ABSTRACT
During the last 20 years British armed forces have been involved on a significant scale in five types of campaign: unilateral anti-guerrilla operations, UN peacekeeping, unilateral intervention, multilateral intervention and humanitarian intervention. If tradition, experience and national pride make it easy in certain respects for British people to countenance many types of intervention, within the political establishment they inhibit involvement in the sort of conflicts which are now breaking out in the former Soviet Empire. By 1992 Britain had become the second largest contributor to such operations with forces in Cyprus, Western Sahara, Iraq-Kuwait, Cambodia and in the territories of the former Yugoslavia. The debate about intervention in Bosnia was damaging to the armed forces and to the government because they failed to achieve a national consensus that humanitarian intervention to run supplies to besieged civilians was all that could be attempted.
