-Caveat Lector- >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 www.sftt.com SFTT Needs your assistance with the Combat Reports The May issue of COMBAT REPORTS will be on Buy the Right Stuff.. Now is your chance to speak up--tell us about what does work, what doesn't, and what your suggestions are for improvements. We have a short deadline so don't delay. Send your email direct to [EMAIL PROTECTED] The June issue of COMBAT REPORTS will be on Leadership. Anybody have an opinion on this subject? What you tell us is important, we need to hear it, so get your email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Mission Statement: To inspire our citizens to reform our military institutions to insure we have an efficient, hardened, effective force that will defend and protect our values, culture and integrity against all enemies, foreign and domestic, at a reasonable cost. <Picture: ------------------------------------------> SOLDIERS FOR THE TRUTH is the result of ideals held by a few men who were challenged to put thoughts into action. Ret. Col. David H. Hackworth, who has written about his military years in his biography, About Face, the Vietnam Primer and Hazardous Duty, speaks regularly on the urgent need to improve our combat readiness and reform our Armed Forces. He has a weekly column in various newspapers and can be seen and heard on various television and radio stations around the country. 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