Record argues that the Clinton administration's performance during the Kosovo crisis earlier this year confirms a growing post-Cold War suspicion: America's military and political leadership lacks the guts to use force effectively against foreign enemies.
The Clinton administration's performance during the Kosovo crisis earlier this year confirms a growing post-Cold War suspicion: America's political and military leadership lacks the guts to use force effectively against foreign enemies. A casualty-petrified Pentagon placed the safety of U.S. military forces above accomplishment of the mission they were assigned.
The immediate result was an excruciatingly circumscribed military action against Serbia named Operation Allied Force, which provoked an acceleration of the very ethnic cleansing of Kosovo it was designed to halt. The enduring result was to advertise to the world yet again America's most vulnerable strategic center of gravity as it enters the 21st century.
The military has come to worship at the altar of "force protection," and in so doing has encouraged enemies and discouraged allies. Slobodan Milosevic—still in power and backed by a Serbian army virtually unscathed by NATO's half-war—has started four wars in the former Yugoslavia, and in each of them he was initially aided and abetted by our manifest lack of will to use force conclusively.
After the conclusion of NATO's air-only war against Serbia, Secretary of Defense William Cohen and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Henry Shelton astonishingly testified to Congress that "the paramount lesson learned from Operation Allied Force is that the well-being of our people must remain our first priority." Really? If indeed the protection of one's own troops is top priority, then presumably they should never be exposed to the risks of combat in the first place. They should be kept home. Or, at a minimum, as in Allied Force, policy makers should limit our enemies to those incapable of shooting back in the air while at the same time offering those enemies nothing to shoot at on the ground.
None of this is to argue that commanders should be cavalier about risks to their troops. But risk reduction should not be permitted to torpedo mission accomplishment. Was the life of any lone American pilot—and a volunteer professional at that—really more valuable than the fate of more than 1,600,000 Kosovar Albanians?
Even in the case of the Gulf War, fear of getting sucked into a bloody Arab quagmire drove the Bush administration, including its Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, to end the war in a manner that allowed Saddam Hussein's survival and his continued defiance—now in its tenth year—of the international community. With the Iraqi Army on the run, the administration took the extraordinary step of declaring a unilateral cease-fire, in the absence of any request for terms from Baghdad. It then sent General Norman Schwarzkopf, without political instructions, to negotiate the details of a mutual ceasefire with a group of Iraqi field commanders.
Almost the first thing Schwarzkopf did was to throw away potentially decisive leverage that might have forced Saddam's ouster. Without any subsequent objection from his civilian superiors, he declared our intent to evacuate the strategically crucial Iraqi territory taken and occupied by U.S. forces. He then allowed himself, again without any subsequent White House objection, to be snookered into permitting the Iraqis to continue flying their attack helicopters, which they subsequently used to slaughter a major rebellion in southern Iraq.
This manifest American rush to stop the war and get its forces out of the Gulf simultaneously mystified and emboldened the Iraqi dictator, who, according to the later testimony of a high-ranking defector, had been on the verge of a nervous breakdown until news arrived that the Americans were calling off the war.
The irony is that U.S. military timidity rests on a false assumption of public and congressional intolerance of casualties. Operation Allied Force was planned and conducted by a Vietnam War-seared Pentagon, convinced that the loss of a few American lives would sink the entire enterprise. But the lesson of Vietnam is not that the American people and their elected representatives are intolerant of casualties. Rather, it is that their level of tolerance hinges on the perceived strength of U.S. interests at stake and on visible progress, however slow, toward bringing hostilities to a successful conclusion.
In the 20th century, the United States expended the lives of more than a half-million of its own to defeat imperial German, Nazi German, and imperial Japanese aggression, and later to contain communist expansionism in East Asia. Only in the Vietnam War did public support crack, and even then it cracked only after four years of battlefield stalemate in Indochina and unprecedented official lying in Washington.
Recent and comprehensive polling data reveal that the general public is much less intolerant of casualties than either civilian policy makers or senior military officers, and that the latter are definitely more skittish than the former.
How is it possible to reconcile zero tolerance of casualties with the professional military ethic of willingness to sacrifice—and even to die—in carrying out a perilous mission in war? Has the United States become, as President Richard Nixon once feared, a pitiful, helpless giant?
War is the province of danger and death; and a casualty-phobic leadership does a disservice to a great power that dozens of other states and hundreds of millions of people around the world look to for leadership and security.
Jeffrey Record is a former professional staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee and author of The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam, published by the U.S. Naval Institute in 1998.