ABSTRACT
Introduction This final chapter focuses on the challenges military organizations face as they participate in missions aimed at achieving or keeping peace, if needed through waging war. These tasks are daunting due to their complexity, the longstanding history of conflicts, and the ambiguity of local stakeholders. Moreover, in spatial terms, conflict regions are oftentimes hard to access, offer little infrastructure, and are characterized by their immense size. In temporal terms, some regions demand very rapid intervention (e.g. stopping genocide), other processes require a longterm perspective (such as reconciliation, rebuilding trust and relationships, and education). A primary focus on opposing forces has shifted towards supporting and influencing local populations living in fragile, failing states (Purl 2007). For dealing with these challenges, high-level concepts such as peacekeeping, peace enforcement, peace maintaining and peace building (Brahimi 2000; Rippon et al. 2004) have been translated into and aligned with strategic and operational concepts. This enables military organizations to handle the multiplicity of tasks across the spectrum of violence and the variety of task areas. We call this the challenge of heterogeneous value creation, stressing the multifaceted nature of desired or experienced benefits (Beauregard 1998; Kang et al. 2007). Integrative concepts have been proposed and refined, such as the comprehensive approach (Crawshaw 2007), multiple-principle guidance (Petraeus 2008), 3D approach (Travers and Owen 2007), the whole-of-government approach, and three-block warfare (Krulak 1999). The major challenge, however, is the translation of these concepts into relevant and ‘practical’ organizational concepts. Interpreted in terms of organizational capabilities, this chapter explores how military organizations define, redefine, and integrate capabilities to deliver heterogeneous value. In doing this, the chapter aims to wrap-up the main findings and insights presented in this book.
