I'll just add a bit of humour to all of this very serious discussion. When I did say to the public that if you are a UN commander in the field and did it at CDAI, don't phone the UN after five or on the weekend, because there's no one to take your call then. When I got back to Canada, I was invited to New York. I was taken to a building on the far side, on the opposite side facing the UN building. We went up in an elevator to the third floor, and there was a door that had a cardboard sign on it. It said, “The General Lewis MacKenzie Memorial Situation Room. We work 24-7”. It was commanded by a Canadian diplomat who was running the show.
They do have an integrated headquarters, as General Mitchell has mentioned. The problem is that at one stage, for about two to three years, Canada and a number of highly trained, staff-trained officers were donated to the UN to set up and run the headquarters. A lot of third world nations, etc., who liked the $150 U.S. per diem in New York, protested because they were losing those positions. They were being asked to turn them over to mostly western-trained officers to run this headquarters, and the UN cancelled the whole thing after less than a year.
They still struggle with this unequal quality of trained personnel to set up and run missions overseas, to the point where the under-secretary general of peacekeeping at the UN, less than three years ago, said that the UN was not capable of running a mission overseas on the scale they have now. However, they haven't resolved the issue. They are still trying. Their hearts are in the right place, but it's pretty hard to do when you have battles going on in the middle of the Central African Republic, for example.