Female Engagement Teams: Informing operations today

Dr Hannah West

Executive Summary

Female Engagement Teams (FETs) remain a tactical asset on UN and NATO Human Security operations today. Under the remit of Human Security Advisers, the British Army continues to train Troop Contributing Nations in their implementation, deploying them on the UN missions in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mali. Since their introduction in Afghanistan, they have become an international model for practising gender perspectives on the ground and satisfying the Women, Peace and Security agenda set out in UNSCR 1325. And yet, there has never been a strategic pause to review their long history and ask the question of why as well as how. Not only this, but FETs provide a case study in Human Security operations, the lessons of which have direct application to Human Security Advisers training and operating today.

The FET mission in Afghanistan was to ‘directly engage Afghan men and women, build trust and influence the Afghan population in order to support the battlespace owner’s intent’ (Land Warfare Centre, 2011, p.2). At an important juncture in the debate surrounding Women in Ground Close Combat (WiGCC), women soldiers were deployed on patrol, wanted there for being women. The seemingly positive rhetoric surrounding the British Army’s decision to introduce them can be attributed to two arguments directed at different audiences. For an internal audience, the British Army employed the argument that they contributed to operational effectiveness bringing military utility in terms of understanding, influencing and intelligencegathering. To an external audience, the British Army justified the introduction of FETs as protecting and empowering Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s treatment of women, thus reinforcing political rhetoric and media narratives used to justify the intervention in Afghanistan nearly a decade earlier. On both counts the British Army were visibly reinforcing a message that they welcomed the introduction of FETs. However, this research argues that FETs were set up to fail or ‘invisibly undermined’ by a British Army, uncomfortable with increasing the presence of servicewomen on the ‘front line’ and the threat this posed to the masculine heart of the Armed Forces embodied by the male infanteer. Institutional resistance manifested in giving them unclear objectives and inadequate training and resourcing that put lives at unnecessary risk. Applying a discourse of exceptionalism to a few servicewomen enabled the remainder