Compromised Command

As NATO's Supreme Commander during the air war over Kosovo, Wesley Clark should have been the most supreme commander ever. In theory, he controlled history's biggest and broadest alliance in its first venture into combat. In fact, however, his command was compromised by more conflicting pressures -- political, diplomatic, military, and legal -- than any other in history. Given these constraints, keeping the enterprise from flying apart was no mean feat, and Clark has a right to be proud of the victory he helped to achieve. But the story he tells in Waging Modern War makes one wonder how much that victory owed to luck -- despite the utterly lopsided balance of power between the West and Serbia. As Clark's account suggests, we have reason to worry if NATO ever has to maintain solidarity and combat effectiveness in a fair fight.

Many of the problems Clark confronted were typical of any war. Others, however, were unprecedented. The Kosovo air war was waged by a 19-member coalition operating by consensus, making it the most multilateral campaign ever. Clark's position in the resulting maelstrom was also unique: he was the nexus of American and European demands and of civilian and military authorities. From this vantage, he observed a slew of serious problems in NATO's approach. In less diplomatic terms than Clark uses to describe them, these problems included making war without admitting that it was war, and a clash of confused notions of how to use force effectively. Clark also faults the American military for failing to support the war properly. His accounts of the straitjacket that NATO legal advisers put on tactical options are laughable -- but only because Serbia's inability to fight back kept such restraints from endangering NATO forces.

WAR ON THE FLY

Clark cites Karl von Clausewitz's dictum that sane people should not start wars unless they have plans for how to finish them. Clark does not mention Napoleon's more adventurous view, which turned out to characterize NATO's approach to Kosovo: "On s'engage et puis on voit" (you engage and then you see). After half a century of unprecedented institutionalized cooperation in peacetime planning for war, NATO's first actual war was initiated, fought, and ended with no agreement among its members -- or within the councils of its single most important member, the United States -- on objectives, strategy, or limits of action.

Clark notes that Clausewitz's dictum was a lesson that Vietnam burned into the minds of his generation of military officers, but he rejects it as "an unreasonable standard." A Rhodes scholar who studied at Oxford two years before Bill Clinton, Clark makes clear that he is not representative of his military cohort, which reacted to failure in Vietnam by becoming "much more combat-focused, much less academically inclined." That difference was only magnified when Clark assumed the dual role of supranational commander of NATO and national commander of U.S. forces within NATO, responsibilities that often seemed to conflict.

The disastrous results of incremental escalation in Vietnam instilled in U.S. officers the conviction that if force is used at all, it must be used decisively from the outset to overwhelm and crush enemies -- not in gradual doses, with the hope that opponents can be prodded into changing their minds. When attempting coercion, restraint is self-defeating, signaling to the enemy not how much it should fear, but how little. A crushing conquest imposes the attacker's will; limited coercion gambles on the target's weakness of will.

Clark, however, proved unwilling to admit the necessity of making a choice between strategies to crush Yugoslavia and strategies to prod it. Thus he describes the planned first phase for the air campaign against Serbia as deliberately restrained -- leaving many assets unstruck, "held hostage" as "incentives for the Serbs to halt." This is straight out of the 1965 playbook for the air war against North Vietnam. Yet in the same breath Clark describes why he felt good about the plan: "No half measures. No Vietnam."

It would not have been hard to crush Serbia had the West been willing to make any significant effort. But NATO did not want a real war, and refused even to call its aerial assault by that name. Nato started the campaign with the expectation that it would be short, and with no exit strategy if President Slobodan Milosevic turned out not to be a pushover. Clark was uneasy about the European preference for indecisive force but did not dig in his heels against it. As he puts it, if NATO countries "wanted to fire a few cruise missiles to make a political statement, did I have the right to say they couldn't?"

AMERICA'S GENERAL OR EUROPE'S?

Clark's contradictory embrace of both decisive force and limited coercion as strategies reflects the position he held as the link between American and European preferences. Before Kosovo, when Americans thought about war, the model they tried to avoid was Vietnam. For Europeans, however, it was World War II, which had a much more devastating impact on the continent than it did on the United States. The Cold War reinforced this European aversion to decisive force, because NATO doctrine during that period relied on the threat of deliberate nuclear escalation to deter Soviet conventional attack. That reliance made it almost impossible to contemplate the actual resort to force that a failure of deterrence would require. Thus "the idea of decisive force never made it into NATO thinking," Clark found, and this made Europeans profoundly ambivalent about combat over Kosovo.