Ten years each week: The warrior's transformation to win the peace

Failed or failing states requiring others to establish security became one of the growing trends of the post-Cold War world, with about 80 percent of all UN peacekeeping missions occurring after 1989. U.S. operations also steered away from conventional war towards something very different: In the past decade, the U.S.'s stability and reconstruction (S&R) operations outnumber those tried during the entire Cold War, with the U.S, launching a new S&R operation every two years.; Despite this rise in S&R missions, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps have not created special purpose forces, designed primarily for S&R environments, such as a constabulary. This study investigates the following puzzle: Why have the Army and Marine Corps decided against creating a constabulary capability to respond to the rise in S&R operations since the end of the Cold War? In investigating this query, related questions shall be explored: How did the Army and Marine Corps choose to respond to this rise in S&R missions? What force structure and/or doctrinal options did they accept? Which did they reject? And, why?; The study tests four theories to answer those questions: neorealism, service culture, bureaucratic politics, and organizational inertia. Primary document research and interviews with over one hundred military and civilian leaders led to the conclusion that service culture provides the most rich explanation of the Army's and Marine Corps' response S&R missions. The Army and Marine Corps rejected several proposals that recommended creating a constabulary, largely due to service culture. However, this study's conclusions challenge the idea of a stagnant service culture that opposes S&R missions. Repeated deployments to S&R missions began to soften a Cold War hardened service culture to slowly allow for some types of adaptation (improving S&R doctrine, increasing military police, civil affairs, and other high demand, low density units) while consistently rejecting others (policing and reconstruction duties, creating a constabulary) that more directly challenged the warrior ethos. After September 11, President Bush declared that weak states could threaten the U.S. as much as strong states in his 2002 National Security Strategy. Connecting the target of S&R operations (weak states) to U.S. survival gave a neorealist boost to a service culture that increasingly valued S&R operations.