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The 1990s saw a vast expansion of effort by a variety of actors to prevent, manage and/or resolve conflicts around the world, including Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Cambodia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and elsewhere with mixed results. The first years of the new millennium have seen more missions in even more apparently hopeless places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The primary mission for the military inserted into these situations is to create a “safe and secure environment”1so that the rest of the peace implementation (or nation-building) processes can take place. What seems to be relatively unproblematic in Bosnia in 2007 is extraordinarily difficult in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the situations in these three countries are most dramatic, all countries face the problem of providing security to their populations.2 This is the basic task of government, but it is not an easy one. In practice, a key …