THE DESULTORY ONSET OF THE AIR WAR

Notwithstanding their narrow intent and the admitted constraints that impeded them, the initial strikes of Allied Force, by their measured nature, stood in marked contrast to the massed and highly orchestrated hammer‑blows that were delivered with such paralyzing effect by coalition air power against Iraq from the earliest moments of Operation Desert Storm. On the home front, criticism of NATO’s seeming timidity was both instant and searing. The morning after the operation’s opening night, Senator John McCain, a former Navy attack pilot and Vietnam POW, complained that “these bombs are not going to do the job…. It’s almost pathetic. You’re going to solidify the determination of the Serbs to resist a peace agreement. You’d have to drop the bridges and turn off the lights in Belgrade to have even a remote chance of changing Milosevic’s mind. What you’ll get is all the old Vietnam stuff, bombing pauses, escalation, negotiations, trouble.”[427]In a similar vein, NATO’s tentativeness and preemptive forswearing of a ground option led the respected London Economist to declare that the West had “stumbled into one of its riskiest ventures” since World War II and to predict that if the bombing eventually succeeded, it would “owe as much to luck as to precision.”[428]

In response to such charges, NATO’s spokesman at the time, RAF Air Commodore David Wilby, gamely said of the enemy as Allied Force entered its second week: “He’s hurting. We know that he’s running short of fuel. We’re starting to hit him very hard on the ground. You will start to see the resolve starting to crack very quickly.”[429]However, USAF officers were complaining bitterly about the restrictive rules of engagement from the first days of combat operations. Similarly, RAF pilots flying combat missions out of Italy scored the insipid air effort as “nancying around” and bordering on cowardice.[430]General Short later commented that the frustration felt by airmen was “under control” because the alliance was not losing aircraft and airmen. He added, however, that had losses begun to occur on a repetitive basis, the alliance would have had to rethink the guidance its leaders were handing down on strategy and rules of engagement.[431]

Indeed, so counter to military common sense was the strategy selected by NATO that Short became convinced early on that strike planning was all “just planning for diplomatic threat,” that his air planners were “just going through the motions to some degree,” and that “we’re probably never going to drop a bomb.” Short added that he and his planners had determined that there were somewhere between 250 and 300 “valid, solid military targets” in the area for the sort of campaign effort that airmen ideally would like to conduct, but that he was told: “You’re only going to be allowed to bomb two, maybe three nights. That’s all Washington can stand, that’s all some members of the alliance can stand, that’s why you’ve only got 90 targets, this will all be over in three nights.” At that, Short frankly conceded that he assumed a prior deal had been struck with Milosevic, whereby Milosevic had told NATO, in effect, that he could not accept NATO’s terms and keep his job unless NATO bombed him and inflicted some degree of at least symbolic damage.[432]That meant, or so Short thought, a token NATO bombing effort against the approved set of 90 targets, 51 of which were IADS targets selected for force protection–both south and north of the 44th parallel–and some in Montenegro, after which Milosevic would dutifully show the white flag.

Short later declined even to give Allied Force the courtesy of calling it a “campaign,” saying that it was not an operation aimed at achieving clear‑cut strategy goals with dispatch, but rather something more in the nature of “random bombing of military targets.”[433]It was one thing, Short said, to go after enemy tanks and APCs in the Iraqi desert the way the coalition did with such success in Desert Storm before the ground offensive began. In that instance, everything behind the forward edge of the battle area was enemy territory, where one could attack targets at will without concern for collateral damage or the potential for killing refugees. In the contrasting case of Kosovo, he said, “we felt that the risk was enormous, and we felt that we were going to spend a lot of assets to get minimum return. It was going to take a lot of sorties to kill a tank, and there was enormous risk of hitting the wrong target because we knew refugees would be moving around in this ethnic cleansing environment.” Short’s preference was to “go after the head of the snake,” as he put it. In an illustration of what he meant, he suggested that ten combat sorties against Belgrade would all hit their targets and achieve a desired effect, whereas “if I send those same ten sorties into Kosovo, perhaps we’ll find a tank, perhaps not, [and] if we don’t, we send the ten sorties to what in my business we call a ‘dump target,’ which is a suspected assembly area or a barracks from which the enemy has fled two weeks ago, and we’ll blow up empty buildings. So the bombs will hit something but the impact on ethnic cleansing is zero.”

For their part, NATO’s civilian leaders could not even bring themselves to face the fact that they were engaged, to all intents and purposes, in an ongoing war. Three weeks into Allied Force, Secretary Cohen declared before the Senate Armed Services Committee: “We’re certainly engaged in hostilities. We’re engaged in combat. Whether that measures up to, quote, a classic definition of war, I’m not prepared to say.”[434]Such diffidence on the administration’s part was ostensibly intended to reflect due executive‑branch obeisance to the war declaration powers of Congress. Indeed, one report noted that the White House had expressly ordered all U.S. government agencies and departments not to refer to ongoing operations as a war out of concern that by so doing, they might bring the administration into a confrontation with Congress over war declaration powers.[435]Yet the stance also reflected an ingrained administration discomfort over coming to full grips with what its leaders had signed up for in Operation Allied Force. That discomfort was most palpably telegraphed in President Clinton’s statement on March 26 that the standoff was “not a conventional thing, where one side’s going to win and one side’s going to lose.”[436]

True enough, there was no pronounced groundswell of American popular support for the Kosovo air war as there had been for the 1991 Gulf War, thanks largely in the latter case to the obvious economic interests at stake in the Gulf, the blatant cross‑border aggression that characterized Saddam Hussein’s invasion, and President Bush’s sustained efforts during the preceding five months to mobilize such support. At the end of the first week, a Washington Post and ABC News poll found that only 51 percent of the American people approved of the way President Clinton was handling the Kosovo crisis, with 55 percent supporting NATO’s air war against Serbia.[437]In contrast, 79 percent of the American populace had supported the air offensive against Iraq at the start of Operation Desert Storm.[438]

One can reasonably ask whether NATO’s initial assumptions about public opinion on the issue of casualties underestimated the degree of popular support that could have been mobilized for a more robust and effective strategy by a more proactive and committed U.S. leadership. The chairman of the respected Louis Harris and Associates polling firm rejected easy suggestions that the American people would inevitably oppose the commitment of ground troops or any other determined use of force. “When the U.S. achieves victory in a just cause,” he pointed out, “the public applauds the use of force. When it loses–worse still, when America is defeated or runs away (as in Somalia or Vietnam)–the public reasonably says the use of the military was a mistake.” Citing the precedent of Desert Storm, he recalled how during the days immediately preceding the outbreak of hostilities, no poll found a majority of Americans in favor of prompt military action. Yet immediately after the air campaign had begun and was deemed to have gotten off to a good start, surveys found that between 68 and 84 percent of those polled approved. Similarly, up to the day before the Desert Storm ground push commenced, a typical poll taken by the New York Times and CBS found that the public preferred a continuation of the air war by 79 percent, with only 11 percent favoring the start of ground operations. A few days after the ground push began, however, a full 75 percent of those polled believed it had been “right to start the ground war,” as opposed to only 19 percent who opposed it.[439]

In contrast to the celebratory reaction and commemorative parades down Wall Street and Constitution Avenue that predominated in the heady aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, one reason for the subdued response of the American rank and file to the successful conclusion of Allied Force may have been that popular expectations were so low–limited, at bottom, to the simplest hope that the United States might somehow extricate itself from the morass it had entered with its reputation as a superpower still intact. Up to the day that Milosevic finally caved in, even the most ardent air power proponents were gloomily eyeing the prospect of an open‑ended bombing campaign. They were also coming to accept the growing likelihood of having to send in allied ground troops to bring the nation’s involvement to a decisive end. Immediately after the cease‑fire, a USA Today /CNN/Gallup poll reported that 53 percent of Americans did not consider the outcome to be a victory for the United States, as opposed to only 40 percent of respondents who did. The poll further reported 46 percent as believing that worldwide respect for the United States had declined as a result of U.S. actions in the crisis, as opposed to 44 percent who thought that it had grown.[440]