WHY MILOSEVIC GAVE UP WHEN HE DID. As might have been predicted, disagreements arose after the cease‑fire went into effect over which of the air war’s target priorities (fielded forces or

As might have been predicted, disagreements arose after the cease‑fire went into effect over which of the air war’s target priorities (fielded forces or infrastructure assets) was more crucial to producing the outcome. Contention also arose over the more basic question of the extent to which the air effort as a whole had been the cause of Milosevic’s capitulation. On the one hand, there was the view of those air power proponents who were wont to conclude up front that “for the first time in history, the application of air power alone forced the wholesale withdrawal of a military force from a disputed piece of real estate.”[142]On the other hand, there was the more skeptical view offered by the commander of the international peacekeeping forces in Kosovo, British Army Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson, who suggested that “the event of June 3 [when the Russians backed the West’s position and urged Milosevic to surrender] was the single event that appeared to me to have the greatest significance in ending the war.” Asked about the effects of the air attacks, Jackson, an avowed critic of air power, replied tartly: “I wasn’t responsible for the air campaign; you’re asking the wrong person.”[143]

We may never know for sure what mix of pressures and inducements ultimately led Milosevic to admit defeat, at least until key Serb archival materials become available or those closest to Milosevic during the air war become disposed to offer first‑hand testimony. Asked by a reporter why Milosevic folded if the bombing had not defeated him militarily, Clark, who knew the Serb dictator well from previous negotiating encounters, replied: “You’ll have to ask Milosevic, and he’ll never tell you.”[144]Yet why Milosevic gave in and why he did so when he did are by far the most important questions about the air war experience, since the answers, insofar as they are knowable, will help to lay bare the coercive dynamic that ultimately swung the outcome of Allied Force. It need hardly be said that such insight can be of tremendous value in informing any strategy ultimately chosen by the United States and its allies for future interventions of that sort. Accordingly, it behooves analysts to make every effort to delve further into this innermost mystery of the air war, since even approximate answers, if buttressed by valid evidence, are almost certain to be more useful to senior policymakers than most “lessons” of a more technical nature regarding how specific systems worked and how various procedural aspects of the operation could have been handled better, important as the latter questions are.

In the search to understand what ultimately occasioned NATO’s success, one can, of course, insist that air power alone was the cause of Milosevic’s capitulation in the tautological sense that Allied Force was an air‑only operation and that in its absence, there would have been no reason to believe that he would have acceded to NATO’s demands.[145]Yet as crucial as the 78‑day bombing effort was in bringing Milosevic to heel, there is ample reason to be wary of any intimation that NATO’s use of air power produced that ending without any significant contribution by other factors. On the contrary, numerous considerations in addition to the direct effects of the bombing in all likelihood interacted to produce the Serb dictator’s eventual decision to cave in. As Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon have remarked, in a balanced reflection on this point, “air power might best be thought of as the force driving Milosevic into a deadend corner and threatening to crush him against the far wall. But had NATO not remained unified, Russia not joined hands with NATO in the diplomatic endgame, and the alliance not begun to develop a credible threat of a ground invasion, Milosevic might have found doors through which to escape from the corridor despite the aerial punishment.”[146]