 Welcome to the U.S. Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. NWC Talks features our world-class experts examining national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. The United Nations is the most prominent intergovernmental organization in the world. Of likely interest in national security professionals, the UN has become increasingly active in political and operational scenarios with almost four to UN Security Council mandated missions and offices. Most national security practitioners will likely have encountered elements of the UN at some point in their careers. For all these encounters, though, the UN's fieldwork is a complex, often misunderstood endeavor, so this episode will explore how its work is authorized, formed, and resourced. I'll chat with Colonel Ross Coffey, Military Professor of National Security Affairs, and I'm eager to share my views gained from service to the United Nations Organization and through personal research and reflection. The content of this video stands between the so-called first and third UNs and it zeroes in on the fieldwork of the Agency's Funds and Programs, or AFPs, and its peace operations before closing on the debate on effectiveness. I'll start with the AFPs, which are relatively permanent organizations that will be contrasted later with the purpose-built peace operations. Within this category, there are the specialized agencies or those autonomous organizations that have been brought into the UN through negotiated agreements. These have a long history with the Universal Postal Union established in the 19th century and the International Label Organization formed by the League of Nations. The Bretton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank formed during World War II are also considered to specialize agencies, as is the World Health Organization that has gained more public interest due to COVID-19. The other types of relatively permanent organizations are the funds and programs. Examples include the UN Development Fund that seeks to eradicate poverty, the World Food Program, aiming at ridding hunger and malnutrition, and the UN Children's Fund, or UNICEF, with the goal of defending children's rights. Despite their independent nature, specialized agencies receive partial funding from member state-assessed contributions, whereas the funds and programs are funded entirely through voluntary contributions. Partly due to the voluntary nature of contributions, funds and programs operate inside a member state on a partnership basis, which also provides the local authority for the funder program to operate. As an example, the World Food Program fulfills member state needs by providing the actual food and, in some cases, logistical support, and member states also play a role in requesting its intervention and directing its capabilities once delivered. Conversely, the authority for the specialized agencies to work in a particular member state is derived through negotiated agreements with that member state, which also affects the way the specialized agencies are funded. As a recent example, the 45th president's noticed withdrawal from the World Health Organization, effective July 6, 2021, illustrated the relationship with member states and specialized agencies. If the U.S. were to have affected its withdrawal, the U.S. would have been no longer obligated to transfer its $200 million-plus in assessed contributions, more simpler terms, dues, nor would its $400 million-plus in donations or voluntary contributions likely proceed, although the U.S. would not have gained the ardual benefit from the World Health Organization's coordination with other member states and stakeholders to reduce the avoidable loss of life or the burden of disease. Funds and programs at the international level are also reliant on member state support at the national level and are therefore affected by their shortcomings or withholdings, as this Wall Street Journal article asserting Chinese reluctance demonstrates. A second example of the U.S. field operations are represented by ad hoc peace operations. U.N. peace operations are formed based on the need and take two forms, peacekeeping missions or missions generally established to maintain or monitor some sort of peace agreement and special political missions and offices or those missions established to create favorable political conditions in support of peace. As of early 2021, there were 12 peacekeeping operations, the majority of which are in Africa with two in Europe, three in Le Bon in the Middle East and one observing the ceasefire in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. These are complemented by 25 special political missions and other political presences with over half in Africa, three in Latin and South America, three in Asia, two in Europe and six in the Middle East. The United Nations Charter provides a legal basis for these operations, with chapters six and seven being the most relevant and chapter eight being applicable. Chapter six authorizes the Security Council to settle disputes through peaceful means. Chapter seven authorizes the Security Council to take binding action by air, sea or land forces to maintain or restore international peace and security. Chapter eight focuses on regional arrangements such as the African Union or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Despite the wide range and missions in scope, these missions share the similarity of deriving their legal authority from UN Security Council mandate as opposed to a negotiated agreement with the affected member state. UN peace operations are themselves emergent evolutionary instruments in that they were never originally nor are presently explicitly identified in the United Nations Charter. The World's 42 and 43 foreshadowed peace operations by establishing the Security Council to authorize to take action and by stating all member states will avail to it armed forces, assistants and facilities. These articles were invoked a few short years after the founding of the United Nations with the establishment of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, the world's first peace operation to bring a cessation of hostilities in the Palestine and mandating the availability of military observers. Since that start over seven decades ago, the Security Council has mandated some sort of United Nations peace operation in all six of the inhabited continents. Although they share some common organizational elements and structural titles, there are often more differences than there are similarities. Large peacekeeping operations have extensive military commitments with a number in Africa each having over 10,000 armed personnel. Contrast this against smaller missions such as the UN Truce Supervision Organization described earlier where the UN mission for the referendum in Western Sahara with unarmed military observers numbering in the hundreds. Submissions have sizable police components with over 2,000 individually contributed police officers and foreign police units while other missions having zero police authorizations within their mandate. The size and composition of the substantive sections in both types of peace operations vary greatly depending on the need. Large missions have thousands of UN international civilians, local hires and UN volunteers and post-supporting reconciliations, stabilization or adjustment of correction type tasks while others are limited to public affairs sections. The same dynamic exists for the mission's sport elements as does its budgets. This provides the theoretical benefit of UN missions being purpose built and technically authorize those exact capabilities required to implement mandated tasks. In reality, there are some complicating factors, first of which is the mandates themselves. Varying widely in both scope and duration, these mandates are informally governed by the so-called penholder system, where certain members of the Security Council either take or assign responsibility to draft mandates and mandate renewals and to convene Security Council meetings on the subject. By virtue of their permanent membership, France, the I.K. and the I.D. states are penholders for the majority of mission mandates. Russia shares the pan on a couple and elected members from the Western Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin American groups hold a small minority of comparatively limited scope mandates. The possibility of penholding member-state national political interests affecting the direction and scope of UN missions should be clear. The other related factor is while the Security Council has the authority to decide which mission should be undertaken, it cannot govern how mandates are actually executed because they don't have explicit control or, more importantly, command of the member-state contributed capabilities. About this discussion on the Security Council and beyond the member-state contributions in either the form of individuals or contingents, the General Assembly plays a complementary and possibly complicating role in UN peace operations. The UN's charter establishes that the General Assembly shall consider and prove the budget of the UN organization, which includes the regular budget that funds special political missions and the set-aside peacekeeping budget. This authority theoretically gives member-states a significant role in what peace operations can and should accomplish. In practice, the laborious nature of advancing mission budgets through the advisory committee on administrative and budgetary questions to the General Assembly's fifth committee, and then on to the 193-member General Assembly, means that budgets lag behind mandates by factors of several months, if not an outright year. Time prohibits me from diving into the member-state withholding of assessed contributions, which is another further complication. Countries from every inhabited continent contribute either individuals or formed units to UN peace operations. As of August 2020, there were over 80,000 contributed individuals and units from 119 countries or over 60% of the UN's member-states. The so-called Global South generally contributes more than developed nations, with Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Nepal, and India identified in October 2020 as the top five contributors. China is the largest contributor among the five UN Security Council permanent members with the United Kingdom and France also contributing individuals and formed units. The Russian Federation and the United States contribute individuals. Reasons for contributions greatly vary and very much reflect member-state national political interest. The top contributor as of August 2020, Bangladesh, exceeding number two Ethiopia by a single peacekeeper, funds a sizable portion of its defense budget based on General Assembly-approved reimbursement of contributed capabilities. African nations with sizable contributions, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, Ghana, Morocco, Tanzania, Chad, and Togo contribute to UN missions in Africa because other regional organizations such as the African Union cannot reliably fund peace operations, hence the necessity to contribute to UN finance operations or more explicitly member-state finance operations that address regional and continental threats to peace and stability. Rwanda in particular was scarred by the mid-90s genocide and the lack of international involvement in peace building and it has since determined that it will actively contribute to peace building and other regions in Africa and it is a source of national pride. In Pakistan are so-called historic contributors to peace operations and gain similar national pride as well as relative monetary guidance in their capacity to export security. Comparatively small nations such as Nepal, Uruguay, Zambia, and Mongolia seek to gain international notoriety through contributing to UN peace operations. China has rumored interest in the successor to a French undersecretary general for peace operations Laquan at the expiration of his term, which may account for its present interests in contributing to peace operations and it's also possible China is exceeding military experimentation or exerting bilateral soft power on the margins of their former contributions to UN missions. These developments are occurring against a backdrop of on-the-ground criticisms levied at Chinese contributions. In 2016, Chinese peacekeepers abandoned a protection and civilian site, leaving 5,000 South Sudanese to be subject to violence and in some cases sexual violence. China's peacekeeping contribution in 2018 was circumspect in failing to deploy required engineer equipment to Mali in order to assume mandated force protection tasks. Beyond China, all member state contributions remain under national command, thus possibly limiting the UN's exercise of operational authority with all the predictable shortfalls associated with the lack of actual command. Considering the categories I've discussed in building off the shortcomings of Chinese peacekeepers, it's questionable if the fieldwork of the second UN is effective. There are several dimensions to this question, but the first being operational effectiveness. A prominent example of the second UN not actually meeting needs, but instead mired in corruption, is founded the Oil for Food Program. A UN internal investigation found lapses in management and oversight and outright corruption in the administration of contracts that effectively allowed Saddam Hussein's regime to earn as much as 11 billion wall under sanctions. Sexual exploitation and abuse perpetrated by the second UN gained such prominence in the mid-2010s that Secretary General Guterres established a high-level panel reporting directly to him on the subject. Suspected corruption on the part of the World Food Program is pretty much generally and regrettably assumed everywhere it operates. These vignettes calling the question the AFP's effectiveness writ large. There are also mixed views on peace operations. Early peace operations focused on peace enforcement have been viewed as successes, including the UN disengagement force and the Golan Heights keeping the peace between Israel and Syria and the UN force and Cyprus preventing hostilities between Greek and Turkish communities. The 2018 disestablishment of the UN peace operation in Liberia suggests operational success in that the host country political institutions were able to evolve in their own and promote a relatively peaceful transition of political power. Conversely, complex missions such as the multiple UN missions in Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are generally viewed as unsuccessful with Somalia remaining a failed state after almost 30 years and the fact there has been some sort of large UN mission in the Congo since the 1960s. The recent declaration at the end of the western Sahara sees fire after 29 years suggests the UN mission did not create favorable conditions for resolution of the speech. A second dimension is that of strategic effectiveness. Missions and mandates on the former Yugoslavia are one example. Initially authorizing intervention under Chapter 8 in 1991 or the Regional Arrangements Chapter, the UN Security Council decided to defer to the EU diplomatic efforts in hopes of a peaceful settlement of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. While these regional efforts failed, the UN Security Council authorized a peacekeeping mission in 1992 to maintain a ceasefire with Croatia, deliver humanitarian aid and relieve Sarajevo. This mandate was not accompanied by the political will in the part of the first United Nations or the member states to contribute the resources and after events like the 1995 Severinites massacre the UN's roles and missions were supplanted by the NATO Implementation Force and later the NATO Stabilization Force. Situations in Mali and the Central African Republic have worsened over time despite the commitment of almost 20,000 military police and civil staff to each of these missions. Beyond some of the operational critiques provided previously and considering the possibility that the majority of member state monetary contributions and donations to the AFPs don't make it the last mile, it would be difficult to say if the operations at the second UN have been strategically successful with these track records. So, the case then be made to continue to support the funding of the second UN or should the case be made to terminate membership in the AFPs and this establishes the ad-hoc missions, transferring them instead to the purview of member state-led coalitions or regional arrangements. In response, there are a few inherent advantages to consider. Even though they are the single greatest cost among all the UN's field operations, UN peace operations are far less monetary expensive. A 2018 Government Accountability Office report identified that a hypothetical comparable U.S. operation would cost twice as much as that of the UN's current mission in the Central African Republic. Specific comparative data isn't available but considering UN operations have the benefit of drawing from a more diverse pool of resources than if a member state were to contribute all the capability of resources, the same would likely be true for other missions. Another advantage is that UN operations have the greater probability of impartiality, meaning that the resources of NGOs and super-empowered individuals are more likely to be failed and integrated with UN peace operations to achieve complementary effects. The fact that each UN mission, either peacekeeping or special political missions, is led by a civilian that supervises the heads of military and police components and leads to the substantive sections suggests that civil integration can be achieved at the field level as opposed to required to come together at the headquarters level. The UN as an organization has a degree of referent convening authority that is not found in any other intergovernmental organization, so for only this reason it represents a corresponding degree of effectiveness not found anywhere else. Beyond these local measures however whether the work of the second UN is viewed as politically and internationally effective largely depends on the eye of the beholder. Realists assess that the UN's fieldwork could likely take a limited view of the UN because it might impinge on national sovereignty. They might note the UN's imposing political wills depend on a member state capabilities and assess contributions. Liberalists could place a much higher value on UN operations given that member state political power is exercised through a framework of international norms of cooperation. Those valuing constructivism might point towards the UN's shaping and implementing of norms behavior such as the value of human rights and the responsibility to protect. In a lot of these differences perhaps a better way to consider the question is to recognize the UN's work in the field will remain a political endeavor that is only one part of an international solution to a problem and one that is interrelated with the first United Nations political will at the member state level. Therefore national security professionals should identify how and where the inherent advantages of the UN's fieldwork can offset the inherent disadvantages of independently operating member states, coalitions, and regional arrangements as well as the reverse where the UN's fieldwork will need the political support of member states if it is to succeed. Reflecting on this talk I hope I illuminated how the operations of the second UN are funded, authorized, and formed. If they haven't already national security professionals and practitioners will likely encounter either an agency funder program or a peace operation at some point over the course of their careers and it's my hope that you are better able to contribute to the debate concerning the UN's role and how member states should view and support its fieldwork. Thanks for joining me and exploring the second United Nations.