The New Way of War?

Among the most important questions, however, is the new strategy's efficacy against the mid-size rogue states it was designed to defeat, such as Iraq, Iran, or North Korea. Before the Kosovo war, Clinton administration defense planners certainly believed in coercion on the cheap: they assumed a mere week or two of bombing would bring Slobodan Milosevic to his knees. The NATO victory took more than two months but still seemed to vindicate the new mantra. Indeed, that coercive air power alone can win wars at minimal cost has become conventional wisdom for many commentators.

For most of its 78 days of bombing, however, NATO was much less certain. As Benjamin Lambeth's lucid narrative reminds us, the received view at the time was that NATO was in real danger of losing the war. In fact, Milosevic's ultimate concession surprised many in the alliance, producing audible sighs of relief from Washington to Ankara.

To what extent was this surrender attributable to America's new way of war -- that is, to the NATO bombing? Many observers have pointed out a variety of other factors that could have contributed, ranging from the threat of a land invasion to Milosevic's indictment for war crimes in the midst of the fighting. William Arkin in the Bacevich and Cohen collection, for example, credits NATO solidarity, writing that Milo sevic threw in the towel only after his gambit to split NATO politically failed.

Lambeth and Stephen Hosmer each credit a range of factors but consider air power the most important. Both authors, however, and especially Hosmer, distinguish between the successful infrastructure bombing and the largely fruitless countermilitary strikes favored by NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark. Whereas Serbia's military survived nearly intact, its power grid and transportation network took heavy damage and could easily have been finished off by continued bombing. It was the threat to this crucial economic foundation that changed minds in Belgrade, they argue.

For Lambeth, the bombing produced a series of changes in opinion -- reduced public resistance to compromise, elite pressure for settlement, Serb perception of NATO solidarity -- that ultimately persuaded Milosevic. The threat of invasion and finally Russian abandonment mattered, too, but the key was that NATO could continue to bomb indefinitely and with impunity. With no way to prevail, further costs became pointless and Milosevic gave up.

Hosmer, although agreeing in the details, sees somewhat different dynamics: the crucial factor, he argues, was Milosevic's expectation that NATO's bombing would soon escalate. And he musters some intriguing evidence to support this view, most notably a series of postwar press interviews with senior Serb leaders. Milosevic, for example, explained that if he had held out, "without doubt, even more massive bombing would have followed in retaliation, with the loss of a great number of lives." General Nebojsa Pavkovic, Serbia's Third Army commander, told army reservists, "If we refused [the NATO offer], every city in Serbia would be razed to the ground. The bridges in Belgrade would be destroyed. The crops would all be burned. Everyone would die." And a senior confidant of Milosevic reports, "We knew that the carpet bombing of Belgrade would start the next day after we refused, so what was the choice?" Of course, with the war already lost, these officials had an interest in demonizing NATO; Milosevic, for example, now uses accusations of NATO genocide to defend himself against war crimes charges at the Hague. Nevertheless, these interviews, the most direct available evidence of the motivations behind Serb decision-making, suggest that fears of a bombing escalation played a major role in the surrender.

Yet Lambeth's and Hosmer's analyses raise as many questions as they answer. After all, the Serbs had absorbed substantial pain prior to 1999 without turning against Milosevic. The UN sanctions imposed in 1992 essentially destroyed the Serbian economy. In 1993, Serbia's industrial output and retail sales fell by 40 and 70 percent, respectively; inflation reached a staggering 116 trillion percent; and about 60 percent of the industrial labor force had been laid off. By the end of that year 80 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty level and the Serbian GDP had dropped to about half its 1991 value -- a steeper decline than the U.S. economy suffered during the Great Depression. Yet Milosevic defied the UN's edicts and the Serb population backed him in doing so.

Moreover, air power has historically inflicted far greater pain than that imposed in 1999 without producing political concessions. As political scientist Robert Pape and historian Conrad Crane have pointed out, the Allies repeatedly firebombed German and Japanese civilians en masse in World War II without generating any meaningful domestic pressure on Hitler or Tojo to end the war. Between 1950 and 1953, strategic bombing laid waste more than half the total urban area in 18 of North Korea's 22 largest cities, to no avail. Indeed, the historical pattern for civilians under heavy bombing is resignation and ultimately apathy: the sheer burden of providing life's necessities drives out political activism.

One could argue that precision changed this pattern and allowed NATO warplanes to touch a nerve that Serbian penury in the mid-1990s or firebombing in Germany, Japan, and North Korea had not. NATO's 1999 attacks killed few civilians and focused on key infrastructure rather than flattening neighborhoods. So with their survival assured, maybe Serb civilians could invest energy in opposing the regime rather than searching for food or fuel among fields of rubble.