NATO's crisis management in the Balkans

Abstract

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces are currently deployed in three Balkan states: Bosnia-Herzegovina; Yugoslavia, in the province of Kosovo; and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). These three deployments represent NATO's attempts to date to conduct crisis management operations, a mission the Alliance adopted in the early 1990s and now a fundamental security task alongside collective defense. In view of the increasing importance of crisis management in NATO activities, this thesis analyzes the Balkan operations to identify lessons that can be applied to future doctrines. NATO's 1991 and 1999 Strategic Concepts are reviewed to illustrate the development of NATO's crisis management doctrine. Each Balkan intervention is examined to clarify NATO's crisis management failures and successes, and to assess apparent lessons. The thesis compares the lessons learned with the crisis management doctrine contained in the 2001 NATO Handbook, and offers recommendations for revisions to take fuller account of the lessons learned in the Balkans.