While war rages on in the Middle East and Ukraine, the American people have just approved a mandate for change in the U.S.; all kinds of change: immigration, crime, military, the economy, out of control government oversight and regulation, judicial lawfare, foreign affairs, it’s a long list.
The world is currently speculating about what President Trump will do about the two current combat zones, Ukraine and the Middle East.
While we are leaning forward as a nation, hopeful, optimistic, open to change and expecting strong leadership, why not add world peace to the to-do list? But, you ask, is it even possible to look for world peace before the Israeli and Ukraine wars are over? One approach would be to look beyond the two current conflicts and watch them just dissolve as part of a larger success story on peace.
The key question is, how can we institutionalize a faster, better, more organized, more aggressive, and all-inclusive plan for preemptive actions that would preclude a Gaza/Lebanon/Yemen or Ukraine from ever happening again?
A suggestion is to have President Trump, in a major speech on Foreign Affairs to the American people and world leaders, describe in some detail a concept of operations for a new world order that is free from conflict; world peace forever.
PRESIDENT TRUMP’S PROPOSED ADDRESS TO THE NATION WITHIN A WEEK AFTER ASSUMING OFFICE ON 20 JANUARY 2025.
President Trump speaking:
My fellow Americans and our friends abroad who may be listening in. Right now, my staff is busy forwarding copies of these remarks to the leaders of the other 192 countries that are member states of the United Nations and the two countries that are non-member observer states. I want them to see my proposal directly not after the remarks have been laundered through the media.
Seeking the means to achieve world peace is not a new subject; some background is appropriate to set the stage for a way forward. Let’s take a quick look back over the past hundred years at previous endeavors.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS:
With technically-advanced machine guns, tanks, an aerial view of the battle space and chemical warfare, World War I was optimistically referred to as “The war to end all wars.” January 1918, U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, outlined an idea for an organization that would be charged with resolving conflicts before they exploded into bloodshed. In 1919 the structure of The League of Nations was laid out in Paris and the Treaty of Versailles went into effect in January 1920 with 48 member countries. Our U.S. Congress failed to ratify membership in the League. Between 1920 and World War II there were numerous opportunities to act, but the organization never did. The League of Nations was abandoned during World War II. The League was not necessarily a bad idea, but numerous times, when actions were required, European countries found it too difficult to put together an effective united front against a potential aggressor.
THE UNITED NATIONS:
In June 1941 representatives from thirteen nations (the U.S. was not included) met in London and signed the Declaration of St. James’s Palace expressing a vision for postwar world order. The next step was the Atlantic Conference in August 1941, at which U.S. President Roosevelt and U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill laid out a more detailed form of the alliance called The Atlantic Charter. The final step was the Yalta Conference, in February 1945 when Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin agreed on the establishment of the United Nations as well as the structure of the UN’s Security Council.
Despite having endured for 79 years, generally speaking, the UN is a weak-intentioned, expensive (2024 internal budget of $3.9 billion) bureaucratic mass that is involved in everything and accomplishes very little. Case in point, did the UN respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine 22 February, 2022? Yes, on March 3rd they voted overwhelmingly for a resolution deploring Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for the immediate withdrawal of its forces. That was it, no actions taken.
The UN is an established international organization perfectly positioned to be a greater force for the greater good of the collective world. But in its current condition, it is incapable of deterring or bringing to a close a conflict such as exists in Ukraine today. We need to completely rethink this issue right now. Change is possible.
THE UN TODAY:
The overarching mission of the UN is, I quote, to ensure international peace and security. But they are incapable of doing so and that is primarily because of how the Security Council functions.
THE SECURITY COUNCIL:
By way of explanation, the Security Council consists of five permanent members, the U.S., China, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom and ten elected UN members. The presidency of the Council rotates among the fifteen members, each serving for one month. Is anyone surprised that Russia was president in February 2022 when they attacked Ukraine?
Under the United Nations Charter, the principal function of the Security Council is also, and I quote, to ensure international peace and security. Additionally, and this is important, the subset authority allows the Council to:
One, investigate any dispute or situation which might lead to international friction.
Two, recommend methods of adjusting such disputes or the terms of a settlement.
Three, formulate plans for the establishment of a system to regulate armaments.
Four, determine the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression and recommend what action should be taken.
Five, call on members to apply economic sanctions and other measures not involving the use of force to prevent or stop aggression.
And six, take military action against an aggressor. Those six represent a very comprehensive list of positive actions, especially the sixth and final authority to take military action against an aggressor. Unfortunately, none of these routinely happen.
The problem is, the Security Council rarely acts decisively because of their decision-making process. All Security Council decisions have to be approved by at least 9 of the 15 members. The problem is that any one, it just takes one, of the five permanent members, U.S. Russia, China, France or the UK can veto a proposal. One veto by a permanent member and the issue, no matter how important, becomes a dead issue with no action. Reality is that China and Russia can and do routinely prevent the Security Council from acting out, and I quote again, to ensure international peace and security.
The bottom line is that the UN has never been the answer to world peace and never will be. We need a new and different way forward.
WHAT IS THE ONE-WORD FORMULA THAT CAN MAKE WORLD PEACE A REALITY?
That word is deterrence. That is, fear, in the minds of a potential aggressor, of rapid and decisive retaliation by a superior force.
My intent tonight is to outline a concept of operation that can potentially involve support from most of the 195 nations of the world to join a new organization outside and separate from the United Nations. My proposal is to call the organization, United for World Peace and the military contingent would be called the International Deterrence Force, IDF. This is not to be confused with Israel’s IDF which stands for Israeli Defense Force. The IDF I will now describe to you has absolutely nothing to do with defense. It is all about deterrence based on a very large and capable offensive force. The organization would look like this:
First, establish two small headquarters, one in the European area and one in Asia.
Secondly, there will be an elected civilian Secretary General serving one six-year term.
Third, there will be an experienced 4-star military IDF Commander and an equally qualified 4-star Vice IDF Commander; one stationed in each of the two IDF headquarters.
Finally, the fully operational International Deterrence Force I will describe to you in a moment that is forward deployed in the member nations.
The United for World Peace mission statement could be pulled directly from the UN Charter. That is to ensure international peace and security by:
One, investigating any dispute or situation which might lead to international friction.
Two, recommending methods of adjusting such disputes or the terms of a settlement.
Three, formulate plans for the establishment of a system to regulate armaments.
Four, determine the existence of a threat to the peace or act of aggression and recommend what action should be taken.
Five, call on IDF members to apply economic sanctions and other measures not involving the use of force to prevent or stop aggression.
And, six, most importantly, be ready every day to rapidly deploy a tailored, highly trained offensive IDF elements against an aggressor.
That’s the framework I am recommending to the United for World Peace organization. At this time let me strongly emphasize that this is not a U.S. organization and the IDF will not be a U.S. force. Everything will belong to the member nations.
Given this framework, let me give you my view of the initial internal workings.
Importantly, this will not resemble the over 120,000 UN employee operation. In my view the United for World Peace organization will be a lot closer to 12 hundred in size than 120,000.
My Vice President, J.D. Vance, will select twelve counterpart Vice Presidents from member nations to act as a selection committee. Member nations will, if they wish, forward the name of a candidate for Secretary General along with a detailed resume. Those will be studied by VP Vance’s Committee and three candidates will be selected to compete in an election, one vote per member nation. The winner will become the first Secretary General and immediately begin serving a six-year term.
A similar action will simultaneously take place to select the IDF Commander and Vice Commander for four-year terms.
Every member nation must agree to contribute to the IDF elements from their existing force structure that can be deployed anywhere in the world within seven days. Every nation will contribute according to its capabilities. Let me give you a sense of how that can work with some examples.
The U.S. has the greatest capability in the world for worldwide force-projection. For example, the world watched in awe in 1990 as the U.S. deployed an overwhelming force to the Gulf War in support of a coalition of 38 nations which rapidly defeated the Iraqi forces; more specifics on that later. One U.S. contribution to the IDF could be our entire air-cargo fleet to fly directly to various countries and transport their IDF contributions directly to the targeted area. Another critical U.S. contribution could be our fleet of about 99 aerial refueling tankers.
Countries with few or no actual military resources (only 136 nations have a defense budget) could provide field hospitals, portable field surgical units with doctors and nurses, aircraft maintenance capabilities, truck drivers, border patrol personnel, police, etc. Nations with only small maneuver organizations could provide, for example, man-portable air defense and anti-tank teams and snipers. There would be a very long list of non-combatant rear-area support requirements.
Countries with established air, land and sea combat forces will provide special operations personnel, armored units, light infantry, artillery, helicopters, tactical aircraft, naval vessels, air defense, combat engineers, all the elements for a military theater of operations. Selected nations in several regions would be responsible for providing an airport that can be quickly transformed into a full-up military operation with multiple runways, an expanded tarmac, maintenance facilities, and housing for the military contingent.
Two of the member nations, preferably among those without an existing military budget, will fully support the two IDF military headquarters’ needs.
Imagine a world-wide International Defense Force organization with little or no annual operating budget. I hope you are getting the impression that this entire concept of operations for continuous world peace can be unique, simple, highly trained, focused, rapidly deployable to anywhere there is a need while also being very austere. By contrast the 2024 UN budget was $3.9 billion.
One uniting factor is that the United for World Peace organization will borrow NATO’s Article 5 Concept. That is, an attack on one member is an attack against all members. Let’s pause right here to define what we mean by the word attack. That would be direct or indirect interaction with ground, air or sea systems as well as the use of non-military systems such as cyber-attacks on member nation civilian and/or military targets.
The first order of business for the IDF military commanders will be to conceptualize what a series of aggressor contingencies might look like. Additionally get current inventories of all the members’ military manpower, organizational structure, weapons systems, etc. From all that raw data the planners will tailor, on paper, a draft lean-and-mean, full-time, rapidly deployable force that can take down the aggressor nation or organization. That tailored force, in total may come from several member nations and form up in the conflict area of operations. Always overestimate the IDF requirements. That is, always plan to take a machine gun to a knife fight. Every deploying force should plan to win with overwhelming force and win fast.
The IDF Commander will establish and publish standards for every contributed element. Every nation will provide a very detailed quarterly readiness report on the trained-to-standard and deployability status of their IDF contributions.
The IDF headquarters will maintain a robust intel-processing element linked to the intel gathering capabilities of all member countries.
All contributing nations will exist in a state of one of four different IDF Readiness Conditions, IDF-REDCON.
IDF-REDCON 1: Normal peacetime condition. A completed plan will be in place in every member nation. Readiness standards will be in force for every IDF element.
IDF-REDCON 2: The Secretary-General and IDF Commander, having identified a potential threat to a member nation, will tailor a force for deployment and place them on 24-hour alert.
IDF-REDCON 3: All personnel and equipment for the designated units will move to assembly areas. Deployment aircraft will move to their first pick-up airfield.
IDF-REDCON 4: Deployment of all designated elements to the target area and preparing to initiate an overwhelming counteroffensive.
SOME OF MY CONCLUSIONS FROM ALL OF THIS DETAIL.
What does all of this detail come down to? The answer is deterrence. The objective of having a highly recognizable superior force that can rapidly deploy anywhere at any time can become so overwhelming for potential aggressors to think about that the IDF will never have to deploy and world peace will become the order of every day. That is the meaning and objective of deterrence.
My second conclusion is that this IDF concept can annually save trillions of dollars in member nations’ defense spending. How can that happen? There are currently multiple nations that have the full range of heavy, light and special forces along with the entire array of specialty services such as engineers, signal, intelligence, air defense, artillery, helicopters, air forces, ships and on and on. Under the IDF organization a nation only has to sustain and train the particular forces they are to deliver to the deployable force. For example, one nation may train and deploy only air defense systems.
SOME POTENTIAL SCENARIOS FOR THE IDF
An attack on small-country “A” in Africa by a larger neighboring country “B” appears imminent. The IDF Commander determines that inserting a couple of infantry battalions on the ground could possibly sufficiently deter the attack. But, using the intent to always have an overwhelming advantage, the commander will deploy a full infantry brigade along with combat supporting forces and tactical air support. Result, Country “B” packs up and goes home. Deterrence is a powerful force for world peace.
A more serious and far-ranging scenario might look like this: China continues to threaten Taiwan with aggressive air and naval operations. It is determined that the demonstrations are a rehearsal for an actual attack. The Secretary-General and IDF Commander agree to go to IDF-REDCON 3. That is, all personnel and equipment for the designated units will move to assembly areas. Deployment aircraft will move to their first pick-up airfields.
China’s Achilles heel is imported oil, about 11 million barrels per day. Inform China that an overwhelming IDF naval force is in route to the South China Sea to create an impenetrable blockade of all incoming gas and oil tankers. Additionally, missiles and aircraft capable of taking out the gas and oil pipelines from Russia will be immediately forward deployed. The Secretary-General will request China publicly sign a pledge to acknowledge that forevermore Taiwan will be considered an independent nation free of all ties to China and provocative military actions against Taiwan are forbidden. Deterrence in action in support of world peace.
During the fall months of 2021, Russia moved a massive army to the Ukraine border giving every indication they would attack which they eventually did on 22 February, 2022. Had the IDF been in place and an IDF-REDCON 3 announced to the world, there is every reason to believe the Russian invasion would never have taken place. Again, deterrence in action, keeping the peace.
The next step could be for the IDF Commander to visit North Korea to discuss ICBM and nuclear testing. Then on to Iran to discuss Iran’s role as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorist organizations as they routinely finance, train, equip and lead terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Sunnis
The UN is incapable of deterring any of these example scenarios.
Why would countries sign up to be an IDF member? Here is a starter list of ten answers as to why a United for World Peace organization is needed now.
One, Middle East countries and Israel are fearful of the hegemony intentions of a nuclear-equipped Iran but powerless individually to stop it.
Two, South Korea and Japan are very nervous about North Korea’s aggressive offensive missile and nuclear programs but powerless to do anything about it.
Three, Taiwan is fearful of a China invasion.
Four, Europe is fearful of more Russian aggression and use of nuclear weapons.
Five, former Soviet Republics are fearful that they may be next on Putin’s list.
Six, the Baltic countries and Finland are fearful of Russia.
Seven, India is in a constant state of unrest over China’s border incursions.
Eight, African border disputes are a recurring concern.
Nine, Iran’s support for terrorist activities threatens the world.
Ten, aggressors who would use cyberattacks to inflict humanitarian and economic disaster on another nation is a growing threat.
During the first one thousand days of the Ukrainian border conflict there have been an estimated 1 to 1.5 million combined dead, wounded, and missing Ukrainian and Russian soldiers and civilians.
Another reason to join other nations as a member in the International Deterrence Force is that there will no longer be a reason to belong to other alliances such as NATO or to maintain ready forces in support of bilateral treaties for mutual protection.
With world peace assurances in place, the next step could be a world without nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or biological weapons.
The UN “peacekeeping force” budget for 2024 was $6.1 billion. With active worldwide deterrence and an overwhelming rapidly-deployable counter-offensive force trained and ready, peace will be the standard world-wide day-to-day condition.
With a proactive International Deterrence Force in place, no nation would ever need to feel alone or stand-alone.
About now more than a few of you are still skeptical about the feasibility of putting together a coalition of nations and then being capable of moving a large combat force possibly thousands of miles into combat. I am here to tell you this proposal is certainly within the art of the possible. Here is why I am convinced and I believe you will be also when you listen to this brief after-action-report.
OPERATIONS DESERT SHIELD AND DESERT STORM
Many of you will recall that on 2,3 and 4 August 1990 Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces attacked, defeated and occupied their neighbor Kuwait with what Saddam Hussein used to brag was the Mother of all Armies.
Pay particular attention to this time-line and the size and number of operational elements that deployed from a dead start on 2 August:
3 August, U.S. President Bush announced that U.S. navy ships had deployed to the Persian Gulf.
7 August, President Bush began a military operation named Desert Shield which formed a 35-nation coalition to defend Saudi Arabia and ultimately liberate Kuwait.
7 August, 15,000 U.S. troops, 32 navy destroyers, 100 helicopters and a contingent of fighter planes arrived in Saudi Arabia.
8 August, the U.S. 18th Airborne Corps began forward deployment to Saudi Aribia, 7,500 miles away.
14 September UK and France announce the deployment of troops to Saudi Arabia.
15 January, 1991, the UN deadline for Iraqi forces to be withdrawn from Kuwait expired.
17 January, the coalition operation Desert Shield transitioned to Desert Storm with the following results:
Coalition: 39 countries, of which 28 contributed combat forces.
Force size: Approximately 670,000 troops from 28 countries, 425,000 of which were from the United States. I’m going to round off the numbers for ease in comprehension.
Coalition air component size: 2,500 combat aircraft, 1,800 of which were American.
Coalition airlift: 509,000 passengers and 594,000 tons of cargo carried.
Coalition sorties flown: 100,000 plus.
Aerial refueling: 15,400 sorties dispensed 110 million gallons of fuel.
Number of dumb bombs dropped: 210,000.
Number of smart bombs dropped: 9,300.
30mm depleted uranium rounds fired by A-10 manned aircraft (tank-killers): 782,000.
Duration of air campaign before the ground invasion: 39 days.
Iraqi tanks lost during the war: 3,700 out of 4,300 oh hand.
Number of U.S. Carrier Battle Groups on station: 6.
Coalition POWs taken during the war: 26.
Iraqi POWs taken during the war: 70,000 plus.
U.S. combat related deaths: 147
Iraqi military deaths: 100,000 plus.
Ground war duration: 100 hours.
Yes, a highly effective multiple-nation coalition can be organized in days. The U.S. has done it once and we can show our IDF allies how to do it again.
FINAL THOUGHTS:
A final IDF deterrent posture will not be a threat, it will be a promise.
There is currently a lot of discussion about the New World Order. Well, here is a new twist on The New World Order, call it World Peace.
I want to emphasize one more time, this initiative will not be a United States-led organization. It will belong to the member nations. I do not want to hear the media reporting tomorrow that the United States is trying to become the leader of the world.
There is no intent with this initiative to do away with the United Nations. They play an important role in humanitarian relief around the world. But we also must accept the fact that they are powerless when it comes to their mission of ensuring international peace and security.
A personal note to the leaders of the world’s other 194 nations. My staff will be contacting your offices beginning tomorrow morning to inquire if you would like to personally discuss this initiative with me in more detail.
Time is of the essence. The Middle East could erupt into World War Three at any moment and the Ukraine conflict could escalate into a nuclear war.
My vision is that if the first 100 of you, the leaders of the world’s nations, can come forward quickly and sign up, at least tentatively, as members of the United for World Peace organization, we could within a few weeks have the 3 members of the Command Group (Secretary General, IDF Commander and Vice Commander) on board with at least a skeleton staff. Soon thereafter the IDF Commander could be assessing potential member military contributions, airfields, logistics, headquarters locations, etc. and drafting deployment plans.
The point being that there is potentially so much to be gained and so little risk or expense involved, that it should not be a difficult decision. Try to think about a year from now when some unstable national leader or terrorist organization decides to launch an invasion of all or some portion of your nation. Immediately, on day one, the score card on the battlefield will be 100 against 1 and the aggressor will ultimately loose decisively and quickly.
This concept need not be a multi-year plan for activation. We can make it happen now and insure, as time goes forward, that we gain additional United for World Pease members, improve our capability, agility and deployment times and thereby institutionalize our commitment to world peace forever.
Thank you.
End of President Trump’s presentation on foreign affairs to the world’s leaders and the American people.
Author: MARVIN L. COVAULT, LT GEN US ARMY retired
Email: MandDcovault@yahoo.com