In the Kosovo crisis of 1999, the lessons of operational war fighting learned during the Gulf War were forgotten. The lack of focus on the proper centers of gravity allowed Serb forces such as this tank column to operate in Kosovo unharmed. If the current obsession with technology and targeteering is not reversed, our ability to use military force decisively against a strong opponent could be crippled severely.
The bombing of Serbia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began on 24 March and ended on 10 June 1999. Operation Allied Force was described as a success, and in many ways it was. NATO airmen, sailors, and soldiers performed extremely well at the tactical level. Too many mistakes, and even blunders, however, were made at the strategic and operational levels. Allied Force must be critically evaluated and some lessons deduced for the future.
Planning: Political restrictions and interference severely hampered NATO's planners' ability to prepare sound and coherent plans for possible action against the Serbs. Some members of the alliance insisted on gradual escalation, believing that President Slobodan Milosevic would back down and accede to NATO's demands. The Clinton administration perhaps was justified in its belief that most NATO members would never agree to a long conflict with Serbia. NATO staffs were directed specifically not to link air and ground operation planning. There was no true campaign plan prepared before or during the conflict. Because NATO's political leaders assumed that the conflict would be short, no packages of political, diplomatic, economic, or psychological measures were prepared. Reportedly, there was no alternate or contingency plan.
Desired End State: In preparing to use military force, one of the principal responsibilities of political leadership is to determine and articulate a strategic guidance to the theater commanders. Such guidance must include a clear description of the political, military, economic, social, ethnic, legal, and other conditions that should exist or be created in a given theater after the end of the hostilities. NATO's top political leadership failed to provide a clear and achievable desired end state. This unwritten set of goals might have included the following elements: the breakup of the current regime in Serbia and the emergence of a democratic regime; the creation of preconditions for the Albanian majority in Kosovo to exercise its right of self-determination; strengthening the position of the anti-- Milosevic regime in Montenegro; the renunciation of Serbia's territorial claims against its neighbors; drastic reduction of the military threat that Serbia poses to its neighbors; and greatly enhanced domestic stability in Macedonia and Albania.
Strategic Objectives: After the desired end state is determined, the political leadership must define clear and achievable strategic objectives. The strategic objectives of both NATO and the United States were ambiguous, poorly articulated, and unrealistic. There was a serious mismatch between the ends to be accomplished and the means the political leadership was willing to use to achieve those ends. To make the situation worse, these objectives underwent changes as the air offensive went on. At the beginning of the air campaign, the United States publicly stated that the objectives of NATO action against Serbia were to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's opposition to Belgrade's aggressiveness in the Balkans, to deter Milosevic from continuing and escalating his attacks on helpless civilians and create conditions to reverse his ethnic cleansing, and to damage Serbia's capacity to wage war against Kosovo in the future or to spread the war to neighbors. Almost simultaneously, NATO publicly stated that the objective of its actions was to help to achieve a peaceful solution to the crisis in Kosovo by contributing to the response of the international community and to halt the violence and support the completion of negotiations on an interim political solution. On 23 April, the North Atlantic Council issued a statement reiterating some of the original statements and adding new objectives, which really were conditions for the termination of the conflict rather than strategic aims. Language such as "demonstrate the seriousness" is so broad and ambiguous that it means little in practical terms. Likewise, the terms "damage" or "degrade" are essentially useless because any damage or degradation inflicted on the opposing force or the enemy's infrastructure would have to satisfy the stated strategic objectives. A more achievable set of strategic goals for NATO probably would have included the following: significantly weaken Belgrade's hold on key elements of power; seize Kosovo province and restore full autonomy for the ethnic Albanians, as a first step for the permanent resolution of the Kosovo problem; drastically reduce the combat capabilities of the Yugoslav ground, air, and naval forces; and weaken Serbian internal security forces.
Theater Strategic Objectives: Normally, strategic objectives within the theater must be determined based on strategic guidance. Initially, NATO stated that its military action was directed toward halting the violent attacks being committed by the Yugoslav Army and the Ministry of Interior and disrupting their ability to conduct future attacks against the population of Kosovo, thereby supporting international efforts to secure the agreement of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to an interim political settlement. In mid-April, DoD stated that the military strategic objective was to degrade and damage the military and security structure that President Milosevic was using to depopulate and destroy the Albanian majority in Kosovo. NATO military strategic objectives might have been more in harmony with the DoD strategic objectives if the following elements were included in it: destroying the Yugoslav Army deployed in the Kosovo province; destroying the major part of the Yugoslav Army and Air Force and their infrastructure deployed north of the 44th parallel; destroying the major part of the Yugoslav Navy; destroying Serbia's capacities to produce heavy weapons and equipment; cutting off import and production of crude oil and refined products; and neutralizing Serbia's electricity grid and power plants.
Methods: After the military objectives are determined, the operational commander and his staff must decide which method of combat force is needed to accomplish them. The accomplishment of a strategic objective in a given theater normally requires the planning and execution of a campaign—a series of major operations conducted on land, in the air and at sea, sequenced and synchronized in terms of space and time and controlled by a single operational commander. Operation Allied Force was not an air campaign, despite the claims of the air-power enthusiasts, but a major combined offensive air operation. It consisted of a series of air strikes and attacks conducted for 78 days that cumulatively accomplished a partial strategic objective. NATO forces did not plan or execute a series of major operations conducted on the ground or at sea.
Attack Direction/Axis: Attack direction or axis refers to a broad swath of surface (land, sea, or ocean) or airspace extending from one's own base of operations to the ultimate physical objective, via selected intermediate physical objectives. Normally, a campaign is conducted along a single strategic axis, and a major operation is carried out along at least one operational axis. If one's forces, however, operate from an exterior position, as NATO forces did, then a major operation is conducted along several tactical axes. NATO initially was at a great disadvantage because air strikes were to be carried out from a few tactical axes covering only the western and southern approaches to targets in Serbia and Kosovo. Most of the strikes were conducted from Aviano Air Base in Italy across Slovenian and Croatian airspace. Another tactical axis was used by U.S. carrier-based aircraft flying from the Ionian Sea via Albania's territory to targets in Kosovo and Serbia proper. This made NATO's strikes predictable and thereby facilitated the task of Serbia's air defenses in the first few weeks of the war. It was not until the second week of May that NATO was able to launch air strikes from Hungary and Turkey, thereby presenting a multidirectional threat to the Serbian air defenses.
Enemy Center of Gravity: For each military objective to be accomplished, a corresponding center of gravity (COG) must be determined. The process of determining the enemy center of gravity starts with an identification and analysis of the "critical factors"—a collective term referring to the critical strengths and weaknesses of a military force or non-military source of power. A COG at any level of war is always found among the enemy's critical strengths, not its critical weaknesses as is often thought. In generic terms, a COG is that source of leverage or massed strength—physical or moral—whose serious degradation, dislocation, neutralization, or destruction will have the most decisive impact on the enemy's or one's own ability to accomplish a given military objective.
NATO planners had to determine the enemy's strategic and operational centers of gravity. The Serbian strategic centers of gravity were the will to fight of Milosevic and his inner circle and the country's military-economic potential as a whole. Milosevic's main pillar of power was 80,000 to 100,000 troops of the Ministry of Interior, not the 140,000 men (including 90,000 conscripts) of the Yugoslav Army, which had been repeatedly purged of generals considered to be insufficiently loyal.
Public support for Milosevic's regime did not collapse just because NATO destroyed airfields, bridges, oil refineries, dual-purpose defense plants, or empty government buildings. Milosevic would only have changed his behavior and his policies if the physical safety of himself and his family were seriously threatened. Had NATO forces actually invaded and occupied Kosovo, the will to fight of Milosevic and his inner circle would have been severely shaken.
In planning for a campaign, NATO planners needed to identify several operational centers of gravity. The first intermediate objective in a campaign is to obtain and maintain air superiority over the area in which combat is to take place. Hence, the fighter aircraft of the Yugoslav Air Force, along with their supporting structure on the ground, represented the enemy's operational COG in the air. Because NATO's objective was to prevent Serbian actions against the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo the proper center of gravity on the ground was not the 52nd (Pristina) Corps of the Yugoslav Army deployed in Kosovo, but the Serbian security and paramilitary forces involved in the ethnic cleansing. To make the situation more complicated for the planners, these ground forces did not concentrate in sufficient mass to represent even a tactical COG. They were deployed in small, mobile and widely dispersed groups. Therefore, their destruction or neutralization required lots of time and resources.
Operational Idea: The operational idea (or scheme) is the heart of the design for a major operation or campaign. It should depict the theater commander's vision of what he intends to do and how he intends to accomplish the assigned operational or strategic objective. The operational scheme for Allied Force lacked imagination and was too traditional. The plan presented a single-dimensional threat because only the use of air power was envisaged. To make the situation worse, the U.S. and NATO political and military leaders said publicly and repeatedly that no use of ground troops was planned. The lack of a ground option greatly eased the problem for the Serbs, who were allowed to use their regular troops freely in support of security forces and paramilitaries in Kosovo instead of being forced to dig in and fortify border areas for defense against a possible invasion. Mainly for political reasons, the operational scheme did not envisage the most optimal use of air power—in mass to overwhelm and shock the opponent early in the operation. Initially, NATO did not have an all-encompassing plan to prepare and "shape" the Kosovo area of operations by simultaneously cutting off the potential flow of reinforcements and supplies over land routes and establishing a sea blockade off the Montenegrin coast. Because the Kosovo crisis extended for many months and too many empty threats were made, NATO planners were unable to count on the element of surprise at any level. It was inexcusable that no plan of operational deception was ever devised.
Lessons Learned: Political and military leaders must be fully aware that political constraints cannot simply be piled up without taking into account their consequences on planning and the effective use of military power. Cumulatively, these constraints might undermine the ability of the military commanders to properly and effectively use their forces to accomplish assigned strategic objectives. If political limitations are too severe, the strategic objectives must be reduced in scope or the time allotted for their accomplishment must be extended—or the limitations on the use of military power must be loosened. For the optimal use of combat power, leadership should limit itself to providing complete, clear, concise, and well-articulated strategic guidance and afterward give the respective theater commander the full authority to plan and execute military actions to accomplish the stated strategic objectives.
Strategic objectives should be clearly defined and achievable with resources on hand or becoming available. They should not be changed unless the strategic or operational situation changes so drastically that the existing objectives no longer are appropriate. In the formulation of strategic objectives, broad and ambiguous terms should not be used. Military objectives selected should be the opposite of the assumed or real objectives sought by the opponent. Otherwise, an opponent with less ambitious objectives or using its forces asymmetrically might accomplish its objectives quickly despite military inferiority, and thereby dictate the terms of the settlement.
The operational idea for a major operation or campaign should be innovative and make it difficult for the enemy to predict how the actions of one's own and allied forces are to unfold. It should ensure speed of execution and make full use of joint force capabilities to deceive and mislead the enemy. Whenever possible, the enemy should be presented with credible threats in all three mediums: from the ground, in the air, and at sea. A sound operational scheme should provide for actions to isolate and shape the battlefield, systematically preventing the arrival of the enemy reinforcements and supplies into the theater.
In the end, the United States and NATO forced Milosevic to accept their demands. Victory, however, was as much the result of diplomacy as air power. The real danger now is that the success of Allied Force might not energize U.S. services and the joint community to identify and then resolve serious deficiencies in the relationship between policy and strategy, strategy formulation, operational planning, and operational thinking. These problems mainly are caused by the obsessive belief, bordering on zealotry, in the paramount value of smart weapons, computer systems, and information warfare. Not surprisingly, military theory and its critical role in shaping and guiding the practical application of strategy, operational art, and tactics are almost totally neglected. The Kosovo crisis of 1999 should be a wake-up call rather than a cause for self-congratulation. We must return to the old-fashioned but well-proven and still highly relevant Clausewitzian and Moltkean approach to warfare. The U.S. Navy in particular seems oblivious to the critical role strategy and operational art always have played the past in planning, preparing, and conducting major operations and campaigns in a maritime theater.
This is not a call to abandon our faith in tactics and technology but to take a more balanced approach to war fighting. The Vietnam War should have taught us that the emphasis on tactics and technology does not ensure victory, but only prolongs inevitable defeat. Discarding or dismissing these lessons as irrelevant today will ensure future defeat at the hand of a stronger and more resourceful opponent who might have less-advanced weapons and tactics but who—unlike the Serbs—is a master of strategy and operational war fighting.
Dr. Vego has been professor of operations at the Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island, since 1991. He has 12 years of active naval service in the Yugoslav Navy and spent 3 years as 2nd Mate in the former West German merchant marine. He has a Ph.D. in modern history from George Washington University and holds a Master Mariner license.