The Limits of Air Power

Generals used to be accused of relying too much on what happened in the last war as they thought about how to fight the next. The danger now, in the aftermath of the Kosovo campaign, is that politicians will be seduced into the same mistake.

NATO’s U.S.-led air war against Yugoslavia eventually forced President Slobodan Milosevic to accept the alliance’s terms for a settlement. NATO was able to win without sending any ground forces into battle; it suffered no combat casualties. But today’s generals know what NATO’s risk-averse political leaders might be tempted to forget: Kosovo was a special case. It is not a paradigm for future conflicts.

Using the pressure of its 1,000-plane air armada and depending heavily on American satellite- and laser-guided bombs and missiles, spy satellites and other high-tech tools of war, NATO compelled Milosevic to submit. To be sure, some of the 20,000 smart bombs it directed against Yugoslavia went astray and killed civilians, perhaps hundreds of them. One tragic mistake provoked an unfortunate political confrontation with China. But the Pentagon claims that 99.6% of the precision-guided weapons hit their intended targets. Success in the Kosovo campaign was due to success in the air.

The alliance deserves to be faulted for getting off to a slow start because some of its members insisted on a gradual escalation in the bombing, hoping that Milosevic would bend quickly under modest pressure. Instead it took 11 weeks and some helpful diplomacy from Russia, sympathetic to the Serb cause, to bring him around. U.S. military experts are right to point out that heavier attacks from the beginning would have done no more damage than was ultimately produced over more than 2 1/2 months. They are also right to say heavier raids almost certainly would have led to a faster political solution. That would have spared hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians the horrors of the ethnic cleansing carried out by their Serb tormentors.

“Victory through air power” was a seductive slogan in the United States around the time of World War II, offering the illusion of a relatively easy, low-casualty triumph. This is not the time to reembrace that myth. The United States provided 70% of the air power NATO used in the Kosovo campaign. But overall U.S. military strength rests on a triad of forces: air, sea and land. Wherever future crises affecting American interests might arise--in the Persian Gulf or on the Korean peninsula, for example--air, sea and land forces all will be needed.

The United States and NATO were lucky this time. But depending on luck is not a sound strategy. If potential aggressors are to take seriously the will of the United States to defend its interests, American political and military leaders must make clear they are ready to use whatever force is needed and to accept the risk of casualties. Kosovo might have been a success, but it is not a model for how to prepare for or fight other wars.