A World of Hurt Awaits Just Over the Yugoslav Horizon

Few ships pack as much punch per pound as this 567-foot U.S. guided-missile cruiser. Plying the Ionian Sea hundreds of miles south of the Serbian province of Kosovo, it bristles with missiles, torpedoes, helicopters, cannons and guns.

“It’s a Death Star,” Capt. Joe Klingseis boasted Tuesday as he leaned into a 35-knot wind gust on the starboard catwalk--his favorite spot on the Aegis cruiser under his command--and admired the Anzio from bow to stern through gold-rimmed aviator glasses.

The comparison with Darth Vader’s space fortress in the movie “Star Wars” is apt.

“We could kill a whole bunch of people simultaneously, and they wouldn’t even know they’re going to die,” the captain said.

Klingseis and his 360-member crew do not expect such a lethal order. But if North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders decide to counter Slobodan Milosevic’s aggression in the separatist province, the Anzio may be called upon to fire the first shot against the Yugoslav president’s air defenses.

That would suit Klingseis fine.

Like President Clinton and other Western statesmen, the 48-year-old career officer and Persian Gulf War veteran from Iowa believes that something ought to be done about Milosevic’s brutal crackdown on ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo--especially the recent massacres of women, children and old men in the Albanian-majority province.

“Nobody likes the thought of a backyard bully,” said the red-haired captain, who considers all of southern Europe his backyard.

“The way I look at it,” he added, “if there’s a bully who is hurting people and he doesn’t need to be hurting them, and if I can help stop him, then that’s a good thing.”

The Anzio--with 61 other warships, 170 military aircraft and 17,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators from 10 NATO nations--just happens to be in Milosevic’s neighborhood this month. They are conducting long-planned war games under the code name “Dynamic Mix.”

That NATO’s biggest Mediterranean exercise this year coincides with its loss of patience over Milosevic’s crackdown in Kosovo is convenient, say officers aboard the Anzio and the mother ship of its battle group, the U.S. aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower.

For one thing, they hope that the size and proximity of the exercise will prompt Milosevic to heed Western demands to back down in Kosovo.

If he does not, NATO could interrupt the war games and deploy some firepower against his forces, the officers say.

“Anybody observing the fact that there are 10 navies out here operating together should get the message that we’re a serious deterrent force,” said Rear Adm. Scott A. Fry, commander of the Eisenhower battle group. “We’re certainly prepared for any contingency, but we’d prefer this be resolved peacefully.”

With some Europeans reluctant to commit force in Kosovo, however, it is not clear that NATO members would act together.

However, Fry said the United States and others could decide to strike independently of NATO. He said his battle group could be within attack range “very quickly.”

Military analysts say an attack would probably begin with cruise-missile strikes to take out Yugoslav air-defense batteries and military command centers in Kosovo. That would be followed, if necessary, by airstrikes on more mobile targets, such as tanks and artillery.

The Anzio carries cruise missiles in some of its 122 launch cells. It is close enough to Kosovo to hit any target there, but far enough away to avoid retaliation by Yugoslav missiles, officers said.

Gunners work in shifts at 30 computer screens in the Anzio’s darkened war room, simulating the launch of Tomahawk cruise missiles and other weapons. Tuesday’s war game drill pitted them against the Italian navy.

If the games gave way to genuine combat, it would all look the same to the gunners at the screens. But Lt. Chip Walz, who runs the war room, said the training is “too intense to think much about that.”

In September 1995, NATO’s intervention with cruise missiles and bombing raids forced Milosevic and other antagonists to begin talks at Dayton, Ohio, that ended the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina two months later.

Among those hoping for a rerun of history is Ensign Tim Spaulding, a radar operator on the Normandy, the Anzio’s sister ship, in the 1995 campaign and now combat systems test officer on the Anzio.

“I had my doubts then” that the bombing raids would work, he said. “I was surprised that a week later they were all in Dayton. . . . If we fire in anger again, I hope something will come of it.”

A similar mood of hope prevails aboard the Eisenhower, although there too the pretend war is too intense to allow much thinking about a real one.