The New Way of War?

Stephen Biddle is on leave from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, while serving as Associate Professor of National Security Studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute. The views expressed here are his own.

From March 29 to June 9, 1999, the NATO alliance, led by the world's only superpower, waged war on a lone republic in an already conflict-ridden region. The combined population of NATO's 19 countries exceeded Serbia's 11 million people by a factor of 65. NATO's annual defense budget was 25 times larger than Serbia's entire economy. Its armed forces outnumbered Serbia's by a factor of 35.

The big news: NATO won.

Does this feat really merit three books in a single year? Actually, it does, for mundane as it should have been, NATO's success was far from certain at the time. And this curious little war has had important implications for U.S. military policy in the three years since. As Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen argue in War Over Kosovo, the conflict helped crystallize a fundamentally new "American way of war." The merits of this new approach have been hotly debated ever since, and this debate frames the central themes of all three books.

BARGAIN INTERVENTION

For Cohen and Bacevich, this new way of war stems from a collision between subtle strategic problems and an unsubtle strategic culture. With communism's demise, they argue, the United States found itself in a world of legitimate but lesser security concerns. Balkan thugs posed no existential threat to America, but civil war in Kosovo could lead to ethnic cleansing, which could create a refugee crisis, destabilize Macedonia and Albania, draw Greece into war, spur renewed Greco-Turkish conflict, and on and on. To prevent this cascade, and potentially others like it, U.S. leadership and military muscle would be needed. Americans, however, are uncomfortable shedding blood for such murky causes. The country likes its aims noble, its objectives clear, its enemies evil, and its commitments short. Americans do well in crusades to end fascism or save democracy; they are not suited, according to Cohen and Bacevich, to the dirty work of imperial policing to secure second- or third-tier interests.

How to square this circle? The Clinton administration's answer, say Cohen and Bacevich, was intervention on the cheap. If the costs were low enough, the public would accept the police work needed to maintain order in the provinces and allow Washington to advance longer-term U.S. goals of political and economic openness around the world. U.S. military involvements should thus be limited to air power, any action should be cloaked in multinational coalitions to lend legitimacy and spread responsibility, and public scrutiny should be limited through careful control of information. Using ground forces, which are more susceptible to casualties and more difficult to withdraw, was to be avoided. Thanks to new technologies, precision bombing from beyond enemy reach could destroy critical economic and military infrastructure while neither killing civilians (which might fracture coalition solidarity) nor sacrificing Americans (which could undermine political support at home). Wars would be short and efficient: the threat of losing bridges, power grids, secret-police offices, barracks, and supply depots without any prospect of killing Americans or halting the damage would soon bring hostile autocrats to reason.

Kosovo would not be the last such war of limited American liability. Even as NATO bombs fell on Belgrade, U.S. and British aircraft carried out a sustained (if nearly invisible) war on Iraq, one that expended more than 2,000 bombs and missiles in 1999 alone -- not nearly the number used in Kosovo but still a sizeable show of force. And the 2001-2 campaign in Afghanistan was both a clear descendant of and a reaction to the military model unveiled in Kosovo.

The analysts in the War Over Kosovo anthology, however, see important problems with this model. Some concerns are practical, such as Michael Vickers' fear that the military will fail to procure the necessary information and precision weapon technologies. Anatol Lieven questions whether limited force from the air will succeed against tribal or other subnational enemies who have little infrastructure to threaten, and James Kurth thinks it will be useful only against a half-dozen rogue states small enough to be bullied but modern enough to be vulnerable.

Others raise moral and political red flags. Bacevich asks whether keeping wars below the threshold of popular concern is consistent with American political values. Could such a policy ultimately give rise to an isolated, mercenary military conducting shadowy operations in places far away from prying public eyes -- and if so, at what cost to American democracy? Alberto Coll raises a series of difficult moral ambiguities by considering who will suffer: although the new approach strives to avoid killing civilians, it deliberately targets a population's electrical power, transportation network, jobs, and livelihoods. In fact, an explicit aim is to pressure enemy governments by creating suffering among their civilian populations. Economic sanctions, though nonviolent, are now widely pilloried as cruel; can this new way of war be any better? And by making war cheaper, will the new approach make wars too easy to start without adequate moral justification or reflection?

WAR OF WORDS