ABSTRACT
To achieve mutual goals, military and civilian actors have to be able to form temporarily viable structures for cooperation. In these structures, complexity can be induced by for instance the different tasks that need to be performed, differing degrees of time-pressure and levels of interdependency between civilian and military co-workers, the non-routine nature of the tasks and their perceived importance, the dynamic context, differing operating cultures, views on leadership, decision-making processes and the degree of autonomy on an operational level (Bollen and Vogelaar 2000). This complexity has to be effectively and efficiently distributed among the participants of the inter-organizational civil-military network to be able to implement, and even adapt, the strategy. This chapter adopts the Viable System Model (VSM) to analyze the viability of an inter-organizational civil-military network in the context of a humanitarian operation. More in particular, it assesses the viability of civil-military cooperation in the case of the operation Allied Harbour (1999).
