This is an important and timely book, which will interest a wide audience. It deserves serious consideration from soldiers and police, lawyers, legislators, and students of the security sector and its evolution.
Work in domestic jurisdictions is what engages most military forces most of the time. Although every one of the cases represented in this volume appears in the Correlates of War data (version 5.0 covering 1816 to 2014) their international conflicts since the end of the Cold War and even further back represent a tiny proportion of their total military effort. However we measure it, by person years, proportion of military expenditure, or named operations, most military forces are overwhelmingly engaged at home. The civil-military relations and legal frameworks for these operations, however, vary widely, and merit close examination in the light of emerging challenges.
Pauline Collins’ and Rosalie Arcala Hall’s collection of case studies of military operation in domestic jurisdiction is wide-ranging, balanced and a useful starting point for further comparative work. Amongst the 16 cases are six federal states, seven unitary states, and three devolved states. Looking at forms of government, we find seven presidential systems, six constitutional monarchies, two parliamentary republics, and one military junta. Africa, South and Central Asia, and the former Soviet Union are not represented in the collection, and this invites new work along similar comparative lines. Those familiar with these regions will find echoes in many of the cases, but also contrasts, particularly in the role of interior ministry troops and paramilitary border guards, occupying the domestic operational space between police and military forces.
At least three factors suggest that the home front will be even more important for military forces in the future. As countries grapple with natural disasters and the accelerating consequences of climate change, military call-outs are likely to increase. Organized crime, terrorism, and insurgency are recurring threats to the domestic integrity of states. State space is changing with technology and globalization, and defence of state territory and population can no longer be confined to its borders. Beyond these factors which increase demand for military engagement in the domestic sphere, changes to states may interrupt the supply of reliable military forces to respond to call-outs. A close reading of the legal, political, and social context of call-out cases will highlight some of the challenges states may face in the future.
Military leaders have always resisted overcommitment to domestic operations. Military professional ideologies (Bentley, 2005) emphasize war-fighting competence, and it is on the strength of this competence that the profession makes claims for society’s resources. Spending more of their time filling sandbags and putting out domestic fires may be in the future of most professional military forces, and it will change the way that society views them. Will this in turn require new frameworks for the deployment of military forces, which may need to manage civilian labour brigades or volunteers?
Crash, Covid and Climate eclipsed the war on terror into which America led the world in the century’s opening years, but the terrorism continued. An illiberal nexus of organized crime, insurgency, and violent political challenges has morphed into new forms requiring military operations under domestic jurisdiction. Gendarme forces, internal security and border troops were creations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as paramilitary forces to control people and territory for the state. Many states reduced the military characteristics of these organizations over the twentieth century. The Belgian Gendarmerie, French Gendarmerie Nationale, Dutch Koninklijke Marechausee, and Royal Canadian Mounted Police all came to look more like national police forces than paramilitary units. Paramilitary formations between police and military help to raise the threshold for public order call-outs. Transforming paramilitary forces with light armoured vehicles and heavy weapons into a national police force with a less robust unit structure – transforming green to blue – opens a wider space for military call-outs in support of public order (Dahlberg, 2020). Amongst the cases presented here, Turkey and Mexico have the most robust military gendarme forces, but also favour the use of armed forces for internal security. The illiberal nexus of terrorism, insurgency, and organized
Smart grids, cloud computing, mobile and urban-scale software, universal addressing systems, ubiquitous computing, and robotics … form an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is not only a kind of planetary-scale computing system; it is also a new architecture for how we divide up the world into sovereign spaces.
bratton, 2015, preface
Information infrastructure allows the penetration of territory, so that citizens and politics are influenced by remote adversaries and essential infrastructure can be attacked with impunity and anonymity. National identity and cohesion can be undermined by social media and manipulation. States in rough neighbourhoods – Mongolia, Poland, Hungary, Finland, and the Baltic states, for example – are considering new domestic roles for the military. Reservists with special skills, elite cyber units, mobilization to support infrastructure, public education and ‘neighbourhood watch’ functions under military discipline might be deployed. Will they become the new price of preserving sovereignty, and are they compatible with liberal democracy? This will depend upon the legal frameworks for their use.
These three factors – climate change, the illiberal nexus, and changing state space – are increasing demand for reliable military operations in domestic jurisdiction. Both the numbers and qualities of forces demanded for operations in domestic jurisdiction and the frequency of their engagement are likely to increase. But the availability of reliable military forces may decline, driven by at least two factors. Aging democracies and federations under strain may face constitutional crises or crises of public confidence that make it harder to deploy in domestic jurisdictions. Public consent is socially constructed; when it erodes, military deployments may create security problems rather than resolve them. This is related to the character of the military being deployed. Recruiting and retaining people with the skills needed for new operations is
The legal framework for military operation and engagement in domestic jurisdiction is important for political, economic, and social understanding of national responses to the changing security environment. The comparative approach taken by Pauline Collins and Rosalie Arcala Hall provides rich material for expanding our understanding of the challenges and potential solutions that face any state and its security sector.
Dr. David Last, Royal Military College of Canada
References
Bentley, Bill. Professional Ideology and the Profession of Arms in Canada. (Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, 2005).
Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015).
Carney, Mark. Value(s): Building a Better World for All. (Signal, 2021).
Correlates of War, Militarized Interstate Disputes, version 5.0 covering 1816 to 2014. <https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/MIDs>.
Dahlberg, Rasmus and Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen. The Roles of Military and Civilian Forces in Domestic Security. Handbook of Military Sciences. (Springer, 2020).