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>From www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/133/oped
How to mount a ground war in the Balkans
By Bernard E. Trainor, 05/13/99
<Picture>espite the G-7 and Russian proposal to solve the Kosovo
crisis, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic is not willing to
consider it without a halt to the bombing. This would allow him to
string out negotiations while he finishes his dirty work free of air
attacks. Moreover, there is no indication that the air campaign is
bringing him to heel. If he remains obdurate and turns a deaf ear to
a negotiated settlement on other than his own terms, NATO must
consider the use of ground forces.
White House denials to the contrary, the failure of NATO strategy
thus far keeps the topic alive. If, in the long run, NATO does decide
to look for a solution on the ground, there are basically two
choices. One makes the clearest military sense, if success is defined
as a quick and clear victory, but it has daunting political
implications. The other achieves a more limited goal, but is
militarily complicated.
The option most frequently discussed publicly would see NATO ground
troops come into Kosovo from either Macedonia or Albania or both.
This option has the advantage of dealing directly with the problem at
hand and conforms with the current limited NATO goals of returning
displaced Kosovar Albanians to their homes and protecting them from
further attacks.
To mount such an operation into Kosovo, NATO needs a far larger and
more heavily equipped force than the 12,000 troops currently in
Macedonia, who were to be peacekeepers under the Rambouillet
agreement. Half measures in Kosovo, such as carving out a ''safe
haven'' for the Kosovar Albanians with the small NATO forces at hand
in Macedonia could be foolhardy as it would make the enclave an easy
target for Serb artillery and ground attacks despite allied air
supremacy. However, wars are not won or lost solely with numbers.
There is an old military saying that applies: ''Amateurs talk
strategy, professionals talk logistics.'' The logistics in this case
are particularly demanding and it could take months to prepare an
attack from the south. Because of the mountain remoteness and lack of
infrastructure in the region, military engineers would have to build
and improve roads and bridges before NATO forces were capable of more
than token intervention into Kosovo. Even if Macedonia agreed to
allow heavy NATO reinforcements to stage on its territory and the
Greeks permitted their transit (not a certain thing), there is only
one decent road running from the port of entry in Salonika in Greece
to Skopje in Macedonia.
Albania presents even greater geographical and logistic obstacles.
Its border with Kosovo consists of rugged mountains, with only one
primitive road at Kukes passing through them to Kosovo. Albania's
capital, Tirana, has the largest airfield in the country, but it is
inadequate for heavy military traffic. Its two ports at Durres and
Shengjin cannot be used to move large amounts supplies and equipment
quickly.
A long, slow buildup of forces for an offensive out of either Albania
or Macedonia could lead to a winter campaign, which NATO certainly
does not want as it would sorely degrade allied air support. While
the lengthy buildup proceeded, the Yugoslavian army would have ample
time to reinforce its 43,000 soldiers and paramilitaries already in
Kosovo and to build defenses. They would also be secure in the
knowledge that when their defenses were breached they always had the
option of retreating into Serbia and dragging the war out.
While the Macedonia military option fails to challenge Milosevic's
power directly, political leaders may find it acceptable because it
is limited in scope and nature, but military logic runs against it.
When it comes to military planning, the quickest way to victory is
not always a straight line. Yugoslavia's geography offers NATO
planners another military option, but at a much higher political
risk. It would require NATO to abandon limiting its goal of returning
and protecting the Kosovar Albanians for one that would destroy the
Yugoslavian army and remove Milsosevic and his ruling clique from
power.
>From a military perspective, a powerful NATO army could be set in
motion much more quickly and effectively from the north out of
Hungary. The troops are at hand for such an offensive. Taking
advantage of Europe's superior transportation systems, armored and
mechanized infantry forces of the United States, France, Britain,
Germany and the Netherlands, currently stationed in northern Europe,
could move by rail and road to the borders of Yugoslavia through the
Czech Republic and Hungary far more quickly than transporting them to
Macedonia or Albania.
NATO, of course, would have to persuade two of its new members to
allow their territory to be used as transit and staging areas for the
attack, no simple matter.
Several hundred thousand ethnic Hungarians live in Vojvodina, the
region of Serbia near the Hungarian border and the territory through
which an invading force would pass. The Hungarians are already
sensitive about the well-being of this minority group. The invasion
of Yugoslavia would certainly trigger strong opposition from Russia
and many other nations with unforeseen consequences. Conceivably, it
could even lead to a resumption of fighting by the Bosnian Serbs. In
the end NATO would be an occupying army burdened with reconstructing
the political and economic infrastructure of Yugoslavia.
It is a high risk political strategy, but carries with it the speed
and decisiveness that is lacking in the limited Kosovo option. If an
attack were ordered out of the north, the logistics and geographical
problems would be far less formidable than they are in Macedonia and
Albania. NATO could send into combat a combined allied force
spearheaded by anywhere from three to six armored and mechanized
infantry divisions or brigades. They would attack across the rolling
Danube plain, which is ideal for armored and mechanized warfare. Such
an attack could go south past Novi Sad and Belgrade, then down the
Morava river corridor past Nis and all the way to the Macedonian
border, a distance of less than 300, effectively cutting Yugoslavia
in two, lengthwise.
When the Germans invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, this is roughly the
route they opened up to establish a supply line to the Axis forces in
Greece. That operation took 10 days to plan, less than two weeks to
execute with casualties of about 200 killed. Given the complexity,
size and voracious appetite of modern-day armies for fuel and
munitions, such an operation could now take up to a month or more to
prepare, but once under way, the Yugoslav army could not stop it.
If the attack was conducted with speed and vigor, casualties should
be low. The target of the attack would be the three Yugoslavian field
armies. One is located in the Belgrade area, one in central
Yugoslavia,and the third in and around Kosovo. Major cities along the
way, such as Belgrade, the capital, would have to be bypassed and
later occupied by follow-on forces to avoid the military and civilian
casualties and destruction associat ed with fighting in cities.
NATO could further complicate the problems faced by Yugoslav
defenders if it chose a variation of the two basic options by
simultaneously attacking from both the north and the south. For this
the alliance could build up a small, but respectable armored and
mechanized infantry task force in Macedonia. This force could then
attack north towards Nis along the Morava corridor pinning Yugoslav
forces between it and the major offensive coming south down the same
river corridor.
To make matters even tougher for the Serbs, NATO could open a third
front. This could be done if the allies sent helicopter-equipped
forces such as the Army's 101st Air Assault Division, 10th Mountain
Division or a Marine Corps Expeditionary Force to Albania. These are
units that could be moved quickly and are well suited for fighting
across the mountainous border into Kosovo. They also require less
supporting infrastructure than armored and mechanized units.
A combination of attacks from three different directions would pin
the Yugoslav army in place, fragment it, and quickly lead to its
defeat. This variation of the two basic options would bring speedy
conclusion to the fighting with minimum casual ties. The three-sided
attack does have an important military drawback: It would take longer
to prepare than either of the basic options.
The Yugoslavian army is made up mostly of conscripts armed with
obsolete weapons. In all respects it is inferior to well trained and
equipped NATO soldiers. Any of the plans would destroy its cohesion
and combat capability. Its units would face the choice of
destruction, surrender or retreat into the mountains of southwestern
Yugoslavia, where Tito found refuge for his partisans in the World
War II.
However, the mountains would be less welcoming today. The
surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities of a modern army,
combined with the mobility of helicopter-borne troops, would make it
hard for the Serbs to evade NATO for long. All of this leave open
what is perhaps the most vexing question: What then? There are
straightforward solutions to the military problems confronting NATO
planners. But the political question of what to do with a Yugoslavia
conquered by the alliance is daunting, perhaps too daunting.
Bernard E. Trainor is a retired Marine Corps general and military
analyst f or NBC.
This story ran on page A21 of the Boston Globe on 05/13/99.
© Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From www.thenewrepublic.com
MAY 31, 1999 ISSUE
LOST KOSOVO
TRB from Washington: War Fair
by Peter Beinart
<Picture: Ship image><Picture>The republicans who attack the Kosovo
bombing because America didn't intervene in Rwanda or Liberia would
be a little more credible had they shown more concern when those
crises actually occurred. But they have a point nonetheless.
America's Kosovo war is unintelligible without reference to the race
of the victims. To win popular support, a humanitarian campaign must
evoke in American minds certain moral associations--associations that
are extremely difficult to conjure in an African context. In that
sense, racism does indeed underlie what we are doing in Kosovo. And
yet an understanding of that racism does not invalidate our
intervention; quite the opposite.
The public debate over Kosovo is not about whether the Serbs are
doing ghastly things to the Kosovars; even isolationists admit that.
It is about whether those ghastly things are normal for that part of
the world or whether they are aberrant. When isolationists say that
people in the Balkans have been killing one another for centuries,
what they mean is that America cannot impose a political solution
because the problem is not, at base, political. Milosevic is simply
expressing a Balkan cultural, or even biological, predisposition that
will express itself regardless of who is in power. On the other hand,
when hawks say they cannot believe this is happening in Europe, they
mean that the Serbs, as Europeans, are capable of civilized behavior.
Something, or someone, out of the ordinary is responsible for the
horror, and, if we can remove it, or him, civilization will return.
This is why interventionists compare Milosevic to Hitler, and his
government to the Nazis. Leaders and regimes, unlike primordial
tribal feuds, can be changed politically.
Which brings us to Africa. Americans are not indifferent to images of
dying Africans. But most Americans are not analytically equipped to
see African slaughter as aberrant. They lack an image of normal,
healthy African civilization--partly, to be sure, because African
countries are less stable and economically developed than Western
ones, but also because those countries receive little American media
attention except when they are in crisis. The argument employed in
the Balkans--that savagery is the norm and therefore intervention
will not change anything--is far more debilitating when applied to
Africa, where Americans have no countervailing moral context. When
was the last time you heard an American say, "I can't believe that
such barbarism is happening on the continent of Africa"?
The Western tendency to see the hatreds of the present as an
extension of ancient patterns, strong in the Balkans but much
stronger in Africa, owes much to the unfortunate legacy of colonial
anthropology. For most of Europe's century-long colonization of
Africa, anthropology was the dominant intellectual framework through
which the West viewed the continent. In Britain, in particular,
anthropology was crucial to "indirect rule"--the policy of leaving a
colonized tribe's social structure intact so it could be administered
by a handful of colonial officials on the ground. To preserve social
structures, Britain needed anthropologists to study them. And
ethnographies conducted with an eye toward preservation tended, not
surprisingly, to depict African societies as static. This assumption--
combined with the fact that African history and political science did
not exist as academic disciplines prior to independence--left a
strong Western predisposition to see African tribal conflict as
primal and unchanging rather than as the product of political
decisions by particular regimes.
One of the central preoccupations of post-'60s scholarship about
Africa has been to debunk this assumption, to show that contemporary
ethnic loyalties and hatreds are modern inventions. But this
revisionism has not really penetrated the public consciousness.
Instead, as the early "End of History" optimism of the post-cold-war
era faded, the age-old-hatred idea gained more and more currency. The
Rwanda genocide, for instance, was rarely explained in political
terms--as the brainchild of hyper-nationalists from a particular
party who came to power by assassinating a president of their own
tribe. The New York Times called the killings the continuation of a
"centuries-old history of tribal warfare," even though historians
agree that the terms Hutu and Tutsi were designations of social
class, not ethnicity, until the twentieth century. The idea that
sustains the intervention in Kosovo--namely, that if you deal with
Milosevic the horrors will end--was virtually impossible in Rwanda,
where Americans didn't even know the names of the leaders who tried
to systematically murder their countrymen.
Even in Somalia, where, at the high point of post-cold-war optimism,
George Bush sent in troops to protect the delivery of food, our
inability to view the crisis in political terms helped doom the
operation. Because the fighting was seen as the product of historic
tribal enmities (notwithstanding the fact that almost everyone in
Somalia comes from the same tribe), no moral distinction was ever
made between one "warlord" and another. In Kosovo, the Clinton
administration has played down its problems with the Kosovo
Liberation Army for fear that Americans would see no moral difference
between the government and the rebels. But, in Somalia, America's
fight with Mohammed Farah Aideed seemed utterly pointless because, as
far as Americans knew, Aideed was no worse than the leader of any
other Somali faction.
Many Kosovo hawks rightly suspect that those who insist America must
act the same way in Africa as in the Balkans really want a policy of
color-blind, nondiscriminatory, moral indifference. They believe it
is better to act on behalf of some groups than on behalf of none at
all, even if the selection criterion has an ugly history to it. But
the racial aspect of the Kosovo campaign is more than simply an
embarrassment. Kosovo is a war to expand the frontiers of America's
moral community. Those who say that the people of the Balkans are
culturally or genetically programmed to kill one another are saying
that they are all, victims and victimizers, essentially unlike us.
The argument is not explicitly racialist, but it has racialist roots.
A century ago, many in America and Western Europe said the same thing
but took it for granted that this was because the people of the
Balkans represented a foreign race. As Yale historian Matthew Frye
Jacobson writes in Whiteness of a Different Color, most Americans in
the 1890s thought that Slavs "held as poor a claim to the color
`white' as the Japanese." America has progressed over the past 100
years, because of mass immigration and a widening of our democracy,
to the point where many Americans see the Serbs and the Kosovars as
racially and morally like us. If this war succeeds, maybe in another
century we will include the Hutus and Tutsis within that moral circle
as well. If it fails, we certainly will not.
(Copyright 1999, The New Republic)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>From www.hackworth.com
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SOLDIERS FOR THE TRUTH is the result of ideals held by a few men who
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A<>E<>R
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