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The United Nations Preventive Deployment, begun in 1993, has the mission of preventing the Balkan War from spreading south into Macedonia. The U.S. mission in that effort, called Operation Able Sentry, is to observe, monitor, and report any activity along the Serbian-Macedonian border.
Currently, the task force assigned to Macedonia is a mechanized infantry battalion (minus), augmented with an engineer platoon, an aviation detachment, a military police (MP) squad, a civil affairs detachment, and several other elements totaling roughly 600 soldiers, 300 of whom live on Camp Able Sentry. Every six months, a new task force takes over the mission. My battalion, the 3d Battalion, 12th Infantry, lst Armored Division, deployed from Germany for its six-month tour in 1995. As commander of the headquarters and headquarters company (HHC), I was "commandant" of the camp.
During preparations for this mission, one of the things we had to consider was the defense of the camp. Unfortunately, in spite of the Army's many recent deployments on peacekeeping or stability and support missions, we found that doctrinal references for conducting a base defense were quite limited. Of the field manuals readily available, only a few even mention base defense: Field Manual (FM) 7-98, Operations in a Low Intensity Conflict devotes four pages to it; the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL) has an Operations Other Than War handbook (No. 94-4, July 1994) containing a few pages on the subject, plus a checklist. Most of this information consists of general concepts with few specifics.
The best manual on conducting a base defense is FM 90-12,
Base Defense: Multi-Service Procedures for Defense of a Joint Base. It goes into much greater detail and includes a sample base defense plan, a discussion of passive and active defense methods, responses to terrorism, and other useful information. Still, many of the lessons we learned about securing a base camp in a peacekeeping environment had to come from onthe-job experience.
Adjacent to Skopje International Airport, Camp Able Sentry houses the task force and all the support assets for the 12 observation posts (OPs) along 70 kilometers of the border. Several buildings from an old Yugoslav air defense unit make up the barracks, and warehouse structures house vehicles, a gym, and supplies (Figure I ). Several...