After the Iraq fiasco I think a little humility should be in order. Grand schemes for "world governance" have a tendency to go wrong, and it's hard to come up with a definition of "rogue" that doesn't include too many countries.

The limitations on the peacekeepers were part of the broader context of trying not to simply invade the place and trigger conflict with Russia (e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/18/world/us-clashes-with-russ... ), a pattern which continues today in Syria.

It really is, why even bother sending them? Even if the directive was to break contact when fired on, you can't safely do that without firing back! It's just absurd, and unnecessarily dangerous for the soldiers on the ground.

Indeed. This is partly why people are so sensitive about anti-Muslim rhetoric and policy in the West today. It's an alarmingly short slippery slope from "send them back" to "send them back and burn their houses" (e.g. Rohingya) to "just hand them over so we can murder them" to "send in the genocide squads", as in Srebrenica that was mentioned at the end of the article.

This trust is a result of intentional training towards enabling everyone down to private to know when to make a decision and when to bother chain of command. It's not only training of management, it's more like a culture.

I guess this post in part has some traction with hn because mission command seems like a wonderful management technique. Just let the people who knows best and have first hand information make efficient decisions, fast, right? But it actually takes good people and a lot of training to work in practice. On every level there has to be a "feeling" of what's reasonable. And management, in turn, must learn when to step back, and maybe more importantly not punish afterwards when equipped with hindsight.

(Served two years in swedish army, too young for Bosnia myself but couple of my officers were in nordbat2)

HN titles have an 80 character limit.

The dash doesn't fit.