Peacekeepers of the twenty-first century: a comparison between professional soldiers and draftees in peace support operations

The proliferation and changing nature of peace support operations has placed demands on the military for which they were ill prepared. In some cases, soldiers ‘equipped’ with a strong warfighting ethos were simply unable to deal with complex emergencies and humanitarian roles. Some of the world's best military units often found peacekeeping duties inadequate for the training they had received and because of the vocation that motivated them to enlist. Conscript soldiers' participation in peace support operations in some cases has been poor, yet oftentimes they proved to be a winning card when faced with humanitarian duties and with the use of limited but firm amount of force. The Italian case, among others, is one of the most interesting examples of conscripts' performance in peace operations. Significant numbers of Italian conscripts were deployed in Lebanon, Albania, Somalia, Mozambique and again in Albania proving that they can represent a positive option in dealing with peacekeeping tasks.