Framing Compellent Strategies
Abstract
The United States occasionally seeks to compel or coerce others, either nations or nonstate actors. To do so, it threatens use of force but, ideally, wants to prevail without actually using force. The analytic language surrounding "compellence" focuses on point outcomes. However, most cases of compellence turn out not to have point outcomes, but instead have been campaigns. For example, the United States was still dealing with Saddam Hussein almost a decade after Desert Storm. In recent experience, the task of compelling has seemed to vary across three broad categories, each with a celebrated case in point: compelling major regional adversaries (Iraq); compelling would-be nuclear weapons proliferators (India); and compelling in circumstances rife with ambiguity, involving such considerations as U.S. stakes, who was to be compelled, and how much control the targets of compellence had over their own forces (Haiti). Efforts to compel Milosevic appeared, in terms of U.S. interests, to straddle the Iraq and Haiti categories; moreover, the Kosovo campaign was conducted as our research proceeded, and so it was added as a fourth case. Other cases were examined in less detail in each category.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2000
- Accession Number
- ADA390476
Entities
People
- Gregory F. Treverton
Organizations
- RAND Corporation