Avoiding The Slippery Slope: Conducting Effective Interventions

Intervention in foreign states poses major challenges for policymakers and military strategists. Mounted to alleviate a humanitarian crisis, end a civil conflict, or replace a tyrannical regime, such operations put conventional armed forces in situations for which they are ill-equipped and inadequately trained. For this reason, the U.S. Army has historically counseled against undertaking such operations. Unless obvious and urgent strategic interests are at stake, Congress and the American people have usually not supported intervention. Even when public opinion favored getting involved, support waned as costs rose and casualties mounted. American Presidents have thus been understandably wary of intervening in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state unless clearly discernible U.S. interests were at stake and/or the intervention could be kept limited and so raise no serious opposition at home. Operations in the Caribbean during the interwar period, the era of gunboat diplomacy,
followed this pattern.
The end of the Cold War, however, changed the security environment, providing more opportunities for intervention in places far from the traditional American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. Since the end of the Cold War, American interests and sometimes American values have motivated Presidents to intervene in places they would not previously have gone. U.S. forces have alleviated famines, restored democracy, stopped genocide, and backed rebels seeking to overthrow a brutal dictator. While many of these operations were unpopular at the time, the White House overcame domestic opposition and saw most missions through to a successful conclusion.
Success does not mean, however, that the missions proceeded smoothly. Mistakes proved costly in both lives and money.
The likelihood that the United States will intervene somewhere in the foreseeable future requires that these mistakes be identified and corrected. This Letort Paper examines U.S. interventions over the past 20 years, a new era of interventionism in which missions were larger and took place much farther afield than previously, in order to identify best practices and common errors. Using a broad analytical framework, the author identifies patterns and derives lessons from past campaigns in hopes of improving the conduct of future ones. This Paper should be of value to strategists and policymakers alike.