mand of the Mission Support element, which is a part of civil-
ian component. Aviation and engineer troops are called mission
“enablers”, and therefore are controlled by the Chief of Integrat-
ed Support Service (ISS) in Mission Support under the current
integrated UN peacekeeping mission construct. This arrange-
ment means that the Force Commander must get an approval
from the Director of Mission Support (DMS) when the Force
needs to use aviation or engineering assets, resulting in a dis-
torted structure given that the Force Commander has no direct
command nor authority for all military units in UNMISS. 20
Even though communication between Force and DMS appears
to be open and workable at UNMISS, it takes an unacceptably
long time to get the approval signatures of the head of Mission
Support and other different levels of civilian component in
order to employ military assets within the UNMISS structure. 21
For example, when the military troops in the field requests
a helicopter for medical evacuation (MEDEVAC) to Force
Headquarters, the request would be transferred to the Mission
Support Centre and the Integrated Service Support cell to get
the necessary signatures on the request from the Director of
Mission Support. The request would have to clear this bureau-
cratic hierarchy in the civilian component, a process that nor-
mally takes about 6 hours to launch the helicopter. The civilian
components of the Mission Headquarters is neither familiar
with, nor knowledgeable about the employment of military
aviation assets. The current procedure in Integrated Missions
require many steps in the command process between the civilian
component and military forces, simply taking too long for
decision-making. The structure and functions, roles and tasks
of many ‘operational centres’ in the Integrated Mission have a
bureaucratic and inefficient nature. The bottom line is that the
Integrated Mission lacks any true ability to respond to an emer-
gency in a timely fashion.
The Investigation Report recommended that the Mission
should establish an Integrated Operation Centre (IOC) in-
corporating all actors under the UN ‘umbrella’ (military, UN
police, UN Security and formed police units) and co-locating
them with the UNMISS Headquarters. However hand, the
Investigation Report recommends an alternative option that the
IOC separates itself from any tasking authority. The question
then arises, what does this IOC coordinate, and how does it dif-
fer from the JOC? The establishment of an additional ‘centre’
may cause further inefficiency in command and control in the
Integrated Mission. In a crisis, when an order or directive from
the civilian component and military Force Headquarters may be
competing, there is no one individual or organization designat-
ed to make the final decision. UNMISS has demonstrated this
shortcoming of the Integrated Mission concept.
Insufficient Coordination in Cluster System in South
Sudan
Clusters are groups of humanitarian organizations (UN and
non-UN) working in the main sectors of humanitarian action,
such as the provision of services such as water, shelter, and
health (See Figure 3). They are implemented when clear human-
37