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Mission creep is the gradual or incremental expansion of an intervention, project or mission, beyond its original scope, focus or goals, a ratchet effect spawned by initial success. Mission creep is usually considered undesirable due to how each success breeds more ambitious interventions until a final failure happens, stopping the intervention entirely.
The term was originally applied exclusively to military operations, but has recently been applied to many other fields, making the phrase Autological word. The phrase first appeared in 1993, in articles published in The Washington Post and in The New York Times concerning the United Nations peacekeeping mission during the Somali Civil War.
The U.S. and subsequent United Nations mission in Somalia (Restore Hope) would seem to be a classic example of mission creep. Begun in late 1992 as a U.S. humanitarian relief operation in the final months of the George H. W. Bush administration, the intervention was converted into a U.N. operation on June 4, 1993. While the initial Bush administration justification for entering Somalia focused on "humanitarian assistance," realities on the ground helped drive ever growing requirements. On June 5, 1993, Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's clan forces killed 23 peacekeepers who were part of the UNISOM II mission. This battle led to a UN Security Council decision seeking to capture those responsible for the deaths of the Pakistani peacekeepers. Along with growing objectives seeking longer term stability (rather than short-term humanitarian assistance), the search for Aidid fostered a more confrontational environment through the summer of 1993. In October 1993, 18 American soldiers died in the Battle of Mogadishu. This incident led to a much more defensive U.S. and UN presence in Somalia. U.S. forces withdrew in early 1994 and all UN forces were withdrawn in late February and early March 1995 during Operation United Shield.
Another early example of mission creep is the Korean War. Exit Strategy Delusions last retrieved February 15, 2007. It began as an attempt to save South Korea from invasion by the North Korea, but after that initial success expanded to an attempt to reunite the peninsula, a goal that eventually proved unattainable. That attempt resulted in a long and costly retreat through North Korea after the intervention of the China. NBC reporter David Gregory has cited the Vietnam War as an important example of mission creep, defining it as "the idea of, you know, gradually surging up forces, having nation-building goals, and running into challenges all along the way." JCS Speech – Meet the Press . Joint Chiefs of Staff website. Accessed August 24, 2009.
In 1956, Aneurin Bevan, politician and architect of Britain's National Health Service, gave a speech before the House of Commons on December 5 against Britain's mission creep in the Suez Crisis against Egypt. "I have been looking through the various objectives and reasons that the government have given to the House of Commons for making war on Egypt, and it really is desirable that when a nation makes war upon another nation it should be quite clear why it does so. It should not keep changing the reasons as time goes on." The speech was considered one of the 14 greatest speeches of the 20th century by The Guardian, along with speeches by Churchill, Kennedy, and Mandela. Eventually the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Nations played major roles in forcing Britain, France and Israel to withdraw from Egypt.Roger Owen "Suez Crisis" The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World, Second edition. Joel Krieger, ed. Oxford University Press Inc. 2001.
The International Monetary Fund, founded to maintain fixed exchange rates for developed countries, transitioned to funding developing countries in the 1970s. In 2005, scholars Sarah Babb and Ariel Buira remarked that the evolving goals of the IMF represented mission creep.
Within recent decades U.S. police forces (and SWAT teams in particular) have become increasingly militarized and expanded in focus in a manner described by The Economist as mission creep.
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