To be sure, it was not as though NATO’s uniformed professionals had been railroaded into an operation against Milosevic without having given it prior consideration. On the contrary, serious and detailed options planning for an air operation of some sort against Yugoslavia had begun at USAFE headquarters as far back as June 1998—planning that was never ultimately made use of for political reasons. Nevertheless, it became clear, shortly after the bombing effort began, that the relatively seamless performance by the coalition in Desert Storm was not to be replicated in Allied Force. Instead, what unfolded was a highly dissatisfying application of air power that showed not only the predictable fits and starts of trying to prosecute a war through an alliance of 19 members bound by a unanimity rule, but also some failures even within the operation’s U.S. component to make the most of what air power had to offer within the prevailing constraints of alliance warfare.
ALLIED MISCALCULATIONS AND FALSE HOPES
To begin with, despite the ultimate success of Allied Force, a mis-judgment of near-blunder proportions came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure: NATO’s leaders did not appreciate the historical and cultural importance of Kosovo to the Serbs and the consequent criticality of Kosovo to Milosevic’s continued political livelihood. Fortunately for the allies, their faulty assessment was not a show-stopper, although it easily could have been had Milosevic refrained from launching his ethnic cleansing campaign and instead merely hunkered down in a defensive crouch to wait out the bombing in a contest of wills with NATO. Once he elected to raise the stakes by proceeding with Operation Horseshoe, however, NATO’s determination to prevail at all cost deprived his strategy of any foundation it may previously have had.
One reason for NATO’s overconfidence that air power alone would suffice in forcing Milosevic to yield on Kosovo was almost surely a misreading of the earlier Bosnian war and the role of Operation Deliberate Force in producing the Dayton accords of 1995. As has been widely noted since Allied Force ended, Bosnia was a part of the former Yugoslav Federation where Milosevic generally got what he wanted and to which he was not particularly deeply attached. In the negotiations that eventually yielded the Dayton accords, Milosevic succeeded in keeping Kosovo unburdened by their strictures at the price of abandoning Sarajevo to the Muslims, in a direct and outright betrayal of his Bosnian Serb compatriots, because there was no significant Serb minority living there.
In contrast, Kosovo was generally acknowledged to be of profound historical importance for Serbia. Among other things, it contained Kosovo Polje, the site where the Ottoman Turks defeated the Serb kings in 1389. As journalist Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, “it was here that the Kosovar lands passed under Turkish Ottoman control for more than five centuries; it was here that the Serbian dream of reconquering Kosovo one day was born, a dream not realized until just before World War I. And it was here, in 1989, that Milosevic held his infamous rally of 250,000 supporters which launched his campaign for a Greater Serbia.”[10] With that depth of commitment, it was all but inconceivable that Milosevic would be talked out of Kosovo by allied diplomacy, even if supported by a threat of NATO bombing which he was inclined, for good reason, not to take seriously.[11]
Expounding further on the erroneousness of assuming that Operation Allied Force would produce the same relatively quick and easy results that the earlier Operation Deliberate Force had produced in the Bosnian crisis of 1995, Adam Roberts noted that “the mythologizing of [that earlier] campaign ignored one inconvenient fact: that it followed a period of sharp Serb military reverses on the ground, including the mass expulsion of the Serbs from the Croatian Krajina. Also, the 1995 bombing was not against Serbia proper, and thus did not arouse the same nationalist response as would the bombing in 1999. The real lesson of those 1995 events might be a very different one: that if NATO wants to have some effect, including through air power, it needs to have allies among the local belligerents and a credible land-force component to its strategy.”[12] A false assumption that air power alone had produced the Dayton accords may thus have contributed further to NATO’s miscalculation that Milosevic could be induced to give up in Kosovo after merely a few days of token bombing.[13] Aleksa Djilas, son of the Yugoslav cold-war dissident Milovan Djilas and an able intellectual in his own right, attested from first-hand knowledge that the West had “badly underestimated the Serbian attachment to Kosovo.”[14] In light of that, rather than ask why it took so long for NATO’s bombing to coerce Milosevic to back down, a more appropriate question might be why he yielded as quickly as he did.
PROBLEMS AT THE COALITION LEVEL
In their joint statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee after the war ended, Secretary Cohen and General Shelton rightly insisted that Operation Allied Force “could not have been conducted without the NATO alliance and without the infrastructure, transit and basing access, host-nation force contributions, and most important, political and diplomatic support provided by the allies and other members of the coalition.”[15] Yet the conduct of the air war as an allied effort, however unavoidable it may have been, came at the cost of a flawed strategy that was further hobbled by the manifold inefficiencies that were part and parcel of conducting combat operations by committee.
Those inefficiencies did not take long to manifest themselves. During the air war’s first week, NATO officials reported that up to half of the proposed strike missions had been aborted due to weather and “other considerations,” the latter, in many cases, being the refusal of some allies to approve certain target requests.[16] Indeed, the unanimity principle made for a rules-of-engagement regime that often precluded the efficient use of air power. Beyond that, there was an understandable lack of U.S. trust in some allies where the most important sensitivities were concerned. The Pentagon withheld from the allies mission specifics for literally hundreds of sorties that entailed the use of F-117s, B-2s, and cruise missiles, to ensure strict U.S. control over those U.S.-only assets and to maintain a firewall against leaks from any allies who might compromise those operations.[17]
In addition to the natural friction created by NATO’s committee approach to target approval, the initial reluctance of its political leaders to countenance a more aggressive air campaign produced a resounding failure to capitalize on air power’s potential for taking down entire systems of enemy capability simultaneously. In his first interview after Allied Force had begun six weeks earlier, the air component commander, USAF Lieutenant General Michael Short, was frank in airing his sense of being constrained by the political limits imposed by NATO, pointing out that the graduated campaign was counter to all of his professional instincts.[18] Short further admitted that he was less an architect of the campaign than its implementor. He was particularly critical of NATO’s unwillingness to threaten a ground invasion from the start, noting that that failure was making it doubly difficult for NATO pilots to identify their targets because of the freedom it had given VJ forces to disperse and hide their tanks and other vehicles.
10
Michael Ignatieff,
11
As one observer wrote of Operation Allied Force afterward, “so low was NATO’s credibility with Milosevic that the threat of war and even war itself were not enough to convince him that he had anything to fear.” Christopher Cviic, “A Victory All the Same,”
12
Adam Roberts, “NATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’ over Kosovo,”
13
This point bears emphasizing. It was not just that Serbia’s stakes in Kosovo were much higher than in Bosnia. The two cases diverged additionally in three fundamental ways, each of which should logically have led the United States and NATO to adopt a more robust and considered strategy in the Kosovo war. First, the 1995 NATO air campaign was linked to a major ground effort by Croatian and Bosnian forces coming in from the north and west and by some 10,000 NATO troops who had been deployed weeks prior to the onset of the bombing. In 1999, in contrast, the ground element was expressly ruled out at the highest levels. Second, the objective of Deliberate Force was limited (ending the siege of Sarajevo) and achievable through a phased, coercive bombing campaign, whereas the goals of Allied Force were ambiguous (including forcing Milosevic back to the bargaining table) and more difficult to achieve through air power alone. Finally, even before the onset of the 1995 bombing, Milosevic had told U.S. negotiators that he was interested in forging a deal to end the war in Bosnia on terms acceptable to the international community. That was anything but the case on the eve of Allied Force. I thank Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution for calling my attention to these differences.
15
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and General Henry H. Shelton, “Joint Statement on the Kosovo After-Action Review,” testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1999.
16
Thomas W. Lippman and Bradley Graham, “Yugoslavs Fire on U.S. Troops; 3 Missing,”
17
Bob Deans, “Pentagon Mum About Air Mission,”
18
Michael R. Gordon, “Allied Air Chief Stresses Hitting Belgrade Sites,”