Whatever the case, the attack moved NATO over a new threshold and brought the war, for the first time, directly to the Serbian people. By the end of the seventh week, there began to be reports of Yugoslav officials openly admitting that the country was on the verge of widespread hardship because of the air war’s mounting damage to the nation’s economy, which had already been weakened by almost four years of international sanctions imposed for Serbia’s earlier role in the war in Bosnia.[67] The destruction of one factory in Krujevac that produced automobiles, trucks, and munitions resulted in 15,000 people being put out of work, plus 40,000 more who were employed by the factory’s various subcontractors. Attacks against other factories had similar effects on the Yugoslav economy. By the time Allied Force had reached its halfway point, the bombing of infrastructure targets had halved Yugoslavia’s economic output and deprived more than 100,000 civilians of jobs. Local economists reported that the effect was more damaging than that of the successive Nazi and allied bombing of Yugoslavia during World War II, when the country was far more rural in its economic makeup. A respected economist at Belgrade University who coordinated a group of economists from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Mladjan Dinkic, called the results of the bombing an “economic catastrophe,” adding that while the Serb population would not die of hunger, “our industrial base will be destroyed and the size of the economy cut in half.”[68]
Only during the last two weeks of Allied Force, however, did NATO finally strike with real determination against Serbia’s electrical power generating capability, a target set that had been attacked in Baghdad from the very first days of Desert Storm. The earlier “soft” attacks at the beginning of May with graphite filament bombs against the transformer yards of Yugoslavia’s main power grid had caused a temporary disruption of the power supply by shorting out transformers and disabling them rather than destroying them. But this time, in perhaps the single most attention-getting strike of the entire air war up to that point, the Yugoslav electrical grid was severely damaged over the course of three consecutive nights starting on May 24. Those attacks, directed against electrical power facilities and related targets in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Nis, the three largest cities in Serbia, shut off the power to 80 percent of Serbia, leaving millions without electricity or water service. They affected the heart of Yugoslavia’s IADS, as well as the computers that ran its banking system and other important national consumers of electricity.[69]
As evidence that these infrastructure attacks were making their effects felt, the early street dancing and carefully orchestrated demonstrations of studied outrage against NATO in response to its earlier pinprick attacks became displaced by a manifest weariness on the part of most residents. Clark continued to stress that the top priority was to destroy the VJ’s 3rd Army or run it out of Kosovo. He also acknowledged, however, the goal of disrupting the everyday life of Serb citizens.[70] By late May, NATO military commanders had received authorization to attack Yugoslavia’s civilian telephone and computer networks in an effort to sever communications between Belgrade and Kosovo.[71] In all of this, a long-discredited premise of classic air power theory, namely, that the bombing of civilian infrastructure would eventually prompt a popular reaction, seemed to be showing some signs of validity. Until that key turning point, Clark later observed, Operation Allied Force had been “the only air campaign in history in which lovers strolled down riverbanks in the gathering twilight and ate at outdoor cafes and watched the fireworks.”[72]
FACING THE NEED FOR A GROUND OPTION
During the air war’s initial weeks, administration officials continued to adhere to their initial hope that an air effort alone would eventually elicit the desired response from Milosevic. Even after Allied Force was well under way, Secretary General Solana announced that he was sure that the bombing would be over before the start of the long-planned Washington summit on April 23 to celebrate NATO’s 50th birthday.[73] Deep doubts that the air attacks alone would suffice in forcing Milosevic to knuckle under, however, soon prompted a steady rise in military pressure—notably from some U.S. Air Force leaders directly involved with the air war—for developing at least a fallback option for a ground invasion.[74]
Indeed, even before the operation was a week old, indications had begun to mount that senior administration officials were starting to have second thoughts about the advisability of having peremptorily ruled out a ground option before launching into Allied Force. The chairman of the JCS, General Shelton, for example, remarked that there were no NATO plans “right now” to introduce ground troops short of a peace settlement in Kosovo.[75] In a similarly hedged remark, Secretary Cohen pointed out that the Clinton administration and NATO had no plans to introduce any ground troops “into a hostile environment,” leaving open the possibility that they might contemplate putting a ground presence into a Kosovo deemed “nonhostile” before the achievement of a settlement.[76] By the end of the second week, Secretary of State Albright went further yet toward hinting at the administration’s growing discomfiture over having ruled out a ground threat when she allowed that NATO might change its position and put in ground troops should the bombing succeed in creating a “permissive environment.”[77] Ultimately, the air war’s continued indecisiveness led President Clinton himself to concede that he would consider introducing ground troops if he became persuaded that the bombing would not produce the desired outcome. In a clear contradiction to his earlier position on the issue, he asserted that he had “always said that… we have not and will not take any option off the table.” That statement was later described by a U.S. official as testimony to an ongoing administration effort “to break out of a rhetorical box that we should never have gotten into.”[78]
By the start of the third week, a consensus had begun to form in Washington that ground forces might well be needed, if only to salvage NATO’s increasingly shaky credibility that was being steadily eroded by the air operation’s lackluster performance.[79] That dawning realization led to two parallel escalation processes: one highly public—the substantial increase in the number of committed aircraft, the growing number of approved targets and heightened percentage of daily shooter sorties, and the hard attacks conducted against the Yugoslav power grid; and the other largely beneath public scrutiny—namely, more serious discussion within the U.S. government over the need to begin making concrete preparations for a ground intervention. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott conveyed a “very explicit” warning to Russian envoy Vladimir Chernomyrdin that President Clinton was seriously considering a ground option, a warning which we can assume Chernomyrdin duly passed on to Milosevic.
67
Robert Block, “In Belgrade, Hardship Grows Under Sustained Air Assault,”
68
Steven Erlanger, “Economists Find Bombing Cuts Yugoslavia’s Production in Half,”
69
Philip Bennett and Steve Coll, “NATO Warplanes Jolt Yugoslav Power Grid,”
71
William Drozdiak, “Allies Target Computer, Phone Links,”
73
James Gerstenzang and Elizabeth Shogren, “Serb TV Airs Footage of 3 Captured U.S. Soldiers,”
74
On that account, Clark later acknowledged that his air commanders were no happier than he was with the absence of a ground threat, noting that it was “sort of an unnatural act for airmen to fight a ground war without a ground component.” Ignatieff, “The Virtual Commander,” p. 33.
75
Paul Richter, “Use of Ground Troops Not Fully Ruled Out,”
76
Rowan Scarborough, “Military Experts See a Need for Ground Troops,”
78
John F. Harris, “Clinton Says He Might Send Ground Troops,”
79
Dan Balz, “U.S. Consensus Grows to Send in Ground Troops,”