It was not just outside observers, moreover, who gave such ready voice to that upbeat assessment. Shortly after the cease-fire, President Clinton himself declared that the outcome of Allied Force “proved that a sustained air campaign, under the right conditions, can stop an army on the ground.”[10] Other administration leaders were equally quick to congratulate air power for what it had done to salvage a situation that looked, almost until the last moment, as though it was headed nowhere but to a NATO ground involvement of some sort. In their joint statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee after the air war ended, Secretary Cohen and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the JCS, described it as “an overwhelming success.”[11]
With all due respect for the unmatched professionalism of those allied aircrews who, against difficult odds, actually carried out the air effort and made it succeed in the end, it is hard to accept such glowing characterizations as the proper conclusions to be drawn from Allied Force. In fact, many of them are at marked odds with the views of those senior professionals who, one would think, would be most familiar with air power and its limitations. Shortly before the bombing effort began, the four U.S. service chiefs uniformly doubted, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, whether air strikes by themselves would succeed in compelling Milosevic to yield.[12] Indeed, the Air Force chief of staff, General Michael Ryan, admitted less than a week later: “I don’t know if we can do it without ground troops.”[13] After Allied Force was over, the former commander of NATO forces during Operation Deliberate Force, Admiral Leighton Smith, remarked that the Kosovo experience should go down as “possibly the worst way we employed our military forces in history.” Smith added that telling the enemy beforehand what you are not going to do is “the absolutely dumbest thing you can do.”[14] Former Air Force chief of staff General Ronald Fogleman likewise observed that “just because it comes out reasonably well, at least in the eyes of the administration, doesn’t mean it was conducted properly. The application of air power was flawed.” Finally, the air component commander, USAF Lieutenant General Michael Short, declared that “as an airman, I’d have done this a whole lot differently than I was allowed to do. We could have done this differently. We should have done this differently.”[15]
Indeed, few Allied Force participants were more surprised by the sudden capitulation of Milosevic than the majority of the alliance’s most senior airmen.[16] By the end of May, most USAF generals had concluded that NATO would be unable to find and destroy any more dispersed VJ troops and equipment without incurring more unintended civilian casualties.[17] General Short had reluctantly concluded that NATO’s strategy, at its existing level of intensity, was unlikely to break Milosevic’s will and that there was a clear need to ramp up the bombing effort if the alliance was to prevail.[18] True enough, on the eve of the cease-fire, General Ryan predicted that once the air effort began seeking strategic rather than merely battlefield effects, Milosevic would wake up to the realization that NATO was taking his country apart on the installment plan and that his ultimate defeat was “inevitable.” The Air Force chief hastened to add, however, that Allied Force had not begun in “the way that America normally would apply air power,” implying his belief that there was a more sensible way of going about it.[19] As a testament to widespread doubts that the air war was anywhere close to achieving its objectives, planning was under way for a continuation of offensive air operations against Yugoslavia through December or longer if necessary—although it remains doubtful whether popular support on either side of the Atlantic would have sustained operations for that long.
In sum, Operation Allied Force was a mixed experience for the United States and NATO. Although it represented a successful application of air power in the end, it also was a less-than-exemplary exercise in strategy and an object lesson in the limitations of alliance warfare. Accordingly, any balanced appraisal of the operation must account not only for its signal accomplishments, but also for its shortcomings in both planning and execution, which came close to making it a disaster for the alliance.
THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF ALLIED FORCE
Admittedly, there is much to be said of a positive nature about NATO’s air war for Kosovo. To begin with, it did indeed represent the first time in which air power coerced an enemy leader to yield with no friendly land combat action whatsoever.[20] In that respect, the air effort’s conduct and results well bore out a subsequent observation by Australian air power historian Alan Stephens that “modern war is concerned more with acceptable political outcomes than with seizing and holding ground.”[21]
It hardly follows from this, of course, that air power can now “win wars alone” or that the air-only strategy ultimately adopted by the Clinton administration and NATO’s political leaders was the wisest choice available to them. Yet the fact that air power prevailed on its own despite the multiple drawbacks of a reluctant administration, a divided Congress, an indifferent public, a potentially fractious alliance, a determined enemy, and, not least, the absence of a credible NATO strategy surely testified that the air weapon has come a long way in recent years in its relative combat leverage compared to other, more traditional force elements. Thanks to the marked improvements in precision attack and battlespace awareness, unintended damage to civilian structures and noncombatant fatalities were kept to a minimum, even as air power plainly demonstrated its coercive potential.
In contrast to Desert Storm, the air war’s attempts at denial did not bear much fruit in the end. Allied air attacks against dispersed and hidden enemy forces were largely ineffective, in considerable part because of the decision made by NATO’s leaders at the outset to forgo even the threat of a ground invasion. Hence, Serb atrocities against the Kosovar Albanians increased even as NATO air operations intensified. Yet ironically, in contrast to the coalition’s ultimately unsuccessful efforts to coerce Saddam Hussein into submission, punishment did seem to work against Milosevic, disconfirming the common adage that air power can beat up on an adversary indefinitely but rarely can induce him to change his mind.
Although these and other operational and tactical achievements were notable in and of themselves and offered ample grist for the Kosovo “lessons learned” mill, the most important accomplishments of Allied Force occurred at the strategic level and had to do with the performance of the alliance as a combat collective. First, notwithstanding the charges of some critics to the contrary, NATO clearly prevailed over Milosevic in the end. In the early aftermath of the air war, more than a few observers hastened to suggest that NATO’s bombing had actually caused precisely what it had sought to prevent. Political scientist Michael Mandelbaum, for example, portrayed Allied Force as “a military success and political failure,” charging that while it admittedly forced a Serb withdrawal from Kosovo, the broader consequences were the opposite of what NATO’s chiefs had intended because the Kosovar Albanians “emerged from the war considerably worse off than they had been before.”[22] Another charge voiced by some was that as Allied Force wore on, NATO watered down the demands it had initially levied on Milosevic at Rambouillet. As early as the air war’s 12th day, this charge noted, NATO merely stipulated that Kosovo must be under the protection of an “international” security force, whereas at Rambouillet, it had insisted on that presence being a NATO force.[23]
10
Pat Towell, “Lawmakers Urge Armed Forces to Focus on High-Tech Future,”
11
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.
13
Quoted in “Verbatim Speciaclass="underline" The Balkan War,”
16
Most others as well were caught off guard by the sudden ending of the Kosovo crisis. See Lieutenant General Bernard E. Trainor, USMC (Ret.), “The Council on Foreign Relations Report on the Kosovo Air Campaign: A Digest of the Roundtable on the Air Campaign in the Balkans,” Council on Foreign Relations, New York, July 27, 2000. One notable exception was USAF Brigadier General Daniel J. Leaf, commander of the 31st Air Expeditionary Wing at Aviano Air Base, Italy, who confidently told his aircrews on the eve of Milosevic’s capitulation that he could “smell an impending NATO victory in the air” (conversation with the author in Washington, D.C., November 16, 2000).
17
John F. Harris and Bradley Graham, “Clinton Is Reassessing Sufficiency of Air War,”
18
William M. Arkin, “Limited Warfare in Kosovo Not Working,”
19
General Michael E. Ryan, “Air Power Is Working in Kosovo,”
20
It bears noting here that the December 1972 bombing of Hanoi was also an example of successful coercive bombing, albeit with a very limited objective and in the context of a much larger war that ended in defeat for the United States. For more on this, see Wayne Thompson,
21
Alan Stephens,
22
Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War Against Yugoslavia,”
23
Robert Hewson, “Operation Allied Force: The First 30 Days,”