After Serb security forces left Kosovo in relative good order following NATO's entry, renewed hostilities between the warring parties were unlikely. KFOR appeared to be an immediate success as far as performing its primary military task was concerned. By intervening with force on humanitarian grounds, NATO had secured the well being of the Albanian majority of Kosovo. However, it was now up to KFOR to show the world that, on its watch, it would not allow reverse ethnic cleansing. Controlling the UÇK became the key to creating a secure environment for all Kosovars, Albanian and Serb. Not only was the UÇK to be disarmed, it had to be kept from becoming an internal security force in a civilian guise beyond NATO or UN control. The only way of doing so was for KFOR to assume the policing task that soldiers were officially not qualified to perform.

In the previous two years, NATO operations in Bosnia had finally triggered debate about the fundamental problem of the ‘public security gap’ between UN Civilian Police and military peacekeepers, and the dilemmas involved in cooperating with local police forces. The term ‘public security gap’ was first coined in a conference co-organized by Robert Oakley at the US National Defense University in 1998. The former US Envoy to Somalia was one of those recognizing the gap to be a chronic problem in peace operations, while political and military leaders generally preferred to regard it as an aberration in their desire to segregate the two trades. Even those analysts who seriously addressed the public security gap hardly contemplated soldiers operating in a complete law and order vacuum similar to that facing UNITAF soldiers in Somalia six years earlier. During the conference held at the National Defense University, Michael Kelly, who had started publishing on the Australian experience in Somalia, was alone in arguing with foresight that the laws of occupation, or at least a temporary military takeover of certain law and order functions, was likely to be inevitable during peace operations. However, this was an unwelcome idea. The lack of prior consideration and military planning for public security left KFOR woefully unprepared for a task it was eager to avoid and hoping to transfer to the UN Civilian Police force at the earliest possible date.