Lifting the Fog of Hybrid War? UN Environmental Understanding in Mali

Abstract

The concepts of hybrid war and hybrid threats have become en vogue amongst politicians and practitioners in the international security domain. Murray and Mansoor (2012) illustrate that hybridity has a long history and was already present in the Peloponnesian War, French involvement in Vietnam and Algeria and the American occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. More recently, Russia’s involvement in Ukraine (see e.g. Ruiz Palmer 2015) and the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (see e.g. Jasper and Moreland 2014) have been extensively studied as examples of hybrid wars. What all these conflicts have in common is that they combine elements of interstate conflict with the fanatical fervour of irregular warfare as well as terrorism and criminal behaviour (Hoffman 2009a). As such, Hoffman (2009b, p. 15) defines a hybrid threat as “any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism and criminal behavior in the battle space to obtain their political objectives”.

1 Introduction

The concepts of hybrid war and hybrid threats have become en vogue amongst politicians and practitioners in the international security domain. Murray and Mansoor (2012) illustrate that hybridity has a long history and was already present in the Peloponnesian War, French involvement in Vietnam and Algeria and the American occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. More recently, Russia’s involvement in Ukraine (see e.g. Ruiz Palmer 2015) and the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (see e.g. Jasper and Moreland 2014) have been extensively studied as examples of hybrid wars . What all these conflicts have in common is that they combine elements of interstate conflict with the fanatical fervour of irregular warfare as well as terrorism and criminal behaviour (Hoffman 2009a). As such, Hoffman (2009b, p. 15) defines a hybrid threat as “any adversary that simultaneously and adaptively employs a fused mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism and criminal behavior in the battle space to obtain their political objectives”.

One of the key areas identified by NATO (2010) as crucial to effectively counter hybrid threats is labelled environmental understanding. ¹ Due to the multifaceted nature of hybrid conflicts , understanding the enemy alone is no longer sufficient. Consequently, scholars have conceptualised the intelligence activities conducted during military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan as the effort to achieve environmental understanding (see e.g. Flynn et al. 2010; Kitzen et al. 2013). These studies reflected upon new initiatives such as population-centric intelligence (Kitzen 2012), cultural intelligence (Spencer and Balasevicius 2009), ethnographic intelligence (Perugini 2008) and human terrain system (McFate and Fondacaro 2011). These initiatives have contributed to our understanding of how to gain a wider and more comprehensive environmental understanding that covers multiple and interrelated domains including but not limited to political, socio-economic and security issues.

The effort to acquire environmental understanding, however, has not been limited to the United States and NATO . The United Nations (UN) too has revised its intelligence capabilities accordingly. As argued by Abilova and Novosseloff (2016, p. 8), the UN “possesses a ‘human richness ’ like no other international organisation . With its personnel scattered across the world, the UN can be close to local populations and have a deep knowledge of the societies and traditions in the contexts where it intervenes”.

UN experience with environmental understanding has culminated into the deployment of a significant and innovative intelligence capability within its Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA ) that started in 2013 .

As this chapter will show, the conflict in Mali can be regarded as a hybrid war. A thorough analysis of the UN experience of environmental understanding in Mali is therefore important to understand how to tackle the challenges posed by hybrid threats . Since civil-military cooperation (CIMIC ) is crucial for addressing hybrid threats, interactions between military and civilian actors in the field of intelligence deserve specific attention. This chapter sheds light on this unexplored subject by examining the importance of CIMIC to obtain environmental understanding during operation MINUSMA . To this end, Section 2 briefly introduces UN peacekeeping missions , emphasising the increasing importance of environmental understanding in present missions. Section 3 outlines the conflict in Mali and its hybrid character, focusing on the deployment of MINUSMA . Section 4 addresses the intelligence network that was involved in obtaining environmental understanding. Section 5 provides an analysis of MINUSMA ’s intelligence processes, examining the main challenges to effective environmental understanding. Section 6 shows that due to the wide array of UN actors in the field, ranging from military personnel to development and humanitarian workers , CIMIC was crucial to obtaining and disseminating environmental understanding. Section 7 discusses the findings of the chapter and draws conclusions .

2 The Changing Character of UN Peacekeeping Missions

Starting in the late 1940s, UN peacekeeping has evolved from small ad hoc arrangements to complex, long-lasting operations involving hundreds of thousands of peacekeepers around the world. This evolution has also shaped the way in which UN peacekeepers acquire environmental understanding.

To unravel the changing character of UN peacekeeping missions, four main distinctive periods can be identified, each with its own features (Koops et al. 2015). During the so-called early experiences from 1948 to 1963 as well as during the Cold War period, UN peacekeeping generally consisted of monitoring ceasefires and interposition missions. The operations were based on three characteristics that are still at the heart of UN peacekeeping: neutrality , consent of the host state and the use of force for self-defence purposes only. During this period, UN peacekeepers were rarely involved in enforcement actions and expressed little desire for the type of environmental understanding needed for conventional military operations (Dorn 2010).

The third period identified by Koops et al. (2015) is the post-Cold War period up to 1998. The UN peacekeeping missions launched during that phase took place in a much more complex and hostile environment. In these circumstances, UN peacekeepers frequently got involved in activities such as protecting humanitarian aid , disarming belligerent factions, monitoring fragile ceasefires and negotiating agreements between reluctant warring parties. Moreover, several missions saw the use of force against UN personnel. This changing context made the need for adequate and timely environmental understanding all the more pressing (Smith 1994, p. 174).

The fourth period of UN peacekeeping —the twenty-first century—was characterised by the development of broader and more complex mandates (Koops et al. 2015). UN missions were supposed to be integrated, which meant that efforts were to be coordinated amongst the wider constellation of UN actors and not just amongst peacekeepers. With the exception of the monitoring mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea , most missions were multidimensional and included military, police, and civilian personnel . Koops et al. (2015, p. 613) state that the mandates “generally tasked the peacekeepers with supporting the post-settlement authorities in extending and consolidating their authority and capabilities across a wide range of sectors from reconstituting the rule of law , assisting security sector reform , bolstering democratic institutions, and protecting civilians”. During these missions, environmental understanding remained of crucial importance in order to address increasingly complex operational mandates.

In sum, a historical overview of UN peacekeeping reveals a trend away from more straightforward deployments. Operation MINUSMA demonstrates this change to increasingly complex operations covering many of the tasks now considered crucial to tackle hybrid threats .

3 The Conflict in Mali as a Hybrid War

The origins of the current crisis in Mali date back to January 2012, when the country saw the fourth Tuareg rebellion since its independence in 1960. The rebels consisted of local Tuareg separatists and Tuareg of Malian origin who had served as mercenaries in Gaddafi’s Libya and united themselves in the Mouvement national pour la libération de l’Azawad (MNLA ) (Boeke 2016). These rebel forces soon occupied a large part of northern Mali and declared the independence of this territory, which they call Azawad (Boutellis 2015). The poor performance of the Armed Forces of Mali in suppressing the rebellion triggered a coup d’état in March 2012 by frustrated army officers in Mali’s capital, Bamako . President Amadou Toumani Touré fled, and the country fell into political chaos (Boeke and Tisseron 2014) .

Meanwhile, the Tuareg fight in the north of Mali accelerated, and by April 2012 about two-thirds of Mali’s territory had fallen into rebel hands. Two months later, however, the MNLA ’s occupation was effectively stopped. An alliance of jihadist groups comprised of Ansar Dine , the Al-Qaida of the Islamic Maghreb and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa drove away the MNLA and imposed Sharia law on the conquered territory. During this period, a large-scale destruction of cultural heritage took place, most infamously in the city of Timbuktu. Meanwhile, while these jihadist groups were in control of northern Mali, they ran terrorist training camps and attracted foreign fighters from all over the world (Boeke and Tisseron 2014). This state of lawlessness was further magnified by the great amount of illicit trafficking including drugs, cigarettes and human beings .

By the end of 2012, negotiations between the interim Malian government, the MNLA and some jihadist groups came to an end. The march of Islamist groups towards Mali’s capital Bamako triggered Serval, launched in January 2013, the French military operation aimed at ousting the jihadist groups (Boutellis 2015). During the first days of operation Serval , French troops carried out heavy combat operations and killed a few hundred fighters. As a result, local resistance crumbled rapidly and armed groups largely vanished into the isolated desert of northern Mali. Soon after, France supported the idea of deploying a UN mission in Mali as “an exit strategy for its forces and as a way to ‘multilateralize’ the intervention” (Boutellis 2015). Regardless of whether or not there was any peace to keep, Security Council members supported the idea of a UN mission. On April 25, 2013, they therefore established the MINUSMA . In broad terms, MINUSMA ’s task was to ensure the stabilisation of key population centres, protect civilians and guide the political reform process (Lotze 2015). To achieve this, MINUSMA consisted of approximately 500 international civilians, 120 UN volunteers, over 1000 policemen and up to 15,000 soldiers (UN 2015). These military troops originated from 41 different nations including European countries (e.g. Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands), African states (e.g. Egypt, Gambia, Niger, Senegal) and several others such as China and Bangladesh.

In conclusion, one can see the conflict in Mali as a form of hybrid war. Although there is still some conceptual lack of clarity surrounding hybridity (see e.g. Lasconjarias and Larsen 2015), many of the threats identified by scholars as hybrid (e.g. Jasper and Moreland 2014; McCullog and Johnson 2013; Hoffman 2009b) are clearly recognisable in the conflict in Mali (see Chap. 2 by Rinelli and Duyvesteyn). These include (1) the combination of conventional military capabilities with small-unit asymmetric tactics , terrorism and criminal activities, (2) the mixture of professional soldiers, terrorists, guerrilla fighters and criminals, (3) the use of criminal activity to sustain operations, (4) the use of terror campaigns to spread fear and hate and (5) the use of flexible and adaptable command structures .

Starting from April 2013, MINUSMA had to deal with these threats. To this end, UN leadership realised that an adequate environmental understanding was essential for the success of the operation, deploying a significant and innovative intelligence capacity that was unprecedented in UN history. The next section examines MINUSMA intelligence capabilities, introducing the main UN actors that were involved in obtaining environmental understanding.

4 The UN Intelligence Network in Mali

MINUSMA ’s civilian and military headquarters are located in Mali’s capital Bamako . The main force of MINUSMA consisted of two Sector Headquarters (SHQs) that were deployed from the start of the mission. While SHQ -West operated from Timbuktu, SHQ-East operated from Gao, capital of the homonymous region. Both SHQs commanded approximately 4000 soldiers each. Due to operational circumstances, in 2015 a third, smaller SHQ was established in Kidal to increase coverage of the northern part of the country. The battalions of MINUSMA ’s main force were deployed within these three sectors. The majority of the battalions consisted of African troops that had to perform a wide variety of tasks that included protecting the local population, escorting UN convoys and carrying out patrols .

To obtain environmental understanding, MINUSMA ’s force design contained the typical military intelligence units (designated by the number 2, according to standard military conventions) within its battalion cells (S2), Sector Headquarters cells (G2) and force headquarters cell (U2). These units were to provide MINUSMA ’s commanders with up-to-date intelligence, especially relating to security. On the civilian side, a Joint Mission Analysis Centre (JMAC ) was established to produce mission-wide and longer-term analysis.² With its products, the JMAC intended to enable senior management to “expose flawed reasoning and compartmentalised views stemming from otherwise ‘stovepiped’ UN structures” (Norheim-Martinsen and Ravndal 2011, p. 460). To do this, the JMAC contained a mixture of civilian analysts, police officers and military personnel . Apart from the JMAC , a civil-military Joint Operations Centre (JOC) was established to provide 24/7 situational awareness on current operations and facilitate coordination of operational activities (Abilova and Novosseloff 2016). Other civilian UN actors that were involved in obtaining adequate environmental understanding included the UN Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS ) and UN Police (UNPOL ) .

Despite the presence of similar force structures, previous missions proved unable to provide sufficient environmental understanding. This was caused by the relatively small capabilities of the units as well as the lack of adequate technological equipment. To help address these deficiencies, Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Hervé Ladsous requested that MINUSMA be enhanced with additional intelligence capacity. After lengthy negotiations, this request resulted in the creation of ASIFU : the All Sources Information Fusion Unit. Once several Western European countries decided to provide the necessary assets, the ASIFU was deployed in March 2014. The main mission of ASIFU was to provide intelligence capacity and “contribute especially to traditionally non-military intelligence analysis, such as illegal trafficking and narcotics-trade; ethnic dynamics and tribal tensions; corruption and bad governance within Mali and MINUSMA area of interest” (UN DPKO 2015). This wide range of topics was often referred to as X-PMESII , indicating (again, following NATO jargon conventions) that information was to be gathered and analysed on Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and Information domains. The X (cross) implied that these domains were interconnected and could not be seen separately. By doing this, ASIFU aims at improving

the processing and production of MINUSMA broad information and intelligence in order to have accessible and useable information on time. This will support the decision-making processes on the operational (force headquarters) and tactical (G2) level. But ASIFU should also be able to support the strategic level: the special representative of the secretary-general through the JMAC and UNDSS . (First Commander ASIFU Col. Keijsers, cited in Karlsrud and Smith 2015, p. 11)

ASIFU headquarters were attached to the UN’s mission headquarters in Bamako and fall under direct command of MINUSMA ’s force commander. ASIFU ’s capacity initially consisted of 30 military officers from seven European countries (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands). Eventually, this capacity increased to approximately 70 officers .

ASIFU had two ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) units under its command that focused on intelligence gathering and analysis. The first was a Dutch-led ISR Company consisting of approximately 65 soldiers. This unit was deployed in the Eastern province of Gao from March 2014 and was attached to MINUSMA ’s SHQ-East. The second unit was a Swedish ISR taskforce. Its intelligence capacity was approximately twice the size of the Dutch-led unit and started to operate a year later, in March 2015. It was situated in the Western province of Timbuktu and was attached to MINUSMA ’s SHQ-West .

Figure 9.1 presents the organisational structure of MINUSMA , emphasising the intelligence components.³ Figure 9.2 contains a map of the most relevant geographical locations.

Fig. 9.1

MINUMSA Intelligence Structure

Fig. 9.2

Map of Mali with relevant geographical positions (MINUSMA ASIFU 2015)

The next section analyses MINUSMA ’s quest for environmental understanding along the different phases of the intelligence cycle , namely, direction, collection, processing and dissemination (see e.g. Omand 2014). To this end, the chapter uses several empirical data sources. First, the chapter draws upon a set of 93 semi-structured interviews that were conducted with both military and civilian MINUSMA personnel who had deployed to Mali between March 2014 and December 2015. Second, many documents from the mission have been analysed. These included intelligence reports, standard operating procedures and meeting reports. Third, the author attended several pre-deployment exercises of ASIFU and SOLTG and made a 2.5-week field visit to Mali in late 2015 to conduct a direct observation of the mission. These various sources provide an accurate and fine-grained account of MINUSMA ’s intelligence cycle .

5 MINUSMA ’s Quest for Environmental Understanding

From the start of the operation, MINUSMA ’s military and civilian leadership struggled with providing clear directions to their units and personnel. This was mainly the result of the sheer complexity of the environment in which they operated (see Sect. 3). As a result, the leadership often did not know what types of information they needed and, based on that, what information requests they had to formulate. A JMAC representative illustrated this as follows :

There was no direction from senior management. Also, the chief JMAC , who did not have an intelligence background, did not comply to our objective of creating situational awareness , but started writing recommendations in the reports as requested by senior management…We determined ourselves what senior management required. Sometimes we were spot-on and would receive more and more requests, and sometimes we would feel our reports were put aside.

MINUSMA ’s force encountered similar challenges in formulating their information needs. During the initial stages, there was no campaign plan and information requirements were often very general and ad hoc. To address this, ASIFU headquarters formulated priority information requests and developed a plan to meet these requirements. This plan, however, remained broad and did not really provide clearer directions. As an officer of the Dutch-led ISR unit argued :

With the best of intentions, HQ ASIFU created an ICP [Intelligence Collection Plan] of 75 pages that was not workable in any way. In their ICP they deconstructed the entire Malian society along the lines of each of the PMESII [Political, Military, Economic, Social, Infrastructure and Information] factors and presented that as their information need, very much in line with the traditional intelligence officer sending a request saying ‘give me everything about …’

In the course of 2015, soon after the arrival of MINUSMA ’s second force commander, the intelligence process became more focused. The priority information requirements were updated and the underlying questions were better structured. However, despite these improvements, most units still found it very challenging to align their collection capabilities with the great amount of requirements they had to address.

On the civilian side, organisations such as JMAC and UNPOL had placed a relatively small number of international representatives in their regional offices throughout the country. These people were often highly educated and had a large network of local contacts as well as extensive experience in Mali or other mission areas. Moreover, as opposed to most of their military counterparts, they generally remained in the area for a year or more. As these international civilians were often accompanied by local employees, they could gain in-depth situational understanding of the conflict and its dynamics.

On the military side, MINUSMA had a great variety of sensors at its disposal to collect information. These sensors varied from typical military battalions to innovative newcomers such as ASIFU . MINUSMA ’s battalions had great potential to collect information since many of their personnel were of African descent. As a result, many of the soldiers understood local cultures and ethnic dynamics and, in some cases, even spoke the same local language. Despite their comparative advantages, however, the added value of the data provided by these battalions remained limited. There were several reasons for this. These included the high illiteracy rates amongst many African soldiers, the limited freedom of movement of many battalions caused by their lack of force protection and the unfamiliarity of many soldiers and staff with Western-style intelligence processes (Rietjens and De Waard 2017).

With regard to ASIFU , the vast majority of its sensors were located within the two ISR units.⁴ Both the Swedish unit in Timbuktu and the Dutch-led unit in Gao had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs ) that were able to gather imagery information by means of high-tech video cameras. While the geographical reach of these systems was only 90 kilometres, however, both ISR units had to cover a much bigger area.⁵ Apart from the UAVs , the sensors of the two ISR units differed considerably. The layout of the Swedish ISR task force was far more traditional and consisted of long-range recce platoon, an electronic warfare section and a weapons intelligence and improvised explosive device (IED ) Disposal squad. Partly as a result of this, their focus was on current military intelligence. The political, economic and social domains, by contrast, were largely overlooked.

To the contrary, the Dutch-led ISR Company in Gao emphasised the collection of information on each of the PMESII domains in order to produce predictive and actionable intelligence. The commander of the first rotation explained it as follows :

We started to collect as much information as possible on the PMESII factors, everything we could find about the situation in Gao, because for Bamako this was still one big question mark. Every piece of information we were able to collect was useful because there was nothing there yet. We focused on the PMESII factors, this was already decided upon in advance, and additionally we looked into threat to the force and threat to the mission but that was of secondary importance. Of course I would like to know when a bomb is going to explode, but what is more important for me is to find out who makes that bomb, who tasks that person, who creates the plan. We want to know in advance what is going on in people’s minds, and to integrate a predictive element to our analyses.

To this end, the unit had several sensors that focused on population-centric intelligence :

• 1. Human intelligence teams to establish and exploit a network of human sources;

• 2. A cover and support team : Using small cameras on their helmets and vehicles, this team collected a lot of imagery intelligence. Moreover, the team carried out street-level engagements to monitor local sentiments.

• 3. A civilian advisor as well as several liaison officers to establish contacts with civilian organisations, the G2 and Malian security forces.

• 4. A field civil-military interaction (CMI ) team, consisting of regular CMI personnel as well as reserve officers that were specialised in agriculture, rule of law and healthcare amongst others. In addition to collecting relevant information on the PMESII domains, the team gained control of several small funds, both through the Dutch embassy and through the UN, that were used to set up projects in order to inspire trust in the local population .

The abundance of information about the environment that MINUSMA ’s organisations collected was then processed. In most civilian organisations, the people who engaged in the data collections were also the ones tasked with processing this body of information further. Depending on their mandate, civilian organisations drafted specific reports. While UNDSS largely focused on threat assessments, JMAC made many different analyses on the political situation of Mali, and the Human Rights Division analysed the extent to which human rights were respected in Mali.

Within MINUSMA ’s force, there was generally a division between the people that collected information and those who processed it. MINUSMA ’s intelligence branches, notably the U2s at the headquarters level and the G2s at the sector level, processed information in regard to current security-related threats. Examples included the IED threat along MINUSMA ’s main supply routes and the whereabouts of different armed groups. Many staff officers in these intelligence branches, however, lacked experience with and knowledge of intelligence processes and did not have adequate technical equipment (see e.g. Rietjens and De Waard 2017). This severely affected the quality and usefulness of many of their reports.

Within MINUSMA ’s force, ASIFU had the most extensive processing capacity. This capacity was partly located at its headquarters in Bamako and partly at its ISR units in Gao and Timbuktu. To store all the incoming information, ASIFU had brought a technical information system, called iBase. Several collators managed this extensive database that included, for instance, information on key leaders, armed groups, settlements and criminal activities. To further process the information, ASIFU had several analysis cells. In particular, the cells of ASIFU headquarters and the Dutch-led ISR Company were very comprehensive in nature. In addition to the typical military analysts, they included geospatial analysts and human terrain analysts. These analysts were often highly educated Western intelligence officers that drafted many different intelligence reports. Most of these reports aimed at the mid- and long-term periods and were, following the X-PMESII approach, comprehensive in nature.

The processing of all the information by MINUSMA ’s organisations led to the production of many different reports. In the case of MINUSMA ’s force, these products included weekly intelligence reports, specific intelligence reports, answers to requests for information and the Quarterly Outlook.⁶

The reports, however, did not fully satisfy the need of MINUSMA ’s force commander and his sector commanders. These commanders valued the current and security-related intelligence most, but at the same time their intelligence branches (U2, G2 and S2) were unable to provide this to the level that was needed. This lack of current and security-related intelligence also affected ASIFU , which was asked to fill this gap even if its original task was to provide PMESII -wide intelligence at the mid- and long-term periods. ASIFU ’s leadership, however, was largely against this shift and stuck to the original design of delivering PMESII -wide intelligence at the mid- and long term .

The relevance of ASIFU ’s intelligence products was unclear even more as MINUSMA did not have the capacity to follow-up on the implications of the intelligence products they received. The battalions of the main force were hardly capable of executing operations and many of them were mostly occupied with supplying compounds and carrying out patrols. As a result, ASIFU ’s intelligence products contributed to the decision-making process of MINUSMA ’s military leadership to a limited extent only. During each phase in the intelligence cycle , interaction between MINUSMA ’s force and the civilian UN actors such as JMAC , UNDSS , JOC and UNPOL turned out to be of great importance.

6 Environmental Understanding and Civil-Military Interaction

CMI within MINUSMA turned out to be rather ambiguous. On the positive side, ASIFU and its subunits produced several tailor-made reports for civilian UN organisations. The ISR Company in Gao, for example, provided the UN Human Rights Division with reports analysing local sentiments on a range of issues, while it provided another civilian organisation within MINUSMA , Protection of Civilians, with quarterly threat assessments. Both UN organisations valued the reports a lot. With regard to the reports for Protection of Civilians , one of the ISR Company’s officers remarked:

Halfway through the mission, the SRSG (Special Representative of the Secretary General) expressed the concern that too little attention was given to the protection of civilians , while this was one of the key points in the resolution. This of course created a lot of questions about what the current status was of the protection of civilians and what the key issues were, which again led them to ASIC [All Sources Intelligence Cell]. This too was absorbed in our ICP [Intelligence Collection Plan], but we additionally produced a tailor-made product that visualized very clearly what the situation was and which buttons to push in order to steer the situation in a certain direction. As with the stabilization product, this product was very well received at the higher levels and the decision was made that our approach was to be implemented nationally in the MINUSMA mission.

Apart from these tailored reports, civilian representatives valued the large database that ASIFU had developed, which could help them address many specific questions that popped up. A UNPOL officer commented:

We do not have a decent database. I’m still waiting for an iBase-structure with adequate search functions. As long as we do not have that, I’m very happy that ASIFU is able to structurally record the information. We can then make requests to get information such as names.

A third mechanism that most representatives considered important was informal information sharing. One of JMAC ’s field officers had frequent contact with MINUSMA ’s helicopter detachment and illustrated this as follows :

In Tabankort there was a meeting between the armed groups - this is before the Anafis meeting - and the rumors had it that the leaders of the MAA [Arab Movement of Azawad] stayed behind and continued different meetings after the other main body of people came back to Gao. So my hunch was that they were meeting for this reason or that reason because of their interests or whatever. Helidet [Minusma’s helicopter detachment] happened to have been taking pictures of that meeting. I saw the same vehicle that I recognized in Gao of which I firmly believed it belongs to the Arabs and I saw a guy in some big white robes that I recognized as Mr. X⁷, being one of the major players. Helidet doesn't necessarily know that stuff of the top of their head, but I did and I was happy to chat with them about that for a bit.

A UNPOL officer added to this:

When I have to go to Djebok, I’ll pass by ASIFU ’s ISR Company. I’ll then ask them to provide me with a threat assessment of my route as well as of the situation in Djebok.

Despite these positive examples, MINUSMA ’s civilian organisations also expressed severe criticism regarding their interaction with the military actors involved. They argued, among other things, that military actors did not share information and that the added value of military intelligence products was limited and that intelligence gathering by the military, most notably human intelligence, endangered human sources. Several main issues underlying this criticism are now further explored. These issues can be conceptualised under three categories: organisational, political and technical .

6.1 Organisational Impediments to Cooperation

Like most multinational operations, MINUSMA has a formal hierarchical structure with most authority centralised at the higher levels. In these kinds of bureaucratic structures, the separate departments often have different mandates, processes and expectations, which can hinder interaction (Yang and Maxwell 2011). This was also the case in MINUSMA .

As Fig. 9.1 shows, the civilian and military units operated in different “stovepipes”. While MINUSMA’s force commander directed all the military assets, the civilian actors within MINUSMA operated under the authority of the two deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-Generals (SRSGs) (the Human Rights Division or the office of Stabilisation and Recovery), the chief of staff (in case of JMAC , JOC and UNDSS ) or the police commissioner (in case of UNPOL ). As a result of these different lines of authority, several of the actors involved gained environmental understanding of their own leadership. Initially, these efforts were hardly coordinated, which led to frustration and duplication of efforts. As one of the JMAC officers remarked:

Little information came from the Special Forces and the ISR Company. Their reports went to the U2 and ASIFU , but not to the wider mission. If we asked for it, we would be helped, but then you would have to know about it.

To improve this situation and better coordinate all activities related to environmental understanding, MINUSMA installed a Joint Coordination Board (JCB) in 2015. The chief of JMAC chaired this board, which included representatives of JMAC , ASIFU , U2, UNDSS , U3, UNPOL , JOC and the office of the SRSG . The weekly meetings of the JCB facilitated communication and increased information sharing between the actors involved. A similar mechanism was put in place in Gao, where representatives of the ISR Company met on a weekly basis with civilian representatives. However, as both the JCB and the meetings in Gao functioned as coordinating bodies only, they had no directive powers, which clearly limited their effectiveness .

Also, liaison officers played an important role in coordinating the activities of the actors involved. Several of the military organisations, notably ASIFU , had embedded military liaison officers as well as civilian advisors from the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Their primary task was to advise the military units they were embedded with. In doing so, they spent considerable time amongst the civilian organisations at MINUSMA ’s headquarters (in Bamako as well as in Gao) which clearly facilitated coordination.

Several other units employed military liaison officers. Apart from liaising with other military units, liaison officers were responsible for coordinating with civilian UN organisations. The respondents, military and civilian alike, stressed that the main competencies for a successful liaison officer included mastering the French language, social empathy, knowledge of the civilian environment and cultural awareness. ASIFU ’s liaison officers displayed varying degrees of these competences. While some of them were fluent in French and had extensive experience working in international environments, others were less sensitive towards their civilian partners and had great difficulty communicating in French. The civilian organisations also stressed the importance of liaison officers but generally lacked the capacity to have their own liaison personnel .

6.2 Political Impediments to Cooperation

From a political perspective, one can observe rivalry between ASIFU and JMAC and to a lesser extent also with UNDSS . Since 2005, the UN had included JMACs in several missions to inform UN leadership about the situation and the progress that was being made (Shetler-Jones 2008). Until ASIFU entered the stage in 2014, JMAC was the primary actor with such responsibilities . From then on, both organisations competed for the favours of MINUSMA ’s leadership. The close ties between the first Dutch ASIFU commander and the then Dutch SRSG Bert Koenders further fuelled JMAC ’s wariness of ASIFU . As a result of this rivalry, much stovepiping remained, undermining information sharing between the two actors. JMAC representatives illustrated this as follows:

instead of sharing intelligence, most people keep information to themselves, due to the competition to bring the most accurate information to the senior management of the mission.

And

influential people or key leaders use the different UN intelligence organizations, sometimes ASIFU , then JMAC , then U2, pitting them against each other.

In addition to bureaucratic politics, humanitarian principles heavily influenced the civil-military interface. Many of the civilian organisations emphasised their impartial stance and saw the peacekeepers as a threat to their perceived impartiality and therefore their own security (Tesfaghiorghis 2016). This issue was most prevalent within the humanitarian actors outside MINUSMA , such as non-governmental organisations (NGOs) .⁸ As one of their representatives stressed :

What we see is that whenever they are in the field somewhere, it starts to be more difficult to move around in this area, because they are the targets of terrorist groups. So we have to keep a distance, because I am more secure when I am far away from MINUSMA . (Tesfaghiorghis 2016)

Apart from the NGOs that operated in Mali, many UN organisations also stressed this issue. In his research on civil-military communication in Gao, Van der West (2016, p. 33) noted that:

one respondent of the ISR Company went to visit the UNOCHA office the day after a demonstration against MINUSMA took place in Gao and said the following: “And I arrived at UNOCHA, and they directly told us that they were not very keen on us visiting them, out of their own interest. In order to not be identified with the military part of the UN”.

6.3 Technical Impediments to Cooperation

From a technical perspective, one observes great differences within MINUSMA . Some of the Western units such as ASIFU , SOLTG and the helicopter detachment contained high technological capabilities. These included UAVs , the pods below the Apache helicopters as well as communication equipment. On the contrary, many African troop contributing nations as well most civilian organisations within MINUSMA did not possess such capabilities. This lack of interoperability hindered interaction .

The communication system Titaan that enabled working with classified information was a clear example of this. ASIFU , SOLTG and the helicopter detachment were the only units that had this advanced system at their disposal. For security reasons, ASIFU ran its entire database (iBase) on Titaan. This implied that most of the products coming from this database could only be accessed on computers using Titaan. In a similar way, much of the information the helicopter detachment and SOLTG obtained was stored on Titaan.

From a military perspective, having such a secure communication system is indispensable to effectively handle classified information. This is especially true in Mali, where many considered MINUSMA ’s computer network to be very unsafe. The downside of it, however, was that information sharing with actors that did not have access to Titaan became complicated, as these actors were not authorised to view the classified products. This was the case for all civilian organisations within MINUSMA as well as a large share of the military actors. As an illustration, a JMAC representative stated that :

the helicopters never send reports for security reasons due to classified technical meta-data in picture-files, which is a pity, although we could send a specific request to the Chief ASIFU .

Many civilian respondents, however, seemed to accept the military use of systems like Titaan. As another JMAC representative argued:

in NATO , we have a culture of security, but not in the UN. If I share a document within JMAC , it could be passed to another structure, component or section.

7 Discussion and Conclusions

The need for environmental understanding in hybrid warfare is widely recognised in military as well as civilian circles. In Mali, the UN addressed this need to an unprecedented degree by deploying new intelligence capabilities. As the new kid on the block, ASIFU was the most salient among MINUSMA intelligence organisations. With an extensive headquarters in Bamako and its two ISR units in Gao and Timbuktu, ASIFU was tasked with improving the production of intelligence within MINUSMA in order to support decision-making at the tactical, operational and strategic level. While doing this, ASIFU had to emphasise PMESII -wide intelligence. The helicopter detachment and Special Forces (SOLTG ) were also innovative newcomers that contributed to understanding Mali’s complex environment in an unprecedented fashion. Despite all these efforts, however, obtaining adequate environmental understanding proved to be extremely difficult for MINUSMA . The challenges were numerous and can broadly be categorised within the phases of the intelligence cycle (see Sect. 5).

Particularly within MINUSMA ’s military component, a recurrent challenge was the tendency of military leadership to emphasise short-term and security-related intelligence over long-term intelligence on other domains. This is understandable, especially when one takes into account that MINUSMA is the mission facing the highest number of casualties in UN history.⁹ However, since the regular intelligence branches of the force were not able to provide sufficient short-term security-related intelligence, assets such as ASIFU —initially meant for comprehensive and predictive analyses—were forced to focus on short-term security issues. As a result, many respondents felt that MINUSMA was constantly overtaken by events rather than anticipating and forecasting what might happen. Closely related to this was the inability of most UN battalions to act upon the intelligence that they received. The units often lacked force protection, adequate material and trained personnel to plan and execute intelligence-driven operations. This severely limited the added value of obtaining adequate intelligence .

It thus seems that MINUSMA overemphasised its intelligence capacity while keeping the remainder of its organisation largely unchanged. Of course, one has to start somewhere to improve the effectiveness of UN missions. In hindsight, however, it appears clear that operational, planning and logistical capabilities should have been enhanced too in order to match increased intelligence efforts. This mismatch can be conceptualised as a form of organised hypocrisy . This concept was already observed in previous UN peacekeeping missions and “refers to inconsistent rhetoric and action—hypocrisy—resulting from conflicting material and normative pressures” (Lipson 2007, p. 6). Although MINUSMA ’s mandate emphasised the protection of civilians and stabilisation of key population centres, “especially in the north” (Lotze 2015), UN member states proved unwilling to provide the resources to successfully accomplish this .

The relationship between the different intelligence providers also needs to be reflected upon. At the military side, this implies, inter alia, a better integration of ASIFU in the force structure. At present, the intelligence branch of the force and ASIFU worked too often in isolation, and command and control relationships were ambiguous to many of the officers involved. If one also takes into account the civilian component of MINUSMA , the number of intelligence providers and the organisational complexity of the intelligence process multiply further. JMAC , UNDSS and the JOC were prime examples of such civilian organisations that gathered, processed and disseminated large amounts of information. Each of them had different mandates requiring the acquisition of different but often overlapping pieces of information. These organisations faced their own challenges in obtaining environmental understanding that included limited intelligence direction, the lack of technical assets required to collect and process the information and the lack of analysis capacity (see Sect. 4).

CMI proved to be important in the process of obtaining environmental understanding. The MINUSMA case shows several examples of successful interaction. The added value of military actors for their civilian counterparts was threefold: (1) ASIFU ’s extensive database containing large amounts of data, (2) the tailored reports that ASIFU ’s units made for civilian organisations and (3) the informal sharing of information between military and civilian personnel .

The civil-military interface was, however, challenged by several organisational, technical and political issues (see Sect. 6). To address these challenges and to make best use of the resources available, MINUSMA ’s civilian and military actors established a JCB in 2015. The JCB decreased duplication of effort and facilitated information sharing amongst the actors involved. Its establishment can be seen as a next step towards integrated environmental understanding within operations combatting hybrid threats . To determine the subsequent steps in the process of further integration, the coherence matrix developed by De Coning and Friis (2011) seems helpful. Within integrated approaches, they identified four main types of relationships that they include on the horizontal axis:

• 1. whole of government: consistency among the policies and actions of the different government agencies of a country;

• 2. intra-agency: consistency among the policies and actions of an individual agency;

• 3. interagency: consistency among the policies pursued by the various international actors in a given country context; and

• 4. international-local: consistency between and among the policies of the internal and external actors—in other words, the host nation and international actors, in a given country context .

On the vertical axis of the coherence matrix , De Coning and Friis (2011) defined six levels of coherence that apply to each of the four types of relationships. These levels vary from actors are united at one end of the spectrum to actors compete at the other end (in between these extremes, De Coning and Friis identified integration, cooperation, coordination and coexistence). Figure 9.3 depicts the coherence matrix and provides some examples as well.

Fig. 9.3

Coherence Matrix (De Coning and Friis 2011)

Applying the matrix to the case of MINUSMA generally shows a level of coexistence within each of these four types of relationships. Actors engaging in most of these showed low levels of alignment and expressed limited ambitions concerning coordination. Interaction was often opportunistic and pragmatic, and only a limited amount of communication and de-confliction took place .

Further integrating the capabilities aimed at enhancing environmental understanding does not require having all actors to interact in a unified way. There are just too many different interests, mandates and modi operandi to make full integration possible or even desirable. Instead, as De Coning and Friis (2011, p. 272) argue, “coherence should be seen as a scale of relationships, where the most appropriate and realistic level of coherence that can be achieved will depend on the exact constellation of organisations involved in an interdependent relationship in that specific context”.

Most forms of CIMIC in Mali would benefit from higher levels of coherence than is presently the case. This implies that actors should try to better integrate their approaches and activities while maintaining their individual identities as well as their right to take independent decisions (De Coning and Friis 2011). Looking at the three different categories of coordination problems presented above (organisational, political and technical), there are several recommendations that deserve immediate follow-up :

• 1. the establishment of a joint database, including underlying technical infrastructure;

• 2. improved linkages (e.g. liaison) between military intelligence capacities and the main force;

• 3. further integration (or at least more clearly defined command and control relationships) of U2 and ASIFU ;

• 4. increased role clarity between ASIFU and JMAC ; and

• 5. better integration of high-tech capabilities within a generally low-tech environment (see e.g. Dorn 2016).

As this chapter made clear, the acquisition of environmental understanding during operation MINUSMA has proved essential and yet extremely complex. Effective cooperation between all the military and civilian actors involved is crucial to enhance the UN ability to both acquire intelligence and act upon the information received, thereby increasing peacekeeping operations’ potential in contributing to the stabilisation of Mali and other hybrid threats scenarios .