Anticipating Ethnic Conflict

This report is the final product of a year-long project entitled "Ethnic Conflict and the Processes of State Breakdown: Improving Army Planning and Preparation," which sought to help Army intelligence analysts who monitor intrastate (including ethnically based) conflict potential around the world. The work of these analysts has grown more important since the end of the Cold War, as the U.S. Army has become increasingly engaged in peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations aimed at preventing, quelling, or dealing with the consequences of ethnic or communitarian strife in Somalia, Rwanda, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Facing the serious prospect of further involvement in such conflicts in the years ahead, the Army has to grapple with the problem of what such intrastate operations imply for its training, equipping, doctrine, and deployment. While the primary mission of the Army and the U.S. armed forces in general will remain the fighting of wars and protecting U.S. interests in the world, peace operations (ranging from traditional peacekeeping, to peace enforcement, to humanitarian assistance) will place increasing demands on the U.S. armed forces in the next 10-15 years, with the Army (and the Marines) most affected. To put it bluntly, there "will be more Somalias, Rwandas, Haitis and Burundis in the future," and the Army will be called upon to deal with some of them. Since the end of the Cold War, the Army has been called upon 25 times to conduct peacekeeping and other humanitarian missions and, as the Army Chief of Staff General Dennis Reimer recently noted, "that is a 300 percent increase and that trend is expected to continue."