General Mike Jackson's impressive military force, eventually numbering some 45,000 troops, was ill equipped and poorly prepared to deal with a power vacuum in a province inhabited by almost two million people. With tanks, artillery, and massive air support, KFOR had ‘escalation dominance’ if anyone chose to challenge it by force. It was superior on the ground compared to most military expeditions of the 1990s. Battalion commanders such as David Hurley and Patrick Cammaert would have been jealous of the ratio of forces to the size of the sector at Anton van Loon's disposal. What KFOR lacked more than numbers was light infantry and military police. It could be argued, however, that what KFOR required most of all for a mission of military government-type proportions was a civil affairs organization similar to that created during the Second World War.

For the unprecedented array of civilian responsibilities and coordination tasks, NATO had to rely on the tools at hand, which was civil-military cooperation (CIMIC). However, although in transformation from its old, primarily logistical Cold War support function since 1996, CIMIC as a concept as well as an operational capability was still in an early phase of development. Since IFOR and SFOR had restored confidence in peacekeeping from its all-time low in 1995, Bosnia was perceived as the model of future peace operations. But just as the existing peacekeeping model hardly prepared the Alliance for Kosovo, the scope of the new CIMIC concept as it emerged from operations in Bosnia appeared too narrow and rigid for KFOR. CIMIC doctrine avoided reference to the possibility of soldiers substituting for civilian actors such as the police and administration and consciously omitted any reference to military government responsibilities or ‘vacuum filling.’ Yet, despite KFOR's poor preparation and the vast gap between the CIMIC concept and the reality on the ground, civil-military cooperation was in many ways what saved the mission in Kosovo from impending failure.

Ad Hoc Civil-Military Cooperation

Jackson made a striking decision in the early months of 1999 during the planning phase for KFOR. As NATO started organizing the deployment of a ground force, CIMIC planners at SHAPE estimated that KFOR would require a CIMIC Task Force along the lines of that deployed in Bosnia.