Standby Arrangement System: enhancing rapid deployment capacity.

"The planning of peacekeeping operations is the ultimate challenge", Major-General Franklin van Kappen, Military Adviser to the Secretary-General, told the UN Chronicle in March. "Because you never know where you have to operate; you never know what they want you to do, you don't know the mandate in advance; you don't have forces, you don't have transport, and you don't have money."

As of 1997, the United Nations has mounted 43 peacekeeping operations. Fifteen were established in the 40 years, between 1948 and 1988; the other 28 since 1989. Missions have multiplied in number and in complexity. "Most early peacekeeping missions responded to interState conflicts, but in recent years peacekeeping has more often addressed conflicts within States, sometimes where Governments no longer function. Soldiers serving under United Nations command as peacekeeping observers or troops have been confronted with more and more challenging mandates. They are involved in a wider spectrum of operations, ranging from traditional ceasefire monitoring to the task of armed protection of humanitarian convoys," General van Kappen said.

At the beginning of 1993, the Secretariat decided to establish a special planning team to develop the Standby Arrangement System (SAS), to have a precise understanding of the forces and other capabilities a Member State would have available, should it agree to contribute to a peacekeeping operation, General van Kappen said. The key element is the exchange of detailed information to facilitate planning and preparation for both the participating Member States and the United Nations. As of now, 62 Member States have agreed to provide standby resources, 40 per cent of which can be ready for use in the mission area within 30 days or less.

Response time

The first aspect that can speed up the deployment of peacekeeping operations is the reduction of the response time between a decision by the Security Council to establish an operation, and the arrival of troops and equipment in the mission area.

This is dependent on national approval. "In some Member States, it goes rather quickly, but in other States it takes a long time, because the several procedures they have to go through are often very complicated", the Military Adviser said. "I would like to speed up the process of decision-making. Even when the answer is no, you would rather have that answer quickly, because then you know that you have to ask another Member State to participate", he explained. Since contributions to the SAS are voluntary, the arrangement does not constitute an automatic obligation on the part of the participating Member State, and it cannot be assumed that all resources will indeed be made available when so requested.

'Strategic lift'

It is possible that a Member State wants to participate, but does not have the capacity to transport its standby forces and depends on the United Nations to take care of the "strategic lift". This leads to the second aspect. "If you follow the UN administrative procedures that are defined by the General Assembly, the procedure takes about three months to get a ship and about six to eight weeks to get an aircraft. But, with a comprehensive database of all the standby resources, including the strategic lift possibilities, it is possible to speed up the organization of transport.

"In my opinion, it is important that the rules and regulations should be updated to make it possible to require sea and airlift in a shorter time period than it is now. Today, the only way to provide efficient strategic lift is on a Letter of Assist basis. That means that you ask a Member State to do the lift for you. But there are not that many Member States that have that capability," he observed.

Logistic support 

The third factor to enhance the Rapid Deployment of peacekeeping operations is the logistic support. In principle, all units made available under the standby arrangements should be fully equipped. But this may not be achievable for all contributing countries. It is therefore important to provide information on the level and status of equipment at the time a standby arrangement is agreed upon, to identify any gaps and fill them as early as possible.

"Logistic support for a multinational force is always difficult, because you have to work with a lot of different types of vehicles, different types of tanks and you have troops that are trained differently. This all makes it a rather complicated affair," General van Kappen explained. "If you look at NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization): at NATO they shy away from logistics, at NATO they say that logistics is a national responsibility. An organization like NATO doesn't touch it and for very good reasons. In the United Nations, it is a UN responsibility. Why? Because we have to work with 185 Member States and some of those Member States just don't have the capacity to do it themselves. If you would impose upon Members that logistics are a national responsibility, you would de facto exclude the participation of a lot of Member States in peacekeeping operations and we don't want that. So the UN takes the responsibility for logistics.

"There now exists a concept of a lease contract. This means that a Member State takes some logistic responsibility and the United Nations pays the country for its logistic support", he explained. "The advantage is that preliminary contribution agreements are to be drawn up in advance between the Secretariat and participating Member States, so that the agreements can be finalized quickly before deployment."

Making it effective

A lot remains to be done to enhance the three main factors-response time, strategic lift and logistic support - that determine the rapid deployment capacity. If such capacity is improved, the SAS will be an effective means that can rapidly deploy needed resources to new or current peacekeeping missions. The information available under the standby arrangements has already proved most helpful in the planning for and subsequent deployment to peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Angola and the former Yugoslavia, and will certainly do so in the future.

"The trouble in the field normally is that you have units from different nations coming together in an operation area", General van Kappen said. "And the staff, the Command and Control element - which has to control all those units - normally is constructed at the same time from officers from different States. So, by the time you have a working headquarters that really can exercise the command and control, you're a couple of months down the road. To improve that, the idea is to have a standing, existing mini-headquarters that can be deployed from New York to a mission area, augmented by people who are on a stand-by basis. This idea of a rapid deployment headquarters is already pretty far advanced, but we still have the problem of who is going to pay for this.

"One of the things is training. Training is extremely important, because peacekeeping operations are multifaceted and require special training. My favourite quotation is from Dag Hammarskjold who said peacekeeping is not a job for soldiers, but they are the only ones who can do it. I would add the word 'unfortunately', because a soldier is not trained for peacekeeping operations; a soldier is trained for fighting a war. Peacekeeping is not fighting a war, but it has military elements. And there are also a lot of nonmilitary elements. It is a multifaceted operation. Basically you need to retrain the soldiers. And I think one of the aspects that we are working very hard on, and quite successfully, is to try to coordinate and harmonize training all over the world for peacekeeping troops.

"One thing is for sure. We have discovered what the limitations are of peacekeeping. There is a whole spectrum of operations that we can undertake. But it is all defined within Chapter VI of the Charter, which is basically peacekeeping. As soon as you cross the line to enforcement, which is Chapter VII, for us, the military, that means that you must have a war-fighting capability.

"We also have developed our procedures further than the classical United Nations military operation, with lightly armed troops. So basically the planning of peacekeeping operations is the ultimate challenge for the military. A lot of the military say 'it can't be done, it is crazy'. And especially at the United Nations, as soon as the mandate is there, they want you to be there yesterday. We always have to start from zero. Each and every operation that we start, we start with nothing."