THE PROSPECT OF A GROUND INVASION

Among the many considerations that converged to produce Milosevic’s eventual capitulation, the most discomfiting to him over the long run–apart from the bombing itself–may well have been what he perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be the prospect of an eventual NATO ground intervention. Whatever NATO’s declared stance on the ground‑war issue may have been, its actions as the air war progressed spoke louder than its words.

To begin with, Operation Allied Harbor, set in motion as early as April 8, aimed at putting some 8,000 NATO ground troops into Macedonia to help with refugee aid efforts. More significantly, a 32,000‑person NATO Stabilization Force (soon to number 50,000) patrolling Bosnia‑Herzegovina, and 7,500 additional NATO troops in Albania deployed to perform humanitarian work there made for an undeniable signal that a NATO ground presence was forming in the theater. That presence included 2,400 combat‑ready U.S. Marines aboard three warships in the Adriatic to provide force protection for the Marine F/A‑18s that were operating out of the former Warsaw Pact air base at Taszar. In addition, some 5,000 U.S. Army troops, with a substantial artillery and armor complement, accompanied the 24 AH‑64 Apache helicopters that were sent to Albania in late April. There is every reason to believe that this deployment, along with NATO’s subsequent decision to enlarge the Kosovo peacekeeping force (KFOR) to as many as 50,000 troops, was assessed by Milosevic as an indication that a NATO ground option was at least being kept open.

Taking advantage of a covert relationship between the CIA and the KLA, NATO also had begun probing the capability and extent of the VJ’s ground defenses, an inquiry that most likely did not escape Milosevic’s attention. In a related development, NATO engineers on May 31 began widening and reinforcing a key access road from Durres to Kukes on the Kosovo‑Albanian border so that it could support the weight of a main battle tank. Earlier, Clark had authorized the engineers to strengthen the road to handle refugee traffic only, but they made it strong enough to support the Bradley armored fighting vehicle (AFV). This time, only three days before Milosevic finally called it quits, Washington gave Clark permission to send in another engineering battalion to make the road capable of supporting M1A2 Abrams tanks and artillery.[153]

Beyond that, Milosevic may have gotten wind of a secret NATO plan for a massive ground invasion code‑named Plan B‑minus, which was slated to be launched the first week of September if approved by NATO’s political leaders. In support of this plan, Britain had agreed to contribute the largest single national component up to that time (50,000 troops) to an envisaged 170,000‑man contingent; the United States would have contributed at least 100,000 more. Developed by a secret planning team at NATO’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, Plan B‑minus relied heavily on previous plans going back to June 12, 1998, which featured six land‑attack options, including a full invasion of Serbia itself (Plan Bravo, with 300,000 NATO troops). The chief of Britain’s defense staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie, later confirmed the outlines of this plan.[154]Milosevic was said by a well‑placed NATO source to have been at least broadly informed of NATO thinking with respect to it. Indeed, as the UK Ministry of Defense’s director of operations in Allied Force, RAF Air Marshal Sir John Day, later commented, “the decision to increase KFOR was militarily right in itself, but it was also a form of heavy breathing on Milosevic and a subtle way of moving to B‑minus while keeping the coalition together. The move also had the effect of shortening our timelines for B‑minus. It is true that the forces that were being prepared for KFOR‑plus were the core elements of what would then have become B‑minus, the full ground invasion.”[155]

In a sign that such indicators may have begun to affect Milosevic’s risk calculus, VJ units were reported in mid‑May to be digging in along likely attack routes from Macedonia and Albania and fortifying the border, in a distinct shift in effort from expelling ethnic Albanians to preparing for a possible showdown with NATO on the ground. In particular, VJ troops were observed laying mines and attempting to block potential ground attack routes from Skopje and Kumanovo in Macedonia, in a pattern of activity suggesting that the allied bombing effort had not yet come close to breaking their cohesion and fighting spirit.[156]

Moreover, earlier on the same day that Milosevic eventually capitulated, President Clinton held a widely publicized meeting with his service chiefs for the express purpose of airing options for land force employment in case NATO decided it had no choice but to approve a ground invasion.[157]That was his first meeting with all four chiefs at any time during the course of Operation Allied Force. Immediately after the meeting, which left the issue unresolved, Clinton was said to have been planning to inform the chiefs that he was now ready to sign on to a ground invasion should developments leave no alternative.[158]In what he later described as “a pretty depressing memo” to the president, Berger wrote that “we basically should go ahead with what Clark had proposed if the [Ahtisaari‑Chernomyrdin] mission failed.” In that memo, Berger listed three options. The first, to arm the Kosovars, would create a multitude of undesirable downstream consequences that would persist for years and thus was ruled out as a nonstarter. The second, to wait until spring, was equally unacceptable because it would oblige NATO to supply and protect the Kosovar refugees in Albania throughout the winter. That left only the third option, a massive ground invasion by 175,000 NATO troops, some 100,000 of whom would be American.[159]Taken together, these developments made for a compelling pattern of evidence suggesting that both Washington and its chief NATO allies had crossed the Rubicon when it came to facing up to the land‑invasion issue, and that they had become determined by the end of May to commit to a forced entry on the ground if the bombing did not produce an acceptable settlement soon.

Some, however, have made more of this sequence of events than the evidence warrants. In the early wake of the successful conclusion of Operation Allied Force, revisionist claims began emanating from some quarters suggesting that the air effort had been totally ineffective and that, in the end, it had been Milosevic’s fear of a NATO ground invasion that induced him to capitulate.[160]Clark himself, in his memoirs, indicated his belief that by mid‑May, NATO “had gone about as far as possible with the air strikes” and that in the end, it had been the Apache deployment and the prospect of a NATO ground intervention that, “in particular , pushed Milosevic to concede.”[161]That notwithstanding the all‑but‑conclusive evidence Clark presented elsewhere throughout his book that NATO’s top political leaders were nowhere near having settled on a definitive invasion plan–let alone decided to proceed with such a plan should the bombing prove unavailing.[162]Even viewed in the most favorable light conceivable, such far‑reaching claims on behalf of the implied ground threat defy believability because any NATO land invasion, however possible it may eventually have been, would have taken months, at a minimum, to prepare for and successfully mount.

In contrast, Milosevic was living with the daily reality of an increasingly brutal air war that showed no sign of abating. Although Clark’s effort to find and attack dispersed and hidden VJ forces in Kosovo was consuming the preponderance of shooter sorties while accomplishing little by way of tangible results, more and more infrastructure targets were also being approved and struck every day.[163]In a revealing admission of what was uppermost among his concerns on the day he elected to settle, Milosevic asked Chernomyrdin directly on June 3 in response to NATO’s ultimatum: “Is this what I have to do to get the bombing stopped?” Chernomyrdin replied in the affirmative, with Ahtisaari adding: “This is the best you can get. It’s only going to get worse for you.” To which Milosevic responded: “Clearly I accept this position.”[164]

There is no question that by the end of May, NATO had yielded to the inevitable and embraced in principle the need for a ground invasion should the bombing continue to prove indecisive. There also is every reason to believe that awareness of that change in NATO’s position on Milosevic’s part figured importantly in his eventual decision to capitulate. There is no basis, however, for concluding that the mere threat of a land invasion somehow overshadowed the continuing, here‑and‑now reality of NATO’s air attacks as the preeminent consideration accounting for that decision. There also is little benefit to be gained from the misguided efforts by air and land power partisans alike to argue the relative impact of the air attacks and ground threat in simplistic either‑or terms. It detracts not in the least from the air war’s signal accomplishments to concede that developments on the land‑invasion front almost surely were part of the chemistry of Milosevic’s concession decision. Although any impending ground intervention was months away at best, there is no question that both the Clinton administration and the principal NATO allies had made up their minds on the need to do something along those lines should the air war continue to prove unavailing. In light of that, as two RAND colleagues have suggested, “in assessing NATO air attacks on Serbia, analysts should focus not on the role air power played instead of a ground invasion… but on the role it played in combination with the possibility of one.”[165]