessels, let's say, working together, it really was never a problem for them because, you know, the doctrine is the same, the language is the same, we're used to working with each other. But when they did get other countries coming in, I think it was Indonesia and a few others, they had no experience working in that coalition framework. And there was really no training manual, handbook, nothing like that for anyone to lean on. So everything was kind of being done on an ad hoc basis, which is something I think the UN has worked on quite a bit. And we can talk about that a bit after. I think the other thing on a higher level the UN discovered was they actually needed more headquarter support to plan that maritime operations so you know with the kind of reinforcement of UNIFIL in 2006 there was the creation of this thing called the strategic

military cell which was designed to kind of supplement the military division within the department of peacekeeping operations because the military division was not really you know sufficient to to you know organize and plan what was quite a complex peacekeeping mission in the unifil and very robust let's put it that way so the smc was set up and they had to then include a maritimes operation component within that because they realized that without it they couldn't adequately plan for a maritime operation and that was the first time the un's really done that so i think maybe the biggest lesson learned the thing that comes out of it is if the UN wants to do maritime operations or wants to use navies for peacekeeping operations,

they actually have to have the organizational structures and the command and control structures to do that. And this is kind of a major lesson that they pulled out of this conflict. And now, and this is quite interesting, if you look at UN training doctrine, if you look at some of the documents coming out of the Department for Peacekeeping Operations, You now actually have maritime operations lessons there. You have, I don't think you can call it doctrine, but they do have documents that specify what navies can do in peacekeeping operations and what they would do, what they can do. And they also, within the table of contributing countries, they can say what naval and river

ring capabilities they want. So I think what UNIFIL did was it kind of reinforced to the UN that navies or naval power is something that they can leverage if they're set up to do so and countries are willing to provide the capabilities for it as well. Yeah, I'd like to go back to your point on interoperability. So we came down to UNIFIL just having completed flag officer seat training up in the UK, which flag officer seat training is probably the best naval training in the world and one of the more stressful things that you can go through outside of carrier strike group operations. So very complex, very involved, very intense period of seven weeks off the coast of

Plymouth, England, doing a lot of communications drills, having to communicate on a lot of different circuits and coordinate a lot of different operations with what is essentially a multinational force that is there because it's not just the Germans who send their ships there to get certified. It's a number of NATO countries and occasionally American ships turn up there now to uh for the forces that are over in rhoda spain but so we went from this very complex operation environment we steamed down in the metro mediterranean and went to katania sicily where we met the german freight niedersachsen who had been participating uh in unifil and had just left and then they showed us the documents that they were using to uh put that sort of the german

staff was using to coordinate things it was a single document um because the staff had had determined they had made a conscious choice. It's like, we have non-NATO countries here. There are all sorts of communications limitations. We basically need everything in this single document that we publish. And I can't remember if it was a daily intentions message or a weekly intentions message. It was a single message that came out that told you basically everything that you needed to know to participate in Task Force 448. It told you which communication circuits that were going to be used for this who was where when they were in those specific locations like everything was in one place very specifically because of the multinational nature

and how quickly the task force had been thrown together and the variety of vessels that were participating it was like that was what they had to do um i would assume if i were to go back now that is probably matured somewhat um where ships probably get a little bit more specific training in the way that I know like land units will go through hyper specific training to participate in peacekeeping operations. We don't, I don't believe we had any significant preparation for that beyond having to embark a legal officer, like a German JAG officer who had specific training on what the rules of engagement were going to be down there. Any other lessons that the UN took from unifil and change its approach going forward i i never i never really but from a maritime

perspective uh i never really found any other lessons uh in terms of how they can how they changed their approach to naval operations so my sense of a lot of this is that as i said it's all very context specific and i'm i'm not entirely sure that like i didn't see like as i said i did see the kind of integration of maritime thinking into certain components within the UMP peacekeeping operations division let's put it that way but after that I'm not sure that we really observed and I wrote this what 2016-2017 so I've been going for quite a long time I don't really see I didn't really see kind of okay these are major changes we're going to make going forward other than the integration of as I said within the headquarters a maritime component and it's

very difficult to see if they're still there actually or not because the reports on that seem to have gone away a little bit uh and and after that i'm not sure if we saw if we've seen anything beyond that other than as i said kind of an organizational integration and that's very easy to write as you know you just make a fancy chart and you put in a box to say maritime component and it looks like it's there but it might not be there right and i think that's an important an important element and as i argue in this chapter i think the un needs to think quite seriously, if they did want to actually use naval forces moving forward, how this would look on a sustained basis. Because as you said, this is very much a German-run initiative.

And I do wonder if some of the European countries pulled out, would anyone else be able to step up and maintain it in this way? So I think for the UN or for peacekeeping operations and the maritime component. As I said, nationally held assets are expensive, and it really takes national agreement to do this. So I'm not sure if they're taking any of the lessons from that, other than maybe that's the lesson that they can't do unless they get a lot of political support from capable nations. So I'll direct the listeners then to one other resource. As I was prepping for this episode, there is an article published on SimSec by David Van Dyke back in March 2019, titled A First Time for Everything, the United Nations Maritime Task Force in Lebanon.

So if you want to go check that out, that'll be linked in the show notes as well. That is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Ian Bowers. Ian, I asked you this previously. I'll ask it one more time here just for the listeners, because I'm not sure how far apart we'll publish these two. But where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Great.

Thanks again for having me. You can find me on LinkedIn is where I normally am now. and I'll be working on a book on joint naval operations in the near future. All right. Well, thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Pulling on the shimbo now. A porter of a porter, you know. Way, hey, pulling the alley. A porter of white, both white and red, oh. Pulling on the shimbo now. So help me, Bob, I'm pulling the alley. Way, hey, pulling the alley.

We'll be right back.