President Obama's management of the political use of multilateral military force in Libya has been a masterful display of how these kinds of operations should be handled, with little opening to mission-creep. As Bleckman and Kaplan (1978, 12) define it, a political use of military force involves a change in the disposition of at least a unit of the regular armed forces "as a deliberate attempt by national authorities to influence, specific behavior of individuals in another nation without engaging in a continuing contest of violence."
By focusing on the specific behavior that the United States wanted from the Libyan regime: stop all attempts to massacre civilians, who are merely moving against your decades long rule, the president was able to lead the NATO alliance, UN and other forces on a well-calibrated mission. By handing over the mission to NATO once its parameters were established through the rules of engagement on the ground, the President ensured that there would be no engagement in "a continuing contest of violence:" a hallmark of a martial use of military force.
I thank you.
Fubara David-West.
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