There is no denying that the Serb ethnic cleansing push accelerated after Operation Allied Force began. It is even likely that the air effort was a major, if not determining, factor behind that acceleration. Yet it seems equally likely that some form of Operation Horseshoe, as the ethnic cleansing campaign was code-named, would have been unleashed by Milosevic in any event during the spring or summer of 1999. Indeed, what a Serb general was later said by SACEUR to have forecast as a “hot spring” in which “the problem of Kosovo… will definitely be solved” commenced more that a week before the start of Allied Force, when VJ and MUP strength in and around Kosovo was increased by 42,000 troops and some 1,000 heavy weapons—even as the Rambouillet talks were under way.[24] Administration defenders are on solid ground in insisting that the ethnic cleansing had already begun and that had NATO not finally acted when it did, upward of a million Kosovar refugees may well have been left stranded in Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro, with no hope of returning home.[25]
Although NATO’s air strikes were unable to halt Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing campaign before it had been essentially completed, they did succeed in completely reversing its effects in the early aftermath of the cease-fire. Within two weeks of the air war’s conclusion, more than 600,000 of the nearly 800,000 ethnic Albanian and other refugees had returned home. By the end of July, barely one month after the cease-fire, only some 50,000 displaced Kosovar Albanians still awaited repatriation (see Figure 8.1). By any reasonable measure, Milosevic’s bowing to NATO reflected a defeat on his part, and his accession to the cease-fire left him worse off than he would have been had he accepted NATO’s conditions at Rambouillet. Under the terms of Rambouillet, Serbia would have been permitted to keep 5,000 of its “security forces” in Kosovo. Thanks to the settlement ultimately reached before the cease-fire, however, there are now none. Moreover, on the eve of Operation Allied Force, Milosevic had insisted as a point of principle that not a single foreign troop would be allowed to set foot on Kosovo soil. Today, with some 42,000 KFOR soldiers from 39 countries performing daily peacekeeping functions, Kosovo is an international protectorate safeguarded both by the UN and NATO, rendering any continued Serb claim to sovereignty over the province a polite fiction. At bottom, as NATO’s Secretary General, Javier Solana, declared in a retrospective commentary on the experience, the alliance “achieved every one of its goals” in forcing a Serb withdrawal from Kosovo.[26] Whether or not one chooses to call that outcome a “victory” entails what Karl Mueller has characterized as “a semantic exercise that should only really matter to social scientists seeking to code the event for data analysis.”[27]
Second, NATO showed that it could operate successfully under pressure as an alliance, even in the face of constant hesitancy and reluctance on the part of many of the member-states’ political leaders. For all the air war’s fits and starts and the manifold frustrations they caused, the alliance earned justified credit for having done remarkably well in a uniquely challenging situation. In seeing Allied Force to a successful conclusion, NATO did something that it had been neither created nor configured to do. Indeed, it might well have been easier for Washington and SACEUR to elicit NAC approval to grant border-crossing authority at the brink of a NATO–Warsaw Pact showdown during the height of the cold war than to get 19 post–cold war players on board for an offensive operation conducted to address a problem that threatened no member’s most vital security interests. As General Clark later recalled, the “ultimate proof” of the air war’s success was that NATO realized its “ability to maintain alliance cohesion despite all the pressures of fighting a conflict, at the same time bringing in new members, and then going into Kosovo itself on an extended and uncertain campaign—uncertain in that there [was] no fixed exit date.”[28]
Reflecting on the air war experience a year later, Admiral James Ellis, the commander of the U.S. contribution to Allied Force, observed that during the final days leading up to March 24, it was a question not of how the bombing effort would be conducted so much as whether it would take place at all. Before Rambouillet, the challenge had been to compel Milosevic to do something. Afterward, it became to compel him to stop doing something. Ellis speculated that had the allies known from the outset that they were signing up for a 78-day campaign, they might easily have declined the opportunity forth-with. Unlike the ad hoc group of nations that fought Desert Storm as a solidly united front, NATO was not a coalition of the willing but rather a loose defensive alliance of 19 democracies. They were all strongly inclined to march to different drummers, and all had varying commitments to grappling—at least militarily—with humanitarian crises in which they had no clear national security stake.[29]
As the bombing entered its third month without a clear end in sight, Ellis feared that allied cohesion might collapse within three weeks unless something of a game-changing nature occurred, such as a drastic move by Milosevic to alter the stakes or a firm U.S. decision to accede to a ground-invasion option. Offsetting that fear, however, was his belief that the allies were finally beginning to recognize and accept the need to come to terms with some thorny operational issues such as granting approval to attack electrical power and other key infrastructure targets. That took time, Ellis said, but the fact that it finally occurred constituted a signal that the alliance was slowly learning how to do what needed to be done.
Finally, for all the criticism that was directed against some of the less steadfast NATO members for their rearguard resistance and questionable loyalty while the air war was under way, even the Greek government held firm to the very end, despite the fact that more than 90 percent of the Greek population supported the Serbs rather than the Kosovar Albanians—and held frequent large-scale street demonstrations to show that support.[30] True enough, there remain many unknowns about the outlook for NATO’s steadfastness in any future confrontation along Europe’s eastern periphery. Yet NATO was able to maintain the one quality that was essential for the success of Allied Force: its cohesion and integrity as a fighting collective. The lion’s share of the credit for that, suggested Air Marshal Sir John Day, belongs to NATO Secretary General Solana, who, in what Day called a “brilliant” performance, showed both leadership and courage in the face of continuous U.S. pushing and an equally continuous reluctance on the part of many allies to go along.[31]
THE AIR WAR’S FAILINGS
Despite these accomplishments, enough discomfiting surprises emanated from the Allied Force experience to suggest that instead of basking in the glow of air power’s largely single-handed successful performance, air warfare professionals should give careful thought to the hard work that still needs to be done to realize air power’s fullest potential in joint warfare. As in the case of the various positive outcomes noted above, many of these surprises entailed shortfalls at the tactical and operational levels. As previous chapters have documented in detail, the targeting process was inefficient to a fault, command and control arrangements were excessively complicated, and enemy IADS challenges indicated much unfinished work for SEAD planners. In addition, elusive enemy ground forces belied the oft-cited claim of airmen that air power has arrived at the threshold of being able to find, fix, track, target, and engage any object on the surface of the earth.[32]
24
“Briefing by SACEUR General Wesley Clark,” Brussels, NATO Headquarters, April 13, 1999.
25
See, for example, the riposte to Mandelbaum by the Clinton administration’s deputy national security adviser, James B. Steinberg, “A Perfect Polemic: Blind to Reality on Kosovo,”
26
Javier Solana, “NATO’s Success in Kosovo,”
27
Karl Mueller, “Deus ex Machina? Coercive Air Power in Bosnia and Kosovo,” unpublished paper, School of Advanced Air Power Studies, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, November 7, 1999, p. 6.
29
Interview with Admiral James O. Ellis, USN, commander in chief, Allied Forces, Southern Europe, Naples, Italy, May 30, 2000. This is not to say, however, that the allies had no intrinsic stake at all. Italy had a stake in preventing further depredations by Milosevic because of the refugee problem they created. Greece had a major stake in what happened to the Serbs because of a largely sympathetic population. Germany also found itself being inundated with refugees. Hungary had good reason to worry about the Hungarian population still inside Serbia. All of the NATO countries had an intrinsic interest in stability in Europe, and Milosevic was, if nothing else, a destabilizer of the first order. I am grateful to Alan Gropman of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces, Washington, D.C., for reminding me of these important facts.
30
Air Commodore A. G. B. Vallance, RAF, chief of staff, NATO Reaction Forces (Air) Staff, Kalkar, Germany, “Did We Really Have a Good War? Myths in the Making,” unpublished manuscript, no date, p. 2.
31
Interview with Air Marshal Sir John Day, RAF, UK Ministry of Defense director of operations in Allied Force, RAF Innsworth, United Kingdom, July 25, 2000.
32
These and other surprises should stand as a sobering reminder that the comparatively seamless and unfettered successes achieved by allied air power during Operation Desert Storm were most likely the exception rather than the rule for future joint and combined operations—both the operating area and the circumstances surrounding the 1991 Gulf War were unique. For more on this point, see Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason, RAF (Ret.),