Converging Forces

The United States Army is tasked to fight and win the nation's wars and is fully equipped with the doctrine, tactics, techniques and procedures to do so. The military peace operations of the 20th century have shown that the Army is less well equipped to "fight and win" under those circumstances . The natural inclination of the Army planner tasked with executing a peace operation would be to turn to the principles of war, espoused by Antoine Henri de Jomini in the nineteenth century and formalized into doctrine the United States in the twentieth, since they are the cornerstone of Army doctrine. In this regard, however, the venerated principles of war have proven inadequate.The United States military recognized these inadequacies and in 1995 introduced the principles of military operations other than war (MOOTW), but MOOTW is a very broad category of military operations, and each of the more specific operations it encompasses has its own unique set of problems. This is especially true in coalition peace operations where questions of consent, impartiality, restraint, and interoperability complicate even the simplest matters. Further, the principles of MOOTW can appear to the military planner more as conditions to be achieved rather than an operational approach to the conduct of peace operations .