The air war in Serbia did not begin well. Part of the problem was the newness of NATO to that kind of assignment. Not only had it never done anything like this before, it had been designed as an essentially defensive rather than an offensive instrument. This operation was on-the-job training. NATO also was, as one of the principals said, a lumpy organization, nineteen members now, with all kinds of built-in political constraints. Too few bombers were on hand when the war started, and the targets permitted were not what the two most important commanders, Clark and Mike Short, his top air force man, had hoped for. The complications for Clark’s command were obvious from the start. He had wanted to hit the traditional optimum targets to make the Serbs suffer: the power grid, the sources of energy, oil and gas and the refineries, and the communications network. Then he watched the target list shrink under political pressure, some of the targets deleted even as planes were taking off to hit them. Clark was, thought one friend, like a head chef ready to cook what he hoped would be the greatest meal of his life, only to find some twenty other self-appointed chefs, arguing about ingredients and cooking times; instead of making the meal better, each managed to subtract some bit of seasoning, diluting the final product.
There was a significant gap between what the NATO military people had seemed to promise Clark before the air war started, and what the NATO political people, more squeamish about bombing Serb political targets, were permitting to be hit. Considerable tensions existed between the more aggressive NATO members, on one hand, and, in this case, what the French and the Italians (the Greeks were always opposed to almost all use of airpower) were willing to go along with. Not surprisingly, frustrations within the command were immense. On the third night of the bombing, Short recalled, he had to cancel a second wave of F-117s because he was already out of targets, particularly ones likely to cause the most pain to Milosevic. As Ivo Daalder and Michael O’Hanlon wrote in their book on Kosovo, Winning Ugly, the NATO forces had only 350 planes ready when the bombing began, roughly one-third of the aircraft they finally needed, and one-tenth of the aircraft used in the Gulf War. There was no aircraft carrier in either the Adriatic or the Mediterranean when it began. All in all, it was, noted the authors, “a textbook case of how not to wage war.”1
It was particularly frustrating for Clark, who hated Milosevic with a passion and had wanted this campaign so badly. Clark was being allowed to use only a small fraction of his full muscle. He was caught in a swirl of political crosscurrents from all sides, a few of them hawkish from his subordinates, but most of them dovish from political types from foreign countries, who might or might not have been his bosses, for no one was ever quite sure. His mandate was so fragile that much of his energy, instead of being spent to demand more force and a better target list, was used to fight off these factions in NATO that wanted to do even less—and were, in fact, calling for a bombing halt, a first step, Clark believed, toward ending the air campaign completely.
Mike Short, who was in the midst of his own private rage against the rules, had little sympathy for Clark. As the air campaign began, Short was furious at the hand he had been dealt, and he blamed Clark and Washington. But since Clark was nearer at hand, most of Short’s anger was fixated on his army superior. Long before they had actually initiated the bombing, Short and his most senior colleagues had given Clark a plan for an air campaign not unlike the strategy that John Warden had devised for Desert Storm. It would, in Short’s words, put out the lights in Belgrade by targeting the military and civilian communications centers, the petroleum centers, and the transportation network. He intended to make Milosevic and his cronies pay for their adventures in Kosovo. In addition, the ordinary Serbs, whom Short felt should know better and who were getting a free ride on Milosevic’s back, would realize, when the lights went out in Belgrade and the bridges came down, that they were also the victims of Milosevic’s jingoism and atrocities.
We had this extraordinary instrument of power, and while Iraq and the desert provided easier targets than Serbia and the mountains, Short believed we should use it with a singular intensity. That was especially true because we were putting the young men and women who were flying these missions at constant risk. What American airpower had done in the Gulf War, Short and the other senior airmen believed, was just a beginning. The effectiveness and power of high-precision bombs and the Stealth bombers had increased exponentially in just eight years, and Short was sure that the pressure he could quickly apply to Milosevic would be unbearable and bring him to the table in a short time.
But that plan had never been accepted. Short believed it had never been put forward by Clark to his own superiors, both civilian and military, and they settled on a gradual, incremental plan that Short simply hated. To him it was all too reminiscent of Vietnam, politically acceptable to nervous NATO politicians and the most cautious members of the Clinton team, but diluted at the expense of military excellence. In Short’s opinion, it was essentially toothless and squandered and neutered this remarkable new technology. Even worse, he believed it gave an unwanted signal to Milosevic of an America that was faint of heart and thereby encouraged him to try to stick it out. Short’s view of what we should have been doing represented the purest distillation of air force ideology, untempered by any sympathy for political complexities. Not all his colleagues, even senior air force officers, agreed with him completely. They understood how he felt, sympathized with his rage, and even knew that if their positions were changed, they might feel much the same way. But they also understood that this mission was something new, that it was a convoluted command, and that the politics of bombing a city in Europe whose citizens had been allies of other European nations were immensely complicated. Short, they felt, was too narrow in his thinking, with little sense of the complexity of Clark’s campaign and the terrible political pressures he faced every day. While what Short said was technically right, they felt that he did not understand the interplay of much larger forces taking place around him.
Political niceties and diplomatic sensitivity meant little to Short. He was an old-fashioned commander cut from the rougher, more unsparing human cloth of World War II officers and less sophisticated than most of the modern, high-level military men. He was tough, almost combative. He was who he was, a fighter pilot, he knew his job and he pretended to be—wanted to be—nothing else. He did not believe that he crossed into other people’s spheres of influence, and he did not like it when they crossed into his. He saw his duty clearly and wanted no obstructions in doing it. In addition, his sense of the obligations that went with his command were very personal. He took his responsibility for the lives of the people underneath him seriously—especially in a campaign like this, where the risks were, despite our technological advantage, a constant. “My kids,” he called the airmen flying the missions, as if they were his, which in one case they were. His own son Christopher was flying a relatively slow and vulnerable A-10 Warthog in the campaign. Sometimes when Short raged against the controls placed on him, especially by French politicians, he would say that if anything happened to his son, his blood would be on Jacques Chirac’s hands.
Short had been part of the TAC air mafia that had in the seventies become an important and powerful inner group within the air force. They had wrestled influence away from the SAC people who had once dominated the service, but who, because they had been wedded to nuclear bombers for so long, and nuclear bombs had never been used, had gradually lost their leverage. By the time Short got the Kosovo command, in 1999, he was by air force standards something of a geezer. He had flown his first combat mission thirty-two years earlier, and he was one of the last of that group of air force pilots who had fought in Vietnam in the relatively early going. Nothing over the years had softened his edges; he was famously blunt and ferociously direct. At the time of Kosovo, he was the oldest three-star in the air force. Getting the Kosovo command was within the air force considered something of a last tip of the hat from General Mike Ryan, the air force chief of staff, to Short. Normally so precious a slot would have been handed off to a bright, ascending young three-star whose brilliance and promise had earned him one last test before receiving his fourth star, rather than someone whose career had leveled out and was essentially awaiting retirement.
Over the years, it was presumed, various attempts to soften Short’s rougher edges had failed, which inevitably made him a favorite of the men and the women who served under him, but on occasion jarred some of his superiors. Short was a man without varnish, forthright, confident, someone with absolute faith in his officers and his weapons. His style could not have been more different from Wes Clark’s. If Clark was a water walker, a star from the day he had arrived at West Point, Short was the grunt who had made good. Turned down by West Point, he had barely made it to the Air Force Academy, where for a time he had seemed more likely to drown than to walk on water. His great talent was to lead men, which came from being single-minded of purpose, sure of the course he favored, and from facing combat without doubts. That, of course, and transmitting to his subordinates the belief that whatever he asked them to do, he would gladly do himself. But those very qualities made him an edgy deputy in a war as politically delicate as Kosovo.
Short had learned his style at home. His father had been an enlisted man in World War II, had jumped on D day with the 17th Airborne, had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and had been badly wounded in another war, Korea. At the new Air Force Academy, where he did not do well because he did not have any great feel for the demanding science curriculum, nor for flying itself until they finally flew T-38s. He graduated 443rd in a class of 517, hardly one of the stars of the class of 1965, and he was assigned to fly tankers, not necessarily a slot that went to the academy’s more select graduates. By chance, Vietnam was just beginning to escalate, the tanker assignment was canceled, and he arrived in the South in June 1967 assigned to fly in an F-4 as a backseater, or GIB (guy in the back), as the air force people called it. The pilots in the front seat, often underwhelmed by the GIB’s contribution, or the lack thereof, had another, less complimentary name for them: “backseat ballast.” That assignment was, Short later decided, a turning point in his career. Had he drawn tanker duty, he would surely have done four or five years in the service, gotten out, and ended up flying for a major airline. Instead, he found something he was good at. He liked their mission, providing close air support for embattled American ground units, knowing that even as he was releasing his payload, he might be saving the life and troops of some lieutenant or captain deep in the big muddy. His career had succeeded because he exuded old-fashioned combat abilities in spite of self-evident academic limitations. As he grew more senior, he belied the increasingly sophisticated air force culture.
Short did not have the great natural feel requisite for air-to-air combat, but he liked his role in Vietnam, flying air-to-ground cover, because the result of his work was so palpable: he could see the troops he was protecting. That made going to work easy. By the time he left Vietnam a year later, he had flown 276 missions, but he was aware that he had had, by the standards of the day, a relatively easy war. The army guys were out there humping the boonies, slogging around in terrible terrain under difficult conditions, fighting a tough enemy. Others he knew had it hard, too; some of his air force and navy peers were flying over North Vietnam into heavy missile fire. Of his three roommates when he was based at Cam Ranh Bay, two were killed flying over the North. He was flying primarily in the South—only forty-five missions over the North—where there was little chance of being shot down. At night he slept under clean sheets. Mostly it was thirty minutes over the target and then back to Cam Ranh Bay. He could go to the officers’ club, have a drink, and take pride that he might have saved some American lives that day, men who would never know who he was and what he looked like.
Short had found his mission in life: he was a pilot, a good one. He got a Silver Star for a rescue mission in Vietnam, an unusual medal for an air force man, and a Flying Cross. Besides, he began to discover, he was good at command, and his old-fashioned bluntness and candor seemed to work unusually well in the modern age. Being a pilot and a commander fit his personality and his talents. Little of what he brought to the table was wasted. He had no abstract abilities, no philosophical skills. Military theoreticians and intellectuals made him ill at ease, and in private he often spoke disrespectfully of them. In the business he was in, if you were any good, you flew and you led, and if you weren’t, then you could teach or write or retire, he liked to say. The only real test in Short’s world was how you flew in combat. His abilities did not go unnoticed, and after Vietnam he got a series of good assignments. He was vice commander and then commander of the F-117 Stealth fighter unit back in the mideighties, when it was still black. He did not fly in the Gulf War; the slots had been wrong and he wasn’t going to be a wing commander. If a slot had opened up for him, it would have been in photo reconnaissance, something he did not really fancy. Flying into combat and taking pictures was not his style.
Short, his friends thought, would not have an easy time as the air commander for an assignment like Kosovo was going to be. Many of the men around him believed that because his frustrations were so great, he soon came to hate Clark, and it was simply not in Short’s nature to understand the more complex equation that faced Clark, nor for Clark to have the human skills to build a bridge to Short. For Short to be Short, he had to push constantly to maximize the target list, nothing less. On occasion, he would talk about how, if he had gotten into West Point as he had originally hoped, he would have been a year ahead of Clark. If he had been a third classman at West Point when Wes Clark arrived as a plebe, Short liked to say, history might have been a little different. Some of the tensions between the two men were historical, like the tensions between Eisenhower and Patton, or Powell and Schwarzkopf. In addition, Clark was an army man, an infantry soldier at heart, who, in Short’s mind, had little sense of what a modern air campaign should look like when properly run. Even before the campaign began, there had been a basic disagreement over their priorities. Clark had asked Short, “Mike, what are you going to do when Milosevic starts killing Muslims in Kosovo?” “Boss,” he answered, “I’ll attack the leadership in Belgrade.” That was the wrong answer, at least for the moment. Neither NATO nor Washington was ready for something that drastic yet. When the bombing campaign began, Clark kept asking Short to go after the Serb Third Army, which was in Kosovo, but Short considered that a waste of airpower. The Third Army, to use the favored air force expression, was not a “center of gravity” for the Serbs in his opinion, and Milosevic did not care what happened to it at all. It was widely dispersed (or would be after the first air attack) and hard to hit. In Short’s mind the obvious strategy was to bypass it and cause pain to the Serb leader and his inner circle.
The true center of gravity, Short insisted, was Belgrade, which housed all the instruments critical to Milosevic’s hold on power. Short and Clark sometimes argued about what they thought was the right target, the jewel in the crown. “Boss, you and I have known for months that we have different jewelers,” Short once told him. “Yes, but my jeweler outranks yours,” Clark answered. That debate never really ended, and Short remained—as far as he was concerned—engaged in minimalist missions striking at the Milosevic forces in the field. “Tank plinking,” the air force called it, and thought of it as a waste of time, resources, and, potentially, lives. Besides, tank plinking in the Balkans was less rewarding than it had been in the Iraqi desert, because the tanks did not heat up as they did there and did not show up on the thermal targeting systems.
Short was convinced that he and the other airmen had made a better proposal for the air campaign and that Clark, if he did not accept it, should at least have allowed them to go to a higher headquarters with it. Clark later thought that Short had simply not been paying attention. Yes, he himself would have loved to wage an air campaign against Milosevic much like the one we had run in Iraq. But it was not going to happen. The political restraints were infinitely greater in Europe and that changed the entire equation. The European allies were nervous about any attack on Belgrade, and Clark got his first sense of the limitations that would be imposed on him even before the campaign began. In the fall of 1998 when he had talked to the NATO political people about the right to go after prime targets in downtown Belgrade, the word had come back loud and clear: Absolutely not!
The case that many nonwhite nations made against American and Western political and military attitudes, that there was always a touch of racism to them, had some justification. Things that were permissible in terms of bombing Iraq—it was after all an Arab nation—were not permissible in Europe. The politics of it were different, and because they were different, the rules of bombing and engagement were different. If the West had used the same ferocious bombing tactics against Belgrade from the very start that it had used against Baghdad, the political opposition in the West would have been greater and might have killed the entire Kosovo campaign. In time, the rules were loosened and critical targets added, but only as failure began to appear ever more likely. The pace of the bombing—how quickly we tightened up the ratchet—was important in the Kosovo war. Some senior air force officials back in Washington talked about the gestation period of the war, the need for it to go on for a time without success, before the civilians, especially the Europeans, were willing to give the military men the targets they asked for.
The divisions, among the Western countries, the military and the politicians, and, finally, one branch of service and another, that hung over the alliance were very real. Clark, in the period when Short was most angry with him in the early weeks of the bombing, had already effectively lost the right to dominate the target list. What Clark really feared once the campaign started were the growing pressures for a bombing pause not just from the Western allies, but from people in the Clinton administration as well. He was convinced that if there was a pause, given the fragility of the mandate he had, the bombing campaign might never resume. That weighed heavily on him, and he had been willing to swap the lack of intensity in the campaign for the right to continue bombing. It was, he later said, only when he reached the Orthodox Easter, some two and a half weeks into the campaign, that he was sure he would not have to deal with a bombing pause. He was also convinced that if he had gone after Belgrade heavily in the first night or two, as he and others had originally wanted to do, the political outcry in Europe might have been so great that the campaign could have ended then and there. He and Short would have been seen as the butchers of Belgrade; they, rather than Milosevic, would have become the principal architects of evil.
None of that satisfied Short. The air campaign, as it was finally manifest, was so weak and soft that for a time he believed some sort of fix was on with Milosevic. In fact, Short told his aides he thought a deal had been made at a level above him. NATO would go through the motions of a bombing campaign to give Milosevic enough political cover to negotiate his way out of Kosovo without bring the wrath of the Serb people down upon him. He would be able to tell the Serbs that he had tried, but NATO had forced his hand with its bombing. Short thought there were too few targets, they were the wrong ones, and the failure to go after what would hurt Milosevic and damage his instruments of power—chop off the head of the snake, in his words—was now working against us. Short came to hate what he was doing. The campaign as it was proceeding was a long way from the one he had once threatened his Serb counterparts with when he had told them to go out and drive around Belgrade and see it for the last time as it was. The campaign was supposed to show NATO’s will and resolution, but in truth, he believed, it was irresolute and signaled weakness and indecisiveness. By the third day, Short had to hold back on using the F-117 Stealth fighters because they lacked adequate targets. Clark kept telling him that more targets were coming, that Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had an attaché case full of them just waiting for the president—or at least the White House—to approve. That, Short thought, was not reassuring to the young men and women flying in his command, targets in an attaché case half a world away waiting to be checked out by political officials.
At one point during the campaign brief, a young one-star officer in his command spoke up and said, “General Short, I don’t want you to take this personally, sir, but it seems to me that what we are doing is randomly bombing military targets with no coherent strategy, sir.” To which Short replied, “You wiseass, you’re absolutely right!” On two occasions he thought seriously of resigning. Whether he would actually have done it is another matter, but he was so tired, angry, and frustrated that he at least talked about it with his two top aides, Major General Gary Trexler and Brigadier General Randy Gelwix. They, in turn, urged him not to. A new commander would need time to become familiar with so complicated an assignment and gain the respect of most of the NATO military people. No other senior air officer would necessarily deal any better with Clark, they said, and most important of all, Short had not lost any pilots, which meant that for all his frustrations he was handling the assignment well.
A week into the air campaign, the bombing did not seem to be working, or at least working effectively. At fifteen thousand feet, the NATO planes were safe, but so were the Serb forces on the ground. Some evidence suggested that the Serbs were being warned by some friends at NATO headquarters which targets would be hit and when. (That turned out to be true; NATO leaked like a sieve in the early days.) Clark, who had always wanted something that was the opposite of Rolling Thunder, the bombing plan in Vietnam, was now caught in something all too much like it. It took eleven days before Belgrade was hit. Instead of a fierce, full-out attack at the beginning, hammering away at all targets, which the Americans had favored and which had been in their original battle plan, the number of targets, the importance of the targets, and the number of planes had been greatly reduced. The campaign they were carrying out, said General Mike Ryan, the air force chief of staff, reflected a far too optimistic view of what would happen: “Yeah, it’s going to be easy, and it’s going to be quick.”2
The larger debate, one that the American and NATO military men were losing in the early weeks of the war, was over target selection. In many cases it was civilians against military, country by country, and certain countries, such as France and Italy, against the United States and Britain. Part of the division between the Americans and some of their European colleagues—particularly the politicians—was due to the differences in attitudes created by vastly different histories. On one side were those who had done the bombing in the past; on the other, those who had been targets of bombing. America during World War II, with the exception of Pearl Harbor, had done the bombing and had not been bombed. In Europe it was a very different story. The devastation of the bombing raids in World War II was a defining experience for the NATO decision-makers. Some of them might have been very young at the time, and some had only heard about it from their parents, but their sensitivity to bombing a European city like Belgrade was far greater than that of the Americans. The Germans had bombed Belgrade early in World War II in one famous and violent night, and some seventeen thousand Yugoslavs had been killed. Those were memories that lasted. The Germans in NATO were notably uneasy about being pulled into any other bombing runs there.
In the early days of the Kosovo war it appeared that each side had grievously underestimated the intentions and the will of the other. If Milosevic had underestimated the propaganda effect of what he was doing in Kosovo on Western public opinion, especially the ethnic clean-and-sweep missions, similarly, the West had underestimated how much more important Kosovo was to his survival than Bosnia, and that he was willing to let his own people suffer and sacrifice before he surrendered. For him to give up Kosovo without some sort of fight was by his political terms suicidal, not unlike asking Bill Clinton to choose domestic policies in 1995 that he knew would surely cost him any chance of carrying California, New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois in 1996. But Milosevic was aware of and more fixated on the weaknesses of the West rather than its strengths. His fatal mistake was in not understanding how his own actions might finally unite the countries in the alliance against him rather than divide them. He knew the French and the Italians were unhappy about bombing Belgrade, and that the Germans were ambivalent about the air campaign. Perhaps, he hoped, the West would break apart or the Russians would come to his rescue. What he was not aware of was the impact of his own cruel policies in the West among those otherwise bothered by doubts, attitudes reinforced as hundreds of thousands of Albanians were driven out of their homes at the beginning of the war. To the West, he became once again Slobodan the racist, the genocidal warrior.
Slobodan Milosevic was, in fact, far better prepared for war than the West. For months he had been moving a large number of his regular troops, his security forces, and his paramilitary units to the Kosovo border, getting ready for what he was almost certain would come: a NATO bombing campaign but no enemy troops to contest him on the ground. Thus, the moment the bombing started, his forces drove through Kosovo to sweep the Albanians off the land. He had once boasted to Clark that his men could rid Kosovo of all its Albanians in just five days. “Just five days,” he had said. “That’s all I need.” What he hoped to provide the allies, as Clark later said, was “a fait accompli to change the demographics of Kosovo.” He would de-Albanianize the country. The West would not have to come in to protect the Albanians because there would be no Albanians left.
The prewar population of Kosovo had been estimated at roughly 1.8 million ethnic Albanians. Before the NATO bombing campaign began in late March 1999, some three hundred thousand Albanians had already been forced out of their villages by the earlier Serb assaults, which started in 1998, according to NGO authorities. Now it was far more brutal. What the West saw—captured by still photographers and television cameramen—were the endless lines of Albanian refugees stretching as far as the eye could see, people stripped of their identification papers and driven out of their homes, on their way to some unwanted and unknown destination. A few weeks into the war, it was estimated that three-quarters of the Albanian population had fled their homes, some eight hundred thousand had been driven out of the country, and another five hundred thousand had become refugees within Kosovo, hiding in the hills.