U.S. and NATO aircraft are now engaged in operations few anticipated when the strikes against Serbia began. Transports are moving Kosovar refugees to “temporary” homes outside the Balkans and bringing in relief supplies for hundreds of thousands in camps in Albania and Macedonia. War-planes are hitting economic targets — the Yugo auto factory in Kragujevac, a heavy-machinery plant in Krusevac — in an intensified effort to pressure Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo. Though heavy industry is a “strategic” target, the impact on Serbia’s military capabilities is long-term at best.
Bridges and fuel storage areas have been hit. These are part of a plan to hinder the movement of enemy troops and supplies. History shows, however, that such efforts are unlikely to lead to an enemy collapse in the absence of a ground offensive that takes the initiative away from enemy planners. Troops free to dig-in at positions of their own choosing move less and use fewer supplies than troops engaged in combat. They have the luxury of time, to move by circuitous routes, to fortify concealed positions, and to amass supplies.
Strikes against Serb army and police units in the field have been hampered by the dispersal of enemy units in small pockets, using villages, forests, and hills as cover. This deployment would spell disaster in the face of a NATO ground attack. Small, scattered units would be quickly overrun. Serbian leaders have the advantage of knowing they do not have to plan for this danger. President Bill Clinton has said repeatedly that the use of ground troops is “off the table.” More important, the Serbs know that no American or NATO army is moving towards the Balkans.
Unless that happens soon, the president will have foreclosed the use of ground troops. NATO last fall estimated that 150,000 to 200,000 troops would be required to drive Serbian forces from Kosovo with minimum casualties. Even with the access Albania has granted to its airspace, ports, and “military infrastructure,” it would take months to assemble an offensive ground army, and one month has already slipped away.
With ground forces in position, by contrast, the threat of an invasion of Kosovo and of the destruction of Serbian authority in the province would powerfully spur diplomacy — far more so than the bombing campaign, which is likely to provoke increasingly hostile international (and perhaps domestic) reaction as it bogs down in a war of attrition. The administration should remember Haiti: Strongman Raoul Cedras refused to vacate his office until Colin Powell personally informed him that the 82nd Airborne Division was on its way. Likewise, in the Gulf War, Iraqi forces stood their ground in Kuwait despite a far heavier bombardment than is taking place in Kosovo. Only when Saddam Hussein saw that the U.S.-led coalition was about to launch its ground war did he begin to negotiate seriously and pull back forces from Kuwait.
Instead of learning from these successes, the Clinton administration is locked into a pattern of failure, repeating in Kosovo mistakes it has made in Iraq. In 1996, power projection via bombs and missiles failed to persuade Saddam to respect the Kurds’ “safe haven” in the north. More recently, they failed to secure the readmission of U.N. weapons inspectors to Iraq. Sporadic airstrikes to “punish and degrade” Iraq’s military capabilities have been fruitless.
Clinton was encouraged to intervene in Kosovo by the “success” of his policy in Bosina. But while it is true that U.S.-led airstrikes preceded the negotiations in Dayton that produced a settlement for Bosnia, they were not decisive. Rather, it was the Croatian ground offensive to retake Krajina that turned the tide. Richard Holbrooke, Clinton’s negotiator at Dayton, affirms this in his memoir To End A War: “The success of the Croatian . . . offensive was a classic illustration of the fact that the shape of the diplomatic landscape will usually reflect the balance of forces on the ground . . . We could not expect the Serbs to be conciliatory at the negotiating table as long as they had experienced nothing but success on the battlefield.”
The success the Serbs have experienced in driving 500,000-plus Kosovars into exile and decimating the Kosovars’ civil leadership and guerrilla movement cannot be reversed from 20,000 feet. Bridges and buildings can be rebuilt, but Belgrade knows that if NATO troops every take control of Kosovo, the province will be lost. That is why the Serbs refused to sign the deal at Rambouillet in February. Clinton has pledged ground troops to keep the peace, but he cannot stomach the thought that they are needed to win the peace.
Much is at stake in the administration’s choice of strategies for Kosovo. Future force levels and weapons configurations will be determined in the light of lessons now being learned. Clinton has embraced the “revolution in military affairs” that is the Pentagon fad of the 1990s. This doctrine bases power projection on precision strikes from manned and unmanned aircraft based on land and sea, with infantry limited to “infestation” teams calling in long-range precision strikes from behind enemy lines. This is the approach being used against Serbia — though with British commandos filling the role of the infestation teams because Clinton (and, reportedly, and even more adamant Gore) refuses to involve U.S. troops on the ground.
If this approach to warfare prevails, it will further shift defense spending away from ground troops and their support. Already U.S. Army active-duty combat divisions have been reduced from 18 in 1991 to 10. The last time the U.S. Army had only 10 active divisions was in 1950. In the crucial count of infantry, the United States has fewer battalions than in 1938, and ammunition stocks for the Army and Marine Corps are some $ 1.7 billion under war requirements.
In Kosovo, an air campaign has failed to prevent the worst from occurring. When the day of reckoning comes, it will be not just the reputation of the Clinton administration that is at stake, but the credibility of the United States and NATO. Escalation to a ground war in Serbia will raise the cost of intervention. But wars should never be entered under the illusion they will be cheap. Technology may well have made it too easy to launch, with a volley of missiles, a campaign that still must be finished with bayonets.
Escalation on the ground will bring the best chance of winning. Potential adversaries around the world are watching to see whether the United States is content to play at push-button warfare or is willing to pay the price of victory.
William R. Hawkins, senior research analyst for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Ca., wrote “Ground Troops Win Wars,” in the September 21 WEEKLY STANDARD. The views expressed here are his own.
