The General in His Labyrinth

Poised on the verge of a new war in Central Asia, we would all do well to examine our most recent conflicts. Gen. Wesley Clark’s “Waging Modern War,” a detailed account of the 1999 war against Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo (which he led as NATO supreme allied commander, Europe) illustrates rather chillingly the problems that the United States faces today in using military force to achieve political objectives. Its lessons are highly relevant now, as the United States plans an unprecedented campaign against a network of terrorist groups and, possibly, certain governments that support them.

International opinion--always a critical consideration in American wars--wants enemy casualties kept relatively low, while the American public has become accustomed to victories without any significant casualties of its own. In addition, as Clark shows, the military continuously strives to limit its use of force to a narrow range of contingencies that have been defined in advance--contingencies like a new Korean war, which are unlikely and have nothing todo with new conflicts, and likethe one in Kosovo, which inevitably break out.

In Kosovo, the NATO alliance--led by Clark and its secretary-general, Javier Solana of Spain, surely one of the biggest heroes of his account--managed through determination, skill and good fortune to realize its objectives and restore the Kosovar Albanians to their homes. We were fortunate, however, that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic chose to give up when he did, and Clark’s book shows why the United States desperately needs stronger political leadership and a more flexible military to feel more confident about the future. Clark himself came to believe that a ground war would be necessary to occupy Kosovo, and his account suggests that neither the White House nor the Joint Chiefs of Staff had the will to begin one.

By late 1998--after a decade of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans that finally halted in Bosnia after the Dayton agreements of 1995--NATO’s Solana, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and many European political leaders were determined to prevent Serbian ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. They wanted Milosevic to sign the Rambouillet accord, which would have given Kosovo autonomy. Clark, as NATO commander, sought to “encourage” Milosevic to give in by making a credible threat of military action, with the intent of going to war if the threat failed. Yet the general immediately encountered resistance from the Joint Chiefs because of the orientation of the post-Cold War American military.

In the early 1990s, searching for a firm requirement against which to measure American forces after the Cold War, the Pentagon decided that American forces would be prepared for the simultaneous occurrence of two “major regional contingencies”--new wars in Korea or in the Persian Gulf, where American forces were already stationed and had already fought wars. Once that standard was adopted, the value of every ship, aircraft, ground unit and new weapon was inevitably measured by its contribution to one of these contingencies. All other global scenarios--including bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia--became less a priority. Our military, Clark shows, began to focus on the wars they had determined in advance to fight rather than on the more serious political conflicts that were certain to demand the nation’s attention.

As the commander of the first war fought by NATO--still, one would think, our most important alliance--Clark would presumably have had first call on assets needed to fight. Yet, again and again, he encountered resistance to the transfer of assets, including the Army’s Apache helicopters, on the grounds that they might be needed in Korea or the Persian Gulf. Our declared military strategy tends to discourage forceful American action anywhere else in the globe--even in areas like Europe or Latin America, which, one might argue, are at least as important to the prosperity and security of the United States.

In this case, Secretary of Defense William Cohen--whose portrayal here is anything but flattering--became angry whenever Clark suggested, even privately, that war in the Balkans might be necessary, simply because it did not fit into his plans. (The new Bush administration has apparently decided to do away with the two-war strategy, and we must hope that it does not replace it with an equally rigid one but rather insists upon a military willing to adapt to rapidly changing American priorities.) And, as Clark points out, the United States’ continuing reluctance to supply men and assets for European operations will make it difficult, even impossible, to maintain our leadership role within NATO, because the command of an alliance almost invariably goes to the country that supplies the most troops.

In trying to fight his war, Clark also discovered that the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 was not yet working as intended. That act tried to increase the influence of theater commanders like Clark during wartime by creating a direct chain of command from the president and the secretary of defense--advised by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs--to the theater commander. Despite this intentional design, during the Balkan War all of the services’ chiefs continually weighed in to ensure that their men and weapons were used only in the ways they wanted, and Clark writes that he got little or no help from Cohen or Gen. Hugh Shelton, the Joint Chiefs chairman, in maintaining his prerogatives. Indeed, at one extraordinary point on June 3, 1999, Clark was not allowed to attend a key meeting between the Joint Chiefs and President Clinton--a rather detached figure in the war, it would seem, who makes only an occasional appearance in “Waging Modern War”--because of his forceful advocacy of a ground war.

Both the Air Force and the Army proved difficult to influence in the ways Clark (himself an Army general) wanted during the war. The Air Force wanted to focus on the strategic bombing of Serbia, rather than on the more difficult and doctrinally unpopular task of trying to hit the Serb forces in Kosovo that were carrying out the ethnic cleansing, because fixed targets in Serbia were easier to hit. The strategic campaign proved hard to execute effectively, partly because of bad weather (a frequent problem in Vietnam as well, although not in the gulf), and partly because of a shortage of targets that would impose crushing burdens on Milosevic’s regime without inflicting significant civilian casualties. The Army successfully managed to prevent Clark from using Apache helicopters for strikes in Kosovo, perhaps because it feared some might be lost.

A possible ground war to liberate Kosovo, which Clark believed from the beginning might be necessary, proved even more contentious. The Army leadership in Washington seemed ambivalent at best about a ground campaign, and when Clark successfully insisted upon planning for one, the Army seemed to favor a massive invasion of Serbia proper from the north, rather than a smaller, more difficult advance into Kosovo from the south--even though the Kosovo invasion would have been quite adequate to secure NATO’s actual objectives. “We don’t do mountains,” one senior Army leader remarked to Clark during these discussions, and Clark did not take the remark to be entirely in jest. Every commander of an allied army has to reconcile a multitude of interests and perspectives, but no commander can function without his own nation’s basic agreement on what he is trying to do and what he needs to do it. Clark didn’t have that.

Despite NATO’s many problems, Milosevic decided to withdraw from Kosovo. The air campaign had hurt but not crippled him; his attempts to destabilize neighboring governments had failed; and, perhaps most important, NATO diplomacy successfully isolated him, eventually leading even the pro-Serb Russians to urge him to make peace. (Clark himself was very disturbed by the Russians’ last-minute involvement in the occupation of Kosovo, but he acknowledges that it had no serious long-term consequences.)

Yet Milosevic did not have to give in, and NATO was fortunate that he did since it is far from clear that Clark ever would have gotten general agreement on a land campaign. In a final irony, Clark was relieved of his command ahead of schedule--an odd reward for a general who had brought about a victory despite the extraordinary constraints and lukewarm support from home with which he contended.

“Waging Modern War” tells a sobering story about the state of American warfare. One wonders if Clark’s account will hold true for upcoming military operations: In the wake of Sept. 11, we may not be so concerned with casualties--our own or the enemies’--anymore. But we need to think about exactly what steps will lessen, rather than increase, the terrorist threat. And we also need innovative commanders willing to improvise to meet a new kind of threat, more determined political leadership, a more flexible outlook in the Pentagon and better adherence to the wartime procedures laid down by the law. Gen. Clark has performed another service by highlighting these problems at a crucial moment in American history.