ABSTRACT
It is becoming highly stylish in international organizations to develop rapid-reaction forces. The United Nations has been wrangling about them for its entire history. NATO, principally a security organization, has them of course. The EU is doing it, and the OSCE will soon, so they say, have a rapid-reaction capability. There seems ample justification for this: we are constantly being reminded of the importance of rapid reaction, and we are invited to infer that, if only the mission could have been mounted more rapidly, countless lives might have been spared, expenses and mistakes avoided or ameliorated, suffering relieved. This is of course all quite true, but the reasons for delays in mounting missions being misunderstood, the wrong remedies are being proposed.
