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I was playing around with ideas for how to model various military operations other than war, and I had an idea about how to model peacekeeping.

I imagine a scenario with at least three sides. A and B hate each other. C is the peacekeepers. A and B might be unfriendly to C, but not hostile.

What exactly is peacekeeping? In theory, it's not to destroy an enemy, but to prevent mutually hostile sides from fighting. So...C needs to serve as a "fence" between A and B. How to do this? It occurred to me that by setting up No Navigation zones around the peacekeeper units, with reference points that are mobile and linked to the peacekeepers, the player would be able to coordinate the peacekeepers to create a fence. (The No Navigation zones would be set up on sides A and B, and the G*d's Eye View could be used to identify where the peacekeepers were when it came to setting up the mobile reference points.) Naturally, the No Navigation zones would not be huge, so there would be gaps in the fence, so peacekeeping units would need to be rearranged on a regular basis. Also, the location of armed units from sides A and B would need to be identified as often as possible.

I'm not sure this would make a very interesting scenario all by itself, but perhaps would work as an element of a larger scenario (e.g., one group of rebels needs to be hunted down and destroyed, but another group needs to be kept from crossing a barrier so it doesn't attack allies, but simply destroying it too is not an ideal option).

Thoughts on this? Are there other, possibly better ways to do this?

I think this would be interesting if the peacekeepers were their own side (UN), and the player was in control of national military forces whose leadership had decided to unilaterally intervene for some specific reason. Maybe WMDs or a hostage crisis.

The peacekeepers would have their own set operational plans and the player would need to work around them to achieve the objective. Because of the politics, the peacekeepers would not be friendly to the player, requiring the player to use both sensors and deduction of the behavior of unidentified units to determine who to hit and who not to. Hitting peacekeepers would of course be the ultimate blunder, reflected in loss of points. Hitting an otherwise neutral side could provoke it to attack their enemy or even the peacekeepers themselves, depending on the politics of the side- or just plain human error. This would of course require a lot of Lua.

Assuming this is centered around ground units/facilities (I can't think of any historical peacekeeping operation that involved ships, or aircraft beyond helicopters) I'm not sure how well it would work under player control. I find that CMO's gunfire model is geared towards long-range artillery duels, resulting in things like armored fighting vehicles and infantry behaving in an uninteresting and disappointing way. The old adage that ground units in CMO are basically there to be used as targets still rings true, in my opinion (for now).