Peace Operations and Their Impact on Combat Readiness

Abstract

Abstract : The Respond portion of U.S. Military strategy Shape, Respond, Prepare Now along with post Cold War downsizing has transformed the Armed Forces of the United States into a force projection military. Every commander, leader, and soldier must be trained and ready to deploy and fight with minimum notice. The Shape portion of our military strategy has resulted in numerous deployments to conduct Peace Operations where we focused on not fighting but preventing war. We often hear that future combat will be come as you are wars with little if any time to ramp-up our warfighting skills to their highest levels. This requirement demands that our forces be focused on their warfighting tasks. There only so many training days available to a peacetime army...241 once weekends and holidays stripped out. For a deployment force on a Support-Mission-Training cycle has those 241 days reduced to 161. The average peace operation deployment time for the Class of 1999 was 145 days. Subtracting the weekends from these 145 days to allow a better comparison leaves 105 days which reduces the training days for a unit deployed on a peace operation to 56 days! Is preparation for and conduct of Peace Operations reducing our readiness to perform our primary mission - to fight and win our nations wars? This paper analyzes the Peace Operations experiences of US Army War College students, our military's future senior leaders, with regards to how they view the impact of Peace Operations on readiness. Using survey results from the 1997, 1998, and 1999 resident classes, we find a changing attitude concerning Peace Operations, their effect on readiness, and their role in preparing our forces to fight and win the next war.