THE DETERMINING ROLE OF THE AIR WAR

To repeat a point stressed at the beginning of this chapter, it would be reductionist to a fault to conclude that Milosevic was bombed into submission by air attacks to the exclusion of any other contributing factors. However, the bombing did create political conditions in Belgrade that enabled Milosevic to negotiate.[174]Insofar as the bombing may have been insufficient to produce his capitulation in and of itself, it bears underscoring that those conditions were all indirect effects of the air war. Had it not been for Allied Force and its direct effects, the additional stimuli would never have materialized. As General Clark later remarked, “the indispensable condition for all other factors was the success of the air campaign itself.”[175]

From the Yugoslav perspective, there must have been a nagging sense of the inexorability of NATO’s eventual victory as the air war neared the end of its second month. The truculent early defiance that was so studiously expressed by Belgrade’s citizens before the war began affecting them personally soon turned into sullen resignation under the mounting duress caused by the bombing of infrastructure targets. For a time, the half‑hearted bombing during the first month actually seemed to rally public determination to withstand the offensive and to increase public support for the widely unpopular Milosevic. However, the spontaneous street celebrations that erupted immediately after the cease‑fire suggested that the Yugoslav rank and file had begun to doubt Milosevic’s stewardship in having led the country into an unwinnable contest of wills against the world’s most powerful alliance. Possibly reflecting mounting popular weariness of the bombing, Deputy Prime Minister Vuk Draskovic declared as early as April 25 that “Yugoslavia should recognize that it cannot defeat NATO and that it must face the reality of a world standing against Yugoslavia.”[176]

The precise and measured nature of the attacks that were being conducted against leadership and infrastructure targets in the heart of the Yugoslav capital on a daily basis only became fully apparent to outside observers after they had a chance to inspect the results up close. As one American reporter who visited Belgrade after the war remarked tellingly: “Like ice‑pick punctures in the neck, the chilling quality of the strikes was not their size but their placement. We stopped at an intersection in the heart of the city. At each corner of the intersection, but only at each corner, there were ruins. The Serbian government center, the foreign ministry and two defense ministry buildings had been reduced to rubble or were fire‑gutted shells. The precision of the destruction suggested a war with an invisible, all‑seeing enemy and a city helpless to protect itself.”[177]

In what may have been read by Milosevic as an ominous indicator that the bombing was coming ever closer to the most senior national leadership, General Ljubisa Velichkovic, the former air force chief of staff, was killed in an air attack on Day 70 while visiting VJ troops in the field. Velichkovic, who had been removed from office by Milosevic the previous year as a part of a purge of the military leadership and been given the honorific title of deputy chief of staff, was identified as the highest‑ranking casualty since Operation Allied Force began.[178]It is entirely possible that Milosevic had come to fear by that point that a similar fate could befall him at any moment.

Viewed in hindsight, the bombing seems to have had two outcome‑determining effects. First, it eventually persuaded Milosevic that NATO not only would not relent, but also was determined to prevail and had both the technical and political wherewithal to do so. Second, given the incapacity of the Serb IADS to shoot down significant numbers of allied aircraft, it further convinced him that his own defeat sooner or later was inevitable. Although its resolve was slow in coming, NATO finally showed that it would not be moved by the public outcry over collateral damage and could sustain the bombing indefinitely, at a negligible cost in terms of friendly losses. As with Iraq’s forces during Operation Desert Storm, the VJ’s leaders, no less than Milosevic, must have found NATO’s ability to inflict unrelenting damage on their country with virtual impunity to be profoundly demoralizing. Before June 3, the commander of the VJ’s 3rd Army in Kosovo, General Nebojsa Pavkovic, had argued that his forces remained more or less intact and that they could defend Serbia if put to the test. After Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin delivered NATO’s ultimatum on June 2 and a cease‑fire was agreed to, however, he reportedly declared to a group of disconcerted VJ reservists that Serbia’s leaders had been put on notice by the Russians that if NATO’s terms were rejected, “every city in Serbia would be razed to the ground. The bridges in Belgrade would be destroyed. The crops would all be burned. Everyone would die.”[179]

True enough, thanks to the improved flexible targeting procedures (that is, procedures for responding promptly to mobile or pop‑up targets that had been detected by allied sensors) that had been implemented by late April (see Chapters Six and Seven) and the clearer weather that had begun to develop the following month, NATO’s ability to get at dispersed and hidden enemy forces in Kosovo improved perceptibly during the air war’s final week. In all likelihood, however, NATO broke Milosevic’s will and that of his political supporters primarily because it had convincingly shown that it could also destroy such key infrastructure targets as hardened bunkers, bridges, electrical power stations, and other targets directly tied to Yugoslav society and the regime’s control over it. By all indications, those attacks played the central role in bringing Milosevic to accept NATO’s demands and created the political conditions in Serbia that allowed Milosevic to abandon Belgrade’s physical presence in Kosovo in exchange for a cessation of the bombing.

As one may recall, manipulation of the Kosovo issue and Serbia’s strong emotional attachment to the province had figured prominently in Milosevic’s rise to power and in his continued hold on it since 1989. For that reason, acceding to NATO’s demands as expressed in the proposed Rambouillet accords would, in all likelihood, have meant political suicide for him. By June 1999, the opposite had become true: Milosevic’s continued survival seemed to depend on finding a way to stop the bombing and to extricate himself gracefully from his growing predicament. Although Ahtisaari and Chernomyrdin provided him with the ready pretext that he needed, it was the air war’s steadily increasing encroachment on Serbia’s core equities that most likely prompted the decisive shift in his political calculus, as perhaps best attested by his own plaintive question to Chernomyrdin on June 2 cited earlier.[180]In contrast, by Clark’s own admission after the cease‑fire, the attempted attacks against dispersed and hidden VJ forces in Kosovo caused the latter little significant pain or inconvenience. That suggests, by elimination, that whatever one may believe was Milosevic’s most critical vulnerability, the bombing of Clark’s target priorities in the KEZ was not what mainly swung his decision to capitulate.[181]

On this still‑contentious issue, defense analyst William Arkin, who led a private bomb damage assessment mission for Human Rights Watch for three weeks in August 1999 and who visited more than 250 targeted sites in the process, perhaps offered the most helpful and incontestable perspective when he observed: “It was not what we bombed, but that we bombed. The coalition didn’t crumble, the Russians didn’t bail Belgrade out, China was unable to affect the war. At some point it was clear to Milosevic that he wasn’t going to be able to wait out the bombing, that NATO wasn’t going to go away, and that progressively Serbia was being destroyed, he chose to get the best negotiated settlement he could. To say it was this or that target that was important to Milosevic is just to engage in mirror‑image speculation.”[182]