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| MILITARY OPTIONS | |
 April 15, 1999 
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Military experts join Margaret Warner to discuss the continuing debate over the use of ground forces in Yugoslavia.
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MARGARET WARNER: Now, three views from outside the administration on
how the Kosovo campaign is going. Colonel David Tretler retired from
the Air Force last year after 30 years of active service as a combat
pilot and planner. He's now a professor of military strategy at the
National War College in Washington. General Richard Neal retired from
the Marines last year as assistant |
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| Skepticism in Congress. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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GEN. RICHARD NEAL (RET.), US Marine Corps: No, I really don't. I'm
concerned a little bit because the reports that are coming out of Kosovo,
obviously this latest MARGARET WARNER: What's your assessment of the policy in the campaign and how it's going? COL. DAVID TRETLER (RET.), National War College: In terms of the campaign
itself, I would say that I share the skepticism that you hear from Congress.
I agree with General Neal that the air campaign itself is probably going
about as well as you could expect, given the constraints that they're
operating under, constraints that say "no civilian casualties,
as few allied losses as possible, no ground forces in theater."
But that's from a purely military perspective. There is no purely military
perspective. We undertake military operations only to achieve some political
objective, which is the definition of what strategy is all MARGARET WARNER: Would you agree that there is a disconnect between the military objective and the political objective? ROBERT HUNTER, RAND: Well, I think that what happened was that -- what NATO's prepared to do, as we've just heard very clearly described, was very different from what Mr. Milosevic was prepared to do. NATO had a long-term program, which started with degrading the air defenses and then using air power with as few casualties on the ground, to civilians and as few casualties to allied forces as possible, and it was going to take time. Milosevic got off right out of the blocks and has done his grisly business in a very short period of time. So now it's less a matter of what you can do with air power to stop him on the ground and more whether you'll have the will power in the alliance to carry on the air campaign and maybe, maybe go to a ground campaign to demonstrate to Milosevic that he is going to pay a very heavy price if he doesn't stop and if we don't have an opportunity to achieve what are our very clear war aims. |
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| The civilian casualties. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MARGARET WARNER: What is the impact on operations-- and I know you had some experience during the Gulf War. You spoke of the tragedy -- there were really were two this week, NATO warplanes ended up killing innocent civilians. How does that affect operations -- should it affect operations? GEN. RICHARD NEAL (RET.): Well, I'm sure there's a reevaluation of
the rules of engagement. They're probably looking at how did the pilot
conduct his mission. I'm sure there's -- I know there's a complete reevaluation
of the MARGARET WARNER: You spoke of maintaining alliance solidarity. Do you fear that alliance solidarity will start to crack if we have more incidents such as these two? ROBERT HUNTER: What's happened is Milosevic has essentially completed
his job and he's now turning to try to consolidate it by splitting the
allies. Everybody worries MARGARET WARNER: Let's go back to a criticism we heard from Senator McCain and others, this Congressman Taylor from Mississippi, too, that the gradualism that we're seeing and Senator McCain said it really -- and thought that political leaders are choosing targets or nixing targets, really what he said, were a painful analogy to Vietnam. You were both in Vietnam. Do you detect echoes of Vietnam here? COL. DAVID TRETLER (RET.): Oh, absolutely. I think that one of the things we learned in Vietnam, is that if you begin a bombing campaign a at a low level and then try to increase it in gradual steps to ratchet the pressure up in an effort to get a result, what can happen often is that the folks you're bombing become accustomed and they have a chance to adjust and adapt themselves and sort of absorb that level of pain and then the next one is just a slight step above, I think most air power folks would tell you that, if we're going to do this, it should be done in a massive way to create as much shock and disrupt at the beginning that you possibly can if you want to produce a result. |
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| Stepping up the strikes. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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GEN. RICHARD NEAL (RET.): I couldn't agree more. I think we had the rheostat pushed all the way to the low numbers at the outset with a high degree of optimism and maybe wishful thinking that in fact a few bombs might in fact get Milosevic to the table. Obviously, we've turned the rheostat all the way over to the right, bringing in extra aircraft to in fact really heighten the temple of operations against Milosevic's targets. I think we have moved into the strategic domain even more so than we originally intended to. The first inclination was that we were going to go down and try to help out in Kosovo to break the grip of the Serbian forces and the special police and their attacks against the Kosovo civilians. Well, that obviously wasn't working, mostly because of bad weather and we couldn't get good targeting information, plus the air defense threat. So then we realized that perhaps we ought to go back up north and start hitting him strategically so that in fact we could get the major decision-maker back to the table. Well, it took too long to make that decision, I think, and I'm not -- I wouldn't point the fingers at anybody. The post-mortems, we'll have plenty of time to discuss it, but I think one of the things we have to take a look at is, you have 19 decision-makers helping General Clark make the decision, not an easy task. MARGARET WARNER: And as General Shelton said today, using the rheostat analogy, General Clark is being told still, "Do not plan for ground troops, do not include that in your planning." What does that do to a commander like that, to have that kind of a limitation? COL. DAVID TRETLER (RET.): Well, it ties at least one MARGARET WARNER: And yet both Secretary Cohen and General Shelton said this is being done in the name of preserving NATO solidarity. Explain the politics, the internal politics of these 19 nations and why you think it's so difficult for the administration, if it wanted to -- they seem to be saying we'd have a very, very hard time persuading our NATO allies that it's time to start planning for ground troops. ROBERT HUNTER: I agree it would be difficult but I think it could be done. There's with a difference between planning and preparing and doing something. I mean you've really got to -- I'm sure some planning's been done. You've got to get the preparations done, you've got to get to the point where you can say, "Go," on an almost instant notice and then you take your political decision to do it. You make Milosevic pay attention at that point. Now, it takes leadership, it takes working with the 19 allies, and frankly the United States has more clout than being one - but it's going to take a determination --- towards that decision. And frankly, I did it with nine air strike decisions for Bosnia and I did it for the implementation force we have there now. It can be done, but they've got to get started because every day that goes by, Milosevic wins. |
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| Plans for ground troops? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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GEN. RICHARD NEAL (RET.): Oh, I think the planning's been done. I mean I can't in my mind's eye, imagine that General Clark doesn't -- and NATO doesn't have on the shelf a ground campaign plan. As was mentioned, the complementary capability of the ground and the air, that's where we really make a difference and a difference is made. I think that plan is there. There is a hesitancy to use it. I think if you go back to when we were just starting to amble into this, and I hate to use that term, there were three options: Do nothing -- military options: Do nothing, air ground or air. I can't, in my mind's eye, see the approval of an air-ground campaign at the beginning. I think there was a lot of wishful thinking on the part of all sides as to how quick we could get Milosevic to the table. And as a result, we picked the air campaign as probably the one that could meet the mission objectives while at the same time putting the least amount of people at risk. That was obviously not proved to be true. MARGARET WARNER: But yet Secretary Cohen and General Shelton both said, if you opened up a debate within the NATO allies over ground forces, if that were a divisive debate, that would also send the wrong message to Milosevic or send with a message of vacillation. Isn't that a risk or no? COL. DAVID TRETLER (RET.): Oh, I think absolutely. I think what you see Mr. Milosevic doing is making judgments about how much pain he can endure, and trying to gauge what the allied reaction is going to be and the level of effort that they're willing to bring against him. And so every time he sees any indication that we're going to place constraints on what we do it, it gives him hope that he can string this out longer. GEN. RICHARD NEAL (RET.): That's a key point and let me just follow up on that, is that by not putting ground as an option on the table as one that NATO might use, we basically took it off the table, and this figured, I believe, substantially in Milosevic's decision-making process. ROBERT HUNTER: Well, as he looks at what's going on at NATO, the debate
is there and seems to have been resolved against it. You know-- so it's
not a matter of a problem of opening it up; it's a matter of driving
it to conclusion the other way. I'm not talking about we're going to
definitely put troops on the ground and risk people's MARGARET WARNER: And as he is. ROBERT HUNTER: And he clearly is. MARGARET WARNER: Thank you, gentlemen, very much. |
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commandant
of the Marine Corps. He was deputy for operations at the US Central
Command during the Gulf War. And Robert Hunter was Ambassador to NATO
in President Clinton's first term. He's now a senior advisor at RAND,
a private research group that deals with political and military issues.
We heard a lot of skepticism on Capitol Hill today about this campaign.
Do you share that skepticism, General?
incident
where the tragedy of some 70 people being killed by a bad mission, but
I think that the air campaign is going as planned. I think they might
have been a little bit overoptimistic about how successful it would
be, and so they kind of thought that perhaps they miscalculated that
Milosevic would back down quickly. It didn't really put all of the guns
up, so to speak and put all the planes in the air that they should have.
Weather has been a contributing factor, as you well know. I think those
ingredients have made it go a lot slower. There's a general impatience
across this country and I think around the world, and that juxtaposed
against the terrible refugee situation that we see nightly on TV has
caused a lot of concern about whether, in fact, the policy is correct.
about.
We're doing a reasonable job of finding and destroying high-value targets.
War is not about destroying high-value targets. War is about making
the other guy do what you want. And at this point in time, it doesn't
appear that what we're doing is inducing Mr. Milosevic and the Serbs
to do what we want. And, in fact, there's with a fair amount of evidence
that indicates it's, if anything, hardening their resistance to do what
we want. So I see a real difficult in getting from where we are to where
we think we want to be. 
mission
itself and how it was flown. And then how -- lessons learned. How could
NATO-US forces try to assure -- you'll never have 100 percent assurance,
as I'm sure a former pilot can tell you -- but how can we assure making
sure that this doesn't occur again? It's very difficult. I would think
that they are not going to change the tactics per se. I think we can
probably surmise from what has occurred that they're still staying very
high and bombing from a high altitude. That would say to me and I'm
sure they would share the same conviction, that they have not a great
degree of confidence that they have neutralized or at least control
the air defense capability that Yugoslav forces have. 
when
this kind of thing happens. It's a tragedy, a terrible tragedy, but
I think that the allies really, all of them, have very clearly in mind
the fact that this was caused by Milosevic, that for every 17 or 70
people who died in this incident, there are 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 who
have been taken out and slaughtered. There are a million people on the
move, 800,000 people over the border. This is straight out Serb propaganda
to try to destroy the will. And I think it's going to backfire on Milosevic.
I think it just underscores people's determination to bring the man
to book and bring this to a halt.
arm
behind his back. Again, one of the things we've learned over history
is that air power works best when it can work in conjunction with ground
forces because it exerts pressure in two different dimensions, two different
domains. And so by not allowing General Clark to do those things, you
simply are creating a situation where the Serbs and Mr. Milosevic can
anticipate sort of the exact dimensions of what this is going to be
like and make adjustments and sort of steel themselves for what's going
to happen.