On February 6, the Contact Group (made up of representatives from France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States), prodded by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, summoned Serb and KLA representatives to the Rambouillet chateau on the outskirts of Paris for a last-chance round of talks aimed at producing an overarching settlement for Kosovo. Those talks ended without agreement on February 23. Further talks began in Paris on March 15. During the latter negotiations, Albright delivered an ultimatum to the Serbs and Kosovars alike that, as an incentive, offered to contribute 28,000 NATO peacekeepers, including 4,000 U.S. troops, to police any negotiated settlement. Three days later, the KLA signed a peace accord aimed at giving Kosovo broad autonomy within Serbia. The day after, however, Serbia refused to sign, insisting that it would not even consider the idea of foreign troops on Kosovo soil. More ominously yet, on the very same day that this second round of talks began, Milosevic ordered a major escalation of the buildup of VJ forces both within and immediately adjacent to Kosovo that had begun the previous month, in a clear sign that a major move against the KLA and against ethnic Albanian civilians was imminent.
By all indications, Milosevic did not enter the Rambouillet process with any intent to negotiate seriously. On the contrary, in all likelihood he saw it as presenting a perfectly timed opportunity to position himself to launch Operation Horseshoe (Potkova), as his incipient ethnic cleansing campaign was code-named. By that point, he most likely fully anticipated that NATO would eventually bomb him, much as U.S. and British forces did in a token manner against Iraq two months previously in Desert Fox. Probably key to Milosevic’s strategy was an underlying belief that he could take at least as much measured pain from a symbolic NATO air operation as Saddam Hussein had endured from Desert Fox. That belief most likely hinged on an associated conviction that NATO’s limited tolerance for bombing would run out in short order and that he would then have Kosovo all to himself, with no further outside meddling by NATO, OSCE, or any other foreign peace-enforcement entities, and with no Kosovar Albanians. As if to bear that out, not only did Belgrade reject NATO’s peace proposal outright, it simultaneously launched a new campaign of burning and pillaging by some 40,000 VJ troops in the central Drenica region of Kosovo, using tanks, heavy artillery, and mortar fire against dozens of villages. In the process, VJ and MUP forces destroyed three of seven known regional headquarters of the KLA and forced thousands of ethnic Albanian civilians to flee. In the wake of that renewed assault, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported 240,000 internally displaced persons in Kosovo, including 60,000 rendered homeless in just the preceding three weeks.
The refugee crisis quickly assumed all the earmarks of a humanitarian disaster. President Clinton ordered Holbrooke back to Belgrade on March 22 in an eleventh-hour bid to persuade Milosevic to desist from further ravaging of Kosovo or else face NATO bombing attacks. Holbrooke was instructed to warn Milosevic that NATO was preparing air and missile strikes that would destroy much of Yugoslavia’s military infrastructure. Milosevic was further warned that the targets of those attacks would be not just in Kosovo but in Serbia as well.[5] Holbrooke made no attempt to bargain and stressed to Milosevic that he was in Belgrade solely to deliver a message. At the end of a four-hour meeting, he was rebuffed.
At that point, with the gauntlet thrown down by Holbrooke, U.S. officials presented NATO’s ambassadors with a final proposed bombing plan against Serbia, the declared goals of which were a verifiable halt to ethnic cleansing and atrocities on the ground in Kosovo; a withdrawal of all but a token number of VJ, MUP, and paramilitary troops from Kosovo; the deployment of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo; the return of refugees and their unhindered access to aid; and the laying of groundwork for a future settlement in Kosovo along the lines of the Rambouillet terms of reference.[6] Commenting on the threatened campaign, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR), U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, warned that “if required, we will strike in a swift and severe fashion.” General Klaus Naumann, the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, added that Milosevic was “severely mistaken” if he believed that NATO would engage merely in pinprick attacks and then await his response.[7]
Earlier, when the allies had empowered NATO Secretary General Javier Solana to authorize air strikes on January 30, the declared intent was to conduct limited raids over 48 hours and then pause to encourage Milosevic to reconsider. The plan this time was for a wider range of targets to be hit and for a longer operation aimed at causing considerable infrastructure damage. In an eleventh-hour bid to marshal public support for the impending air effort, President Clinton made an appeal, in a televised speech at a labor union luncheon on the day before the bombing commenced, beseeching the American people to support his actions in coming to grips with NATO’s looming Kosovo predicament.[8]
To be sure, planning for an air operation of some sort against Serbia had begun as early as June 1998. Initial plans were for an option called Operation Nimble Lion, which would have pitted a substantial number of U.S. and allied aircraft against some 250 targets throughout the former Yugoslavia.[9] This option was developed wholly within U.S. channels by the 32nd Air Operations Group at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, at the behest of USAF General John Jumper in his capacity as commander, United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), in response to a directive from Clark in his capacity as commander in chief, U.S. European Command (USEUCOM). A separate plan called Concept of Operations Plan (CONOPLAN) 10601 was later developed by NATO and approved by the NAC. Although there was some overlap between these two plans, the thrust of each was different. Nimble Lion would have hit the Serbs hard at the beginning, whereas 10601 entailed a gradual, incremental, and phased approach. The latter ultimately became the basis for Operation Allied Force.
Two closely related U.S. joint task force (JTF) planning efforts called Operations Flexible Anvil (commanded by U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Daniel Murphy, commander of the 6th Fleet) and Sky Anvil (commanded by USAF Lieutenant General Michael Short, commander of the 16th Air Force at Aviano Air Base, Italy) followed in the summer of 1998.[10] Those efforts were terminated when Milosevic initially agreed to a cease-fire after his October 5–13 talks with Holbrooke.[11] In all, General Jumper later reported that by the onset of Allied Force, no fewer than 40 air campaign options had been generated and fine-tuned.[12] Those options were said to have included some that were at least implicitly critical of the proposed use of NATO air power without a supporting ground threat to encourage enemy troops to assemble and maneuver so they might be more easily targeted and attacked from the air.
5
In his exchange with Milosevic, Holbrooke said: “You understand our position?” Milosevic: “Yes.” Holbrooke: “Is it absolutely clear what will happen when we leave, given your position?” Milosevic: “Yes, you will bomb us. You are a big and powerful nation. You can bomb us if you wish.” Bruce W. Nelan, “Into the Fire,”
6
Jane Perlez, “Holbrooke to Meet Milosevic in Final Peace Effort,”
7
R. Jeffrey Smith, “Belgrade Rebuffs Final U.S. Warning,”
8
Charles Babington and Helen Dewar, “President Pleads for Support,”
9
Telephone conversation with Lieutenant General Michael Short, USAF (Ret.), August 22, 2001.
10
Flexible Anvil was a U.S.-only option that envisaged only ship-launched Tomahawk and conventional air-launched cruise missile attacks over a 48- to 72-hour period, roughly along the lines of Operation Desert Fox conducted against Iraq the following December. Sky Anvil envisaged follow-on air strikes in a transition to a NATO operation (or an operation involving a more truncated coalition of the willing). General Short believed that it was counterproductive to fragment these closely connected options into two separate plans, but he and Admiral Murphy were well acquainted and kept each other informed. Conversation with Vice Admiral Daniel J. Murphy, USN, commander, 6th Fleet, aboard the USS
11
Lieutenant Colonel L. T. Wight, USAF, “What a Tangled Web We Wove: An After-Action Assessment of Operation Allied Force’s Command and Control Structure and Processes,” unpublished paper, p. 1.
12
General John Jumper, USAF, testimony to the Military Readiness Subcommittee, House Armed Services Committee, Washington, D.C., October 26, 1999. The most fully developed of these iterations, called Operation Allied Talon, was a true phased air campaign plan rooted in effects-based targeting and aimed at achieving concrete military objectives. Despite the best efforts of the JTF Noble Anvil leadership (Admiral James Ellis, General Jumper, and General Short) to sell this plan to SACEUR, General Clark never adopted it. Instead, he elected to cut and paste different elements of the different plans that he thought were most appropriate and labeled the resultant product Operation Allied Force. Comments on an earlier draft by Hq USAFE/SA, April 6, 2001. General Jumper himself later confirmed that Allied Talon was a nonstarter. Conversation with General John P. Jumper, USAF, Hq Air Combat Command, Langley AFB, Virginia, May 15, 2001.