FACING THE NEED FOR A GROUND OPTION

During the air war’s initial weeks, administration officials continued to adhere to their initial hope that an air effort alone would eventually elicit the desired response from Milosevic. Even after Allied Force was well under way, Secretary General Solana announced that he was sure that the bombing would be over before the start of the long‑planned Washington summit on April 23 to celebrate NATO’s 50th birthday.[92]Deep doubts that the air attacks alone would suffice in forcing Milosevic to knuckle under, however, soon prompted a steady rise in military pressure–notably from some U.S. Air Force leaders directly involved with the air war–for developing at least a fallback option for a ground invasion.[93]

Indeed, even before the operation was a week old, indications had begun to mount that senior administration officials were starting to have second thoughts about the advisability of having peremptorily ruled out a ground option before launching into Allied Force. The chairman of the JCS, General Shelton, for example, remarked that there were no NATO plans “right now” to introduce ground troops short of a peace settlement in Kosovo.[94]In a similarly hedged remark, Secretary Cohen pointed out that the Clinton administration and NATO had no plans to introduce any ground troops “into a hostile environment,” leaving open the possibility that they might contemplate putting a ground presence into a Kosovo deemed “nonhostile” before the achievement of a settlement.[95]By the end of the second week, Secretary of State Albright went further yet toward hinting at the administration’s growing discomfiture over having ruled out a ground threat when she allowed that NATO might change its position and put in ground troops should the bombing succeed in creating a “permissive environment.”[96]Ultimately, the air war’s continued indecisiveness led President Clinton himself to concede that he would consider introducing ground troops if he became persuaded that the bombing would not produce the desired outcome. In a clear contradiction to his earlier position on the issue, he asserted that he had “always said that… we have not and will not take any option off the table.” That statement was later described by a U.S. official as testimony to an ongoing administration effort “to break out of a rhetorical box that we should never have gotten into.”[97]

By the start of the third week, a consensus had begun to form in Washington that ground forces might well be needed, if only to salvage NATO’s increasingly shaky credibility that was being steadily eroded by the air operation’s lackluster performance.[98]That dawning realization led to two parallel escalation processes: one highly public–the substantial increase in the number of committed aircraft, the growing number of approved targets and heightened percentage of daily shooter sorties, and the hard attacks conducted against the Yugoslav power grid; and the other largely beneath public scrutiny–namely, more serious discussion within the U.S. government over the need to begin making concrete preparations for a ground intervention. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott conveyed a “very explicit” warning to Russian envoy Vladimir Chernomyrdin that President Clinton was seriously considering a ground option, a warning which we can assume Chernomyrdin duly passed on to Milosevic.

At the same time, a pronounced rift emerged between Clark and his Pentagon superiors over Clark’s insistence on replacing talk with determined action in connection with preparations for a ground invasion. In his memoirs, Clark later gave candid vent to his frustration over this rift when he referred to the “divide between those in Washington who thought they understood war and those [of us] in Europe who understood Milosevic, the mainsprings of his power, and the way to fight on this continent.”[99]Earlier in April, he had challenged U.S. and British officers at NATO headquarters to consider “what if” options for a potential ground war. Out of frustration over the refusal of both Washington and his NATO masters to countenance any serious consideration of a ground component to Allied Force, he also asked the Army, shortly after the air war began, to send him a half‑dozen officers from the School of Advanced Military Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to draw up secret plans for a broad spectrum of ground options, ranging from sending in peacekeepers to police any settlement that might be achieved single‑handedly by the air war to launching a full‑fledged, opposed‑entry land invasion if all else proved wanting. It soon became clear from that inquiry that only about a dozen roads led into Kosovo from Albania. Like Kosovo’s bridges, they were heavily mined and strongly defended, with VJ troops well positioned on the high ground of the most strategically crucial terrain. Accordingly, the study concluded that the best invasion routes would be from Hungary and Croatia into the flatter terrain of northern Serbia.

Several administration officials later commented that an invasion threat from both east and west (namely, from Romania and Croatia and from Hungary) would have been preferable to one from Albania alone, where the transportation infrastructure was extremely primitive and where wheeled vehicles would quickly bog down in wet weather.[100]They further characterized the nascent ground threat as pointed not just at Kosovo but at Serbia proper, since such an operation would aim directly at Milosevic’s greatest vulnerability and, in so doing, threaten to take down his regime. Secretary General Solana later allowed that he had authorized NATO’s military command to revise and update plans for a possible ground invasion, while at the same time indicating that the alliance was still far from any decision to use ground forces and voicing his conviction that the air effort would ultimately achieve its objectives.[101]

Throughout this secret ground‑options planning, Clark was strongly resisted by Secretary Cohen and White House security adviser Berger. But he had the unwavering support of Britain’s prime minister, Tony Blair, who had unsuccessfully raised the issue of ground troops with Clinton at the NATO summit in late April. Not long thereafter, apparently reflecting growing British concern that air attacks alone would prove insufficient to compel Milosevic to quit, British Foreign Minister Robin Cook took the lead in mid‑May in proposing that allied ground troops be sent into Kosovo, even in the absence of a peace agreement, once the bombing had reduced VJ forces to a point where they could mount only scattered resistance.[102]

After a month of continued inconclusiveness in the air war, one began to hear talk not only at NATO headquarters but also in Washington regarding the need for a credible ground threat to evict the marauding Serb forces from Kosovo. As the end of the second month approached, NATO appeared more than ever headed toward conceding at least the possibility of a land invasion, even though the Clinton administration would still not brook even a hint of encouraging public debate over the subject. As one possible explanation for the administration’s continued reluctance to embrace the growing need for a ground operation of some sort, polls taken during the air war’s seventh week indicated that war fatigue was setting in, occasioning the first significant decline in U.S. public support. That support dropped from 65 percent in late April to 59 percent by mid‑May, with opposition to the air war rising from 30 to 38 percent during the same period.[103]

By late May, with winter weather promising to become a limiting factor as early as the beginning of October, Clark had begun to stress that time was now critical with respect to planning for a ground invasion. On one occasion, he expressly warned NATO’s civilian leaders and Washington alike: “Don’t let the decision make itself.”[104]In the British view, September 15 was absolutely the latest date on which a ground push could start, based on a determination that it would take a minimum of one month to complete the operation.[105]

By most accounts, the turning point in facing up to the need for a serious ground option came on May 27, when Cohen met secretly in Bonn with his four principal NATO counterparts, the British, French, German, and Italian defense ministers, in a six‑and‑a‑half‑hour session convened expressly to consider what it would take to mount a land invasion and to weigh the merits and risks of such a course of action. By one informed account, that meeting was pivotal in getting the allies to come to closure once and for all on the need to begin serious preparations for a land invasion.[106]The chief of Britain’s defense forces, General Sir Charles Guthrie, was an especially strong backer of a ground option, as was the British defense minister, George Robertson. The RAF also had agreed from the start that a ground option was needed. As but one indicator that acceptance of the need for such an option had, by that time, become all but a fait accompli, British planning had progressed to the point of actual reserve call‑up and the booking of ferries and civil air transports to deliver British troops to the combat zone. The Bonn ministerial meeting thus took the process begun at the NATO summit a step further toward solidifying the idea that NATO was going to win, come what may, by extending that notion to include acceptance of a ground invasion should matters come to that.

By the end of May, NATO was generally acknowledged by the media as “inching ever closer to some kind of ground operation in the Balkans.”[107]Lending further credence to that impression, several administration officials later acknowledged that Britain was on board with the United States by that time for a ground invasion if need be. They further acknowledged that most of the allies’ concerns about attacking infrastructure targets had been largely put to rest, even though France remained an obstacle, and that it would have been easier to obtain NAC approval to go after increasingly sensitive targets with air attacks once the likelihood of a NATO ground invasion loomed larger.[108]