The Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands

FRoM the FIeld | 155 The purpose of this article is not to provide a critical analysis of the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) or a robust platform for lessons learned. Rather, it offers a general introduction to the country and an overview of a stabilization and reconstruction operation with a different framework than many of the operations that the United States has participated in during the post–Cold War period. RAMSI is an Australian-led intervention that deployed to the Solomon Islands in July 2003 to establish peace and security. Unlike the Australianled Peace Monitoring Group, which deployed to Bougainville from May 1998 to June 2003,1 and the ongoing commitment to East Timor,2 RAMSI is led by a diplomat. It emphasizes policing and a “light” military presence. One could argue that the lessons learned from recent interventions in fragile and conflictaffected countries such as the Solomon Islands are more relevant to future U.S. commitments than the plethora of lessons learned templates and volumes of doctrine that are being pieced together from the Afghanistan and Iraq experiences. The Solomon Islands is the third largest archipelago in the South Pacific consisting of a scattered double chain of 992 islands extending 1,000 miles southeast from Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. With a population of approximately 560,000, the country has a diverse cultural mix across