ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF AIR POWER. Viewed in hindsight, the most remarkable thing about Operation Allied Force was not that it defeated Milosevic in the end

Viewed in hindsight, the most remarkable thing about Operation Allied Force was not that it defeated Milosevic in the end, but rather that air power prevailed despite a U.S. leadership that was unwilling to take major risks and an alliance that held together only with often paralyzing drag. Fortunately, the Clinton administration did a creditable job of keeping the allies together in the end, albeit at the cost of what Brent Scowcroft called “a bad strategy” that raised basic questions about the limits of alliance warfare and about whether the United States should, in the future, settle instead for coalitions of the willing, at least in less than the cataclysmic showdowns of the sort that NATO was initially created to handle.[559]One can only wonder what greater efficiencies might have been registered by a more assertive campaign approach had the U.S. government been willing to play a more proactive role in leading from the front and setting both the direction and pace for NATO’s more hesitant allies.[560]

Lesson One from both Vietnam and Desert Storm should have been that one must not commit air power in “penny packets,” as the British say, to play less‑than‑determined games with the risk calculus of the other side. Although it can be surgically precise when precision is called for, air power is, at bottom, a blunt instrument designed to break things and kill people in pursuit of clear and militarily achievable objectives. Not without reason have air warfare professionals repeatedly insisted since Vietnam that if all one wishes to do is to “send a message,” call Western Union. On this point, Eliot Cohen summed it up well five years before the Kosovo crisis erupted when he compared air power’s lately acquired seductiveness to modern teenage romance in its seeming propensity to offer political leaders a sense of “gratification without commitment.”[561]

To admit that gradualism of the sort applied in Allied Force may be the wave of the future for any U.S. involvement in coalition warfare in the years ahead is hardly to accept that it is any more justifiable from a military point of view for that reason alone. Quite to the contrary, the incrementalism of NATO’s air war for Kosovo, right up to its very end, involved a potential price that went far beyond the loss of valuable aircraft, munitions, and other expendables for questionable gain. It risked frittering away the hard‑earned reputation for effectiveness that U.S. air power had finally earned for itself in Desert Storm after more than three years of unqualified misuse over North Vietnam a generation earlier. For all his disagreement with so many other arguments put forward, to no avail, on the proper uses of air power by his air component commander, General Short, even General Clark emphasized after the air war ended that despite understandable pressures for a gradualist approach both from Washington and among the NATO allies, “once the threshold is crossed to employ force, then force should be employed as quickly and decisively as possible. The more rapidly it can be done, the greater the likelihood of success.”[562]

As the Gulf War experience showed, and as both Deliberate Force and Allied Force ultimately reaffirmed, U.S. air power as it has evolved since the mid‑1970s can do remarkable things when employed with determination in support of a campaign whose intent is not in doubt. Yet to conjure up the specter of “air strikes,” NATO or otherwise, in an effort to project an appearance of “doing something” without a prior weighing of intended effects or likely consequences is to run the risk of getting bogged down in an operation with no plausible theory of success. After years of false promises by its most outspoken prophets, air power has become an unprecedentedly capable instrument of force employment in joint warfare. Even in the best of circumstances, however, it can never be more effective than the strategy it is intended to support.