Beyond Gunboat Diplomacy

Military intervention short of full scale war is not a new phenomenon as a means of pursuing national interests. With the end of the cold war, military intervention has taken a new twist in the form of peace operations. The United States Air Force (USAF) in particular is being used as a tool of national policy in peace enforcement operations with increasing regularity. The USAF was involved in the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and maintained an air presence in both Turkey and Saudi Arabia to control the Iraqi repression of its civilian population. This involvement raised a fundamental question about when and how airpower should be used as an effective coercive force in peace enforcement operations. Peace enforcement is a military intervention in an ongoing conflict that uses military force to coerce one or more belligerents to comply with mandated restrictions. The purpose of this intervention is to create the proper security conditions such that other peace efforts such as humanitarian relief and diplomatic peacemaking can help the belligerents resolve the conflict without the use of force. This study uses Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq and the Unified Taskforce/United Nations Operations in Somalia II (UNITAF/UNOSOM II) as case studies to examine how airpower influenced these peace enforcement operations.