Dealing with rules of engagement is hard enough when only one country's forces are in the field or at sea. Problems multiply, however, when rules of engagement must be developed for multinational forces. The U.S. experience in Kosovo is only the most recent example of this increasingly common trend of combined operations around the world. Learning to cope with other countries' conflicting notions of the rules of warfare is an inevitable part of the 21st century's brave new world.
During the past decade, many nations have reduced their military force structures while simultaneously increasing their involvement in nontraditional military operations. As these trends merge the role of the modem warrior with that of the peacekeeper, rules of engagement (ROEs) are becoming evermore indispensable in applying military force. This was demonstrated by NATO's attempt to draft comprehensive, standing rules of engagement while simultaneously participating in the alliance's first operational deployments.
From 1993 to 1996, maritime operations planners at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe, and the headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic, led the effort to draft NATO's first attempt at comprehensive joint, standing rules of engagement. This document, "Joint Combined ROE," originally was intended to establish general NATO ROE policy, and serialized rules for land, air, and naval forces. This task fell to naval planners because NATO standing ROEs had been strictly a maritime affair until the early 1990s. Land and air "ROEs" amounted to tactical direction on countering Warsaw Pact incursions into NATO territory or airspace. In 1993, addenda were proposed to NATO standing naval ROEs, in response to new mission requirements brought to light during Operation Sharp Guard.
Participation in Operation Deny Flight that same year highlighted NATO's need for full-spectrum ROEs. The Joint Combined ROE working group was established to draft comprehensive policy guidance and a compendium of measures to cover air, land, and sea contingencies. Coincidentally, this work also was used to form the foundation of what would become the ROE annex to the operation plan for Operation Joint Endeavor.
For Western-style democracies, rules of engagement provide the means by which the legal and political arms of government regulate the use of military force. Rules dealing with the traditional military uses of force are expressed easily within the confines of national and international laws and conventions. Complications begin to arise, however, with the expansion of the military's role in so-called peace support missions. Paramilitary or police functions such as boarding and seizure, crowd control, and protection of civilians are becoming the day-today staples of many armed forces. This gray area increases the importance of clear, concise ROEs in describing the limits of the military's ability to use force.
Political guidance determines the ways in which these legally based instructions affect each commander's and soldier's tactical decisions. The tactical impact of legal and political influence depends on a number of factors: the type of government; the government's relationship with its military; the country's culture; and the nation's recent experience in conflict. This final factor has a subtle way of influencing both the application of ROEs in the use of force by the military and the nation's interpretation and enforcement of its own laws and political guidance.
Finally, rules of engagement must reflect and support the commander's operational mission statement. The two must be compared continually to ensure that they remain in agreement. In this regard, ROEs should be considered another tool for the operational commander's use in accomplishing his mission. When political authorities establish or change an operation's objective, along with a review of the order of battle, a commander also must examine the approved rules to ensure that they permit the proper use of available force. If the commander does not consider the politically approved ROEs effective enough to accomplish the mission, civil authorities either did not understand the mission's requirements or the commander misinterpreted his objective. In either case, the misunderstanding must be resolved before troops get to the field.
ROE Mind-sets
The language and application of rules of engagement are controlled by two contrasting mind-sets: permissive and restrictive. The permissive mind-set contends that commanders should be allowed to use all resources at their disposal to accomplish their missions, except those that are specifically prohibited by ROEs. The restrictive mindset is the view that commanders may use only those resources specifically allowed by ROEs. While U.S. ROEs generally are permissive, many NATO nations have more restrictive national ROE systems. Problems arise when the two contrasting ROE mind-sets meet, as in the development and approval process for a multination operations plan. In any attempt to reach compromise, it is easier to provide some restrictions in a permissive approach than to liberalize a restrictive one. A method to accomplish this is to adjust approval authority for the use of specific weapon systems not anticipated for use in self-defense to an acceptably high level within the chain of command.
Self-defense
Self-defense is a national prerogative, but coalition political and military leaders still must understand thoroughly the implications of contrasting national self-- defense policies. This is especially important in military missions where the threat may be ill defined and the most likely use of force will result from an individual or small-unit act of self-defense.
While most nations accept self-defense as the inherent right of military personnel, some take what they feel to be a more pragmatic approach. They foresee situations where self-defense by the military may be clearly subservient to an operation's overall political objective. As such, military forces may be severely restricted in their ability to respond to hostile intent. In fact, the outright extension of the right of self-defense—to include actions perceived to show hostile intent—has, until recently, been rare beyond U.S. forces.
For most nations, a response to hostile intent or the commission of a hostile act is considered within the definition of self-defense if the reaction is both proportional and takes place without appreciable delay. Nations involved in multinational operations, however, may seek to extend the definition of self-defense to include responses to hostile acts that would otherwise be seen as retaliation. The intent of such a redefinition might be to avoid multinational military or political interference in a nation's unilateral decision to retaliate for a hostile act against its forces.
With some other nations, a response in self-defense can be made only as long as those committing the hostile act still are considered an immediate threat. The factors controlling the perception of the level of threat are subjective, and therefore open to some interpretation within ROE policy directives. In addition, forces not threatened directly may not respond in defense of friendly units under the definition of self-defense. To reach a compromise between different ROE mind-sets, specific ROEs may have to be written—spelling out in detail the dividing line between "self-defense" and "reaction to a hostile act."
ROEs in Peace Support Operations
The problem with peacekeeping is that we take military personnel who have trained their entire careers to kill people and destroy things and then throw them into an operation where they have to do the exact opposite.
Peace support operations cover many nontraditional military roles—including humanitarian relief, peace enforcement, and peacekeeping. All of these operational situations have varying potentials for the use of force, and therefore require varying ROEs. Just as various military incidents have influenced the U.S. mind-set toward self-defense, the British Army's experience in Northern Ireland and events involving Canadian forces in Somalia affected both these nations' attitudes toward the application of force as NATO later prepared to deploy to Bosnia and Herzegovina in Operation Joint Endeavor.
Joint Endeavor was unique, because it was the first attempt to conduct this type of operation on such a large scale and under a unified multinational command. An important aspect of command unification was the requirement for forces to work with a single set of NATO-- approved ROEs. NATO planners did not start the ROE development effort from scratch. Operations Sharp Guard and Deny Flight had been going on for some time and U.N. ground forces had been operating for two years with their own ROEs.
One of the primary issues that planners tried to resolve was the ROE mismatch that existed between the naval, air, and land forces operating in and around the Former Republic of Yugoslavia. For maritime forces, it was not a significant transition. In the air and on land, however, things were not as simple. During 1994, the belligerence of the warring factions and the threat they posed to U.N. peacekeepers resulted in the use of NATO air power in both an air defense and interdiction role. The missions, forces, and ROEs available to NATO were adequate to accomplish this task. The U.N. ground forces, however, were not sufficiently equipped, and they did not have the rules to defend themselves against the retaliation expected as a result of NATO air strikes. This mismatch forced several NATO nations with participating ground troops to veto—repeatedly—the expansion of NATO's air effort.
Participation in a multinational operation does not release a nation's forces from their obligation to abide by national law. Can a commander be held legally responsible when a subordinate unit from another country uses force or weapons in a manner that is approved in the ROEs but is contrary to the commander's national law? The use of claymore explosive devices in perimeter defense is an example where national law and treaty interpretation vary widely.
During the buildup to Operation Joint Endeavor, there were offers of forces from all over the world. Many of these nations were unknown quantities as far as their use and understanding of ROE concepts. One of the conditions for becoming part of the operation was an unconditional acceptance of the NATO-approved ROEs. The ability of these nations to understand and implement those ROEs correctly was an important issue as the Joint Endeavor force deployed.
Fortunately, NATO rules of engagement have several elements that serve to make them useful at all levels. The ROE annex to a NATO operations order has three parts: the general policy section; an aide memoire; and a soldier's card. The aide memoire is a distillation of policy guidance and serialized rules and serves as a ready reference at the tactical headquarters or unit level. The soldier's card is an index card-sized list of dos and don'ts relating to the use of force by individual soldiers and small units. A caveat to the "one ROE" demand was that nations had to be given the latitude to disseminate guidance to their troops on how their national law applied to the approved ROEs. The emphasis here was to protect commanders and individual soldiers from running afoul of national law through the correct implementation of NATO-approved ROEs. Nations that did have caveats were obligated to notify their NATO chain of command so that upper-echelon commanders were aware of any operational limitations. Since many languages were represented in Operation Joint Endeavor forces, there were concerns about the quality of the ROE translations. In the end, time and staff limitations precluded inspections, and it was left to individual nations to translate the aide memoire and soldier's cards accurately.
The Operation Allied Force air campaign in Serbia and Kosovo raised some new ROE issues and confirmed some old ones. Allied Force moved very quickly from planning to execution, and several breakdowns in the ROE implementation process occurred. By early 1999, "Joint Combined ROE" was mature enough to be used as a basis for operations plan ROE development. It was not, however, a NATO-approved document, and significant operations plan-approval-process delays were caused by negotiations over language in generic ROE measures. ROE planning tended to default to the legal staffs and some implementation misunderstandings could have been avoided had there been greater subordinate headquarters involvement in the planning process. Once Allied Force was under way, the lack of approved standing ROEs became a serious impediment when NATO military commanders attempted to react to the quickly changing battlefield environment. As had occurred previously in the Balkans, the potential for serious operational mismatches was present when supporting ground and naval forces deployed to the area in a peacetime ROE posture while the air component was actively engaged in combat operations.
On 1 December 1999, six years of hard work and difficult negotiations culminated in the North Atlantic Council's approval of MC 362, "NATO Rules of Engagement." The council's sanction of the world's first and only joint, combined ROE system not only will aid NATO in multinational operations planning, but also will foster understanding of the essential role of ROE coordination in mission success.
Conclusions
Lessons learned from recent NATO ROE experience are important to anyone involved in planning or executing multinational joint military operations. These include:
- ROE development must be a collaboration between operators and lawyers. Standing or operation-specific ROEs first must meet the requirements of national and international law. At the same time, ROEs must reflect the needs of the commander and be written in common language.
- A permissive ROE mind-set is easier to modify to reflect national political and legal concerns than a more restrictive form.
- The development of standing ROEs is essential to eliminating the need to reinvent the wheel for every multinational operation. A pre-existing, approved ROE concept will lessen the tendency of nations to want to negotiate changes based on the direction of the political wind that day.
- Unity of command must be protected through the use of a single ROE. Multinational ROEs also must be flexible enough to allow for the legal limitations of individual nations.
- Joint force commanders must be on guard against mission and ROE mismatches between different force components.
- ROE concurrence must be a requirement for nations seeking admission into a multinational force.
- ROE training must be conducted down to the small-- unit and individual levels, especially during peace support operations. This presupposes that an accurate version of the ROEs is available, which may not be the case-depending on the timeliness of the operations plan's political approval.
Many of these lessons are based on political and military quirks of the NATO operations plan development and approval process. These lessons are useful, however, as indications of the reality of future multinational operations planning. ROEs often are considered a planning process adjunct and are left to the judge advocates, but they must be considered integral parts of all military operations planning, training, and execution. Operators must understand the full intent of each ROE policy statement and measure. An operation's ROE profile continually must be compared to the commander's intent and all political guidance for complete continuity. In the highly charged political world of multinational operations, to take ROE development and application lightly will put lives at risk and jeopardize success.
Commander Spence served at Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers Europe, from 1994 to 1996. He is the former commanding officer of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA)-22 and presently is Head, Aviation Section, Programming Division (N80), OpNav Staff.