Deploying for Peace

Chadian Troops Partner with U.S. and French Trainers to Prepare for Peacekeeping in Mali

ADF STAFF

When Lt. Col. Jeffrey Powell and his team of 68 trainers arrived in Chad, conditions were less than ideal. They faced heat, equipment shortages, language barriers and an aggressive deadline of 32 days.

Powell, a member of the U.S. Army’s 5th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, was there to partner with a French defense contracting company and Chadian military trainers to prepare 1,425 Chadian Soldiers for deployment as part of the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA).

At an outpost 80 kilometers south of N’Djamena, the heat approached 35 degrees Celsius, meaning tactical training could last only until noon before Soldiers had to move to classrooms. They were limited to 50 weapons for training, and instructions had to be translated from English into French and then again into a local Arabic dialect.

Faced with these hurdles, Powell shrugged. “As long as they’re motivated, we can do just about anything,” he said in an interview after his first day inspecting the camp.

32 Days, Six Lanes

For a month, the Chadian Soldiers at Camp Loumia executed six training lanes, or skills categories, designed to help identify and clear improvised explosive devices, set up checkpoints, set up an observation post, perform dismounted patrolling, improve marksmanship, and assault an enemy target.

It was a crash course in modern peacekeeping. During dismounted patrols, Soldiers were taught to control an angry crowd and identify an attacker among civilians. At checkpoints, they learned how to scan for threats and use mirrors to search under vehicles for bombs. To overcome the heat, Chadian Soldiers practiced nutrition and hydration techniques. On the rifle range, Soldiers practiced breathing methods to steady themselves before shooting and performed “dime drills” in which they fired at a target while balancing a coin on the barrel of the gun.

Powell stressed that training for a modern stabilization mission like the one in Mali should be approached like preparing for a war zone. In peacekeeping, the environment can change in a matter of moments.

“In this day and age [preparing for the battlefield and for peacekeeping] is not different,” Powell said. “There’s a great book called the Three Block War. It basically said you have to be prepared to conduct peacekeeping operations and peace enforcement operations and then decisive action, all within three blocks. I think that by training people to the standard of being able to do decisive action, they can scale back.”

The Soldiers worked with a U.S. Army Civil Affairs unit and were taught the three capabilities mandated by the United Nations for peacekeepers: protection of the population, prevention of sexual assault and prevention of human rights abuse. Later, U.N. officials tested the men on these subjects.

“This is very important. We call it in French, ‘comportement,’ ” said retired Brig. Gen. Jean Michel Reydellet of the French defense contractor Sovereign Global France. “It’s the ability of the Soldier to be integrated into another country and respect the culture.”

Each Chadian combat company did at least three day iterations on each of the lanes followed by an evaluation period. U.S. trainers adapted an Army assessment form on which companies were rated on a scale of one to five for their performance on each lane. The training culminated in a live-fire exercise in which squads bounded forward to assault a target. This type of squad-level live-fire maneuver was a first for the Chadian forces at Loumia and was completed without any injuries, Powell said.

Separate training at Loumia focused on combat medicine and medical evacuation. One of the highlights of the training was when French forces flew a Puma helicopter from their nearby base in N’Djamena and Chadian Soldiers practiced loading casualties aboard.

Perhaps most gratifying to the U.S. and French military trainers was that a week after the training, the Chadian companies were repeating the training lanes on their own and had drawn up a “synchronization matrix” to track their progress up until their deployment. Chadian commanders said training on new equipment, reporting procedures and situational awareness of the Malian environment would continue up until deployment.

Difficult Mission

The Soldiers were to be deployed to northern Mali, an environment where interethnic fighting and asymmetric attacks by extremist groups are constant dangers. Chad is the largest troop-contributing country to MINUSMA, with more than 1,200 Soldiers deployed as of early 2014. Chadian forces trained at Camp Loumia were to be tasked with holding together a fragile peace in the north with an infantry battalion expected to be split between Tessalit and Aguelhok, a reserve battalion in Gao and a special forces company in Timbuktu. Although life in northern Mali seemed to be returning to normal in 2014, violence erupted in May when the Malian Army was overrun in Kidal by fighters from the National Movement for the Liberation of the Azawad (MNLA).

Despite the frustratingly slow pace of dialogue and peacebuilding in Mali, Brig. Gen. Madjior Solness Dingamadji, advisor to Chad’s chief of defense staff, said his nation is committed to the MINUSMA mission due to its importance for regional stability. “This mission has to do with neutralizing terrorism in all its forms,” Dingamadji said.

Dingamadji noted that participating in U.N. peacekeeping operations poses numerous challenges for Chad ranging from logistics to interoperability, and adapting to a foreign command and control structure.

There also are numerous advantages for his Soldiers. They will receive relatively high reimbursement rates and invaluable professional development. Dingamadji noted that his Soldiers are gaining experience in the rules of engagement in a peacekeeping setting, learning how to protect the civilian population, and improving their English- and French-speaking capabilities. The general staff is learning new U.N. standard reporting methods, message protocol and organizational structures.

“The advantages for a contingent who responds to the requirements of the United Nations are numerous,” Dingamadji said. “They can be summarized as including financial gain, professionalism and, in general, security sector reform for every country that contributes troops.”

Chad’s Soldiers have invested heavily in the future of Mali. They first deployed there in 2013 when they faced fierce fighting in the terrorist stronghold of the Adrar des Ifoghas mountains, sustaining dozens of casualties. The intervention forces succeeded in expelling extremist groups from the area, and Chad’s leaders say they’re not about to let the country slide back into chaos.

“We participated with great pride in the liberation of Mali,” said Moussa Faki, Chad’s minister of foreign affairs, in a 2013 interview. “We are now prepared to participate in its stabilization, because with that comes the stabilization of the entire region.”  

Minusma Lessons in Multilateralism

The United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) is instructive as a case study in multilateralism. It includes 36 troop-contributing countries and coordinates its actions with the Malian Army, two European Union missions for military training and civilian assistance, and the French troops of Operation Serval.

It is one of the most logistically challenging missions the U.N. has undertaken, due to the vast size of Mali, its harsh climate and its lack of infrastructure. MINUSMA also is understaffed. As of March 2014, it had about half of its mandated 12,600 personnel.

“That’s the international environment for you — it is difficult,” said Col. Joost de Wolf of the Netherlands, MINUSMA’s deputy chief of staff of operations. “The whole art of it is to coordinate things and to deconflict. Make sure [entities] are not operating in the same sort of area at the same time. There’s quite a lot of real estate in Mali; it’s twice the size of France.”

After its first year, MINUSMA can boast some successes, including maintaining order during a 2013 presidential election and facilitating the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced people to the nation’s north. With its patchwork of international, continental and regional players, MINUSMA demonstrates what the future of multilateral peacekeeping may look like on the African continent. The long and winding path to the creation of MINUSMA from 2012 to 2013 also highlights the strengths and shortcomings of the African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA).

A Look Back

Early in 2012, after a coup d’état in Mali, West African heads of state met in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ougadougou, Burkina Faso, to coordinate a response. The goal was to persuade the Malian junta that had seized power to return the country to civilian governance.

When that stalled, leaders began activating the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Standby Force. The force was authorized to prepare an intervention in March 2012 under the name of the ECOWAS Mission in Mali. However, several impediments prevented the standby force from intervening quickly. First, it became clear that it would be difficult to persuade countries, many of which have security concerns at home, to contribute enough troops for the mission. Second, the estimated annual cost of $227 million for the peacekeeping endeavor was unaffordable and required assistance from outside donors. Third, some of the countries most closely connected with northern Mali –– Algeria and Mauritania –– are not members of ECOWAS, and there was not a similarly developed standby force from North Africa.

To make the intervention more continental, the African Union stepped up in June 2012 and created the African-led International Support Mission in Mali (AFISMA) to bolster and train the Malian Army to restore peace. In November 2012, the AU’s Peace and Security Council adopted a plan for a harmonized intervention. The U.N. Security Council voted to authorize the mission but did not provide financial or logistical support. As 2012 drew to a close, extremists consolidated their gains in northern Mali and civilians fled by the hundreds of thousands, but a U.N. envoy and former Italian prime minister, Romano Prodi, announced that any military intervention likely was nearly a year away.

The slow pace may have emboldened extremists who marched south, capturing the city of Kona and appearing poised to push into the capital, Bamako. In January 2013, France responded to pleas for help from Mali’s interim president and launched Operation Serval. In a matter of months, in partnership with Chadian and other regional forces, the countries were able to retake and secure northern Mali. The MINUSMA mission was officially established in April 2013 and launched with a “rehatting” ceremony for troops serving under AFISMA.

“It’s a long process,” said Maj. Gen. Jean Bosco Kazura of Rwanda, MINUSMA commander. “The problems in the north do not only concern the country of Mali. They go beyond its borders. It’s a problem that’s a bit global in the Sahel region, and the forces of the U.N. work in that realm.”

Observers have called Mali a major test for the APSA and have identified several lessons learned. Some of these were outlined in an after-action review that ECOWAS completed in February 2014 while others come from academic studies of the intervention effort.

Intervention must be rapid. The AU was criticized for not responding quickly enough to the emerging crisis in Mali. The African Standby Force (ASF) is scheduled to be fully operational across the continent by 2015 and is expected, under the most dire situations, to be capable of responding to a crisis within 30 days. However, the Malian crisis showed that much work remains. Since the crisis, ECOWAS has called for the creation of a Special Standby Two-Battalion Rapid Response Force capable of responding quickly to a deteriorating event and sustaining itself for at least 90 days. Similarly, the AU has announced it will create a rapid-reaction force called the African Capacity for Immediate Response to Crises to serve as a stopgap until the ASF is operational.

Intervention must be funded. When first proposed, AFISMA’s budget for 8,000 troops was $930 million, and the budget for 5,500 additional personnel was $458.5 million. That money was not readily available. A donor conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, was able to collect only promises for $455 million to fund the mission. The African Peace Fund, created as part of APSA, is intended to finance peace support operations through contributions by AU member states. The need for dependable funding was outlined extensively in a 2008 report.

Early warnings must be sounded and heeded. Neither the military coup nor the attempt by the north to secede from Mali came as a total shock to observers of the fragile nation. In the months leading up to the crisis, Mali had been thoroughly destabilized by a constellation of problems including drug trafficking, corruption, and the influx of weapons and fighters connected to Libya. However, no preventive action was taken. “The crisis in Mali has highlighted the gap between the rhetoric of prevention, which lies at the heart of the objectives of the AU and ECOWAS, and its actual practice,” wrote Lori-Anne Théroux-Bénoni, a researcher based in the Dakar, Senegal, office of the Institute for Security Studies. “While the AU warned against the consequences of the Libyan crisis, particularly on Mali, it did not take full measure of the fragility of the Malian state.” The Continental Early Warning System will be an important part of the framework used to prevent the next failed state in Africa.

APSA should correspond to geography. Théroux-Bénoni pointed out that the response channels of the ASF are built around Regional Economic Communities. The Malian conflict, like many that can be envisioned in the future, affects the entire region. “The Malian crisis has showed the limits of the currently geographically bound security ensemble, and might call for an architecture that is less reliant on limited geographical areas,” Théroux-Bénoni wrote. In February 2014, the leaders of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger agreed to create a regional organization known as the G5 Sahel to bring collective resources to bear on common challenges, including extremism.

Peacekeeper training must be continuous. Readiness is a constant challenge for peacekeeping missions including AFISMA and MINUSMA. U.S. Col. Daniel Hampton, a senior military advisor at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said the current model in which peacekeepers are trained and equipped before deployment without continual support and reinforcement of skills is not efficient. Hampton said Soldiers trained to proficiency on military tasks lose a part of that skill set after only 60 days. After 180 days, there is a 60 percent loss in skill retention. Hampton called for permanent training institutions in African countries to sustain the operational readiness of peacekeepers. “It is time to move beyond the reactionary nature of train-and-equip missions and create enduring capacity,” Hampton wrote.

Peacekeeping must include peace enforcement. Historically, the U.N. has been most willing to intervene in crises in which there is a “peace to keep.” However, in situations like Mali and Somalia where the goal is to win a country back from a determined and elusive extremist element, traditional peacekeeping duties must be paired with “peace enforcement” work. The U.N. acknowledged this in the creation of MINUSMA, saying it was operating in a new geopolitical context and facing threats not encountered before. Because of this, Jeffrey Feltman, U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs, said it would be critically important for MINUSMA and future missions to make a clear distinction between peacekeeping tasks of a stabilization mission and the peace enforcement and counterterrorism activities of a parallel force.