Annals of C2 (VI): Here's why coalition command structures are so ungainly

By Nora Bensahel

Best Defense bureau of C3 (command, control and confusion)

Awhile back, Tom asked why
the United States is so bad at designing effective wartime command structures. Subsequent contributors and commentators
identified several different reasons, including careerism, bureaucratic
turf wars, and an imbalance in civil-military relations. Yet most of these comments have overlooked
one critical factor: The United States almost always fights its wars in
coalition with other countries, and coalition
command structures never work well.

Political cohesion is the center of gravity in any coalition
operation.  Even when all coalition
members agree on the desired endstate of the operation, they often disagree
about how to achieve those objectives
-- and particularly about command and control structures. They must compromise to find some sort of
agreement that they all find acceptable. Unsurprisingly, the political imperatives of consensus and agreement
often conflict with the military imperatives of winning a war as quickly and
cheaply as possible. And when they conflict, political cohesion usually wins.

Examples abound of wartime command and control structures
that were considered ineffective from a purely military perspective. In 1999, for example, many observers decried
NATO operations in Kosovo as a "war by committee," since any member state could
veto any target on the air strike list. (The Dutch took a lot of flak for vetoing a strike on a palace where a
Rembrandt painting hung, but the United States vetoed targets more
frequently because of its stringent standards about potential civilian
casualties.) 

The command structure in Kosovo may have not have been
particularly efficient, but it did not prevent the war from reaching a
successful outcome. In Afghanistan, however, the need to maintain coalition
cohesion has led NATO to accept force contingents from many countries that
place national caveats -- or restrictions -- on how those forces may be used,
which has significantly limited the military options available to the NATO
commander.  National caveats have already
been blamed for many of the military shortcomings of the operation, and they
will be blamed even more if the ultimate outcome of the operation is judged to
be a failure.

Even coalition command structures that seem to work well
often do so despite being inefficient
and politically driven. Capt. Rosemary
Mariner (U.S. Navy, ret.), for example, argues that "command and control in
the [1991] Gulf War was a big success story." Yet to assuage Saudi political concerns, the operation involved two
entirely separate chains of command -- one under the command of U.S. General
Norman Schwarzkopf, which included most Western forces, and the other under the
command of Saudi General Khalid bin Sultan, which included all Arab
forces. Neither general had the
authority to issue orders to the other, which clearly violates the principle of
unity of command, though they coordinated informally very well.

Furthermore, some crucial operational decisions were made
for political rather than military reasons. At the beginning of the air war, General Schwarzkopf diverted more than
one-third of the coalition's 2000 daily air sorties to hunt for Iraqi Scud missiles
that were being fired on Israel, which put the air war significantly behind
schedule. Even though he repeatedly told
the press that the Scuds were militarily insignificant and posed no threat to
the coalition, this was the price that had to be paid to keep the Israelis from
retaliating directly. At the end of the
war, U.S. Marines waited outside Kuwait City for more than 24 hours --
one-quarter of the entire length of the ground campaign -- for Arab forces to
catch up so they could symbolically liberate the Kuwaiti capital.

Why didn't these military inefficiencies pose more of a
problem? Simply put, the Gulf War
coalition possessed a lot of slack that could absorb these inefficiencies. The Iraqi military turned out to be much
weaker than originally anticipated, and could not mount a coherent military
response to the coalition offensive. Furthermore, the coalition had more than six months to execute its operational plans almost exactly as they
were written. Saddam Hussein's
shortcomings mean that these coalition arrangements were never tested under any
operational stress at all. Similar
command arrangements could easily become problematic in more challenging
military situations.

Clausewitz's famous dictum applies as much to military
coalitions as it does to individual states.

Coalition warfare is still the continuation of politics by
other means -- but politics in the international system requires bargaining and
compromise among sovereign states. And
that results in wartime command structures that do not operate efficiently or,
in some cases, effectively.

Nora Bensahel is the deputy director of
Studies and a senior fellow at
the Center for a New American Security. Her Ph.D. dissertation was titled "The Coalition Paradox: The Politics
of Military Cooperation."