Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention - by Michael E O'Hanlon (Paperback)

About the Book

Humanitarian military intervention and muscular peace operations have been partially effective in recent years in saving thousands of lives from the Balkans to Haiti to Somalia to Cambodia to Mozambique. However, success has often been mitigated by the international...

Book Synopsis

Humanitarian military intervention and muscular peace operations have been partially effective in recent years in saving thousands of lives from the Balkans to Haiti to Somalia to Cambodia to Mozambique. However, success has often been mitigated by the international community's unwillingness or inability to quickly send enough forces capable of dealing with a situation decisively. In other cases, the international community has essentially stood aside as massive but possibly preventable humanitarian tragedies took place -- for instance, in Angola and Rwanda in the mid-1990s and in Congo as this book goes to press. Sometimes these failures have simply been the result of an insufficient pool of available military and police forces to conduct the needed intervention or stabilization missions. In this timely new book, Michael O'Hanlon presents a blueprint for developing sufficient global intervention capacity to save many more lives with force. He contends, at least for now, that individual countries rather than the United Nations should develop the aggregate capacity to address several crises of varying scale and severity, and that many more countries should share in the effort. The United States' role is twofold: it must make slight redesigns to its own military and, even more important, encourage other nations to join it in this type of intervention, including training and support of troops in countries, such as those in Africa, that are willing to take the necessary steps to prevent humanitarian disaster but lack the resources.

Review Quotes

"A straightforward and passionate appeal to the United States' and the United Nations' role in preventing mass atrocities, Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention is a highly commended effort to personal, professional, governmental, academic, and community library Contemporary International Studies collections." -- "Bookwatch"

"Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention, by Michael O'Hanlon, provides an insightful look at this overlooked area that often accompanies U.S. conflicts." --Captain George Galdorisi, U.S. Navy (retired), "United States Naval Institute Proceedings", 3/1/2004

"The book's most useful contribution is its third chapter, a global survey of force projection capability. It reaches the remarkable conclusion that whereas 62 per cent of US troops are quickly deployable, only three per cent of the seven million standing forces in the rest of the world are (p. 56)." --Alan J. Kuperman, School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy, "Contemporary Security Policy", 8/1/2003

"With this extended essay, Michael E. O'Hanlon, a thoughtful and respected policy analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, has made and effective and, on the whole, persuasive case for a greater international effort to increase the 'global capacity for humanitarian intervention and peace operations.'" --Mats Berdal, Kings College London, "RUSI Journal", 8/1/2003

About the Author

Michael E. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair. His recent books include "The Future of Arms Control" (Brookings, 2005; with Michael A. Levi), "Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary" (Brookings, 2004), and "Crisis on the Korean Peninsula" (McGraw Hill, 2003; with Mike Mochizuki).