Published: 13 August 01
Air & Space Power Journal- Fall  2001

Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat by Gen Wesley K. Clark. Public Affairs (http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com), 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, New York 10107, 2001, 512 pages, $30.00.

Waging Modern War is another book written about an air war by an Army general—not just any Army general but one whose bacon was saved by airpower, and one who hardly can credit airpower for its unique attributes. "We have to be very careful with inflated expectations of what we can do with high technology, precision strike from a distance," retired general Wesley Clark said in a Fox News interview in May 2001, promoting his book. "Ultimately it’s going to take good people on the ground, up front, to work in some very complex environments."

Complex environments? That would describe Operation Allied Force, the coalition war-that-couldn’t-be-called-war presided over in 1999 by a commander in chief (CINC) uniquely positioned to understand his political masters and circumstances— an officer who also had the advantage of having sized up his opponent for years. Yet, Clark’s assumptions about Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic’s will to resist proved faulty, and as supreme allied commander Europe and CINC of United States European Command (EUCOM), Clark never really prepared contingencies for the 78-day air war that unfolded. What he did instead—as reflected in his lopsided prose—is agitate, almost with masochistic zeal, for anything but airpower. Clark provides excruciating, sometimes painful, detail of the political constraints under which he operated. Yet, nowhere does he look back to ask whether his push for Task Force Hawk or for a ground campaign contradicts the realities he describes.

General Clark says the war was "personal" for him but tells his tale with a strange passivity and subtle disassociation. Gen Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), was "high on the idea" of Apache helicopters. The "biggest concern" of Lt Gen Michael Short, the air component commander, was the loss of aircraft. National security adviser Sandy Berger demanded that Serbian forces in the field be the priority for attack. Everyone else was concerned about civilian collateral damage. Clark’s EUCOM staff developed a "mechanical . . . attrition" methodology for assessing the success of strikes. The "processes of approving . . . targets, striking the targets, reading the results, and restriking were confusing." So where is Clark? One might conclude that this is chateau generalship sine qua non (His office is even called the chateau!). Physically removed from his joint task force and air component commanders, with decisions being made all around him—in Brussels, the Pentagon, and the White House—Clark portrays himself as unable to influence much of what was going on.

Unlike the bland war autobiographies by Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf, Waging Modern War is most honest in describing tense relationships between Clark and Secretary of Defense William Cohen, General Shelton, and Clark’s Army colleagues in the Pentagon. The author’s account of seat-of-the-pants decisions constantly being made by a small circle of ranking officers and civilians over the telephone does not inspire much confidence in formal planning, staffing, or "command and control."

I kept hoping for some insight into the mind of a supreme commander unable to command. And I wanted Clark to reflect on why prewar judgments proved so wrong. Finally, it would have been nice to know whether Clark thinks there might have been a different or better way to fight the war. The CINC claims that people on the ground are essential for this kind of "modern war," but he does not make his case, leaving us wondering whether this is merely the conclusion of an obsessive Army officer or a standard worthy of debate.

What of the air war? Given the scores Clark seems intent on settling with the Pentagon, it is odd that he does not directly take on the now well-aired disputes he had with General Short, his combined and joint force air component commander (JFACC), over whether the emphasis of attacks should be on "strategic" or "tactical" targets. Clark’s arguments are twofold: First, he says that the "moral and legal imperative" of using force "was to go after the Serb ground forces that were committing or aiding the ethnic cleansing." Second, he argues that Milosevic’s center of gravity was the Serb "military machine and police in Kosovo."

Both arguments are worthy, but Allied Force is appallingly fallow territory to plumb the intellectual depths of this doctrinaire—I would say outmoded—debate between target sets that are in practice complementary. Clark admits that even if strikes were successful against Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, "the air actions still wouldn’t hit the paramilitary units that were causing most of the damage" and ominously describes "strategic bombing advocates . . . gaining the upper hand in the interagency discussions." Weren’t they also interested in winning the war? How did Clark expect to change the realities of airpower’s inability to stop paramilitary operations?

Unquestionably, General Short stonewalled Clark in not putting the level of emphasis on ground forces that the CINC wanted, but Clark never reflects on whether his focus on Serb forces remains convincing. At one point he says that he told Short, "We’re going to win or lose this campaign based on how well we go after the ground targets." Well, it didn’t turn out that way. Did Clark in fact have a subconscious agenda, once he did not obtain the instant victory he initially forecast? "There were limits as to what the air campaign could realistically achieve," he says again and again. When "we weren’t having the desired effects with the air campaign," he began to stress the "limitations of the campaign" to his Pentagon masters, "setting the stage for the move to a ground option."

Airpower, according to Clark, is a diminishing asset. He believed that "eventually we would run out of easy-to-strike targets"—easy, as defined by those "that were projected to generate only small numbers of accidental casualties." Clark decries the micromanagement free-for-all that vetoed urban, electrical power, communications, and other targets. But he also reveals his own preconceptions about civilian collateral damage that seem to undermine his passing the buck to Washington and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies. "By the end of May," Clark reports, pressure to avoid collateral damage forced NATO to eliminate targets and pare back the campaign. "The weight of public opinion was doing to us what the Serb air defense system had failed to do: limit our strikes."

So Wesley Clark leaves some challenges for airpower advocates:

• Is this the only way in which politically constrained wars can be fought?

• Would strategic attacks have brought the war to a more rapid, successful conclusion, thereby ultimately reducing the risk to civilians in an ever-escalating conflict?

• Why isn’t strategic attack some anti– Army airpower conspiracy?

• Was public and political fretting in response to actual civilian harm, or was it based on imagined damage?

• Can one make a comparison between damage from the air war and damage that would have occurred in Kosovo had we used Army Apache helicopters and ground rockets—followed, of course, by Clark’s desired ground invasion?

Why do these questions have to be answered? Fast-forward to the future. It’s 2010, and America is once again using its military forces in a humanitarian intervention, with all the usual constraints. A JCS chairman, Air Force chief, CINC, or JFACC goes before a president to argue that this time the air campaign should be done the "right" way—none of that hesitant, micromanaging, gradually escalating, namby-pamby stuff. Someone argues for going after the head of the snake or effects-based targeting or some other strategy du jour—it doesn’t really matter. What matters is a president’s likely reply: "General," he’ll remark with some consternation after having received the killer briefing, "What was wrong with Operation Allied Force? Not one NATO pilot was lost, civilian harm was indeed kept at a minimum, Milosevic was in the Hague within two years of the cease-fire, and Yugoslavia is a democracy today. In Iraq, general, we fought your strategy, and Saddam Hussein is still there."

Was Allied Force such an aberration? Perhaps Clark’s dichotomy between real war (ground war, that is) and air war is not merely an "Army" general’s perspective. Maybe this is the dominant political view in our society. General Clark is wrong about so many things, but airmen ignore these preconceptions at their own peril.

William M. Arkin
Maxwell AFB, Alabama

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.