In a sign that such indicators may have begun to affect Milosevic’s risk calculus, VJ units were reported in mid-May to be digging in along likely attack routes from Macedonia and Albania and fortifying the border, in a distinct shift in effort from expelling ethnic Albanians to preparing for a possible showdown with NATO on the ground. In particular, VJ troops were observed laying mines and attempting to block potential ground attack routes from Skopje and Kumanovo in Macedonia, in a pattern of activity suggesting that the allied bombing effort had not yet come close to breaking their cohesion and fighting spirit.[15]
Moreover, earlier on the same day that Milosevic eventually capitulated, President Clinton held a widely publicized meeting with his service chiefs for the express purpose of airing options for land force employment in case NATO decided it had no choice but to approve a ground invasion.[16] That was his first meeting with all four chiefs at any time during the course of Operation Allied Force. Immediately after the meeting, which left the issue unresolved, Clinton was said to have been planning to inform the chiefs that he was now ready to sign on to a ground invasion should developments leave no alternative.[17] In what he later described as “a pretty depressing memo” to the president, Berger wrote that “we basically should go ahead with what Clark had proposed if the [Ahtisaari-Chernomyrdin] mission failed.” In that memo, Berger listed three options. The first, to arm the Kosovars, would create a multitude of undesirable downstream consequences that would persist for years and thus was ruled out as a nonstarter. The second, to wait until spring, was equally unacceptable because it would oblige NATO to supply and protect the Kosovar refugees in Albania throughout the winter. That left only the third option, a massive ground invasion by 175,000 NATO troops, some 100,000 of whom would be American.[18] Taken together, these developments made for a compelling pattern of evidence suggesting that both Washington and its chief NATO allies had crossed the Rubicon when it came to facing up to the land-invasion issue, and that they had become determined by the end of May to commit to a forced entry on the ground if the bombing did not produce an acceptable settlement soon.
Some, however, have made more of this sequence of events than the evidence warrants. In the early wake of the successful conclusion of Operation Allied Force, revisionist claims began emanating from some quarters suggesting that the air effort had been totally ineffective and that, in the end, it had been Milosevic’s fear of a NATO ground invasion that induced him to capitulate.[19] Clark himself, in his memoirs, indicated his belief that by mid-May, NATO “had gone about as far as possible with the air strikes” and that in the end, it had been the Apache deployment and the prospect of a NATO ground intervention that, “in particular, pushed Milosevic to concede.”[20] That notwithstanding the all-but-conclusive evidence Clark presented elsewhere throughout his book that NATO’s top political leaders were nowhere near having settled on a definitive invasion plan—let alone decided to proceed with such a plan should the bombing prove unavailing.[21] Even viewed in the most favorable light conceivable, such far-reaching claims on behalf of the implied ground threat defy believability because any NATO land invasion, however possible it may eventually have been, would have taken months, at a minimum, to prepare for and successfully mount.
In contrast, Milosevic was living with the daily reality of an increasingly brutal air war that showed no sign of abating. Although Clark’s effort to find and attack dispersed and hidden VJ forces in Kosovo was consuming the preponderance of shooter sorties while accomplishing little by way of tangible results, more and more infrastructure targets were also being approved and struck every day.[22] In a revealing admission of what was uppermost among his concerns on the day he elected to settle, Milosevic asked Chernomyrdin directly on June 3 in response to NATO’s ultimatum: “Is this what I have to do to get the bombing stopped?” Chernomyrdin replied in the affirmative, with Ahtisaari adding: “This is the best you can get. It’s only going to get worse for you.” To which Milosevic responded: “Clearly I accept this position.”[23]
There is no question that by the end of May, NATO had yielded to the inevitable and embraced in principle the need for a ground invasion should the bombing continue to prove indecisive. There also is every reason to believe that awareness of that change in NATO’s position on Milosevic’s part figured importantly in his eventual decision to capitulate. There is no basis, however, for concluding that the mere threat of a land invasion somehow overshadowed the continuing, here-and-now reality of NATO’s air attacks as the preeminent consideration accounting for that decision. There also is little benefit to be gained from the misguided efforts by air and land power partisans alike to argue the relative impact of the air attacks and ground threat in simplistic either-or terms. It detracts not in the least from the air war’s signal accomplishments to concede that developments on the land-invasion front almost surely were part of the chemistry of Milosevic’s concession decision. Although any impending ground intervention was months away at best, there is no question that both the Clinton administration and the principal NATO allies had made up their minds on the need to do something along those lines should the air war continue to prove unavailing. In light of that, as two RAND colleagues have suggested, “in assessing NATO air attacks on Serbia, analysts should focus not on the role air power played instead of a ground invasion… but on the role it played in combination with the possibility of one.”[24]
MILOSEVIC’S PROBABLE DECISION CALCULUS
To better understand the interaction of influences that most likely persuaded Milosevic to concede, it may be instructive to view Allied Force as it unfolded not through our own frame of reference, but rather through Serbian eyes. Those who planned and ran the air operation understandably tended to fixate on such negative aspects as target-list restrictions and what many considered to be excessive fretfulness on the part of the alliance’s political leaders over the possibility of causing collateral damage. For them, the air war’s dominant hallmarks were such sources of daily frustration as repeated delays in the target approval process and the consequent inefficiency of the overall effort. Naturally, in their view, the performance of air power in Operation Allied Force left a great deal to be desired.
15
Michael R. Gordon, “NATO Says Serbs, Fearing Land War, Dig In on Border,”
16
Jane Perlez, “Clinton and the Joint Chiefs to Discuss Ground Invasion,”
17
For details, see Steven Erlanger, “NATO Was Closer to Ground War in Kosovo Than Is Widely Realized,”
18
McManus, “Clinton’s Massive Ground Invasion That Almost Was.” NATO commanders were asking for three months to assemble the invasion force.
19
A recent example of this countercontention dismissed the claims of unspecified “air power enthusiasts” and posited instead that “the decision to commit ground forces [a decision which, in fact, had
20
General Wesley K. Clark,
21
The most compelling of such evidence cited by Clark was the May 28 statement by Secretary of Defense Cohen, made less than a week before Milosevic capitulated, that “there is no consensus for a ground force. And until there is a consensus, we should not undertake any action for which we could not measure up in the way of performance…. And so, there is a very serious question in terms of trying to push for a consensus that you really diffuse or in any way diminish the commitment to the air campaign. The one thing we have to continue is to make sure we have the allies consolidated in strong support of the air campaign. They are. And they are in favor of its intensification. So that’s where we intend to put the emphasis.” Ibid, p. 332.
22
However, by dispersing their assets and selectively emitting with their radars, Serb IADS operators forced NATO aircrews to remain wary to the very end and denied them the freedom to operate at will in hostile airspace. Although the Serbs’ repeated attempts to bring down NATO aircraft frequently came in the form of ineffective ballistic launches, the launches were amply disconcerting to allied pilots, who were forced to threat-react—often aggressively—to ensure their own safety. Many guided shots in accordance with IADS doctrine were also fired against attacking allied aircraft, requiring even more aggressive and hair-raising countertactics by the targeted aircraft. A first-hand account of one such episode is reported in Dave Moniz, “Eye-to-Eye with a New Kind of War,”
23
Quoted in Tyler Marshall and Richard Boudreaux, “Crisis in Yugoslavia: How an Uneasy Alliance Prevailed,”
24
Daniel L. Byman and Matthew C. Waxman, “Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate,”