Kosovo Report Supports Calls for Separate Army Peacekeeping Force

They are taught to be prepared for an attack at any moment, to return fire when threatened, to win with overwhelming force.

This conditioning produces elite U.S. combat troops. But some experts have disputed whether it is the best preparation for the peacekeeping missions that combat troops often take on in the world today. And an official Army report now gives added support to their view.

The report, the result of an Army investigation, found that a few soldiers from the elite 82nd Airborne Division harassed, threatened and assaulted civilians during a five-month mission in Kosovo that ended last spring.

One important factor in their actions, the report says, was the difficulty they had as combat-trained troops trying to adjust to the unfamiliar demands of peacekeeping. As troops of the 3rd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment tried to make this adjustment, they suffered “disciplinary and leadership breakdowns” and “experienced difficulties tempering their combat mentality,” the report says.

The 1,100-page analysis, released earlier this week, grew from an investigation into the sexual assault and murder of an 11-year-old ethnic Albanian girl in January. Staff Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi was court-martialed for the crimes and in July pleaded guilty to forced sodomy, three indecent acts and murder.

Separately, the Army took administrative disciplinary steps against six enlisted men for their misconduct in treatment of Kosovars. Three officers were given letters of reprimand.

Army leaders for years have resisted suggestions that they set up a separate cadre of troops trained exclusively for peacekeeping duty. With the country unwilling to increase the size of its active-duty military, such a move would only drain troops who are needed to keep the country ready for conflicts, including big regional wars--such as the Persian Gulf War--that could still occur.

“The best peacekeeper is a well-trained fighter,” Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during an appearance in Beverly Hills last month.

But earlier this summer, a congressionally chartered study panel, the Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, urged the government to ease the burden on the active duty military by developing a “government-wide capability” for handling peacekeeping and humanitarian crises. Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the GOP nominee for president, also believes that peacekeeping is “not the mission of the future” for the active-duty forces, said John Hillen III, a defense analyst who is a consultant to the Bush campaign.

“Why should you take the world’s best war-fighting machine and use it to decide whose duck belongs to whom, in a place like Kosovo?” said Hillen, not speaking for the Bush campaign. He is a former member of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Richard J. Dunn, a retired Army colonel, contended that combat and peacekeeping troops develop opposite instincts and to mingle the two missions is to hurt both.

For combat, troops need to be conditioned to “take the initiative--be brutal--and use a lot of firepower,” he said. Peacekeepers, in contrast, need to learn to “be cautious, think about protecting themselves and not overreact.”

The Army investigative report describes how members of the 82nd Airborne trained for combat and fully expected to fight when they entered the southeast corner of Kosovo last September, three months after the end of the Kosovo war. Before their deployment, their training had focused on close-quarters battle, counter-sniper fire and other small-unit infantry tactics.

What they found instead was frustration as they sought to prevent the ethnic Albanian majority from surreptitiously attacking an ethnic Serb minority that in the war’s aftermath made up less than one-third of the local population.

Their battalion commander had given them orders to locate and “neutralize” Albanian splinter guerrilla groups--orders that were “emphatically” out of line with the wishes of the Army’s higher-ups, according to the report. But the troops told investigators that they found it difficult to carry out those orders and other routine peacekeeping duties.

“The soldiers expressed frustration in what they perceived to be their law enforcement role,” the report says. The battalion’s command sergeant major said flatly: “We are not trained to act as police and perform police duties.”

The author of the investigative report, Col. John W. Morgan III, cited what he said were the unit’s “overly aggressive tendencies.” These were evident in the unit’s slogan, “Shoot ‘Em in the Face,” he wrote, and in the soldiers’ “standard operating procedure” of pointing their M-4 carbines in the faces of local nationals at night to illuminate their faces with the attached spotlights.

The report quotes an American military police battalion commander complaining about the unit’s “heavy-handed treatment” of the Kosovars and suggesting that such an approach might not be uncommon for combat troops.

“You always hear the old adage that this is an infantry force [and] they just believe in force,” he told investigators.

The Army report takes the view that the unit was “not adequately trained” for peacekeeping before it embarked on the mission.

An Army spokesman, Maj. Tom Collins, said that the unit’s deployment orders came in last summer at a point where it was impossible to give the soldiers the full course of training for peacekeeping situations. That training is traditionally spread over eight months before deployment, he said.

But he insisted that lack of instruction was not the key ingredient in the unit’s misconduct. These troops were “bad apples” who “knowingly violated the rules,” he said.

Collins said the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. troops continue to be rotated through Bosnia and Kosovo with a good record demonstrates that soldiers can shift between combat and peacekeeping duties.

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Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this story.