One crucial reason is the extraordinary influence of the Joint Chiefs chairman in the Bosnia debate. “I don’t know what the administration would have done without Colin Powell,” says one of Clinton’s most senior advisers. Despite his initially rocky relationship with General Powell over the issue of gays in the military, Clinton has come to rely on him. The result is that Powell’s doctrine of “overwhelming force” has become a pretext for overwhelming reluctance to get involved in the Balkans. “All options are bad, and some are worse,” Defense Secretary Les Aspin keeps saying.
Stuck in advisers’ minds is the nightmare scenario outlined by Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey, then Powell’s assistant, to the Senate Armed Services Committee last August: “You are dealing with 23,000 square miles of a country slightly larger than South Vietnam. It is four times bigger than Northern Ireland, with 200,000 armed people in it.” McCaffrey speculated that ending the violence in Bosnia would take “around 400,000 troops” deployed for “a year or so.” That, he said, was “a personal judgment, not based on detailed analysis.” Yet the view soon became gospel.
In fact, there is another way-the kind of grubby police action that the U.S. military hates but that might help the Bosnians fight back, or make the Serbs pull back, or at least give peace a chance. Short of an all out invasion, the United States and its allies could still choose one or more of the following limited military options: mount an air campaign against Serbian forces in Bosnia; establish safe enclaves for Bosnians; arm the Bosnians; bomb Serbia. The choices are all doable, though with drawbacks. But the administration still needs to answer the larger question: what is the goal? Here’s how the various military scenarios might play out.
Allied air power can inflict significant damage on Serbian troops in Bosnia. While its weapons are plentiful (chart, page 29), the self-styled Army of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a conventional force that probably couldn’t survive more than a few days of sustained assault from the air. A full-scale bombing campaign could destroy military headquarters and communications systems, immobilize forces by destroying their fuel supplies, savage their efforts to maneuver and regroup, pick off individual units in their barracks and kill or terrify the troops manning artillery batteries by using napalm, fuel-air explosives and cluster bombs. The Serbs could be reduced to a guerrilla force, capable of little else beyond sniping and sabotage.
Within Bosnia, the Serbs have few air-defense systems one or two bases from which fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters can take off-to threaten allied planes. The Serbian defense radar network is equally sparse, and only patchily defended by surface-to-air missile (SAM batteries. Of greater concern to U.S. military planners are antiaircraft guns and shoulderfired SAMs. The way to avoid antiaircraft fire is to fly at high elevations, which risks having nonguided bombs miss their targets, or to strike at night, which U.S. Air Force pilots are trained to do.
Serbian command and control networks and supply lines are particularly vulnerable. Their ground forces in Bosnia are organized into seven corps equivalents, each with its own headquarters. Beneath them is a network of roughly 115 individual combat or combat-support unit&-all of them with barracks, vehicle parks and fuel dumps, which present clear targets–some 400 in all, perhaps 50 of which are critical. Serbian forces are fuel starved; there are persistent reports of tanker trucks making daily runs over Bosnia’s northern and eastern borders to sustain the military there. Convoys of gasoline-filled tankers are sitting ducks. There are only a few roads to target: no more than a dozen highways lead into Bosnia from Serbia, Montenegro or Serb-controlled portions of Croatia.
Striking Serbian artillery is trickier. Thanks to reconnaissance photos, the Pentagon knows where the emplacements are. Planners on the Joint Chiefs and NATO have picked which aircraft to use-a mix of air force F-111s and F-15Es, as well as navy A-6Es from the USS Theodore Roosevelt, off the Adriatic coast. A major problem for the air force, however, is that precision bombing is likely to succeed only for the first few strikes. “The Serbs will start to shoot and scoot,” says a Pentagon army officer, using the artillery phrase for firing and moving. Once Serb artillery moves-into the woods or inside buildings–allied forces must either maintain a virtually permanent air cap over Bosnia to spot the artillery as soon as it fires (hugely expensive) or insert trained “spotters” in Bosnian cities to call in airstrikes as the artillery opens up. Even those measures may not halt the Serbs. They can attack Muslim enclaves as effectively with mortars–which are mobile and extremely hard to target from the air.
For months the Bosnian government, badly outgunned by the Serbs, has begged the West to lift the arms embargo. U.S. intelligence says that of the roughly 150,000 Bosnian troops, perhaps only half have weapons. It’s obvious which kinds of arms to send: assault rifles such as AK47s, grenade launchers, light 81-mm and 82-mm mortars, machine guns and weapons to pierce Serb armored vehicles. As long as the allies continue to enforce the no-fly zone, Bosnians don’t need antiaircraft missiles. The sticking point is how to deliver the arms. Defying the embargo, the Bosnians have already bought millions of dollars’ worth of weapons from international arms dealers, only to have Croats insist on keeping half the weapons as a “fee” to move them overland. That arrangement has recently become tense, as fighting has raged in central Bosnia between Muslims and Croats. Middlemen would either have to be bought off or simply bypassed.
One school of thought in the administration believes Washington should merely announce that it wishes the arms embargo lifted and then, as one Pentagon official sardonically puts it, “sit back and wait for the entrepreneurs to move in.” There is no shortage of cash for such an operation; the Saudi royal family is said to have given the Muslims several million dollars last year to buy weapons. The downside is that it invites Islamic fundamentalists-Iranians, Afghans, perhaps Egyptians-to move in.
That worry has prompted some planners to suggest that the United States should run the arms deliveries. Technically, it would be easy enough: relying on the same C-130 transport planes, operating out of the Rhein-Main base, which are now dropping relief supplies to Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia. AC-130 could get shot down and some arms would inevitably fall into the hands of the Serbs. But the chief problems are ethical. “You could not ensure that the arms were only used against Serb combatants,” says British Defense Secretary Malcolm Rifkind. Would the Muslims, victims of ethnic cleansing, turn their rage on Serbian civilians? Some military advisers doubt whether, even with additional light weaponry, the Bosnians could hold their own.
Since the standoff in Srebrenica, where 135 Canadian troops have kept several thousand Serbian troops from attacking some 20,000 civilians, the idea of “safe areas” under U.N. protection has gained support. The Clinton administration has ruled out the use of substantial ground forces, so it must persuade other allies to take up the mission. How to get them in? The Canadian force entered Srebrenica through Serbian lines as part of a cease-fire deal. Because that arrangement is unlikely to be repeated, two options remain-either airdropping troops into the towns or enabling the U.N. troops already on the ground to fight their way in.
Parachuting troops is hardly a snap, but far from impossible. Both the British and the French have highly trained forces. The U.S. Air Force C-130 crews of the 435th Air Wing, with lots of recent practice running relief supplies, have perfected a high-precision drop system. While allied forces were arriving from the sky, U.S. aircraft from the 52nd Fighter Wing at Spangdahlem in Germany could provide suppression strikes on Serbian forces surrounding a given town. The 52nd could also help U.N. forces blast their way into an enclave. Some 7,000 British and French troops, already on the ground in Bosnia, have light armored vehicles with guns that can give as good as they get. What the soldiers lack is air cover, a need that could be filled by F-16s and A-10s from the 52nd Fighter Wing.
A more ambitious option would be to roll back Serbian territorial gains. That, of course, would require the insertion of massive numbers of ground troops. Clinton opposes that, fearing high casualties. Over in NATO, however, senior U.S. military officers take a very different view. After more than a year of collecting intelligence and drawing up plans for intervention, a multinational team led by Gen. John Shalikashvili, the U.S. and NATO commander in Europe, has concluded that an outright invasion and occupation of Bosnia by allies could be achieved in “a matter of days,” according to one inside source. In a primarily airborne operation, “the fighting would be over in less time than [the ground campaign in] Desert Storm,” he says. The cost would be low-fewer than a hundred people killed or wounded, and probably closer to 20. “There would probably be more casualties from vehicles sliding off the mountain roads than there would from hostile fire,” says the source. The scenario envisions a multinational force of up to 300,000 troops dominated by U.S., British, French and Canadian soldiers. (Germany might provide medical and logistics support.) “Most likely, you would put a large number in for the initial operation, then pull most of them out in fairly short order,” the source says.
NATO planners’ basic difference with the administration is that they do not envisage “victory” over anybody, not even over the Serbs, their idea is simply to stop the killing. Their model for action is not Desert Storm-but Operation Restore Hope. In Somalia, U.S. forces landed in Mogadishu, seized control of airstrips and fanned out into the countryside. Similarly, allied forces would secure airfields in Bosnia, then airlift troops directly onto those fields, where they would move out by stages into the countryside. Coalition forces would take territory based on a system of zones into which NATO planners have divided Bosnia. The entire operation would require a two- to three-week buildup of forces, using air bases along the Italian east coast as a jump-off point. To sustain the force in place, allies would open up a port on the Adriatic-most likely in the Croatian town of Split. “The basic scenario is that we move in and [the Serbs] go home,” says the NATO source. “Some, perhaps a substantial number, would flee to the hills. They could be a nuisance, but nothing more.”
The nuisance factor raises problems. The troops would be subject to a steady drizzle of casualties from sniper fire and land mines, plus the possible loss of helicopters from shoulder-fired missiles. “How many deaths would it take before the Congress and the public demanded to know why American lives were being lost over there?” asks former national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft. And that raises the largest problem-namely, what’s the objective of the campaign? NATO planners accept what the administration still refuses to concede: at this late date, the only feasible political goal of intervention is to quell the fighting and separate the participants. That inevitably leads to a partitioning of Bosnia and massive exchanges of territory and people-in other words, to abetting ethnic cleansing.
The failure of the conventional “escalate to a clear victory” approach is most apparent in the ultimate option-to take the war to Belgrade. That would involve bombing military and civilian leadership, communications systems, electricity generators and transmission lines, oil supplies, railroads, bridges and airfields. Demolishing the Serbian air-defense network with antiradar missiles and cluster bombs would allow allied air power to roam freely over the country. It would be relatively simple to use fuel-air explosives against Serbian aircraft, which are sheltered in hangars, or to send B-52 bombers to hit airfields. Against leadership targets in Belgrade-Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s office, the Ministry of Defense, telecommunications hubs-U.S. Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from the Adriatic would be the weapon of choice. Belgrade could be plunged into darkness by hitting two main power lines and one switching center. But if the goal is to cripple Belgrade to where it can no longer support aggression in Bosnia, the United States would have to wage a unilateral campaign so ferocious that international public opinion would revolt. And if the objective is to persuade “right-thinking” Serbs to overthrow Milosevic, the plan might backfire by stiffening public sentiment in his favor.
Perhaps the best option of all starts with rethinking the military paradigm. That is only beginning to happen-within the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various in-house military think tanks. Aspin is quietly agitating for novel approaches, beginning with a redefinition of post-cold-war threats on which new planning can be based. The No. 1 threat, Aspin has said, “is the danger we face from regional ethnic or religious conflicts.” The task, he says, is “figuring out what kind of forces we’re going to need to deal with them”–which requires “special concerns, special needs, special kinds of things.” In the case of Bosnia, that may mean limited intervention of a completely novel sort. “There is no conventional military victory attainable here,” insists defense consultant Phillip Karber. “What the outside world can try to do is to reduce the level of violence and brutality. That’s a classic policing role.”
Of course, there’s already a police force in Bosnia-the U.N. troops on the ground. What’s needed is to give those forces more clout, just as the U.S. military did in Somalia. The Clinton administration, for example, could send the 11th Air Cavalry Regiment from its base in Fulda in Germany into Sarajevo or Tuzla and use its Apache helicopters, backed by air force A-10s to protect U.N. convoys and relieve beleaguered enclaves. Face to face with U.S. troops, Serbian forces, who now routinely block U.N. efforts, would surely back off. It would hardly be a stirring military campaign-and it would certainly cause some U.S. casualties. But it might also set a new course for how to deal with the messy kinds of conflict that threaten to be around for quite some time.
Do you approve of the way Clinton is handling the situation in Bosnia?
39% Approve 30% Disapprove
Do you agree or disagree that the fighting in Bosnia is not America’s problem?
49% Agree 44% Disagree
Do you favor or oppose U.S. military planes’ attacking Serbian artillery, military positions and supply lines In Bosnia?
40% Favor 45% Oppose
How likely are airstrikes by U.S. and allied planes to stop the fighting in Bosnia?
51% Very to somewhat likely 41% Not too, or not at all, likely
Do you favor or oppose sending U.S. ground forces to Bosnia?
27% Favor 60% Oppose
From the NEWSWEEK Poll of April 29-30, 1993
About 137,000 on all sides, according to the Bosnian government. But counts differ widely and are prey to political manipulation.
More than 15,000 dead or missing. About 36,600 wounded. Main killers: disease and hunger. Many survivors are severely traumatized.
2,280,000 displaced or trapped in Bosnia and Herzegovina, according to U.N. sources. An additional 1,760,000 are scattered across Europe.
For 600 years Bosnia and Herzegovina was a crazy quilt of ethnic and religious groups. During World War II it was the setting for some of the most vicious internecine fighting in the Balkans. But under the tough postwar leadership of Yugoslav President Marshal Tito, it became a socially and politically stable republic.
Serbian nationalists declared war on Bosnia after Muslims and Croats voted to secede from Yugoslavia in March 1992. Since then, Serbs have relied on “ethnic cleansing” to seize about 70 percent of the republic, while the Croats have grabbed an additional 15 percent. Most of the remaining Muslim population is in the cities.
A United Nations/European Community plan proposes to preserve Bosnia’s borders by carving it into 10 semiautonomous provinces, each dominated by an ethnic group. The Vance-Owen proposal would roll back some, but not all, of the Serbs’ territorial gains. Bosnia’s Croat and Muslim leaders have agreed; the Serbs so far refuse.
Mount air campaign against Serbian forces in Bosnia. Drop bombs to destroy military headquarters and fuel supplies.
Establish enclaves. Beleaguered Muslim communities would be “safe areas” protected by paratroopers.
Arm the Bosnians. The biggest single obstacle they face in defending their homes is a shortage of weaponry.
Bomb Serbia. A bombing campaign could destroy leadership, communications systems and power lines.
