In late February, UN Secretary-General António Guterres recommended that the Security Council establish a UN-funded logistics support office to bolster the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission (MSS) in Haiti. The proposal, prepared in response to the Council’s November request for a “full range of options” of assistance the UN could provide to the Haitian authorities and the MSS, comes at a moment when Haiti’s politics are fragile and security conditions are deteriorating across Port-au-Prince and the surrounding regions. Security Council members will spend the coming weeks dissecting the secretary-general’s proposal and testing whether they are prepared to back it.

Why does the MSS need reinforcements?

The Security Council authorized the MSS in October 2023 to assist the Haitian National Police (HNP) in conducting offensive operations against armed gangs and protecting strategic locations across Haiti, with the goal of improving security conditions sufficiently so that the Haitian authorities could hold general elections. Though backed by a Security Council resolution, the MSS is not a UN-led mission. Some diplomats and UN officials preferred this route as a way to give the mission more latitude in conducting offensive police operations. They also hesitated to send UN peacekeepers back to the country due to MINUSTAH’s checkered legacy in the country. This approach, however, has left the MSS without the benefit of the UN’s extensive operational, financial, and administrative assistance.  As a result, nearly every aspect of the MSS has depended on voluntary support from a handful of member states. Kenya and the United States have carried the lion’s share of this burden. Kenya assumed overall leadership of the operation and deployed the vast majority of the approximately 1,000 personnel currently on the ground. The US, which spearheaded the creation of the MSS through the Security Council, committed over $600 million of financial and operational support to Kenya and the mission. A handful of countries contributed to a dedicated trust fund, which has about $110 million on hand as of the time of writing.  

This voluntary model has left the MSS severely understaffed and underequipped. Few countries have stepped up to contribute new personnel, leaving the mission well short of its envisioned strength of 2,500 personnel. Considerable portions of the MSS’s equipment are either in disrepair or poorly suited to urban combat in densely populated areas with narrow roads. The secretary-general’s letter suggested that nearly 50% of the MSS’s armored personnel carriers are nonfunctional. As Crisis Group documented in its February 2025 report, officers’ needs are considerable, ranging from “more ammunition and high-caliber weapons to helicopters and vessels that can curb rising gang activity at sea.” Prospects for new injections of voluntary funding are low, and the Trump administration is unlikely to continue its predecessor’s policy of underwriting the vast majority of the mission’s expenses. 

What Does the Secretary-General Recommend?

In his letter to the Security Council, the secretary-general proposed a single approach to reinforcing international security assistance to Haiti: creating a dedicated logistics package for the MSS and expanding the mandate of the UN political office, BINUH.

The logistics support model would involve the provision of operational, material, and administrative support from the UN to a non-UN force, paid out of the UN’s assessed peacekeeping budget. It would be implemented by a stand-alone UN office on the ground and is modeled on the UN’s assistance to African Union forces in Somalia that dates back to 2009. Guterres’s letter identifies a few broad areas of possible support that would be covered under such a model, including but not limited to life support (food, water, and fuel), mobility, medical assistance, engineering, communications, and the establishment of temporary operating bases. Many of these details would depend on the Security Council’s final authorization.

This is not the first time the Security Council has flirted with the idea of creating a logistics support package to bolster the MSS. The secretary-general first acknowledged that the MSS may need this kind of assistance back in August 2023, nearly six weeks before the Security Council adopted the resolution creating the MSS. In that same resolution, the Security Council gave the secretary-general an option to create a standalone logistics support package to accompany the Kenyan-led mission—albeit one funded through voluntary contributions and not through the UN’s assessed peacekeeping budget.

In addition to backstopping logistics for the Kenyan-led police mission, the secretary-general identifies other operational areas that would benefit from UN-coordinated assistance. These include nonlethal assistance directly from the UN to the HNP (funded by both the UN’s peacekeeping budget and voluntary funding), support to bolster the Kenyan-led mission’s intelligence capabilities, and additional capacity to ensure compliance with the UN’s Human Rights Due Diligence Policy.

Separately, the secretary-general suggests that the Security Council should reposition BINUH, the political office supporting governance and state-building reform in Haiti since 2019, to also cover tasks that would make Haitian security operations more sustainable. His proposal includes developing programs that would help individuals defect from armed gangs and creating a standing team within BINUH to help it implement the Security Council sanctions regime on Haiti.

What Are the Benefits and Drawbacks of the Secretary-General’s Proposal?

The UN’s pitch to the Security Council is best understood as both an interim measure and a political compromise. It offers a clear path for the Security Council to bolster the MSS with much-needed support. But it also raises more questions than it answers about the trajectory and viability of international security assistance to Haiti.

Most urgently, the logistics support package would offer the MSS financial and operational assistance that would help alleviate the mission’s financial shortfalls and reinforce its enabling capabilities. It would reduce some of the mission’s reliance on the UN voluntary trust fund and eliminate the MSS’s current need to request reimbursement without certainty that it will recoup its expenses. A focus on troop mobility and deployment would also assist the MSS in establishing all twelve forward operating bases across Port-au-Prince (it currently maintains three) and help it evolve from primarily conducting quick-reaction offensive operations to possibly sustaining its gains and holding ground. Separately, Council members can use the secretary-general’s recommendation to expand the mandate of BINUH to push back against other countries that took a more cautious approach during the July 2024 negotiations on its mandate renewal.

However, the proposal on the table also comes with many possible downsides and unanswered questions. Many of them relate to financial issues. While the proposed logistics support package would cover a wide range of assistance to the MSS, member states would still be asked to voluntarily contribute critical assets such as lethal equipment and stipends for deployed personnel. Though the secretary-general specified in his August 2023 letter that the Security Council could explicitly mandate the provision of lethal assistance, the latest proposal makes no mention of this.

The concept’s dependence on continued voluntary contributions, in addition to the use of the assessed peacekeeping budget (for the logistics office) and the UN regular budget (for BINUH), would also raise the burden on donors—particularly when this comes on top of contributions to Haiti’s humanitarian response plan and bilateral support. It is likely that there will be too many mouths to feed at a moment when the US, the largest donor to Haiti, is cutting funding across the board.

The proposal would also face challenges related to coordination. The logistics support model, if implemented as outlined in the secretary-general’s letter, may result in having “too many cooks in the kitchen.” One could easily envision a situation where the heads of the MSS, BINUH, the proposed logistics support office, and UN agencies, funds, and programs on the ground get caught up in internal jockeying over strategy and influence, especially if the logistics office is separate from the political mission. This dynamic would make it harder for Haiti’s transitional authorities (who themselves are mired in fierce political competition) and international embassies on the ground to work with a unified set of multilateral interlocutors.

The MSS and UN would also face coordination challenges in implementing their mandates. Implicit in the secretary-general’s proposal is that these entities should collectively undertake many of the tasks and functions inherent to a multidimensional UN peacekeeping mission without the same degree of operational integration. The UN’s attempts to conduct this symphony of different UN and non-UN functions—whether uniformed or civilian—will be harder without an integrated approach. This arrangement would also make it more challenging for diplomats and officials based in New York to provide oversight.

Finally, the report leaves one question entirely unanswered: if the MSS gets up to its originally envisioned strength with support from the logistics package, would that be sufficient to stem the tide against the armed gangs? The MSS’s original concept of operations was designed for a security context before Haiti’s armed gangs began coordinating their attacks at a time when they held less territory in Port-au-Prince. Even as the UN acknowledges worsening security conditions across Haiti, this letter does not offer member states a clear sense of whether the MSS is still fit for the task.

Whither a UN Peacekeeping Operation?

Perhaps the biggest gap in the secretary-general’s proposal is not what’s included but what’s omitted: an analysis of the merits and drawbacks of sending a blue helmet mission back to Haiti. Diplomats on the Security Council were not surprised that the UN chose against recommending such a move. But they were disappointed that the letter did not seriously evaluate this possibility, let alone suggest others as requested in their original plea for “a full range of options” from the UN.

Guterres’s opposition to sending peacekeepers back to Haiti is well known. He has asserted for years that the conditions in Haiti are not appropriate for blue helmets, as they would be required to conduct offensive operations that some argue go beyond the UN’s peacekeeping doctrine and rules of engagement. Concerns about UN peacekeepers getting caught in a “stabilization trap” are merited and worthy of critical examination, especially among member states. While the secretary-general could have used the letter to restate this case, he instead acknowledges that “the calls for peacekeeping have not gone unheard” and that the UN would be prepared to revisit the discussion as soon as Haiti’s security situation stabilized.

The secretary-general’s decision to omit this option from the proposal is also a byproduct of his close reading of Security Council politics. China and Russia have thus far opposed sending UN peacekeepers back to Haiti, motivated both by legitimate concerns about such a move and by their reluctance to give the US extra assistance in managing a conflict in its own backyard.

Another variable in this equation is the Trump administration’s views on security assistance to Haiti. The Biden administration led the charge to transform the MSS into a UN peacekeeping mission last September. The new administration has yet to show its cards on this issue, though Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver in February to unfreeze approximately $64 million of assistance to the MSS. The administration’s views will have an outsize influence on the Security Council’s upcoming discussions. But without the US’s unequivocal backing for a UN peacekeeping operation, a logistics support package seems like one of the few options that Council members may be able to agree on. 

Though there are understandable hesitations about a return to UN peacekeeping in Haiti, there are also upsides beyond sustainable funding and logistics assistance. Countries that have been reluctant to contribute troops to the MSS may feel more comfortable participating in a UN-led mission. An integrated mission structure, which would most likely bring the work of BINUH and the UN agencies under one umbrella, would help the Security Council better align different aspects of international assistance under a common strategy and operational framework.  At an operational level, an integrated approach to security monitoring and community engagement would also provide a boost to the mission’s situational awareness and peacekeeping intelligence capabilities, which were essential parts of MINUSTAH’s military and police operations.

Looking Ahead

A UN peacekeeping operation arguably has a better chance of helping Haiti stem its security threats than the current configuration of the MSS, even with some backing from the UN’s peacekeeping budget. This is not a consensus view, and others who study UN peace operations have cautioned of the risks of going down this road. At such a pivotal moment for Haiti, Council members should have this debate in as thorough and transparent a manner as possible. But by opting for an interim measure, the secretary-general has made it harder for the Security Council to consider, let alone evaluate, different options for action.

With this proposal in hand, Security Council diplomats may meet in the coming weeks to discuss what comes next, well ahead of their currently scheduled meeting on BINUH in mid-April. They should focus not only on what is politically feasible but also on what will give Haitian security forces the best chance of sustainably deterring and disarming the gangs. Opting for a band-aid measure may be the more feasible option at a time of deep geopolitical divisions in the Security Council. But they should thoroughly examine every option available to them, lest they find themselves revisiting this conversation in a year’s time with an even worse prognosis for success. 

Daniel Forti is a Senior Analyst for UN Advocacy and Research at Crisis Group.