MILOSEVIC’S PROBABLE DECISION CALCULUS

To better understand the interaction of influences that most likely persuaded Milosevic to concede, it may be instructive to view Allied Force as it unfolded not through our own frame of reference, but rather through Serbian eyes. Those who planned and ran the air operation understandably tended to fixate on such negative aspects as target‑list restrictions and what many considered to be excessive fretfulness on the part of the alliance’s political leaders over the possibility of causing collateral damage. For them, the air war’s dominant hallmarks were such sources of daily frustration as repeated delays in the target approval process and the consequent inefficiency of the overall effort. Naturally, in their view, the performance of air power in Operation Allied Force left a great deal to be desired.

Yet to those on the operation’s receiving end far removed from such concerns, it must have seemed, certainly by the end of the second month, as though NATO was prepared to keep escalating and to continue bombing indefinitely. From Milosevic’s viewpoint, new targets were being attacked with mounting regularity after the NATO summit of April 23–25, and ever more infrastructure targets were being hit with seemingly no end in sight. Moreover, one might surmise that even the inadvertent Chinese embassy bombing played an indirect part in inducing Milosevic to capitulate. Whatever U.S. and NATO officials said about that incident for the public record, Milosevic may have thought that the bombing had been intentional and that it presaged both a lifting of NATO’s target limitations and worse damage yet to come. As if to affirm that fear after the fact, USAFE’s commander, General John Jumper, later disclosed that with the increased number of strike aircraft that had become available in theater by late May, the operation’s intent was to employ FACs and begin attacking kill boxes all throughout Serbia, not just in Kosovo, and to go at will after tunnels, bridges, storage areas, and other military targets of interest.[166]

The almost universal belief among air warfare professionals that a more aggressive effort starting on opening night, in consonance with a more doctrinally pristine strategy, would have yielded the same result more quickly may have been correct as far as it went, but that conviction was based solely on faith in the intrinsic power of the air weapon, not on any evidence directly related to the case at hand. The only way a more intensive and resolute air campaign would have caused Milosevic to fold substantially sooner than he did would have been for the air war’s effects to persuade him that much earlier that his strategy had no chance of succeeding.

In fact, as RAND colleague Stephen Hosmer has argued, Milosevic’s decision to capitulate hinged on developments that necessarily took time to unfold and mature.[167]To begin with, the Serb dictator, just like NATO, pursued a concrete, if also flawed, strategy from the very start. He knew that the terms levied by the United States at Rambouillet, if implemented, would have replaced Serb dominance over Kosovo with a NATO military presence that claimed rights of access to all of Yugoslavia. They also would have raised the distinct possibility that Kosovo’s future would be decided by a NATO‑enforced referendum, an event which could only have resulted in a loss for Serbia.[168]Those two threatened outcomes, along with additional downside consequences, would have put at risk not only Serbian control over Kosovo, but also the foundations of Milosevic’s personal rule, and hence his political–and perhaps even physical–survival.

In addition, Milosevic probably convinced himself that if he hunkered down and stoically endured the bombing, he could undermine NATO’s persistence and cohesion by ensuring the eventual occurrence of noncombatant civilian fatalities and extracting the fullest propaganda value from collateral‑damage incidents. Indeed, he most likely balked at Rambouillet in full expectation that he would be bombed by NATO, yet only symbolically and for a token period of time, convinced that NATO would lack the stomach to continue bombing for very long. On this point, Stojan Cerovic, a Serb journalist working in Washington, suggested that Milosevic at first saw no danger to himself from the bombing and operated on the assumption that other nations would become so incensed over NATO’s perceived attempts at hegemony that they would rally behind the Serb cause.[169]No doubt expecting nothing more than a replay of the ineffectual pinprick attacks that had been carried out by U.S. forces against Iraq since the preceding December, he evidently calculated that he could easily wait out any punitive air strikes that NATO might bring itself to carry out.

Where Milosevic blundered even more grievously than did NATO (in the latter’s faulty assumption that just a few days of bombing would suffice) was in unleashing the full brunt of his ethnic cleansing campaign almost immediately after Allied Force began. No doubt he calculated that Operation Horseshoe would quickly empty Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian populace and thus enable him to move directly against the KLA, eliminate it as a continued factor affecting any ultimate political outcome, and, along the way, solve his ethnic problem in Kosovo with a fait accompli. Alternatively, or perhaps in addition, he may also have been trying to signal his own determination to NATO, although there is no “smoking‑gun” evidence to this effect. After all, the main lesson he likely drew from Deliberate Force in 1995 was that he gave up the fight just a few days too early. Most assessments of Deliberate Force include arguments that NATO was approaching the end of its rope politically and militarily because of a lack of additional approved targets.[170]In light of that perception, Milosevic, in addition to working on his Kosovar Albanian problem, may simply have been trying to tell everyone that this time it would not be so easy. Whatever the case, his depredations instead merely galvanized NATO’s resolve and ensured that the allies would continue bombing until their objectives were met. By throwing down a gauntlet to NATO and, in effect, challenging it to see who could hold out longer, Milosevic forced NATO to recognize that its own credibility and existence as an alliance were now on the line.[171]

There is no way of knowing for sure from the evidence currently available why June 3 was the date on which Milosevic finally elected to give in. There is a strong presumptive case to be made, however, that by the end of May, he had come to realize that any remaining countercoercive leverage he had over NATO was almost nonexistent. As Hosmer concluded, once the Serb dictator became convinced that future attacks would be unconstrained, a settlement at the earliest possible moment became not just an option but an imperative. Continued bombing during the negotiations over implementation of the agreement, moreover, closed the door to any possibility of his backsliding. Milosevic further had every reason to assume by that time that any terms of a settlement agreement would never look better, and that the time was propitious for a loss‑cutting move while he could retain at least the polite fiction of having extracted concessions from NATO.

As for disincentives against holding out any longer, Milosevic also had every reason to believe that continued resistance on his part would only lead to continued, and quite probably escalated, bombing. Even in the absence of an imminent NATO ground assault, he knew that the air war could have continued for many more weeks, even indefinitely. With the possibility that electrical power and water supplies to Belgrade might be cut off at any time, the approach of winter offered the prospect of making daily life horrendously difficult for Serbia’s leaders and rank and file alike. Worse yet, the mere thought of a NATO land invasion occurring at some indeterminate future point had the most ominous implications, in that it could have meant Serbia’s loss of Kosovo for good, posing the direst threat to Milosevic’s survival. In light of those mutually reinforcing facts, he evidently convinced himself that although his own continued livelihood required his capitulation, he could convert his tactical defeat into a long‑term loss for NATO by swallowing his temporary setback in Kosovo while remaining in power to fight another day.

In sum, although it did not achieve a military victory over Belgrade in the classic sense, NATO unquestionably prevailed over Milosevic in a high‑stakes contest of wills. Diplomacy and coercive bombing together convinced the Serb dictator that he had failed to split NATO and that Russia would not act to stop the air war. At the same time, they allowed him enough maneuver room to maintain at least a fig leaf of a claim to credibility in the eyes of his compatriots that he had not yielded to NATO on all fundamentals. As Barry Posen concluded, “all of the principal wedges into NATO’s cohesion had been tested. Further testing would prove very expensive in terms of damage to Serbia’s infrastructure and economy.”[172]

In the end, however inefficient the air war may have been because of its need to honor U.S. and NATO domestic political realities, the manner in which it was conducted (avoiding friendly fatalities and minimizing noncombatant enemy casualties) nevertheless effectively countered and ultimately neutralized Milosevic’s strategy by keeping NATO’s cohesion intact to the very end. In response, the Serb dictator most likely opted to accept NATO’s demands simply out of a rational calculation that he had nothing to gain and much to risk by holding out any longer. Indeed, as the endgame neared, one can imagine how he may even have begun to harbor dark visions of being gunned down in the street, in the grim manner of the Ceaucescus after their control over Romania collapsed in 1991. Said a source close to the Yugoslav government: “I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when Milosevic finally listened, but there was tremendous pressure from all sides; the West, his inner circle, and his wife. It was building up, and eventually he just let go.”[173]