Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention

(Paperback)

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Despite worldwide internecine ethnic and political conflict, humanitarian intervention by the international community has been effective in several high-profile cases, helping save thousands of lives in Somalia and ending genocide in Bosnia and Kosovo. However, a sufficient capacity for multilateral humanitarian intervention does not yet exist. In this volume, Michael O'Hanlon presents a blueprint for saving lives through force. He suggests new ways of spreading the responsibility for intervention forces onto regional powers. Ultimately, he contends, individual countries must develop the aggregate capacity to react nearly simultaneously to several crises of varying scale and severity.

Reviews

"A straightforward and passionate appeal to the United States' and the United Nations' role in preventing mass atrocities, Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention is a highly commended effort to personal, professional, governmental, academic, and community library Contemporary International Studies collections." Bookwatch

"With this extended essay, Michael E. O'Hanlon, a thoughtful and respected policy analyst with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, has made and effective and, on the whole, persuasive case for a greater international effort to increase the 'global capacity for humanitarian intervention and peace operations.'" Mats Berdal, Kings College London, RUSI Journal, 8/1/2003

"The book's most useful contribution is its third chapter, a global survey of force projection capability. It reaches the remarkable conclusion that whereas 62 per cent of US troops are quickly deployable, only three per cent of the seven million standing forces in the rest of the world are (p. 56)." Alan J. Kuperman, School of Advanced International Studies, Bologna, Italy, Contemporary Security Policy, 8/1/2003

"Expanding Global Military Capacity for Humanitarian Intervention, by Michael O'Hanlon, provides an insightful look at this overlooked area that often accompanies U.S. conflicts." Captain George Galdorisi, U.S. Navy (retired), United States Naval Institute Proceedings, 3/1/2004

Author Bio

Michael E. O'Hanlon is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair. His recent books include The Future of Arms Control (Brookings, 2005; with Michael A. Levi), Neither Star Wars nor Sanctuary (Brookings, 2004), and Crisis on the Korean Peninsula (McGraw Hill, 2003; with Mike Mochizuki).