Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo

Transcript

Michael H. Armacost:

Good morning, everybody. I'm Mike Armacost. It's my pleasure to welcome you to Brookings this morning for this briefing, which marks the first anniversary of the end of the NATO military campaign in Kosovo.

We're especially pleased this morning that our keynote speaker, General Wesley Clark, who, as you know, was Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and was in overall command of NATO's forces during the war—and he'll offer a commander-eye's view of the war and then will take your questions until about 10:00. General Clark's got some commitments in New York later this morning, so he will be with us for about an hour.

After his departure, we'll have a panel of experts to discuss a number of issues that were provoked by the war:

Did NATO win? It seems to me pretty obvious. Could the war have been avoided? How decisive was air power in the outcome? Did European allies impede a more assertive military campaign by the U.S.? And what are the overall lessons we can take away from the experience?

Two of the panelists in that program are senior fellows in our Foreign Policy program, Ivo Daalder and Mike O'Hanlon, and they've just published a book called Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo. I think there are copies for all the members of the press here this morning. Others can get it in our little bookstore shortly. We like to see people buy these books. In any event, it's published this week, and we're very proud of it.

And the other panelist will be Michael Elliott, who is editor in chief of eCountries.com and former editor of Newsweek International. Richard Haass, who is the vice president and director of our Foreign Policy Studies program, will moderate the panel discussion.

I'd encourage you to find the information packets outside the back hall. It has the information about our participants and some other information.

At 2:00 this afternoon Ivo Daalder will participate in a chat room discussion on our website, www.brookings.edu, and he'll take up some of the issues that are discussed this morning. You can find on our website a host of other materials that represented our commentary on the war and how it was conducted.

It's a great personal pleasure to formally introduce our keynote speaker for the briefing. General Wes Clark commanded NATO forces in the war. He also served simultaneously as commander in chief of the U.S. European Command and, therefore, was in charge of all U.S. forces in scores of countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He is a 1966 graduate of West Point. In a very long and distinguished career, he's held a host of important assignments, among them commander in chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama. He was J-5, or director of plans and policy, at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the leader of the military negotiations in the Dayton Peace Talks. During Vietnam, he commanded a mechanized infantry company.

So it's a great pleasure to have you here this morning, General. Join me in welcoming General Clark for his observations and then your discussion.

General Wesley Clark: Well, thank you very much for that kind introduction. It's a great pleasure to be here with you this morning. I am going to use some slides. I hope they're not going to be overwhelmingly PowerPoint.

But one of the things I've found about the operation is that there's been a lot written about it, there's a lot that's talked about it, but the simple truth is, people don't know a lot about it. And so the first step in doing anything like a one-year reflection on the war has to be to get the facts out. And what I'd like to do is give you the facts as I've seen it.

This is a presentation I've taken around to the various war colleges. I've talked to a lot of military people with this presentation. It's a non-classified presentation, and it'll take about 15 or 20 minutes. And I want to go through the facts, get them out pretty rapidly here and then I would eagerly await your questions on this. This is going to be my perspective on the operations and where it came from. And I'm still an active-duty office in the United States armed forces, at least for another couple of weeks, and this is my chance to give you, a broader audience, a little more of the details that I think need to be there to provide the basis for an informed discussion and the right type of lessons learned on this, I think, very important and significant activity.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the organizations that were engaged here; the air campaign, the implications; something on KFOR and what it's doing today, and then very briefly on the conclusions. And I'm talking from the perspective of having been the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. This was a NATO operation. It was under NATO command and control, with our 19 member nations in NATO, Allied Command Atlantic and Allied Command Europe, and I was the commander of Allied Command Europe.

We reported in NATO channels. I reported through the military committee to the North Atlantic Council, which was headed by the secretary-general of NATO, Dr. Javier Solana. At my headquarters, which was called "Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe," or SHAPE, we had a multinational staff.

And you can just see by looking at the flags here, I had a British deputy; I had a German chief of staff; I had an Italian deputy chief of staff; I had a U.S. operations officer; Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish intelligence officers; a British policy and requirements officer; a Spanish logistician, and so forth. This is an integrated multinational command.

We also operated, though, in a very complex command architecture. Because I'm—I was a dual-hatted commander. That is to say, I was not only the commander of Allied Command Europe, I was also the commander of the U.S. European Command. And so in that chain of command I reported through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the secretary of Defense.

What I wanted to say was that there were really two mutually reinforcing and supporting chains of command. What you'll see up there in blue is the U.S. chain of command. It's full of acronyms, and if you'll just permit me to talk for a moment about this.

Under the U.S. European Command, we had the U.S. Air Force element in Europe, which had a subordinate 16th Air Force. We had the U.S. Naval element in Europe, which had the 6th Fleet. We had the U.S. Army element in Europe. Then, in addition, we had a joint task force that I had set up to be able to coordinate U.S. classified assets which were not releasable in terms of the detailed operating procedures into other nonclassified channels. And so this was a supporting task force to Allied Forces South, both commanded by Admiral Jim Ellis. General Meigs, the U.S. Army commander, was actually on the ground in Bosnia, where he's commanding the operation of the Stabilization Force. When we created Task Force Hawk we took U.S. Army elements. We formed a task force. We put it under the Joint Task Force in Naples.

Then we had the NATO command running from my headquarters at SHAPE through AFSOUTH, an air operation that was supported strongly by the 16th Air Force but was in a different location, was a fully multinational operation, the Allied Command Europe Rapid Reaction Corps, which was on the ground in Macedonia, arriving before the outbreak of fighting, and the ACE Mobile Force Land, which we deployed in early April in response to the humanitarian catastrophe to Albania. So we had headquarters both in Macedonia and Albanian on the ground. And we stood up a U.S. Joint Task Force around an Air and Marine team, to be able to provide air transportation and intra-country lift to both of these headquarters to assure that the humanitarian supplies could get in.

That gives you some feel for the complexity of what was going on. So when you hear a lot of different opinions about this from military people, and you hear people say well, they weren't quite sure what was happening, why was this done, why was that done, it should not surprise anyone. This is about as complex a command structure as anyone would ever fear to see. But we had it and we worked it.

Once we went into the air campaign on the 24th of March, we had this as our intent, and this is the intent that we briefed. It was to: Attack, disrupt and degrade his current operations; deter further Serb actions; and overall degrade his military potential. But we knew strategically we had a lot more than an air campaign going on, and so what we were really doing is operating on multiple axes of effort—an air campaign, of course, and that was the centerpiece and the most time-consuming and difficult piece of what we were doing.

But right along with the air campaign was the requirement to conduct a strategic isolation of Yugoslavia. We had to work this at the diplomatic level, we had to work it at the military level, at the Naval level. We had to go to the surrounding nations, we had to create an encirclement, a diplomatic, legal, economic, as well as military encirclement of Yugoslavia.

We had to conduct humanitarian relief. We knew at the outset of the campaign we were going to have to conduct some humanitarian relief; we didn't know how much. In the previous village-busting campaign that Milosevic ran in the fall of 1998, he kept the people from leaving Kosovo, probably in order to prevent an excuse for an international intervention. And so it wasn't clear what his strategy would be in this case, but we knew we would have to look for some humanitarian efforts. Turned out it was substantial.

And we still had 30,000 NATO troops on the ground in Bosnia. And if you think back to that time, you recall all kinds of concerns that the whole theater was going to go up in flames because there'd be opening fighting again in Bosnia if we dared do anything in Kosovo. So we had to operate on four strategic axes.

We had two NATO activation orders we were operating under, from authorities granted in October of 1998. One was a limited air operation, which was a one-time shot of missiles, and the other was the phased air operation. This is the phased air-operation mission. I used to keep it in my desk drawer, and every morning I would pull it out and look at it and shudder because it's a tough mission statement. It was performance-oriented leadership. That's what this mission required. We had to get the job done: Halt or disrupt a systematic campaign of violent repression and expulsion. That mission statement was written and approved by the nations in NATO in the summer of 1998, nine months before the operation.

In fact, the circumstances, of course, were different when it was time to conduct the operation. Milosevic had built up his army. He probably had 50,000 troops on the ground. He had built up his police forces. We never got an accurate number, maybe 15–20,000 police. They had been given lots of heavy weapons. He brought in numerous paramilitary gangs of thugs, who came in, also armed with heavy weapons. They were apparently given licenses, like privateers in the 18th century, to go in, create mayhem under the supervision of the army or the Special Police, run people out, and do whatever damage they wanted to do, expropriate property and keep a certain percent of what they stole. But it was a pretty brutal operation that we saw taking place.

In the last meeting that Dick Holbrooke and the other team had with Milosevic on the 22nd of March, Milosevic was saying he could finish off the KLA in five days. The team then went over and saw the generals, and the generals were much more realistic: They said five to seven days before they could finish off the KLA.

So if you looked at it from Milosevic's perspective, when it came time to deliver the threat, Milosevic had many options: He could inflict unacceptable losses on NATO aircraft. He had been told by one country, that their air-defense system would be pretty effective and that NATO would have relatively high losses.

He could absorb the strike. He had, I am sure, done a lot of analysis on NATO air. He had looked at the things that had been done since the, and during the, operation in 1995. He had watched us. And I am sure that his generals told him that: "The air defense is going to be effective, Mr. President, and don't you worry about in any way. Yugoslavia is well prepared."

He could count, he thought, on undermining alliance cohesion, eroding domestic support; through threats, through inflicting punishment, through just the natural tensions and discord, which happened when democratic societies have to take difficult measures involving the use of force in uncharted diplomatic and legal waters.

He probably thought he could have full support from Russia and no doubt had good communications with the Russians, especially early on and probably including intelligence information and other things; and no doubt thought that he could attack NATO's foundations by exporting instability in the region; Albania, Macedonia, fill them with refugees. Who could have believed that Macedonia could have tolerated 300,000 Albanian refugees? If you had gone to any political science expert on the region six months before that, and said, "Well, you're going to have 300,000 Albanians here," they would have said: "It's impossible. The country is going to fall apart; it's going to break."

So Milosevic, always the con man and able to look at this with many, many options, played it, and he played it long, as he usually tended to do. He accepted the airstrike.

We went in with strikes on two axes. We knew we had to simultaneously go at the strategic level and we had to go at the tactical level. We said up front, there was going to be no sanctuary. We said there would be no restrictions on attacking enemy air defense if it threatened our pilots. This was not going to be a repeat of the Rolling Thunder campaign in Vietnam. We were not going to see our pilots doing demonstrative strikes at great risk to themselves. When we used air power, it was meant to be a significant use of air power; it was meant to be used with the gloves off and no restrictions on the pilots' abilities to protect themselves from whatever source that was.

So we went first, in accordance with the plan, after the integrated air defense. We had worked this plan up the previous summer. It had been extensively war-gamed. We added in command and control. We added in the infrastructure for the forces. And almost from the first day, we attacked the headquarters and the facilities of the troops and the police that were doing the damage on the ground in Kosovo. We knew we had to operate simultaneously on two axes because there were really two centers of gravity. There was the center of gravity with Milosevic and his parties around Belgrade, where they were extremely sensitive to the economic interests, to his control over Serbia's most important city, and there was Milosevic's concern for the protection of his armed forces, on which ultimately his survival depends.

In order to run the campaign and look at the trade-offs involved, we set up something new, which we called measures of merit. These weren't exactly objectives. They were the trade-offs that were designed to give us the right balance of effort and risk and so forth. And let me explain what these were.

The first requirement was to avoid losses, principally losses of aircraft. The reason was, this had to be an air campaign of indefinite duration. We knew at the outset that you can't start an air campaign if you go into it losing four, five, six aircraft a day, with the headlines—I know we have some members of the press here—the headlines screaming that "NATO loses 12th aircraft," "NATO loses 30th aircraft," because then the clock's ticking. And in order for this campaign to work, we knew the air campaign had to continue indefinitely. The key to that was to minimize, avoid if possible, the losses of aircraft.

Early on, we also knew that we were going to have a risk to our forces in Bosnia and in Macedonia, and so we put a lot of emphasis on that. We knew we could strike fixed targets, but could we impact Serb forces in Kosovo? I put that in there as a second measure of merit, and I worked it every day during the operation. We had to minimize collateral damage, and we had to maintain alliance cohesion.

And the reason this was useful at the strategic level is because trade-offs were involved. If you want to go and take greater risks with your aircraft, you may suffer losses; you may be able to do more against the Serb forces in Kosovo, or you may be able to further reduce collateral damage. If you are not going after the Serb forces in Kosovo, perhaps that has an impact on alliance cohesion. If you don't bring the full alliance on board, with the strategy and the targeting, in some way that meets their needs, then you lose alliance cohesion.

We knew we had to succeed in all four measures of merit to make the air campaign work, and that's what we did.

Here's just a sketch of how we actually worked the operation on the ground—or in the air. This is the clock. When we started the operation, we had about 366 aircraft there, and we concentrated our strikes at night because that was the best time to go in with least risk to the air force and still being able to hit the targets. And as we expanded throughout the campaign, we went to full 24-hour-a-day operations, and we moved the daylight operations further and further north with more and more conventional aircraft.

So what this shows is going in with what we call the Kosovo Engagement Zone, we had blocks of time that we flowed the airspace into and worked with the unmanned aerial vehicles over Kosovo 24 hours a day. We had these referenced grid boxes where we moved in aircraft to strike in southern Serbia at the infrastructure that was sustaining the forces here—the command and control, the early warning and so forth. And we had higher technology assets that went into the more dangerous, heavily defended area around Belgrade. And then as we were effective in disrupting his integrated air defense system, we moved these assets northward. And that was the flow of the air campaign. This is a sketch from the sort of early—that was a sketch from the sort of early April period.

We said it was going to be a progressively intensifying air campaign. So you can see the reinforcement of the assets, going from about 360 aircraft on the 24th of March to over 900 in June. And I'd like to just point out that the allies provided 34 percent of these aircraft. There's been a lot of discussion after the war about—next slide, please—about how much the United States did and how much the allies did. And, of course, everyone's always interested in burden sharing. But historically air power has been a unique strength of the United States. It's always been our comparative responsibility, our comparative advantage in economic terms, in the alliance. We brought, and we always have brought, the high technology air power. Allies brought the ground forces. Historically in the Cold War that's the way we did it. And, of course, that pattern has maintained itself. But we did have a third of the aircraft provided by allies.

The real problem we had, one real problem in the campaign, was the weather. And on 39 days, exactly half of the campaign, more than 50 percent of the strike sorties were cancelled due to weather. This is simply a fact. Even with high technology aircraft, you're still in an area like this dependent on weather. Looked at by day, you can see how the manned aircraft sorties stacked up, you can see the building of the numbers of sorties from the beginning toward the end of the campaign, roughly tripling at its high point, the impact of weather, the heavy use of the cruise missiles early on when we had targets that were suitable for cruise missiles and when we needed them to keep the pressure on during periods of especially bad weather.

In total, 38,000 sorties were flown, 23,000-plus bombs and missiles, about one-third of which was precision-guided munitions. And at the end of the war, this is the way we saw the effect on the target set. And if you can see these colored balls up here, basically green means light damage, and then moving toward moderate damage. And what this shows is we were very effective against the electric power system, the military production, the ammunition, the POL, the military supply routes. When we got into forces in the field, command and control, the integrated air defense system, he had a lot of redundancy, he had some good tactics. We had a tough fight on our hands here to do this. But we put the pressure on, and I'll show you how it all worked out.

I want to leave the air campaign and now go into what was happening concurrently in the air campaign. This was the ground force planning.

In the summer of '98, as part of the NATO family of plans and options that we looked at, we looked at about a dozen ground options; two involved forced entry into Yugoslavia; one, an entry into Kosovo; one, an entry into Serbia itself. We estimated at the time it would be about 75,000 combat troops for the Kosovo operation, and about 200,000-plus combat troops to go all the way in. This was on the shelf; it was one of the concept plans that was used, reviewed by NATO leadership, and it was always present in our thoughts.

As we began the air campaign, it became clear that we had to go back and relook what would happen, because there always was a strategy behind this operation. The strategy was to announce a threat, make a threat. If that didn't work, to carry out the threat of air. If that didn't work, to move to the next level, and that next level would have been ground. And so as we were working in early April, beginning our SHAPE assessment, very privately in my headquarters, we had on the ground already 11,000 troops with the ACE Rapid Reaction Corps in Macedonia. By late April, we had Task Force Hawk and ACE Mobile Force Land on the ground in Albania in addition, with the U.S. Fifth Corps Headquarters, or the great majority of it, including the commander. And by early June, we'd announced the buildup of the forces to fill out the full 50,000-plus requirement of the Kosovo force. So we had forces flowing again into Macedonia; we were over 16,000 in early June, plus the 13,000, with two corps headquarters on the ground.

I would suggest it was elementary logic for Milosevic to conclude that something bad, very bad, was going to happen to this forces in Kosovo, and relatively soon. And frankly, it had nothing to do, in my view, with declaratory statements; it had everything to do with the capabilities of the force on the ground. In fact, the way we saw it is that by the early part of June, Milosevic was a man without options. We'd put him in a box early, there were a lot of doors. Now the doors had been closed.

He had failed to inflict unacceptable losses. When he took our three soldiers captive, he put them on television, they looked pretty beat up, and the American people did not say, "Oh, we're going to have to stop this. This is too dangerous for our soldiers." They got mad, and it made us more determined. So that failed.

He didn't inflict unacceptable losses on our aircraft. In fact, we recovered both airmen from the aircraft that went down inside Serbia. He discovered that it wasn't such an easy matter to absorb the strikes. We were hitting him where it hurt, on both axes.

On the ground in Kosovo, his army was basically in hiding. The reason large portions of it looked in good shape when they pulled out was because they hadn't done anything. They'd moved in in February, they were in assembly areas. As the air campaign began, they pulled their forces out of those assembly areas, they put them in the forests, they put them in buildings, in built-up areas, in many cases forcing the Albanians to live on the upper stories of the buildings to provide human shields for their equipment. And when the war was over, they pulled those forces out. So we kept the army from being very effective in this and, at the same time, we hit—as I showed you on the slide—the electricity, a lot of the sustaining infrastructure, the airfields. And he was taking continuous losses up there. So he couldn't absorb the strikes. He failed to undermine alliance cohesion. He failed to have any significant support from Russia. In fact, Russia, in its own interest, came in to convince him to accept NATO's conditions. Macedonia and Albania stood firm. And in the end, he did accept NATO's conditions.

In January of 1999, when I went down with Klaus Naumann to Belgrade to see Milosevic after the Racak massacre, I said, "Mr. President, you told Ambassador Holbrooke that Kosovo's more important than your neck; is that right?" And he said, "Absolutely incorrect. I did not say that." I said, "Well, what did you say, Mr. President?" He said, "I said Kosovo is more important than my head." All right. We listened to that. But we didn't know what it meant. And after 78 days of the air campaign, we found out what it meant. It meant, as in many cases with Slobodan Milosevic, that he had made the pragmatic decision, and after 78 days, Kosovo was not more important than his head. He gave up Kosovo to save his regime, to save his army and to save his head.

As I've looked at the implications of the operation, it seems to me that what we have to understand is that—three things at the highest level. First, once the threshold of using force is crossed, in the post-Cold War era we need to be looking at the most-decisive-possible use of force. I'm not complaining in this case about the support I received from allied governments. I want to make that very clear. What I'm suggesting is that we need to develop a new strategic understanding amongst allied governments and all of the defense analysts: In the post-Cold-War era, when you use force, it has to work. It's not a matter of using force and then relying on your opponent to say, "Gee, I can't continue with this, because it may lead to thermonuclear war," which was the Cold War model. In this case, the force had to work. And when Milosevic saw the ground threat and the fact that we were going to handle the problem in Kosovo whether he liked it or not, then he took the easy way out. But it's important that we understand that we need to escalate as rapidly as possible so that we don't draw out campaigns unnecessarily.

Whenever planning is done, it always has political consequences; has to be politically approved, one way or another. It inevitably leaks out through some inadvertent comments or meetings or rumors. A lot of questions are raised. And while I'm not suggesting we shouldn't be sensitive to the political implications of the planning, I think one of the lessons of this campaign is that planning has to be detailed, realistic and far-sighted from the outset; and that in terms of balancing the political risks of planning versus the military requirements, that we need in the post-Cold War era to give a lot more attention to the detailed military planning.

And finally, I believe that the use of force should be the last resort. It has to be a credible and capable option, but it has to be the last option that's chosen. That is to say, when it's used, it should be used in concert with all of the diplomatic, economic and legal elements of power. And yet this was a situation in which it was very difficult to do this because in these circumstances, we were engaged in a limited conflict. It wasn't a declared war. There wasn't an invalidation of the Law of the Sea, for example. So we had oil still being shipped into Serbia at the same time our pilots were risking their lives, flying overheard trying to bomb the oil. It's not the best way to use military power or other elements of power.

So I think that nations have an obligation to their service members. And I think that the strategists have an obligation to think through the need for the concert of all the elements of power. This was not a war; it was coercive diplomacy. And as I said, there was always a strategy behind it; a strategy of discussing an air threat, making an air threat, executing the air campaign, and then moving into the ground threat. It was diplomacy backed by force, ultimately, that resolved the conflict. But we certainly had to be prepared to go the final step.

In military circles, there have been a lot of discussions about the campaign. And some of the criticisms and some of the misunderstandings are shown on the next slide, and let me just talk about these for a second.

Many people say, "Well, there is no strategic plan." Well, I don't know what that means, really. I have showed you on the previous slide what the plan is. Logistics and so forth are national responsibilities, not NATO responsibilities. And no one could have possibly war-gamed out the trigger events and all of the conditions in advance. It required a lot of creative fast footwork by diplomats and other people, to make this work. It wasn't just a military operation. So while it may not have had a Field Manual 100-5 military plan attached to it, there certainly was a compelling logic behind this, and I have no doubt that the Serb side saw that logic.

Some people believe that the key was to have bombed Belgrade the very first night. Well, we did strike in the vicinity of Belgrade at Batajnica Airfield. But you know, we bombed in Baghdad the first night, and Saddam Hussein didn't pull out of Kuwait. So I don't think it automatically follows that bombing a capital city the first night is the key to success in one of these campaigns. As I say, you have to have military impact with your operations.

On the other hand, we do want to be as decisive as possible from the outset of one of these campaigns. We went after two centers of gravity. It was not possible to run a campaign, which only went after strategic assets and ignored the forces that were doing the terrible crimes on the ground. But likewise, it wasn't possible only to go after the forces that are on the ground and ignore what was being done, and the source of the power, from Belgrade.

Some people have commented on what they saw as political micromanagement. You know, I have to tell you that, when you are dealing with politically sensitive targets, you need responsible authorities to take responsibility for the attack of those targets. And I am very satisfied that in this campaign we did.

I noticed on the news today there is criticism of the attack on the Serb media. Well, of course, that was a controversial target. But the Serb media engine was feeding the war. It was a crucial instrument of Milosevic's control over the Serb population. And it exported fear, hatred and instability into neighboring regions. And so it was a legitimate target of war, validated by lawyers in many countries and validated by the International Criminal Tribunal.

But it sure eased our minds a lot to know that our elected political leaders took the responsibility for that strike. Some people thought that when the Russians came into Pristina Airfield, that we didn't have to worry about it. They said: "Look, the Russians are coming in. Don't worry. They don't have any logistics. Pretty soon they'll be eating out of our hands, and we'll have them under our control."

Well, I think from the Russian perspective, it could have been turned around. It was: "We are going into Pristina Airfield. Don't worry about the logistics. NATO will feed us." And, in fact, as we know from the BBC documentary, there was, apparently, a serious Russian effort to reinforce that element of Pristina Airfield, to attempt the partition of Kosovo, which we stopped.

Some people thought that ground forces really didn't play. Let me just talk for a moment about Task Force Hawk. It was a full—we could call it a joint strike force. It had a corps headquarters, two dozen Apache helicopters and a bunch of other helicopters with it. It was a mixed heavy-light brigade on the ground with tanks. It had multiple-launch rocket systems—155, 105mm artillery; key elements from the corps headquarters, very robust logistics and communications. It was a full joint strike force. It was a lot more than 24 helicopters. It deployed in less than 30 days from a virtually standing start into a restricted airfield in adverse weather in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. It was trained and ready to go by the required date, and it had strategic impact.

I was in Albania about five weeks, six weeks ago, saying goodbye to the Albanians, and the minister of defense told me, he said, "I took your advice." I said, "What advice was that, Minister?" He said, "Once you brought Task Force Hawk in, we moved our army entirely up to the border. We stabilized our border and we prevented the Serbs from coming in and attacking our country. We put 150 tanks north of this reservoir that's up there. It was a pretty bold move. It was a bold move that was made possible only by the presence of Task Force Hawk on the ground." In fact, these ground forces signaled resolve, demonstrated capabilities, stabilized both Albania and Macedonia, enhanced the targeting of fielded forces, gave credibility to the ground threat and then let us go quickly into KFOR at the end of the fighting.

Turning briefly now to KFOR, let me just suggest that after the air campaign, basically KFOR has worked about as we planned it in the summer of 1998. We got the Serb forces out, we prevented a partition, we established security, we demilitarized the KLA. In the process, we enabled the largest spontaneous refugee return since World War II. Reducing violence dramatically, we established a groundbreaking, strong relationship with the United nations, enabling the United Nations, the European Union and others to go ahead with political and economic development.

In that mission, Europeans are carrying 85 percent of the burden; Americans, 15 percent of the burden. Yes, we still need additional police. We need economic redevelopment there and we need to move ahead with elections. But those are things that KFOR can't solve. For KFOR, it's doing an excellent job, but it's a job that's not without challenge. It's being challenged by Milosevic and his manipulation of Serb opinion and by the Albanian extremists, and it's going to continue to face challenges on the ground.

I conclude by just saying that despite some very, very complicated circumstances, we did meet the political objectives. The Serb forces, military police and paramilitary came out. The fighting stopped, NATO forces went in, and the Albanian refugees returned. I have nothing but praise for the soldiers, the men and women on the ground in KFOR. I think they're doing an absolutely fantastic job, and as we look ahead, I hope we understand how important it is to stay the course. The problem in Kosovo, no more, no differently that the problem in Bosnia, can only be ultimately resolved by seeking a regional solution.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, that's what I'd hoped to convey as the basis for a good discussion here, and I welcome your questions. Thank you.

Gen. Clark: Who has some questions? There's a question right here.

Question: Thank you. Thank you, General Clark. My name is Laralie Kelly [sp]. I'm a Fellow in the House of Representatives. And I would love it if you would expand a little bit more about the different types of tools that the United States could bring to bear in engagement in foreign policy in a post-Cold War world. As you know—I mean, I've seen you testify many times on the Hill—how hard it is to talk comprehensively about peacekeeping as also a preventive measure. And we all see what's happening to the State Department and multilateral budgets. And it's not—I'm not convinced that the DOD budget is ever going to be able to absorb comprehensively peacekeeping, and not to say that that would be an ideal thing. But I also work with a lot of folks in the military and there's tremendous work being done on peacekeeping in these civilian areas also, and in working with non-governmental organizations. Could you comment on that? And my basic question is, I mean, how are we going to get really good at this?

Gen. Clark: Well, first of all, let me tell you that I think we do have to get good at this. I think the failed state is an international problem not only in Europe, but elsewhere, and we're going to have to learn to deal with the problem of failed states. That means providing some basis of security on the ground, which means either military or paramilitary—quasi-military forces deployed over there. The Italian Carabinieri have done an excellent job with us in Bosnia and in Kosovo. It's a military trained as police. They can't go alone; they've got to have a military backup. But you clearly need military forces.

That having been said, the bulk of the work has to be done in the economic and political area. Economic and political aspirations of populations have to be met. That can only be worked when there is adequate stability and security. But this requires resources and a range of institutional alternatives, from education to humanitarian assistance, to police training, to training in municipal governance, elections, monitorship, democracy, to values and attitude readjustments. And it's going to be long and difficult work.

So I do think it's a field that's worthy of a great deal of study. We need to look at our own institutions, our procedures, and in some cases, our laws on this. This is my personal opinion, after having worked this. Obviously, I'm giving you my personal opinion, not my DOD opinion on it. So I want to make that clear.

Yes.

Question: Bill Buckley, Georgetown University. General Clark, I wanted to thank you for your presentation here. You've also done an updated chronicle which is coming out in three weeks. You did it last spring. I was—pardon me, the end of last summer. I was intrigued by how in that essay at the end of last summer the real key point you felt was alliance cohesion in the conclusion of the conflict. However, now you've keyed in on the threat of a ground war as being a key incentive. I've noticed a kind of evolution in your thinking in this regard. I wonder if you could comment on that evolution, and if you could also comment on the fact that some have discussed whether or not some of the bombing, especially in the later part of the war, wasn't in fact an effort to get people, to motivate the population of Serbia, to get rid of Milosevic, and hence, if you will, a very different objective than the NATO objective regarding Kosovo.

Thank you.

Gen. Clark: Well, first of all, good question. Of course, allied cohesion was the—it was the essential element of NATO's success. We had to maintain alliance cohesion. But I believe I said from the beginning that there was always the threat of a ground operation that figured in Serb calculations.

In February before the war I had called to the Serb military commander, General Ojdanic. At the instruction of Secretary-General Solana, I said, "General Ojdanic, you need to get those forces back out of Kosovo. They don't belong there, they're violating the promises you made to NATO." He said to me, "Well, we have to have those forces there because you're going to invade us." This is February. I said, "We're not going to invade you. This is ridiculous. Pull the forces out." At the very outset of the air campaign, we saw Serb forces trying to prepare defensive positions. So they were acutely conscious of a ground threat from NATO from the very beginning, all rhetoric notwithstanding. Since the end of the war, as additional information has emerged, I have learned more about Serb motivations.

Question: Could you comment about the claims that some of the NATO bombing, particularly—

Gen. Clark: We never did any bombing designed to affect popular opinion against Milosevic. That was never an intent of the bombing. We went after military and military-related targets, we went after those targets that are impact.

Of course, we knew the population would be pretty upset at Milosevic. The dancing on the bridges stopped relatively rapidly. And all of this orchestrated jubilation that we saw in the first week or so of the air campaign faded out. But that wasn't the objective of the bombing. The bombing had legitimate military operational objectives. Anytime you bomb, it has an impact. And we did our very best to minimize the impact on innocent civilians, all ethnic groups.

Question: And could you—just as a follow-up, final follow-up, could you comment, please, on what was reported in the European press and has been confirmed at least by some contacts I have in Belgrade that they, in fact, had the first 10 days of NATO bombing targets and, as a matter of fact, were probably given them by the French or the Greeks.

Gen. Clark: Well, I don't think that's a correct statement, and I don't think they did have those first 10 days of targets.

We know that there was a leak of the plan to the Serbs. They had a copy of the plan, including the mission statement, which I showed you up here. And we know that they knew the categories of the targets. And with a little proper intelligence work, they could probably figure out, if the targets was airfields, where the airfields were that might be bombed. But the specific targets, when they were going to be attacked and how and so forth? No, I don't think they had any access to that.

Question: How'd they get that?

Gen. Clark: How did they get it? An officer gave them that plan. An officer of a—a NATO officer assigned to NATO headquarters gave it to them. It's a matter of public record.

Question: Was that the French official who—

Gen. Clark: Yeah.

Question in the back.

Question: General, I'm Alexandra—[inaudible], Serbian Unity Congress, president of the Washington chapter. And you might remember me from the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs. I just wanted to—I won't take issue—I do have an issue with your last answer about civilian—or military targets because I don't think schools and hospitals count as military targets. But I'll take that another—

Gen. Clark: I think we discussed this at the Baltimore—

Question: Yes. I'll take that up another time.

Gen. Clark: —Council on World Affairs, and I'd be very happy to discuss it with you in detail at any time. But I can assure you we never targeted a school or a hospital, despite the fact that we had very good information that Milosevic was using schools as bases and keeping his military forces inside schools.

Question: Well, we'll leave that. Actually, my question is this. My question is this. One of the reasons for us going into Kosovo was to keep the multiethnicity—promote multiethnicity in Kosovo. And 350,000 refugees later, Serbs, Gorani, Roma—Gypsies, whatever—Slavic Muslims who have left, that multiethnicity is disappearing rapidly under our noses. In fact, in the last 10 days, eight Serbs were killed under NATO's nose.

My question to you is, what specifically is KFOR doing to ensure the safety of the 100,000 that still remain? Number one. And number two, what specifically are they doing to help return the 350,000 that have already left?

Gen. Clark: Well first, let's go to the statements that you made. I certainly respect your opinion, but I want to differ with it in one very important respect. Most of the people that left—and we'll discuss a long time about how many left, but 350,000 is much higher than any number that I've ever seen. It's back to the numbers that Milosevic has been using for a long time about the Kosovo population. Many of those people, most of those people left before KFOR ever arrived. They left in part because they were afraid because of what they had done or because they were afraid that they would be blamed for what other Serbs had done to the Albanian population.

Once KFOR got there, the refugee outflow stopped. We took a census in late August. It showed about 100,000 Serbs remaining. We have since verified that census, and it remains there, and there is, in fact, an inflow of Serbs coming back in, a steady trickle coming back in. With each convoy run, additional people come in to the Serb communities that are there in Kosovo. There is discussion as I was leaving there about five weeks ago, a discussion about the programs to promote Serb resettlement in Kosovo, and I'm sure that will be done.

But you're quite right; we all want a multiethnic situation in Kosovo. We deplore all of the violence against all the ethnic groups. We strongly condemn it. And we're taking very strong and effective measures on the ground to guard individual sites, protect groups of people moving, and anticipate attacks and follow up and locate and detain and prosecute perpetrators.

A question up here.

Question: Phil Gordon—Brookings. General, you showed us a very interesting chart at the very beginning about the two chains of command, the red and the blue. And I think you described that as incredibly complicated and one of the bigger challenges you faced. The French in their post-Kosovo report also made a lot out of the two chains of command issues, the cruise missiles and stealth we did alone as Americans, and other things were for NATO. I just wondered if you had any comments on the lessons of that, both for future NATO operations and also for any implications for European ambitions for their own security structures.

Gen. Clark: Well, first of all, the dual chain of command, the dual hatting of the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as also the Commander in Chief U.S.-European Command, is an arrangement that's been in effect since the early 1950s. It was actually put in effect and designed by Eisenhower because he realized that what you needed to build a strong alliance was a leading ally. And by giving the Supreme Allied Commander the command over the U.S. forces that were in Europe, it enabled the U.S. forces to form a very strong foundation for NATO activities. That's been the structure for a long time. This is the first time we ever exercised it in a combat operation. And it proved to work here.

I know there has been a misunderstanding on the part of the French parliamentarians. You may have read their "Lessons Learned" report, which says that actions were taken outside the NATO chain of command. That's absolutely incorrect. There were never any military actions taken that did not go through me, through the ABSOUTH commander, Admiral Ellis; and, if they involved air activities, through the AIRSOUTH commander, General Short.

It so happens that we were both NATO officers and U.S. officers. But this dual-hatting protected some U.S. technology and, at the same time, enabled it to be fully integrated into the NATO campaign. So there was never an issue with a dual chain of command leading to confusion and so forth, at the higher levels. It did complicate the staff work, but it was a single integrated chain of command.

A question?

Question: I am Andy Marshall with the L.A. Times.

If I understood your recommendations, you indicated that, in the post-Cold War era, you have got to go in quickly and get the job done fast. Yet you seem to say that your critics, who say you should have gone downtown quickly, are wrong. What would you have done in retrospect, as you inquest it now, that you didn't do then, to get it in, in less than 78 days?

Gen. Clark: Well, I had to, throughout the campaign, push the envelope. It was necessary. But you know, we had to have a NATO consensus, and we had to have NATO cohesion. And this was a very difficult thing for the alliance to generate. And so we pushed, as hard as we could push, to get the largest number of targets at the outset, and to escalate as rapidly as possible. I am not complaining about this to the political leadership of the alliance because they were pushing, along with me. There was a lot of work to be done in many countries.

Remember, you have 19 parliaments or legislatures. You have 19 publics, each of which is raising concerns and issues and has a different historical and geographical, economic, ethnic perspective on the conflict. So there are some obvious difficulties when you try to work an alliance operation like this.

That's why I am suggesting that you have to have a better strategic understanding. It's not any point in going back to this operation. I know what the targets were in downtown Belgrade that could have been struck. Had they been struck, they would have made more of a psychological impact, but I think it's a highly arguable case that they would have changed the outcome of the war or shortened it in any way. If they had generated an adverse reaction in European publics, they might have crippled the conduct of the operation.

One of the things that American audiences don't appreciate is that, on the 6th of April, 1941, German bombers leveled Belgrade. They caused 17,000 casualties. It's a shame on Germany to this day, when you talk to their men and women who studied this, that they did this. As a French pilot said to me; during the war he said: "The Serbs are our European brothers. This is Europe. These are people." And so in everything we did, we tried to get the right balance between a militarily sound operation and following the strategy that was approved by the nations, politically approved by the nations.

Over here, a question. Yes?

Question: I am Pamela Taylor, Voice of America.

You also said that post-Cold War world wars are not going to be repeats of Rolling Thunder. And as you know, the operation has been widely criticized for the fact that pilots flew at such high altitudes, that they caused a lot more collateral damage than perhaps otherwise—that is, civilian damage. And now we are seeing the results of that in the recent report from Amnesty International which is very critical of the civilian casualties on the ground in Serbia.

Is this a concern—that if this is indeed the way we're going to fight wars in the future—that's just leaving America and NATO open to charges that we're fighting cowardly wars, where Americans don't die but others do?

Gen. Clark: Well, I think there's a number of issues that you raised in that statement. First of all, we flew at the optimum altitude for weapons delivery. So I think it would be difficult for a military analyst to believe that we caused more collateral damage by flying from a higher altitude. The weapons we were delivering were precise from that altitude.

Secondly, it's hard for me to accept the proposition that there is some sort of fair balance in war in which we have to let Americans die to prove that we're sincere.

We fought this campaign with four measures of merit, as I explained, understanding that we wanted a campaign of indefinite duration which would achieve its impact. It did. And so by that measure, the campaign was a success.

As far as being able to attack targets effectively from that altitude of 15,000 feet, I would tell you that that's the altitude that our airmen selected, and they went below it when it was effective to do so and it was necessary to do so. And sometimes they flew above it when it worked better. And so I want to make it clear that that was the recommendation from the airmen and was not something that was imposed by politicians. This was your military working to do the best job it could in dealing with the issues that it was handed.

As far as Amnesty International's concerned, of course, we very much regret civilian casualties, on all sides. We especially regret the 10,000 or so Albanians who were murdered by the Serbs in this campaign. And so I think you have to look at the tragedy in balance. We did the absolute minimum, in terms of bombing, to set it right and meet NATO's objectives. And you know, I—we're all sorry that any civilians died, of any ethnic group. But we did our best to prevent civilian casualties.

M. Armacost: A question in the back.

Question: General, Tom Bronson, the Baltimore Sun. I wondered if you'd comment on the—[off mic]—American sector. I understand that General Sanchez was looking for another six or seven battalions. He only got, I believe, two. Do you—and he wanted additional troops, apparently, to patrol the border. Could you comment on the troop levels there? Do you think they are adequate?

Gen. Clark: Well, the troop levels as I left—and I've been out of the command now for 35 days—the troop levels as I left were appropriate for the mission. We looked at these troop levels very carefully. We talked to Sanchez. We looked at what he needed. We brought in some reinforcements from some other sectors, as we had done in Mitrovica, because we think it's important—we thought it was important to multinationalize the problem, so that many nations are working together on the problem, because by having their soldiers work together, they get a better common understanding of what the problem is.

So it was important to bring German and Italian troops in there. And they did come in, and they did reinforce. We provided some reinforcements.

And obviously, this is a moving train. And if the mission changes and requirements change, I'm sure that the national command authorities in the United States, working with the European command, will provide the forces that are needed—

Question: But did Sanchez want additional troops, six or seven battalions?

Gen. Clark: No. No, he didn't. We did some analyses of if we tried to change the mission so that we were going to picket line, seal the border, with a man standing sentry every hundred meters, what would it take? And so that was a six- or seven-battalion figure. But that was never the mission.

Question: One other quick question. General Shelton wrote you a letter after U.S. soldiers went up to Mitrovica. The Pentagon said it was merely a gentle reminder, but some saw it as a slap against you. And even people on your staff said that, "We weren't popping any champagne corks after we got the letter." Could you comment on that?

Gen. Clark: Well, I'm not going to comment on that. I'm going to tell you very simply that this was a tasking that came down from the commander on the ground, General Reinhardt, asking the Americans to do what many other nations had done previously, which was send a company up to Mitrovica. The Americans went through the planning process. As the U.S. European Command commander, I felt it was my obligation to defer this to the Pentagon. I did. I want to General Shelton, who went to the secretary of Defense; I was told to go ahead.

And so I can't really comment on the letter. I didn't write it. I did receive it. And we were fully in accordance with—we all had a full understanding of everything that was going on. So, that's the way things work.

A question right here.

Question: General, Colonel Polumbo, U.S. Air Force, and a research associate at ISD at Georgetown. Sir, I did my research this year on Allied Force, and I thank you for the opportunity to hear your comments, especially at the end of my year.

Gen. Clark: I'm sorry I didn't comment at the beginning of your year. I might have saved you a lot of work!

Question: You'd have saved me a lot of work, sir, you would have!

But I want to ask a question that maybe is elemental. But it appeared that a lot of the strategy development, course of action selection that maybe the North Atlantic Council dwelled on, or at least looked at, was development of targets versus strategy. And it appeared that we went and we selected targets and presented targets as our way to show them what courses of action they had available to them. I wonder if that's something that maybe in your aftermath of the conflict that you've instructed them that it's a better way to look at the strategy, the effects that we're trying to have, more of the mission elements before we actually get into the target selection?

Gen. Clark: As a matter of fact, that's an incorrect understanding of what happened. The North Atlantic Council never looked at targets; they never picked out targets. Those targets never went to foreign ministries. I never briefed them to ambassadors.

Secondly, they did look at, in the operations plan, effects-based targeting. The first mission was to take out the integrated air defense system lock, stock and barrel. Did we do it? You did the research, did we do it? Did we take out the integrated air defense system?

Question: We didn't take it out, but that's—

Gen. Clark: But we worked through it, right?

Question: —we had the right effect on it.

Gen. Clark: Okay. Well, that was the effect that we sought. It was an effect-based campaign at the strategic level.

Now, when you got right down to it, many of the targets that a lot of the discussion was about were politically sensitive targets because they had impact on the civilian population, like bridges over the Danube, especially in Belgrade, or the electricity.

So I don't think the armed forces in our country should assume, as matter of sort of staff college training, that when you go into one of these operations you're going to be given carte blanche, bomb anything you want, get the mission done. It doesn't work that way. It's not pure war—at least it won't be until survival interests for nations are at stake. And so when there are less than survival interests at stake, then there are going to be political constraints.

As a student of warfare, you've read Clausewitz. Clausewitz says that any military objective—a military operation has to be directed toward a political objective, and it has to be carried out within the political constraints of the political leaders articulating the objective. That's what was done in this case.

Now, I think one of the reasons the armed forces, and in particular the Air Force planners, had difficulty was because we'd been to school on Desert Storm. Desert Storm was an entirely different battlefield. It was a battlefield that was clean; it was clean of civilians, mostly clean of refugees, clean of vegetation, mostly purely visible. It was pretty much clean of media, too. I would suggest to you that you have to be prepared in the future to fight on cluttered battle fields, where there are civilians, friendly and not so friendly civilians; where there's tough vegetation, where there's tough weather. It's a much more challenging operational environment, and particularly in a case like that where you're operating against a capital of a European country, you're going to have to expect political constraints.

There is no way that you can convey to junior members of the armed forces the sort of political judgments that heads of government have to make. That's what they stand before their electorate for. They will be held responsible for those choices, and I think that the NATO political leaders in all the countries did an incredibly courageous job in moving this operation forward into unprecedented terrain; in looking at the problem as it was; and making some very tough calls on targeting.

Question: Thanks.

Gen. Clark: Thank you. Question right here.

Question: John—

Gen. Clark: Yes, John?

Question: General, could you amplify your very interesting slide on ground options? It's been very widely reported that as the war came to an end, the president was just on the brink of having to make some difficult decisions, and indeed, I think you'd been given the authority to do some long lead-time planning even before that. And so could you tell us what your understanding is of how far the political authorities had come towards making a decision, given that there had been the defense ministers meeting in Frankfurt as well? And then secondly, could you tell us, since you'd had the SAMs there in SHAPE planning away, what your final understanding was of what the ground option would take in terms of troops and how long it would take to—

Gen. Clark: Well, some of that material is not releasable, and I'm only one potential source on this. But it was my belief that NATO would have done anything necessary to succeed, including a ground option. I was still doing work on the ground option as the war ended, but you know, in the military we often think of planning, then preparation, then execution. But in reality, it's never that simple. The plans were being worked, we were going to make a strategic decision to move ahead with the preparations, forces were going to move, planning was still going to be worked. The planning was going to go from the NATO cosmic level down to the division level, brigade level, battalion level; company commanders were going to be out there looking at maps and picking out avenues of approach and so forth. So we had a long way to go in the planning process. But I am convinced we would have gone all the way.

What would it have taken? Well, again, that was very much going to be a function of the effects of the air campaign as we went through the month of June. It was going to be, in effect, the results of the planning that was done by our corps and division commanders on this, and by the land component commander who would have been selected. And so we had a, I think, a very effective assessment process and we were prepared to move forward in preparing forces, based on the assessment, simultaneously planning and preparing and preparing for an execution, just in time to meet the requirement that Secretary-General Solana gave us, which was, "Get the refugees back home before winter."

I've got time for one more question. Over here. This lady right here. Yes?

Question: Thank you, General Clark. I'm Elise Storck, I work with the U.S. Agency for International Development where I was on the Kosovo Working Group. In contrast to your comments about coordination and cohesion within NATO, I'd like to ask about coordination in the U.S. government. Your slide on the complexity of your command structure referenced humanitarian elements and the term now, "humanitarian intervention," seems to be part of the lexicon. Can you talk about coordination among DOD, USAID, Department of State and so forth, how this was working, both in Washington and in the field, and would you make any recommendations for improved coordination?

Gen. Clark: Well, I really can't comment on the coordination in Washington because I wasn't here during the campaign. My interface with Washington was strictly through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the occasional visitors, like Strobe Talbott or Secretary Albright or Secretary Cohen, who would come over to the theater. But other than that, I interfaced on a daily basis through the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Pentagon handled a lot of the U.S. coordination, because remember, I was working the NATO aspect of this.

On the ground, I think the coordination was excellent. I think our soldiers on the ground in Kosovo and in Bosnia have a tremendous appreciation for the Department of State, the Agency for International Development, and all of the non-governmental organizations that come with this. We've worked very closely in Bosnia on refugee returns, and we're hopeful that as more funds become available, there'll be a lot more done on the ground in Kosovo.

But I'll leave the Washington end of it to you all back here in this fair city.

Question: Thank you.

Gen. Clark: Thank you very much.

Richard N. Haass: Good morning. I will dispense with lengthy introductions. What we are going to do is begin with Ivo Daalder, then go to Michael O'Hanlon, and then end with Mike Elliott. As you know, Ivo Daalder and Mike O'Hanlon are the co-authors of this poster, or at least the book behind the poster—to my left—Winning Ugly—this new book, which I think is the most authoritative book to date on the Kosovo operation. And then we are going to ask Mike Elliott, who was instrumental in the BBC documentary about this, to give his perspective. And then again we are going to open it up to your questions. But let me first begin with Ivo Daalder, who is a senior fellow here at Brookings.

Ivo H. Daalder: Good morning. What I was thinking of doing was to answer at least two of the questions that we pose in our book, and posed at the framework for our study, which is whether NATO did the right thing, and whether even if it did in conducting the war that war could have been prevented by more apt diplomacy prior to the war. Our short answer to both of those questions is that, yes, NATO did in fact in the end do the right thing. And while war could possibly have been prevented by more apt diplomacy earlier on, over as time went by it was going to be more and more difficult to achieve the goals that we think were the right goals to achieve without using force.

NATO did the right thing, because if it had not acted militarily in the face of what Milosevic and his forces had demonstrated they clearly were able to do, and had already done in places like Bosnia and Croatia, that if we had not acted in this case it would have been a moral and a political and a strategic calamity. Morally the United States and NATO could not stand by as thousands were murdered and raped, tens of thousands were threatened, and hundreds of thousands were expelled from their homes, and indeed from their country, stripped even of their ID cards as they struggled across the border with a suitcase containing their worldly belongings.

Politically not to have acted would have brought Washington and allied capitals in a manner about a fierce debate about what one should and should not do in these kind of situations—not unlike the kind of debate you saw in Washington between 1992 and 1995 over Bosnia. And having had the Bosnian debate, having multiplied that over 19 countries, would have been politically unsustainable.

Strategically, moreover, the consequences of inaction, which we usually forget when we look at the consequences of action—but the consequences of inaction in this case would have been highly—would have been large and highly destabilizing for the region. We would have let Milosevic once again get away with a murdering campaign. We would have had the destabilization of Kosovo's neighbors, of Albania and Macedonia, who had to absorbs tens and then hundreds of thousands of refugees and having—and, finally, who would have had to take care of millions of refugees. These are the consequences that would have flowed if we had not acted.

So, NATO was right to go to war. There is no doubt in our minds about that. Though as Mike will explain, the manner in which it did so leaves something to be desired.

There is, however, a larger question before you get to this point, which is, Was war inevitable, or could the conflict have been prevented short of the use of military force? And our answer, as I said, was that preventive action much earlier might have been effective in steering the conflict toward a nonviolent resolution, but that as time went by the likelihood of reaching that solution without using force was becoming smaller and smaller. And by the winter of '98-99, it was almost inevitable that war would have to be the nature of the solution.

It was right to believe, as many in NATO and the United States believe, that Mr. Milosevic was the key to this conflict, both in terms of its origin and in terms of its resolution. After all, it had been Slobodan Milosevic who had ridden the nationalist tiger to power on the back of the Kosovar Albanian population. However, when we used Milosevic to solve our problems in Bosnia; and, more importantly, when we used Milosevic to resolve our implementation in Bosnia, and started to rely on him for the peace and security in Bosnia, we would inevitably, and did inevitably lose leverage over Milosevic. The question of pushing Milosevic over Kosovo bumped up against the question of what that would do in Bosnia. And in balancing the need to secure his cooperation for peace in Bosnia, and confronting him over the possible crisis that might be emerging in Kosovo, we focused on the short-term benefit of gaining his cooperation rather than the long-term need to confront him over the question of Kosovo.

At the same time, the United States and many of its allies were reluctant to consider confronting Milosevic with force if necessary, even though many believed that only a credible prospect of force would likely convince Belgrade to engage in a serious discussion about Kosovo's political future. NATO was asked, as General Clark reminded us, to examine all military options; and, as he reminded us, not just air power, but ground forces, including the use of 200,000-plus ground forces to quote/quote "subjugate" Belgrade, and to deliver as an alliance on that request for options. But from the early goings-on, politically certainly options were left off the table—those involving the use of American and NATO combat troops.

Throughout 1998, the question of whether or not NATO could under even peaceful conditions deploy combat troops was answered negatively. Fearing both a congressional and an allied reaction to that decision, the administration consistently and preemptively took the question of ground forces off the table.

Hesitation about what the United States and NATO were willing to do in 1998 played into Milosevic's hands. When in negotiations with Mr. Holbrooke in October 1998 Milosevic agreed to pull some of his forces back from Kosovo, and to allow unarmed civilians to monitor the situation on the ground, he did so knowingly that he retained full control over this area, and that the fact that there were unarmed observers on his territory in effect meant that NATO could not and would not use air power if he decided not to comply with the agreement he had just signed.

Also, in negotiating with Milosevic we failed to secure the cooperation, the necessary cooperation, of the Kosovars in the October deal. And his—and Holbrooke's explicit instructions not to consider ground forces that would have been capable, or ought to have been capable of making sure that when the Kosovo Liberation Army was going to fill the vacuum that the withdrawal of Serb forces was creating, they would have been capable of preventing that, those forces were not allowed to enter, and they were not allowed to be part of the negotiations. As a result, when we had the deal in October we had two consequences: one, the knowledge by Milosevic that he could defy and violate the agreement without any consequences for him in terms of airstrikes; and, secondly, the fact that the Kosovar Liberation Army had not signed off to any deal and was going to take advantage of whatever the situation allowed. In other words, a return to armed conflict between Serbs and Albanians was almost inevitable at the end of 1998, and in fact it emerged at the end of 1998 that that return of conflict already was occurring.

It could have prevented if NATO had been willing and able to deploy a large force inside Kosovo, in the territory in order to separate the two sides. Washington vetoed that possibility in October, and by early 1999 Milosevic was convinced he could force his solution on his Kosovars by using force in the belief that NATO would not do anything to prevent him from succeeding. He miscalculated, clearly, because we did in the end intervene, although the manner in which we did leaves something to be desired.

But to end on that final note, the question of when we entered in 1999, the question of whether this conflict could be resolved by the use of force, short of a NATO commitment to do whatever it would take to prevent him from doing what he was going to do in Kosovo, and then demonstrating that through use of force was unlikely to have occurred. Nothing that could have happened at Rambouillet, we conclude, or elsewhere indeed in terms of negotiations, was likely to believe to the path away from war and towards peace. But as Mike will tell you, the degree of force that was necessary in order to influence from Milosevic's calculations became a central element in his calculations, and in how the war would proceed.

Michael E. O'Hanlon: First of all, thank you all for staying after this great presentation by General Clark. And on behalf of Ivo and myself, I also wanted to very quickly thank a couple of the people who have helped us so much with this book, Karla Nieting and Micah Zenko, in particular with research assistants. Richard—who read this thing three times in draft, and Mike Armacost, and the publications department, Janet Walker and others, Bob Faherty and the folks in public affairs/communications—have just been fantastic in helping us produce this book in less than a year after the war ended. So we are very grateful.

I wanted to just answer—we only have a half hour left, and we want to save some time for your questions. So I wanted to just briefly answer a couple of questions I'll pose to myself, make a couple of observations, and then turn it over to Mike Elliott.

The first question I'd like to raise is: Were we well prepared? And General Clark talked earlier about essentially how we in his opinion were well prepared, or at least how we had the anticipation of a possible long air campaign if necessary. I would like to challenge that. I have no doubt that General Clark wanted to be well prepared, but I question whether he was allowed to become so. And we can get into more of the details in my argument in the Q&A, but I would just quote for you a couple of other statements by top NATO military officers, for example Admiral Ellis who was in charge of Southern Command, who put it very succinctly in a briefing last summer. He said, "We called this one absolutely wrong." In other words, we had no ability to ratchet up an air campaign if the first two or three days, the very limited bombing strikes, did not work. It was a very blunt statement. I think it was an accurate one.

And Klaus Naumann, who was German four-star general who advised NATO's North Atlantic Committee—or Council, excuse me—General Naumann said, "Milosevic prepared for war last spring; we prepared for a limited operation." In other words, again, two or three days of coercive bombing—there was always the possibility of continuing thereafter, but that was the plan, and I think it was a major mistake. We all saw what happened as a consequence Milosevic had the opinion that we were not going to stay with this, and that he could take it a lot better than we could dish it out or were willing to dish it out.

Now, that obviously changed in the course of the war, and I am a great admirer, as is I think Ivo and others, perhaps understandable, of how that happened over time, and how at least the military and the NATO as an alliance stuck together. But the initial preparations and the initial mentality was certainly not one that would prepare for an extended operation. It was one that thought two or three days of pin pricks would succeed. This is what led, therefore, to, in my judgment, Milosevic being willing to do whatever he thought he could get away with or wanted to get away with in Kosovo, and namely the largest forced expulsion of people in Europe since World War II—even as NATO was bombing. What you essentially had going on in the first few weeks of the war was two wars: one the Serbs against the ethnic Albanian people; the second NATO against Serbia. And not only were these two separate wars, but NATO was barely even a participant in the first war. We were barely even a player in the issue of what the Serbs were doing to the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The bombing campaign was almost irrelevant to what was happening on the ground. It was a very, very poor start to the conflict.

Now, this should have been predictable—and not every detail could have been predictable, but I would point out the 1998 NATO mission statement, that General Clark had up here as one of his viewgraphs, as in my judgment—and no fault of his—but in my judgment an oxymoron. What it said was NATO air power will be used to physically stop ethnic cleansing. It can't happen. It's not physically possible. This should have been clear. It's one thing to hope that air power will coerce Milosevic into changing his mind about whether he wants to attack the ethnic Albanian people. But that chart said you have to be able to stop this with air power. And I believe even a thousand airplanes—which is what we had at the end of the war—even a thousand airplanes is not enough to stop that. It may be enough to reverse it—and thank God in the end it was. It is not enough to stop it. So there was a fairly poor planning on the part of NATO as a whole. And it is primarily the political leadership that deserves criticism for this, of course, but nonetheless it's one—it's a point that I believe needs to be driven home.

Now, some people have essentially admitted this by saying, It wasn't our fault in the United States; it was the allies' fault. We would have loved to wage this war much more ambitiously, but we were not allowed to. So my second question is: Is this claim true? This is a claim you hear from Secretary of Defense Cohen, General Short who ran the air war. I believe this claim is demonstrably false, and I'll just quickly tick off a couple of reasons why. We are the ones who for example—just to give several anecdotes or data points of reference—the United States had an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean Sea up until mid March 1999. We pulled it out and sent it to the Persian Gulf ten days before the war began, and we did not replace it with any other aircraft carrier; nor did we replace it with any more airplanes in land bases in Europe. We had fewer airplanes in March 1999 as we went to war than we had had in Europe, in that part of the continent, the fall before. We had Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on the first night of the conflict publicly stating she did not see this as a long-term operation.

We had also a United States that in the previous year, in conjunction with Britain, had attacked Saddam Hussein for only four days, and then attacked Osama bin Laden for one day, and declared victory, even though in neither of these two cases did we actually accomplish our strategic goals. In particular, in the case of Iraq, this was about weapons of mass destruction in the hands of our probably number one global nemesis in a region of acute concern. And Richard has also argued this point elsewhere. All we are prepared to do is to attack for four days, "degrade" his forces—a term that has become very unfortunate and prevalent in our thinking—and go home. This precedent could not have escaped Milosevic. And so what he saw, regardless of what General Clark knew, regardless of what ultimately came to be—those of us watching from the outside, including Milosevic, had plenty of reason to doubt whether NATO was ready, and plenty of reason to think that Washington had just as cold feet as any other ally. So that's my second question.

And I am starting critical, but I am going to wind up a little bit more positively in my last couple of points, because I am struck by how much this war ultimately became in my judgment a clear victory in the sense that five to ten thousand dead ethnic Albanians, one to two thousand dead Serbs is a very tragic figure, but a very modest figure by the standards of war, and in particular by comparison to Bosnia, where our will to intervene had been much less clear-cut. In Kosovo we were much more decisive. The reason that Milosevic did not slaughter these ethnic Albanians as he expelled them from Kosovo was perhaps because he knew that might be enough to get us to go after him with ground forces, perhaps even marching on Belgrade. there was a certain amount of deterrence, a certain amount of commitment that was clear and that over time was effective.

And so I am struck by the fact that by the standards of war this was not a particularly bloody one, and most of the damage that occurred was reversed. I also believe that today we do see a lot of problems with Serbs being allowed to live securely in Kosovo, but the scale of what's going on is far less than what was happening a year ago. And in fact people will argue that Milosevic would not have done most of this if it weren't for NATO bombing him. I think that's demonstrably wrong. We know now that Operation Horseshoe, his plan to expel hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, was well prepared before NATO began to bomb, began NATO even clearly indicated it would bomb. He may have killed fewer people in the process of doing that—that's entirely possible. He also may have killed a lot more, as he proved himself perfectly willing to do in Bosnia. So I think you have to take all these things in consideration and view the overall outcome here, as messy as it still may be, as a decided improvement on what would have happened otherwise, and a pretty good outcome by the standards of war.

A couple of quick observations and I'll conclude. Even though NATO got off to a very bad start, it really showed its strength as an alliance as time went on. It is remarkable that a lot of left-leaning governments, from Germany to Italy and elsewhere, a country like Greece that had a very strong affinity for the Serb people, and a 95 percent opposition to this war among its population—all these countries together somehow gathered strength from each other and conviction from each other as the war went on. So instead of 19 members being 18 too many in the sense that you perhaps would have more dissension, someone wanting to stop the campaign, the alliance actually worked as an entity to shore up each other's political resolve. And that was a remarkable accomplishment that was not necessarily easily predictable.

A second quick observation—and I'm just making a couple of somewhat disjointed points here to conclude—Germany's role in this conflict was very, very positive in my judgment, and it sometimes escapes our notice that Germany dropped bombs on a former victim of Nazi aggression in this conflict, and now has armed peacekeepers in Kosovo, just as it does in Bosnia. In the late 1990s in the Balkans, Germany has really begun in my judgment to come of age as a post-World War II power. I hope that process will continue. It's certainly worth noting. And quite significant in historical terms—not commonly discussed.

A third quick point: American troops and NATO troops in general performed fantastically in this operation and in the peace mission. To me it clearly belies a lot of the rhetoric you hear in Washington about a hollow U.S. military or hollowing U.S. military. There are a lot of strains on our military today, but the quality of the forces is outstanding, and I doubt it's ever been better.

The fourth and fifth point, then I am done. This war may have finally sort of shot away the idea that we need to have an exit strategy for every conflict we get in. Not only do we not have an exit schedule, we have no idea if and when we will ever leave Kosovo; we don't even know what the game plan is for leaving. We don't even know if Kosovo is going to be independent, if it is still going to be part of Serbia, if we are going to have to wait for some new sort of confederal structure within a new Yugoslavia. The bottom line is we didn't insist on such a strategy before we went in, and thank God we didn't. And so the exit strategy concept is usually valuable. You want to have some sense of where you are going before you begin to use force. But if there is a potential mass campaign of ethnic terror in the works, you don't need to have the details worked out in advance.

A very final point: some people have said this operation is the repudiation of the so-called Powell Doctrine, which talks about using a lot of firepower and force, decisive force. In our judgment this was, if anything, a reaffirmation of the Powell Doctrine. NATO only succeeded after it built up its air power by a factor of three; when it started attacking a multiple of targets in Belgrade, as I believe it had to; when it became much more effective in the field in Kosovo against Serbia's forces; and when it started talking, relatively convincing, although perhaps not totally decided terms, about a ground invasion. So to me this says that even though air power gets the majority of the credit, and I'll acknowledge having been wrong in predicting that it wouldn't be enough by itself during the conflict, all the other tools of power were certainly critical, and this was something that had to be waged with a serious conviction that this was a war, that it was not just as General Naumann put it, "limited operation" in order for us to prevail. Thanks very much.

Michael Elliot: Thanks, Richard and Mike and Ivo. I've been so impressed by the standard of presentations and audience participation this morning, and that I kind of broke all tenets of working for a dot.com. I wore a tie for the first time for two months.

I want to stand back and just two or three minutes look at some of the issues that have been raised in terms of the Kosovo war from slightly wider perspective. For me Kosovo was a small war, at least by 20th century standards, that raised extremely big themes—three in particular. First of all, as General Clark's presentation abundantly showed, it asked us to rethink the theory and practice of war fighting in the new century with consequent implications for thinking about force structure, training, deployment, the proper role of air power, what have you.

Secondly, in a geopolitical sense, the Kosovo war and its aftermath is part of the ongoing debate as to the nature of the relationship between the Atlantic democracies, the United States and Canada on one side of the Atlantic, and the democracies of the European Union and beyond on the other side of the Atlantic, especially as that relationship impacts post-Cold War conflicts, whether within Europe or within some reasonable distance of Europe.

And, thirdly, Kosovo asks us, I believe, to reexamine for what reasons it is legitimate for the state to ask young men or women to fight and die. It's been said a number of times, both during the war and after the war, that Kosovo was a war of values rather than a war of interests, whatever that might mean. To put it another way, if you like, the war I think should ask us to reexamine and inquire what it is that the national interest really is in the 21st century, and whether it is the case that the national interest as conventionally defined is the sole reason for which we can ask young men and women to fight and die on our behalf.

I want to concentrate just for a couple of minutes on the third point, which has been absorbing me since the war broke out, and continues to. And it has absorbed me for one reason, if I can just kind of be personal. This is one of the very few cases that I can remember in my intellectual life when I have really done a 180 degree change in my thinking. I take it as anti-climatic—this is a slightly controversial statement, but I'll put it out there anyway—that at the beginning of 1999, as conventionally defined in what one might call Westphalian terms there was no threatening national interest of either the United States or of any of the major European powers in what happened in a small corner of the Balkans. Up to 1999, Kosovo has been the sight of an extremely nasty but quite small civil war. It hadn't spread, in common with all the wars of the Yugoslav secession. Despite many predictions to the contrary, there had been no significant spreading over the border of the ex-Yugoslavia. Herr Bochen [ph], if he were here, would remind us that on one day sometime in 1993 one small village in Hungary was accidentally shelled; but other than that, the wars of Yugoslav secession had not spread. Nor I believe could the national interests be brought into play in the beginning of 1999 by some kind of post-modern formulation that for example the West European countries had an interest in intervening in Kosovo, because they were scared for example of mass immigration.

I was worried about intervention in Kosovo for another reason, and that is it seemed to me to validate, to put it at its mildest, what was a skillful program of internationalization of the Kosovo conflict by one of the belligerents, that is to say the KLA.

So I started out in 1999 implacably opposed to the intervention, and I am convinced that it was likely to get us into more trouble rather than less. Within three months I changed my mind completely and eradicably, and was convinced that the intervention was right, that it was extremely skillfully conducted, and that the lessons of it were profound ones that we should all think about.

I changed my mind, I suppose, because I came to the conclusion that in our modern world conventional definitions of what the national interest mean are inadequate. In conventional terms or in old Westphalian terms, or what have you, it is extremely difficult to see why the Netherlands or Canada or Sweden or Denmark or plenty of other countries should have armed forces at all if they can only be deployed in defense of what were once considered to be national interests—that is to say territorial integrity or national survival.

In the past it seems to me we have made an implicit assumption that the national interest should be defined by officers of the state, and that the assumption continues that those who live in the state has one crucial identity for the purpose of defining the national interests; that is to say they are British, they are German, they are Americans, what have you.

In mature democracies, it seems to me, we can no longer expect automatically to cede the power of defining what is in the national interest simply to officers of the state. More to the point, as Dominic Blasey [ph] of EFRE [ph] has argued consistently over the last few years, we live, and in particulate in Europe we live—and I see some European scholars in the audience—in a world of multiple identities. While you can be Catalan, Spanish, European, humanitarian, a supporter of the UNHCR, a member of Greenpeace, what have you. In these circumstances, in terms of mature democracies in which it is no longer possible or no longer desirable for officials just to specify what the national interest is, and in which people have multiple identities, I think it is natural to expect that there will be popular pressure to go to war when there is a true humanitarian catastrophe emerging before our eyes. And all the evidence, as both Michael and Ivo has suggested, is that there was a true humanitarian disaster unfolding in Kosovo, which had it not been for intervention would inevitably been worse than it otherwise would. In those circumstances, it seems to me, we need to rethink what our doctrine or doctrines of the national interest is, to give us some workable templates upon which we can support armed intervention.

That leaves us—my final comments—with us some very, very tricky questions for the future. We have been used in the Westphalian system, or in its modern version thereof, to ask young men, and increasingly young women too, to fight for national interests. We now have to decide whether we are legitimately able to ask them to fight and die for values as well as interests, and it's a tricky question.

There is also what I often think of in my mind as the April 6, 1941 question, and that is to say if you are going to do a humanitarian intervention in a country, do you do it with overwhelming and decisive force, or do you try to be as—I can't think of a better word—"nice" about your intervention as you can possibly be? There were a number of critics during the war—David Reese and others—who argued that precisely because the war occasionally got labeled a humanitarian one, people had not been prepared for the fact that war requires the application of decisive violence for its quick termination. And that's a question not simply or not mainly actually for the men and women in uniform to understand but rather for those who encourage such humanitarian wars to understand too wars are never nice.

And finally and most trickily, if the Western democracies are to fight wars of values, wars of humanitarian intervention, wars that can't be justified in the old Westphalian model of national interests, how do we avoid the potential that those wars simply become in effect wars of imperialism in which Western powers come in and solve unpleasant violent civil conflict in curious and otherwise largely ignored parts of the world? All of those questions are ones that I think Kosovo brought into very, very sharp relief for us, and ones that will continue to absorb us as we integrate the lessons of that curious small war into our thinking. Thanks.

R. Haass: Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Ivo and Mike O'Hanlon.

Richard N. Haass: It's about ten of—we'll probably go on for about—just so you know, until about a quarter after, which I hope will accommodate most of your questions—it's 15 minutes longer than we promised, but the power point went on for 15 minutes longer than we thought.

You've heard all sorts of comments up here about whether it was right to fight this war; and, secondly, whether it was fought in the right way. And essentially you heard largely affirmative comments on the former, that it was essentially right to fight, or unavoidable to fight, and second of all that it was largely fought, however, at least in initially, in the wrong way. And that essentially is the view of the panel, if not of the keynote speaker this morning. Given the lateness of the hour, I will be uncharacteristically restrained, and I won't report on any of those questions, and instead open it up to you. Again, I ask you to be—to identify yourselves, to wait for a microphone, and to ask questions whether than add to our presentations this morning.

Question: Good morning. Edward Josephs with SAIS. Two questions, please, one looking backward and one looking forward. Mr. Elliott, I think you just said that in all the Yugoslav wars there's been nothing crossing the border, no transfer of the conflict. Last year at this time I was the senior camp manager at Stenkovac One, taking care of these folks in Macedonia. And just very briefly ask you your impression, all of you, about the success, the fact that Macedonia did not fall apart despite Milosevic's best efforts then, tensions that we witnessed in the camp. The second question—

R. Haass: Can I be arbitrary and limit you to one just because there's about a—there's a sea of hands?

Question:—real quick, Richard, real quick—looking forward, just looking forward, Ivo, you said that Milosevic miscalculated last year—if he moves against Montenegro or indeed Kosovo and elsewhere, would he be miscalculating now? Do we have any other options? Those are my questions.

Michael Elliott: Thank you. Just on the war spreading, I'm always precise when I talk about that point to say that the war didn't spread beyond the borders of the former Yugoslavia. There, of course, was the shelling into Albania during the Kosovo war as well. I think the Macedonian government, in retrospect—there were obviously some problems in the camps, and there were obviously some members of the Macedonian armed forces who were less than—what's the word I'm looking for—welcoming. But I think, I think the Macedonian government behaved more than credibly throughout the war and continues to do so.

Ivo Daalder: On Montenegro, just two small points. One is I think it's regrettable that nobody knows what it is that we would do—we, the United States and we NATO—in case violence were to assault Montenegro. We have gone through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo without knowing what we would do, and in the end we always intervene. I think it would be useful to remind Mr. Milosevic that we will do so again.

Secondly, Montenegro is slightly different than Kosovo. It is actually a constituent republic of the former Yugoslavia, and therefore our opposition to the prospect of independence is one that is less well based, to put it mildly, than on the case of Kosovo. And that our notion that we should roll back at this point, while at the same time in terms of having a referendum and et cetera, the movement on independence and at the same time saying that we're really not sure whether we're going to come to your aid if there is a major escalation of violence, is likely to encourage Mr. Milosevic to miscalculate rather than to calculate correctly, because in the end, we will not be able to stand by and have another war in the Balkans without our intervention, as we weren't in any other case before them.

R. Haass: Any other options we could take?

I. Daalder: Well, for one we could say that we are in fact interested in the territorial integrity of Montenegro, and that the kind of commitment we were making during the war, which was a virtual Article 5 commitment to the defense of Montenegro, would either explicitly or implicitly be there. One other thing I would like to see happening is we make very clear that if Milosevic is ready to move on Montenegro, we may be ready to move on him.

R. Haass: The gentleman with the red tie. Could the people move their microphone on their ties? It's easier to pick up high on their ties.

Question: Ivo and Mike, thank you for an excellent book. I think it's going to be a guidepost for some of the government discussions here in the states. I'm a little curious—you've both spoken about Milosevic's calculations and miscalculations. I'm wondering if you had any conversations with Serb. officials that confirmed or disconfirmed this. And then, Mike, I wondered if you—or Ivo, I wondered if you would explore why it is we didn't apply the kind of intensity to the Kosovo situation that the United States has for almost five decades applied to Israel and its relation to its surrounding neighbors.

I. Daalder: We did not talk to Serb officials. And if we had, I'm not sure that that would have been very helpful in terms of determining what Mr. Milosevic's state of mind was. It is difficult to know what his state of mind was. What we did is in good old fashioned social science analytical work is we extrapolated from the evidence to reach judgments about the correctness or incorrectness of the calculations. We extrapolated from the evidence that a Milosevic sitting in Belgrade looking at what NATO was prepared to do might have thought that we were not prepared to do but in the end we did. After all, as Mike said, when Iraq challenged us in 1998 on an issue on which our interests were certainly more directly involved, we bombed for four days and called it quits. It was not strange for Milosevic to think that maybe we would call it quits after two or three days of bombing in the case of Kosovo. We believe he miscalculated in escalating the violence and forcefully expelling nearly a million, which left NATO with very little choice but in fact to continue to work to the end, including, if necessary, in our view, a ground campaign.

Question: On the issue of the Mideast, can you compare it?

I. Daalder: Kosovo is not Israel.

Question: And that's a truism. And that says it all. This is an odd statement from a social scientist doing analytic work.

R. Haass: I don't think it's a particularly odd statement given that there's fundamentally different interests and a fundamentally different history to the U.S. relationship. It seems to even marginally or in any way begin to equate the nature of the U.S. commitment in history to Israel to the nature of the U.S. commitment in history with Kosovo is an apples and oranges, it doesn't begin the comparison. Sir.

Question: Jeremy Strozer, SAIC. Some of you mentioned the changed nature of the military campaign in Kosovo versus previous campaigns in the past. Specifically, you, sir, mentioned how you should question whether you should send young men and women into conflicts based on values rather than national interest. And my question to you is NATO's role in the future and how the NATO credibility will sustain itself based on missions of values, and if maybe the new strategic concepts should go through some form of ratification process in the NATO member countries due to the fact that in some ways it does change the nature of NATO's mission and thus the nature of the alliance itself.

M. Elliott: Well, I think one should be a little bit careful here. I mean, I'm calling this a mission of values. I don't think in the Pentagon they would say, oh yeah, Kosovo, that was all about values, that wasn't at all about interests. So, I mean, I don't think one should—I don't think one should elide important point. I mean, I don't think should elide a point that a commentator might make here to something that, as you say, is a military doctrine, because I think that there's a big difference.

But, that said, sometimes I kind of wake up in the morning and I think, you know, we really haven't sorted anything out. We haven't sorted anything out since that wonderful day in November of 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell down. I mean we are still living in a period where we are constantly, it seems to me, having to rethink our geopolitical relationships, our strategic implications, and the nature of our armed forces, now merely 11 years after the effective end of the Cold War. And we'll continue rethinking how and why we should fight wars in the post-Cold War world for some time yet. We haven't yet got the big picture straight.

R. Haass: I want to thank Michael Elliott for giving a rationale for what we do here at Brookings with that response. And I also think what you heard up here was one of the things that makes Kosovo to some extent tricky if not sui generis, is that it was not a purely humanitarian intervention. There was strategic interests involved. It was a mixed bag, if you will, of rationales that got us into it, and that in some ways both made it more likely, but also complicated, how we went about it. Sam?

Question: The point that I wanted to make, and a question I wanted to ask, has already be discussed a bit, just in Richard's comment and Mr. Elliott's. I just came back this week from four weeks, four months, in Asia, where I find there is a great deal of puzzlement about the concept of humanitarian intervention, even given the fact that Kofi Annan, who has, you know, talked about it a great deal, is from Africa, the Asians look at the Kosovo war as one of intervention based upon American and more particularly European concepts of Realpolitik. For them to accept the notion of humanitarian intervention raises issues of ethnic conflict and intervention in ethnic conflict. And they're the first to point out that the West is not prepared to intervene in every ethnic conflict by any means at all.

My response to that was, as you meant that Kosovo was waged in terms of the national interest as defined by the NATO countries. And it seems to me in particular Kosovo took place, the war in Kosovo took place because of the fact that Yugoslavia and the disintegration of Yugoslavia was creating a black hole in the center of Europe, and that it was really impossible for the Europeans and the Americans to accept that and the long-term consequence. And, in fact, we're still struggling with that, because the Stability Pact, nothing has happened since the war ended, really isn't yet fully cementing, if you like, democracy and things, what-have-you in that part of the world.

So why don't we get rid of this notion of values which helps us internalize our own, our own rationale some way, in the midst of the fact that this is a national interest and it was limited to Europe. And in fact, the strategic concept, which was just mentioned a while ago, limits a NATO intervention at this point to the area of non-occupied missions to the area immediately related to the European theater.

Perhaps Mr. Elliott would like to comment on that, or anybody else.

R. Haass: Michael.

M. Elliott: I was gonna defer on the grounds that I've said enough. I had the—but I know exactly what you mean about Asia. I had the great misfortune to spend a week in Beijing three days after we bombed the Belgrade embassy and had some fascinating conversations—the smiling man from the foreign ministry with the impeccable English accent and two degrees from the London School of Economics, he said to me, "So, Mongolia next?"

On the question of whether or not there truly is a national interest in the wars that took place in the ex-Yugoslavia, simply for the purpose at the time, I'm going to defer. I mean, we can kind of gently talk about it outside. I have real reservations on whether, on whether that is the case, but I don't want to take up an awful lot of time.

R. Haass: Mike?

Michael O'Hanlon: I'll just quickly say that I think it's pointless to try to say it's all one thing or another, Andrew, and I sort of wish you had made that argument because my guess is you could have convinced some of your interlocutors, perhaps not in China, but certainly in Japan. I talked to a lot of Japanese about these sorts of issues. They don't have the same instincts we do, but they are not unsympathetic, in many cases, at least, once the argument is presented. And I think that if you try to assess the mood of the American public, and why in the end Bill Clinton could talk about putting 750 American airplanes in the Balkans and talking possibly about a ground war, the reason why I think he could have done that within the American body politic is partly because of values. So, I see no point in the end of trying to say it's all one thing or another. And my guess is that a lot of Asians are sympathetic to that argument, even if they don't have the same basic approach to foreign policy and humanitarian intervention that we do.

R. Haass: Yes ma'am.

Question: Meg Vess [ph] from GAO. I have a question for Mr. O'Hanlon. You mentioned that this was a validation of the Powell Doctrine. However, do you foresee—would you recommend any changes to either doctrine or training based on Kosovo, despite it being a validation of the Powell Doctrine?

M. O'Hanlon: It's a very good question. I think I'll just comment on one specific issue, which is the Army. And as we all know, the Army, General Clarke's arguments notwithstanding, got a pretty bad rap for the way in which it was not prepared to use its helicopters and other assets in Kosovo very quickly. The Army has been brilliantly talking now about a transformation strategy, which it says is now possible because of technology. I would argue it's necessary because of geo-politics. It's not an issue of technology, it's a question of strategy. We're a little over prepared for wars that are fought near major ports, and we're not as good at getting inland. And so I think the Army does have get a little bit lighter, with not relying just on a second airborne program with light infantry. And, so that would be my main argument. If the Army's doing the right thing but for largely the wrong reasons, but at least it is realizing it has to get lighter even while it stays lethal.

R. Haass: Sir.

Question:—at the Washington Times. I was wondering, both presentations seemed to say that Milosevic still has this enormous capacity to do mischief in the region. Was it a realistic goal to try and get rid of him in the war and a failure of the operation that he's still in power a year later?

I. Daalder: No, I agree with General Clark that it was not either or intention or our mission to get rid of him. And I don't think that you ought to look at the result of this campaign in terms of whether or not he's there. You can look at the result of our efforts to get rid of him and call them a failure, which is true, but then the kind of means we're prepared as a nation to bring to bear on these kinds of questions are limited by the risks that this kind of operation entails. You're not going to get rid of him by supporting an opposition that is both incompetent and corrupt when it comes to the democratization of Serbia. And I don't think that the war in and of itself was designed to get rid of Milosevic as the final point—it was to get his forces out, and we did that, and in a rather quick, in the end, and successful manner, despite the fact that in the first month or so we failed.

R. Haass: More generally, I think a number of crises over the last decade show that limited applications in military force, which I would include Kosovo, are notoriously poor was to effect the sort of specific political change you're talking about. If you're serious about getting rid of somebody, you better be prepared to do what we did in Panama, or in Haiti, which essentially is complete occupation and then complete re-engineering of another society. But essentially anything short of that, unless you get lucky, you cannot use, you cannot use military force to bring about that sort of specific political change.

Yes, ma'am, all the way in the back.

Question: [Off-mic and inaudible]

R. Haass: Can you just wait for the microphone for a second?

Question: Sonya Donova [ph] with the East Central European Scholarship Program. My question to you would be are you concerned of the possibility that the support and the arms which the KLA has received, and its presence in Albania and in Macedonia might have given rise to a new danger of a greater Albania, having contained the greater Serbian threat that now we have a new potential, that of a greater Albania being in the formation. Thank you.

I. Daalder: No. I'm not. I think, for two reasons. One is the kind of support that the KLA has gotten, which has mostly been through the Albanian diaspora, has been quite limited compared to what the greater Serbian aspirations have. And secondly, as long as the United States and its NATO allies, in fact 85 percent of the NATO allies being Europeans, remain in Kosovo, I don't think the KLA is going to be able to take over that part of the world, despite its attempts, despite it's nefarious behavior and its involvement in things that we don't necessarily like. It is a small group of people that over time will become smaller because it doesn't—it can't deliver the basic needs, the basic needs of the Albanian people, be they in Kosovo or outside of Kosovo. So, the answer is, no, I'm not that worried as long as we remain militarily and politically engaged in this part of the world.

R. Haass: Sir.

Question:—Ivo Daalder, I'd like to ask could you comment on the reluctance in Congress for a continued American presence in Kosovo and what its consequences might be if Congress really votes against continued presence?

R. Haass: Please, don't answer that in Dutch, by the way?

I. Daalder: Why not? It's easier. I think, I mean, the vote in the Senate, ten days ago now or even long than that, I thought was deeply disturbing, even the outcome—53 to 47 is not a ringing endorsement of a continued military presence in the Balkans, when that military presence constitutes only 15 percent of the total. And if it were true, as many in Congress seem to assume, that we are there and the Europeans are not, that we are paying the bill and the Europeans are not, then I can understand that sentiment.

But when the United States Senate, led by two of its senior members, introduces a bill that says that we should get out because we're carrying 15 percent of the burden, I get worried And I think that we are not out of the woods yet, at all, on the question of whether the Congress is going to vote in the future on this issue. And if we do withdraw because of a Congressional vote, I think many in Europe are going to ask the question not only about what the United States is willing to do in the Balkans but what is it willing to do in the rest of Europe. And that is not a decision and a discussion that I think would serve the American interests or would be one that is pleasant when it really comes out in the end, which is one of the reasons probably why we got still 53 senators, although only 15 Republicans, which is worrisome in and of itself there, as well.

But it is clearly a sign that things are, that, one, that we need a little bit more information about what it is that the United States is doing in the Balkans, which is not only small but appropriate—appropriately small, but it's also appropriate that we're doing 15 percent. This is not something we just want the Europeans necessarily to do. We ought to contribute in the way that we have, and it is perfectly, perfectly rational that we remain engaged for the foreseeable future.

R. Haass: We have time for about one or two more. Pete.

Question: General Clark gave a fairly strong defense of the importance of the political decisions in terms of, in terms of the military strategy and targeting and so on. And my—it's a two-part question—one is looking back, a military question to Mike, how much frustration was there in the U.S. military about that political decision making? And then the second part of the question is taking a look down the road to anybody who wants to answer—the media during the war was filled with leaks and of grumbling of you can't find a war with a committee, you know, 19 members vetoing every target, et cetera. What is the U.S. military likely to conclude from this down the road? Do they want to fight this kind of a committee war down the road, or are they more likely to go it alone because of the frustrations—or, or how does it look down the road?

M. O'Hanlon: We'll start with your first question, Peter, and I'm glad you asked it. In this case, I would actually be somewhat critical of the U.S. military because I think there was, and we made this argument in the book, there was a certain bias against further intervention in the Balkans. Now, this was not something that led to insubordination, but it did lead to a lack of enthusiasm for thinking through all the details of this conflict and how it might unfold. That did not extend to NATO. NATO's planning committee did look at a number of options, as we saw earlier from General Clark's presentation.

Within the Pentagon, you had a reluctance to want to get involved because there was the sense of the force already working too hard, and that's why people continue to use this word, degrade—let's attack for a few days, degrade his force, and declare victory. And I believe that actually the quality of military advice, we don't have the kind of archival documentation or interview access to the Pentagon that we wanted on this, but my guess is the quality of Pentagon advice was not very high because there was a reluctance to get involved. And I think you saw that when the president could state on the first night of the war we will physically prevent Milosevic from conducting ethnic cleansing with air power, which is such an obvious absurdity to make that claim that I can't believe he was getting as blunt advice as he really needed.

M. Elliott: I second all of that, and would add to it, indeed, that I think some of the grumbling about the fighting, fighting a war by a committee of 19, has continued since the war, and it has been well sourced through extremely influential people in the Pentagon, and I'm pretty fed up with it, to tell you the truth. I mean, NATO is an alliance of democracies. It's been in existence for 50 years. It hasn't always had 19 members, but everyone knows the ground rules of fighting a war that is controlled by 19 democracies which have, which have domestic constituencies to satisfy. In fact, a NATO structure that had an American commander-in-chief, a German head of the military committee, a Spanish general secretary of NATO, and I would add, a lot of political leadership from the British prime minister—did extremely well in the spring of 1999. And if people in the armed forces of this country or any other country for that matter are not prepared to put up with the degree of mess and muddle that necessarily follows political direction by the representatives of an alliance of democracies, then I suggest they're in the wrong line of business.

I. Daalder: I wanted to add also, General Clark started to answer factually in one of the questions he had on targeting—I think it's very important to understand that from a military perspective that this was not a war by committee. This was a war by a single command chain. That none of the targets, not one target, was ever sent to the NAC for approval by the Icelandic ambassador or the Luxembourg ambassador.

There were three countries that demanded and got the right to review certain sets of targets. One of those countries was the United States. The other one was France, which contributed the second largest proportion of the aircraft, and the third was Britain when it came to the question of U.S. aircraft flying out from British soil. And the British prime minister, as the British prime minister has with regard to nuclear weapons, ever since nuclear weapons were deployed in Britain, said that he wanted to have the right to review the targets that were being hit by those aircraft.

I think it is not only understandable, it is wholly appropriate that politically elected leaders, as General Clark said, review and approve targets when we're hitting downtown Belgrade, or Montenegro, as the case was, or particularly sensitive targets whose destruction may cause large-scale collateral damage. But the Dutch prime minister didn't have that right, and the Luxembourg prime minister, and in fact, the chancellor of Germany didn't have that right, or the prime minister of Italy.

So, the whole notion that this was a war by committee is just pure nonsense. And anybody who argues, as in fact the senior air force commander has, that this somehow was, that somehow the French president intervening in this process put at risk NATO soldiers and NATO airmen is just wrong.

R. Haass: Since everyone's responded to that, let me just say two things. There's a pattern in this country to criticize multilateralism when we ourselves are unwilling to essentially lead. And to use Mike Elliott's point, things tend to get more messy and more muddled when the United States is a reluctant leader. And one of the reasons this war was as messy as it was, diplomatically and militarily, is the United States could not decide often what it wanted and when it could decide it was not very strong in promoting its aims. So, we have largely ourselves to blame. And I'd say this is true of other areas where the U.N. has often taken the hit—whether it's Rwanda, Sierra Leone, or other places—it's more, I think the criticism belongs much more in Washington than it does at the regional or global level.

There is though, coming back to the second half of Pete's question, though, I think it does raise real questions of whether a group of 19, or if and when NATO continues to enlarge can really be the operational body for war-fighting, particularly when the interests at stake are less than vital. And I would suggest not. And I think the future is not so much NATO goes to war but if NATO's involved, NATO becomes something of a holding company and those members of the organization who wish to go to war and have the means to go to war will. But the idea of NATO being a traditional alliance going to war with all 19, and you know, in the future 28 or however many countries participating, I think is an idea that is unlikely to come to pass.

Let me ask my panelists, the three panelists here, if they want to say anything in closing. And why don't we reverse it. Is there anything that they've said, they've heard said, they want a disagreement, or anything they wish they had said, or anything they wish they had said differently.

M. Elliott: Following on from John Berry—my ex-colleague, John Berry's interesting question to you, I was, I was intrigued and surprised and would like to more about the presentation, about the conviction in General Clark's presentation that there was a credible ground threat and that there was likely to be a ground war by the fall. I blinked once or twice at that.

I. Daalder: Anybody have the book? I think it's page—

R. Haass: Good. Ivo.

M. Elliott: All right, I'll check it out.

I. Daalder: No, I'm—I think, other than—actually, let me take issue with what Richard just said, because I think that, again, this is not a war of 19. Operation, it was a war with a single command structure. And if we have 22 members, there would be no difference in the way we would conduct a war. The real question then becomes on when and how one uses force and decides to go to war, and whether that decision is more difficult to be made at 22 than at 16 or 2.

And there, I would strongly support Richard's first argument, which is that if the United States has a clear sense of what it wants, it will be able to drag along the 18 or 24 or 29 other members in a mission that it believes is in the interest of the United States and of its allies. The problem occurs, as it always does, when we have a committee and it has no chairman, as was true in this particular case. Not only the United States at times not really clear about what it wanted to do, it was clear about what it didn't want to do, and that happened to be the wrong thing, like deploying ground forces when that was clearly required. It is when the United States does not lead that a committee becomes truly messy, but when it does lead, the committee really becomes, in fact, less important.

R. Haass: Up here were are not a committee. I am the moderator, so I am in charge. And what I really want to do is thank you all for your endurance and your interest. I want to thank Mike Elliott for traveling down here to join us. And I want to commend to you this new book by Ivo Daalder and Mike O'Hanlon called Winning Ugly. It is not an ugly read. It is a good read. Indeed, for a Brookings book, pardon me for saying so, it is a surprisingly good read. It's anything but your, what you might expect is a wonky book. It is eminently readable. It is eminently well researched. And it is well worth your while. It will be—it is, and will remain, I believe, for some time to come, the authoritative book on diplomacy and the battle aspects of Kosovo.

So, thank you three, and thank you all.

[END OF EVENT]