Was the war in Kosovo the sort of war the United States is likely to fight in the early part of this new century? The U.S. Air Force apparently believes so and is raising this question by making the Kosovo air war its typical major theater war (MTW) for the new Quadrennial Defense Review.
The Air Force has been crowing for some time that in Kosovo, for the very first time, modern air power won a war single-handed, even though the triumph was delayed because politicians shrank from the use of sufficient force to shock the Serbs at the outset. Some supporters now contrast rapid dominance, achieved by long-range aircraft, with the older concept of rapid deployment. If indeed the Air Force can now triumph in war single-handedly, then presumably it deserves the lion's share of scarce defense funds.
That the Air Force sees Kosovo as a major war suggests some embarrassing conclusions. This relatively minor operation seems to have drained a large fraction of Air Force resources, both in aircraft spares and in the new types of precision-guided weapons. Although total bomb tonnage dropped on Serbia and Kosovo was relatively limited, the number of sorties was substantial, and the operation was protracted. Each sortie, no matter how little bomb tonnage it delivered, exacted a cost in airframe life and, for that matter, in pilot and ground-crew efficiency.
The Air Force is discovering that the scale of spare parts it built up for the Cold War does not suffice. That scale was predicated on fighting a single. very violent world war. not a long series of minor operations. On a subtler level, Kosovo continues a drain on the Air Force, as it tries to adjust to the sort of protracted deployments with which the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps have long been familiar. In the post-Cold War era, the Air Force advertises itself as the deployable force, but in fact it is designed to operate from permanent bases, as it did during the Cold War. A downsized Air Force, moreover, must deploy an ever-larger fraction of its strength as the number of foreign commitments multiplies. The strain is telling: pilots are leaving the service. A boom in airline hiring has not helped. To a potential enemy, the Kosovo operation would seem to demonstrate that the United States cannot afford many repetitions, whereas the Serbians (or, more significantly from a dictator's point of view, Slobodan Milosevic) handily survived.
It is, of course, also worth asking how Kosovo would compare with a really big regional war—say, a repeat performance of Desert Storm against Iraq. Just how much did all those sorties achieve, and how much more would the Air Force's preferred air strategy have achieved? For that matter, were the political restrictions on air attack avoidable, or were they an inevitable part of any coalition operation?
The larger question is whether Kosovo is the sort of victory about which anyone should be crowing- As in Iraq in 1991, the war aim was twofold. The visible war aim was to halt Serbian aggression in Kosovo, and that was accomplished: the Serbians were thrown out. The much less visible aim was to eliminate Milosevic himself, because he is a continued threat to the stability of the entire region. The hope was, moreover, to make the point that "ethnic cleansing" would be contested. This aim was much more important than liberating Kosovo. because there is a continuing potential for further warfare in Central Europe brought on by ethnic warfare—and because some of these possible wars may involve the new NATO partners, such as Hungary. It also was important that the war not penalize any of the friendly countries of Central Europe, such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. Imposing a high cost on such fragile regimes would quite possibly break their ties to the West. It already is being suggested that, having failed to solve the problems of the ex-communist countries of Central Europe, the West is driving them back into Russian arms, presumably with disastrous results. President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic has said that "If the West does not stabilize the East, then the East will destabilize the West." These remarks apply quite as much to the attempts to apply shock therapy to the Central and East European economies as to the fairly crudely conceived strategy applied to Serbia.
The second war aim failed altogether; at this writing Slobodan Milosevic rules in Belgrade, just as Saddam Hussein rules in Baghdad. In each case, the Western powers, primarily the United States, seem to have imagined that ejecting the ruler from his target country would cause him to collapse at home, his prestige broken. Both Saddam and Milosevic, however, realized that their populations never expected them to triumph over Western coalitions. Defeat was honorable; indeed, Saddam has turned his defeat into a sort of victory by saying that he had stood up to the West; Milosevic seems to be doing much the same thing in Serbia. He has suffered some anti-regime demonstrations, but they seem to have been ineffective. Indeed, given the damage NATO inflicted on Serbia, anyone demanding the ouster of Milosevic can easily be painted as a traitor, which is a devastating label in a very chauvinistic society, particularly one that has produced a Milosevic.
Because Milosevic remains in power, an embargo is still being enforced against Serbia, in hopes of ejecting him. Among other effects of the embargo is an effective stoppage of shipping along the Danube River, which is destroying the Bulgarian and Romanian economies. In effect the governments of these countries (as well as that of Hungary) are being shown that membership in the Western alliance can be crushingly expensive. How can we claim that liberating Kosovo was worth their current pain, which must include a real potential that they will fall back on the old communist politics?
How important, then, was the first war aim? To the West, Kosovo really mattered because the fight became a test of whether Americans and Europeans would do anything to protect abused Moslems, After an abject failure to do so in Bosnia, the Moslem world could well ask why it ought to remain friendly to the West; was Moslem blood to be considered cheap? Fighting the war also probably avoided a much larger South European conflagration, at the least a major Greek-Turkish fight.
To Milosevic, however, Kosovo was probably not terribly important per se. He had used it as a nationalistic rallying cry. but few Serbians really cared about it, and fewer still wanted to live in it. Milosevic presumably was interested mainly in maintaining his own political power. He saw Serbian nationalism as a way of attracting and retaining support. It would be best if Serbians won, if Greater Serbia could somehow he built, but a victimized nationalism is also a very potent source of support. It should have been clear that ejecting Milosevic from Kosovo would have very little to do with ejecting him from power or, for that matter, with neutralizing Serbian nationalism. One of the remaining ethnic enclaves in Serbia is the Vojvodina, which is Hungarian. What happens if Milosevic decides that the right way to deal with humiliation by NATO is by punishing a NATO ethnic group on his side of the border'?
The theory of the bombing and of the embargo seems to have been that a suffering Serbian populace would blame Milosevic, eject him, and abandon ethnic crimes. That is the classical theory of strategic air power. It was and is absurd. Nationalism is a popular movement; the crimes of nationalism tend not to be seen as crimes by the nationalist population. That is why Croatians convicted of war crimes in The Hague have returned home to heroes' welcomes. Pressure on Serbia as a whole was unlikely to cause the populace to repent. It was much more likely to leave Serbians with a feeling that they had been victimized. The situation is not really too different from that in Germany in 1945. The Germans ended the war unrepentant; their views changed because of sustained occupation, re-education, and the need to mend fences with the neighbors they had victimized. Imagine what would have happened if World War II had ended with the Germans simply withdrawing behind their pre-war frontiers. That is about what happened after World War I—with tragic consequences. Have we bought a similar future in the former Yugoslavia" Will a return to Kosovo become the slogan of a new generation of Serbian nationalist politicians?
So the question the Air Force raises, when it calls Kosovo a prototype major theater war. is really the very old question of whether air power, unaided, is a way of winning wars. In Kuwait, it seems at least arguable that the air power that counted was tactical: it was the air power which helped destroy the troops actually occupying Kuwait. The strategic attacks elsewhere in the area were largely wasted, with the important exception of the last-day strike, which destroyed a bunker in Baghdad and probably convinced Saddam that if the war were to continue, he might be killed. In Kosovo, it seems that the only air attacks that mattered were a few late in the war that directly threatened Serbian paramilitaries in the breakaway province (and which worked because they were executed in conjunction with a ground force-the Kosovo Liberation Army). Everything else was, in essence, a feel-good exercise that allowed the Western powers to imagine that they were doing something to the enemy, while they gathered strength for some sort of decisive attack. This is not a new function for air power. After 1940, when the British were ejected from the continent, attacks by Bomber Command were the only way in which they could continue to fight the Germans in Europe. The attacks were therefore pressed forward, despite their terrible cost (to the British)—and even though, as we now know, they had virtually no effect on the German war economy, at least until 1943 or perhaps 1944.
These arguments are likely to become quite bitter, because the price of individual weapons and platforms is escalating. The Air Force is on the verge of reviving the old argument that it can, in effect, replace the other services with a simple global weapon. Current interest in network-centric warfare, which might be seen as precision strike warfare based on global reconnaissance, may yet play into the Air Force's argument, particularly as the costs of the necessary sensors escalate.