May 4, 2010 | 1:47 pm
Courtesy Of The Wired Danger Room
When the Pentagon released its master strategy document earlier this year, the document contained an interesting phrase: The military needed to focus on “preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities or large-scale natural disasters abroad.”
The insertion of that line into the Quadrennial Defense Review marked a paradigm shift: Previous versions of the strategic plan included no such references to stopping “mass atrocities” as a military imperative. It was a quiet victory for advocates of a new vision of U.S. national power that would make genocide prevention a military priority.
And while genocide-prevention hasn’t been fully embraced by every arm of the military, it’s building momentum. In an event tomorrow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Army Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) will unveil the Mass Atrocity Response Operations military planning handbook, a step-by-step guide written by and for military planners that outlines how to stop a genocide.
How, exactly, would it work? Ideally, the handbook’s designers have argued, you stop a genocide before it happens, through diplomatic action, political pressure or pre-emptive deployment of a protective force. But sometimes you may have to go in heavy. Scott Feil, a retired Army officer who is a member of the project’s core planning group, has argued that a 5,000-strong task force from a modern military would have been sufficient to stop the killing in Rwanda.
It’s part of a larger effort by the Carr Center and PKSOI to sell the concepts of genocide prevention within the Pentagon and the national-security establishment. As Sally Chin, MARO Project Director at the Harvard Kennedy School, told Danger Room: “the 2006 National Security Strategy states that the US may be required to stop genocide or mass killings through armed intervention – but until the 2010 QDR, no official source directed the military to prepare or plan for such a contingency.”
This kind of project is supposed to reach an audience that matters most: The military’s powerful regional combatant commands. Why is this important? For starters, it could become the launching point for future military interventions. In delivering an annual threat assessment to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said: “Looking ahead over the next five years, a number of countries in Africa and Asia are at significant risk for a new outbreak of mass killing. All of the countries at significant risk have or are at high risk for experiencing internal conflicts or regime crises and exhibit one or more of the additional risk factors for mass killing. Among these countries, a new mass killing or genocide is most likely to occur in Southern Sudan.”
In other words, the U.S. government needs to be prepared for — and perhaps militarily plan for — intervening to stop mass killings. That doesn’t necessarily mean U.S. boots on the ground: Intervention, broadly speaking, could include a diplomatic offensive to prevent an outbreak of violence. Or it could mean convincing regional security organizations — the African Union, for instance — to deploy their own peacekeepers. But as the earlier MARO primer noted, U.S. combatant commands are likely to end up as “first responders” in some capacity if such an incident happens.
The “G word” is still politically fraught. Most recently, President Barack Obama had to dance around the subject in a statement to mark Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, which commemorates the mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.
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