Préface

Allies That Count : Junior Partners in Coalition Warfare is an important work that focuses on an unfortuantely overlooked topic - junior partners in coalition warfare. Too often, scholarship and public debates related to contemporary warfare remain trapped in an artificial discussion of collective entities ("The North Atlantic Treaty Organization did X"), or they focus on the policies of the major actor, the United States. While this is partly understandable, it is also problematic as it seems to deny agency to the other partners and to lump them all together in the same category. The great benefit of Olivier Schmitt’s work is it highlights that not all junior partners are the same and that their autonomous policies can have positive effects on the conduct of a multinational intervention.