ABSTRACT
The Belgian armed forces, like other complex organizations in the post-modern global world, have become more diverse internally and are also operating in an ever more diverse environment. Their new missions are themselves very diverse (the fight against terrorism, peacekeeping, humanitarian missions, monitoring, etc.), take place all over the world in culturally, ethnically and linguistically very diverse regions, and are conducted most of the time under the guidance of intrinsically ambiguous rules of engagement, in a multinational framework (NATO, Eurocorps, but also all the new so-called task forces, force packages, modular structures, etc.). For example, Belgian troops are presently deployed in Afghanistan as part of ISAF, in Kosovo as part of KFOR, and in Bosnia as part of EUFOR. But in the past few years the same troops, or other units, were part of multinational task forces sent to Somalia, Rwanda, Zaire, Haiti, Cambodia, Turkey, etc. Finally, given the nature of these new missions, the rules of engagement of these forces are intrinsically ambiguous. In other words, as is the case with private companies operating in a global economy, the Belgian armed forces face internal as well as external diversity.
