Since 2014, Western militaries renewed their focus from peacekeeping to combat operations against advanced opponents. Russian tactics, as demonstrated in the conflict in Ukraine, relied on massed indirect fires. Facing a (near-) peer adversary keen on using artillery on a massive scale raises the …

Study of an exit dilemma from a defence economic perspective on alliances, more specifically against a background of burden sharing theories on NATO. We consider an international alliance, NATO, to be a community programmed to receive, as once membership has been obtained, no country has ever exited, …

National political leadership faces complex dynamics in order to plausibly exit a military mission. Putnam's two-level game helps to understand the essence of these dynamics. National political leadership will aim to keep the domestic audience on its hand in order to remain in office, while simultaneously …

In literature on public support for military missions, political discord has been criticised, because it is claimed that having a single strategic narrative as a basis for consensus helps foster such support. In this chapter the author starts from the perspective of the primacy of politics. The chapter …

The author reflects on the nature of exit from state-building missions and the challenge of evaluating it. He does this by first discussing the growing importance of evaluation and the conditions required for a proper evaluation as exposed in the professional evaluation literature, He refers here to …

Overview of recent issues central to political, military, and academic debates about political and military exit strategies from conflicts and wars. One important concept is the supposed political military divide, time and again expressed in the dichotomy end states versus end dates.

Strategic communication includes all messages and activities across the levels of war in order to affect target audiences and to encourage certain behaviour. It can be divided into a horizontal way, the way the messages and activities are crafted and sent to touch the public, and a vertical way, the …

In crisis areas, military and civilian missions are often simultaneously active, but they have different mandates and are executed by different organisations. Also the way those organisations leave a country after an intervention differs. This article provides a comparison between the military (ISAF/NTM-A) …

The introduction to NL ARMS 2015 "The dilemma of leaving" povides an overview of recent issues central to political, military, and academic debates about political and military exit strategies from conflicts and wars.

This article reviews the international efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1991. It concludes that while there have been several strategies of dealing with that country both during and after the war, very few of these have actually produced the desired outcomes. In spite of successes in the sphere …