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1999
[H.A.S.C. No. 106–12]
UNITED STATES AND NATO MILITARY OPERATIONS AGAINST THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA
HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
HEARING HELD
APRIL 28, 1999
Page 2 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 1 Of 2HOUSE COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
One Hundred Sixth Congress
FLOYD D. SPENCE, South Carolina, Chairman
BOB STUMP, Arizona
DUNCAN HUNTER, California
JOHN R. KASICH, Ohio
HERBERT H. BATEMAN, Virginia
JAMES V. HANSEN, Utah
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania
JOEL HEFLEY, Colorado
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey
STEVE BUYER, Indiana
TILLIE K. FOWLER, Florida
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
JAMES TALENT, Missouri
TERRY EVERETT, Alabama
ROSCOE G. BARTLETT, Maryland
HOWARD ''BUCK'' McKEON, California
J.C. WATTS, Jr., Oklahoma
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas
JOHN N. HOSTETTLER, Indiana
SAXBY CHAMBLISS, Georgia
Page 3 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 1 Of 2VAN HILLEARY, Tennessee
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida
WALTER B. JONES, Jr., North Carolina
LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JIM RYUN, Kansas
BOB RILEY, Alabama
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada
MARY BONO, California
JOSEPH PITTS, Pennsylvania
ROBIN HAYES, North Carolina
STEVEN KUYKENDALL, California
DONALD SHERWOOD, Pennsylvania
IKE SKELTON, Missouri
NORMAN SISISKY, Virginia
JOHN M. SPRATT, Jr., South Carolina
SOLOMON P. ORTIZ, Texas
OWEN PICKETT, Virginia
LANE EVANS, Illinois
GENE TAYLOR, Mississippi
NEIL ABERCROMBIE, Hawaii
MARTIN T. MEEHAN, Massachusetts
ROBERT A. UNDERWOOD, Guam
PATRICK J. KENNEDY, Rhode Island
ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
Page 4 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 1 Of 2SILVESTRE REYES, Texas
TOM ALLEN, Maine
VIC SNYDER, Arkansas
JIM TURNER, Texas
ADAM SMITH, Washington
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
JAMES H. MALONEY, Connecticut
MIKE McINTYRE, North Carolina
CIRO D. RODRIGUEZ, Texas
CYNTHIA A. McKINNEY, Georgia
ELLEN O. TAUSCHER, California
ROBERT BRADY, Pennsylvania
ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
MIKE THOMPSON, California
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut
Andrew K. Ellis, Staff Director
Thomas Donnelly, Professional Staff Member
Michelle Spencer, Research Assistant
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
Page 5 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 1 Of 2CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF HEARINGS
1999
HEARING:
Wednesday, April 28, 1999, United States and NATO Military Operations Against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
APPENDIX:
Wednesday, April 28, 1999
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 28, 1999
UNITED STATES AND NATO MILITARY OPERATIONS AGAINST THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA
STATEMENTS PRESENTED BY MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
Skelton, Hon. Ike, a Representative from Missouri, Ranking Member, Committee on Armed Services
Spence, Hon. Floyd D., a Representative from South Carolina, Chairman, Committee on Armed Services
Page 6 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 1 Of 2WITNESSES
Cohen, Dr. Eliot, Director of Strategic Studies, School for Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Killebrew, Col. Robert, USA (Ret.), Former Director, Army After Next Program
Link, Maj. Gen. Charles, USAF (Ret.), President, Air Force Memorial Foundation
Nash, Maj. Gen. Bill, USA (Ret.), Director, Civil-Military Programs, National Democratic Institute for International Affairs
Summers, Col. Harry, USA (Ret.), Military Analyst and Columnist, Author, On Strategy
Van Riper, Lt. Gen. Paul, USMC (Ret.), Former Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps, (Command, Control, and Communications)
APPENDIX
PREPARED STATEMENTS:
Cohen, Dr. Eliot A.
Page 7 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 1 Of 2Killebrew, Col. Robert
Link, Maj. Gen. Charles D.
Spence, Hon. Floyd D.
DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD:
The Mystique of U.S. Air Power
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House of Representatives,
Committee on Armed Services,
Washington, DC, Wednesday, April 28, 1999.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 10:20 a.m. in room 2118, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Floyd Spence (chairman of the committee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. FLOYD D. SPENCE, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM SOUTH CAROLINA, CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
The CHAIRMAN. The meeting will please be in order. I apologize for the delay in opening the meeting. We have had a vote and it delayed the meeting. Many of our Members will be coming along presently.
Today the committee continues its focus on the issue of the war in Kosovo. NATO is one month into Operation Allied Force and the air campaign has not yet achieved the Alliance's objectives. This lack of tangible progress and the continuing disconnect between the Alliance's stated objectives and the military means being employed has led some to advocate openly for the introduction of ground forces into Yugoslavia.
I remain strongly opposed to the commitment of United States ground troops in the Balkans under any circumstances. However, I also believe that this committee has an obligation to explore, debate, and, I hope, better understand the implications of a ground campaign in the event that the Alliance goes down that path.
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At the same time, the committee also has the opportunity and obligation to examine the advantages and the limits of using air power in an effort to compel Serbian behavior, both political and military, on the ground. To help us in this effort, we will hear from two panels today. First we will hear from a group of distinguished retired officers and analysts who will discuss the conduct of the air war to date and the many operational and technical issues associated with the air-only strategy. These experts are retired Air Force Major General Charles Link, who, in addition to a long and distinguished operational career, also led the Air Force's efforts on the Quadrennial Defense Review; and retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, one of the Marine Corps' leading thinkers and former Assistant Commandant for Command, Control, and Communications, whose wife is from my home state of South Carolina, I might add parenthetically. Dr. Eliot Cohen, director of the Air Force's Gulf War Air Power Survey and professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
I have asked our witnesses to give us an assessment of the air campaign to date, to compare it to similar air campaigns, especially air operations during Operation Desert Storm, and to discuss the strength and limitations of air power as a tool to help the Alliance meet its objectives.
Later in the hearing, we will hear from a second panel of expert witnesses who have been asked to discuss the implications of a ground war in the Balkans. I hope our witnesses can provide us with their insights into the numerous tactical and operational issues involved with the conduct of a ground campaign in the Balkans, as well as discuss the considerable risks associated with such a campaign.
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Joining us later will be retired Army Major General Bill Nash, who commanded the First Armored Division during the first deployment of United States ground forces to Bosnia in 1995 and who commanded an armor brigade several years earlier in the Gulf War; and retired Army Colonel Bob Killebrew, who spent most of his career as a commander and planner in the 18th Airborne Corps, the Army's premier rapid deployment unit; and retired Army Colonel Harry Summers, author of the book On Strategy, and a frequent columnist and commentator on military affairs. I welcome all of our witnesses to the committee today.
Over the past weeks and months, we have spent a great deal of time discussing and debating the administration's policies, diplomatic and military, in the Balkans. The policy debate should and will obviously continue. In fact, the House today will spend most of its time and perhaps tomorrow debating the growing involvement we have in the Balkans.
In setting up today's hearings, I have attempted to temporarily set aside the policy debate and focus on more detailed implications of military action to date and possible military actions in the future.
Before turning to our witnesses, I would first like to recognize the committee's distinguished Ranking Democrat, Mr. Skelton, for any opening remarks he would like to make.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Spence can be found in the appendix on page 56.]
Page 11 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2STATEMENT OF HON. IKE SKELTON, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM MISSOURI, RANKING MEMBER, COMMITTEE ON ARMED SERVICES
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Let me take this opportunity also to welcome the panel of distinguished military experts. It is good to see familiar faces once again.
As the Chairman mentioned, the purpose of this hearing is to discuss operations and tactics so that the Members of this committee and the Congress as a whole might better understand the conduct of NATO military operations in Kosovo. In addition, we want to examine the various scenarios that might involve a ground campaign.
Again, if I may, Mr. Chairman, I want to commend you on this ongoing effort to keep Congress informed about the events taking place in the Balkans. Under the Constitution, we should play a vital role in any policy that involves U.S. military operations. This hearing will help Congress meet its responsibilities.
It has been said that our success in the Gulf War has led Americans to expect quick, decisive, and low-risk military operations. At our last hearing on April the 15th, Secretary Cohen and General Shelton correctly cautioned that our operations in the Balkans were risky and that we should be preparing for casualties, something we have thankfully avoided so far.
I take this opportunity to raise a further caution. We must have patience with the current air campaign.
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When I traveled to Europe with Secretary Cohen earlier this month, General Clark told us that many more important targets are left. History teaches us that we should have a thorough bombing campaign to degrade Milosevic's military, even if it lasts for several months. The air campaign alone might be enough, but even if ground troops become necessary later they should not be introduced until the air campaign has been completed. This is what General Schwarzkopf did in the Gulf War. This is what we failed to do at the Pacific island of Tarawa in 1943.
Ending this tragedy in Kosovo and protecting stability in Europe is crucial to America's national interest. Twice this century Americans in uniform have gone to Europe to fight wars against tyranny and did so, as we recall, successfully. As free and moral nations, the United States and its NATO allies have a responsibility to end the atrocities being committed in Yugoslavia and to prevent this violence from spreading to neighboring countries. We must prune into President Milosevic's policy of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
We should do whatever it takes to win. Failure by NATO to defeat Milosevic would weaken NATO and create serious political and military consequences for the future. The credibility of NATO is at stake; and if we fail, European stability would be compromised for years to come.
Mr. Chairman, yesterday I was visited in my office by two gentlemen who were members of the administration of Missouri's President Harry S. Truman. There are not many members of the Truman administration left. Maybe only a half dozen or so. They talked to me about President Truman's many foreign policy accomplishments, particularly in NATO. NATO provided a security framework that allowed for peace and stability in Europe for the last half of the 20th Century, and American involvement was critical. It marked a reversal of historical American isolationism.
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President Truman, who had that quality that we called vision, knew in the wake of World War II that America must be engaged in the world. We could no longer retreat behind our borders.
Now as we approach the beginning of the 21st Century, the need for American engagement is no less critical. Current military operations in the Balkans are a critical test of NATO's ability to maintain peace and maintain stability in Europe. It is a test, Mr. Chairman, that we must not fail.
I am looking forward to hearing from our two panels and receiving their thoughts on NATO military operations in the Balkans, and I thank you for this opportunity.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, Mr. Skelton.
Without objection, our witnesses' prepared statements will be submitted for the record along with any accompanying materials.
General Link, the floor is yours, followed by General Van Riper, and Dr. Cohen batting cleanup.
STATEMENT OF MAJ. GEN. CHARLES LINK, USAF (RET.), PRESIDENT, AIR FORCE MEMORIAL FOUNDATION
General LINK. Mr. Chairman, Members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for this opportunity to come before the committee to comment on NATO military operations being carried out in Kosovo.
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When President Clinton announced the NATO decision to intervene in Kosovo, he said the NATO mission would consist of air strikes which would serve to, one, demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's opposition to aggression; two, deter President Milosevic from continuing and escalating his attacks in Kosovo; and, three, to damage Serbia's capacity to wage war in the future.
Unfortunately, President Clinton also saw fit to assure the American people that he did not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war. In addition to providing the Serbian dictator with ill-advised insights into our military plan and the possibly tentative nature of our commitment there, the President's remark created the impression that what we were about to do was simply not quite war.
Of the President's three objectives, the first two have more to do with diplomacy than with military action. Demonstrating the seriousness of NATO's opposition and deterring Milosevic from continuing and escalating his attacks in Kosovo are dependent on the perceptions and discretion of the enemy. Such objectives are difficult to measure. Like other functions of traditional diplomacy, demonstrating seriousness and deterring involve some sort of communication. One side sends a message, in this case with bombs, then listens for a response from the other side.
In Kosovo, from the start, military action has been used to send diplomatic signals. In this case, air power has been employed in a slowly escalating series of attacks, a gradualism, an approach that has failed in the past.
Page 15 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2The fundamental flaw in such an approach is the extent to which the enemy is ceded the initiative. Only the enemy can make the decision to react or not to react. A secondary but still significant flaw is a fundamental function of human nature. In limited attacks, the enemy is permitted the time to adjust to his new circumstances gradually, both psychologically and physically.
On the other hand, the third objective, damaging Serbia's capacity to wage war in the future, suggests direct military action; but it is framed in subjective language, open to further interpretation.
A more precise approach here would have been to state the objective in terms of destroying Serbia's capacity to wage war on its people and its neighbors. For example, an objective in the Gulf War was to eliminate Iraqi capacity to threaten its neighbors.
A clear military objective would have been well suited to an effectively prosecuted air campaign because of the inherent qualities of modern aerospace capabilities. In particular, the unique marriage of American technology and operational aerospace competence have produced truly revolutionary military capabilities, the characteristics of speed, range, lethality and precision, combined with surveillance, stealth and stand-off to create extraordinary asymmetrical advantages over an enemy not so equipped.
In the case of Kosovo, such precious advantages have been squandered in the imprecise or tentative approach imposed on the military commander by NATO's 19 political leaders. By viewing Operation Allied Force as an exercise in diplomatic signaling, and not as a state of war, NATO has failed to lend the necessary purpose to focus its military efforts. By avoiding the issue of being at war, NATO leaders have also managed to avoid the serious thinking that would lead us to a deeper understanding of the risks versus gains of various courses of action or inaction.
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The most crippling effect of the nonwar attitude may be the resulting command structure, or lack thereof. When our forces are committed on the ground, we somehow know we are at war. We expect to see a ground force commander who will apply his hard-earned skills and special expertise to lead his forces to accomplish the mission. His ground-force competence is drawn upon to ensure that the best tactics, doctrine, and strategy are brought to bear.
We depend on his judgment to tell us when the mission is not worth the risk, when his forces face greater than reasonable dangers, or when unforeseen opportunities present themselves. We also expect him to consider and suggest the best ways to connect the military means under his command to the stated policy goals.
Now consider the present circumstances. Because NATO chose to employ only air strikes, there is a sense that we are not really at war. Instead of turning to a competent air commander, as we did in the Gulf War, targets are being selected by a committee of 19, none of whom possess any particular competence with regard to air campaigns. The military airmen involved in Operation Allied Force have been relegated to simply servicing targets.
Now, most recently, this situation has been even further complicated by the addition of another 3-star officer, an Army officer, to command the 24 Apache helicopters which have been deployed in support of the air campaign. So we have one 3-star officer in Vicenza commanding most of the air assets and another 3-star officer commanding 24 Apache helicopters. A valuable and universally acclaimed lesson of the Gulf War about unity of command over air operations is being discarded.
Page 17 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2This confusion about air strikes and war is compounded by the now characteristic confusion over the roles and responsibilities of the executive and legislative branches in the act of committing U.S. forces to combat. Since we do not have to contemplate our actions under the serious label of war, we are free to focus excessively on the means as opposed to the ends of our activity, on the process as opposed to the objective.
The means discussed here have revolved around the decision to use air power only and to avoid any use of ground forces. Traditionally, as you know, we have emphasized the powerful synergies of warfare, the simultaneous application of land, sea, and air capabilities. What has changed in recent years is the relationship between air power and land power.
In the Gulf War, modern air power created the conditions that gave coalition land forces an overwhelming advantage. An air campaign preceded a ground campaign, a significant departure from the way we had been training and planning throughout the Cold War period.
Since the Gulf War, we have had to consider air power as an option.
It is important to understand military options in terms of their relative values. While the air power option may not be the perfect solution to any particular military problem, it often may be the preferred approach of all those available. Today, the air power option permits NATO to attack and destroy Milosevic's military capability while minimizing risk to friendly forces. It is not surprising to see political leaders choose an air-power-only approach at a time when their sons and daughters might be thrust into harm's way on somebody else's behalf.
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Too often, when we think of our sons and daughters at war, we see them in the role of ground forces. Today our sons and daughters are at war, in the air. They are placing their lives at risk and taking the lives of those they have been ordered to attack. Despite our impatience with the current pace of operations, we should not overlook the magnificent job they are doing and have been doing in the skies over Kosovo and Serbia. We should be proud of each and every one of them and of all those who provide and support the superb systems they are employing.
Having said that, it should be noted that the operation in Kosovo began much too tentatively. Given the political constraints that were imposed, this operation should not be construed as an air campaign in the sense of what is militarily feasible today. To take a lesson on the limitations of air power from this experience to date would miss a much more important point. We, America and our Alliance and coalition partners, are still learning how to use these new military tools; how to connect them more effectively to policy goals; how to formulate policy goals which are made possible by these tools themselves. This is where we need greater attention on the part of policymakers, military planners, and commanders.
At present, we find ourselves involved in a chess game in which our opening moves have been badly played. By initially precluding options and limiting our level of effort, we gave our plainly inferior opponent the idea that he could achieve his ends by forcing a stalemate. We certainly can still win; but victory will require more time, more military, and more patience on our part.
Thank you, sir.
Page 19 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2The CHAIRMAN. Thank you, General.
[The prepared statement of Maj. Gen. Link can be found in the appendix on page 62.]
The CHAIRMAN. General.
STATEMENT OF LT. GEN. PAUL VAN RIPER, USMC (RET.), FORMER ASSISTANT COMMANDANT OF THE MARINE CORPS, (COMMAND, CONTROL, AND COMMUNICATIONS)
General VAN RIPER. Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members, ladies and gentlemen, when I last appeared in this room a year and a half ago, before retiring after some 40 years of active service with the United States Marine Corps, I thought it would be the last appearance. I welcome the opportunity and appreciate being able to come before the committee on this important matter this morning.
In 1996, Major General Robert Scales and myself began to talk about the future of warfare. At the time, he was heading up the Army-after-next project in the Army's training and doctrine command, and I was the commanding general of the Marine Corps' Combat Development Command. We decided it was an important subject which deserved serious consideration. So we assembled distinguished historians, retired and serving officers, and defense thinkers, and held a series of discussions over more than a year.
The product of those discussions and that analysis was a white paper that later appeared under the title ''Preparing for War in the 21st Century,'' in Strategic Review and Parameters.
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It was to be a counter to those of the high technology persuasion.
As we went through this discussion and debate, we looked at two recent periods of American history, two periods that were very different. The first was from the close at World War II, up and through the Vietnam War. The second was post-Vietnam through Desert Storm. If we go back to that period of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the Nation's military policy was based on a new look, which postulated that strategic nuclear weapons would replace conventional forces.
One observer at the time described it, I quote, the American yearning for some simple, single solution to all the bothersome and frustrating complexities of living in a world of perennial conflict.
We were introduced not only in terms of weapons acquisition, but on to the battlefield the principles that Mr. McNamara brought of systems engineering and introduced these solutions to operational and tactical problems.
The damage to needed military capabilities were long lasting and we saw the results, unfortunately, in Korea and even more so in Vietnam.
Those of the generation that I and Major General Link represent came out of Vietnam committed to never seeing this happen to our Nation again, and there was a renaissance. It was a renaissance of thinking.
We went back to the study of war from the first principle through the eyes of Clausewitz, through the methodology of history. And what we saw take place in the late seventies and throughout the 1980s, which—I see Mr. Skelton there, he certainly was a contributor to professional military education of our officers and prodding us on to do this, and we came to understand the true nature of war.
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This was the secret to the success in Desert Storm, as much as the high-tech weapons, precision-guided munitions, the well-trained and highly qualified soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
I am concerned today that we are returning to that period of the 1950s and the 1960s. It is not the new look, but it is called the new way of war. In one of our service documents, the New View of Conflict, the microprocessor, the chip, all it brings, has replaced nuclear weapons as the cure-all, the single silver bullet. And we hear terms like dominant battlefield awareness, sensor to shooter, long range precision strikes, that are supposed to eliminate the need to ever close with and destroy an enemy.
Despite our experience, the possibility of a fix for the challenges of war has shown astonishing persistence. I would like to quote from a paragraph, two paragraphs, from the white paper that Bob Scales and I authored, that I think get to the essence of the situation we have today.
''U.S. military policy remains imprisoned in an unresolved dialectic between history and technology, between those for whom the past is prologue and those for whom it is irrelevant.'' Today's debate about the preferred structure of American military forces thus, in the end, is a debate about the future of war itself. The debate goes far beyond which weapon to buy or whether to favor this or that capability. At its heart, rarely considered and even less articulated are fundamentally incompatible views about the nature of war, about the conditions to produce victory and defeat, indeed, how one should define these concepts, and ultimately about the purpose for which we maintain military forces in the first place.
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For those placing unbridled faith in technology, war is a predictable, if disorderly, phenomenon; defeat, a matter of simple cost-benefit analysis; and the effectiveness of any military capability, a finite calculus of targets destroyed and casualties inflicted. History paints a very different picture.
Real war is an inherently uncertain enterprise in which chance, friction, and the limitations of the human mind under stress profoundly limit our ability to predict outcomes; in which defeat, to have any meaning, must be inflicted, above all, in the minds of the defeated; and in which the ultimate purpose of military power is to assure that a trial-at-arms, should it occur, delivers an unambiguous political verdict.
Mr. Chairman, Members, though I agree with the major general's analysis of the situation, I fundamentally and strongly disagree with his conclusions as to why we have arrived at this state today, and I look forward to the opportunity to expound on those views.
I would like to close by saying nothing that I say and certainly other panel members say is meant to demean or disparage the fine soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines. They are skilled and dedicated and courageous as any this Nation has ever produced. Though I would prefer to speak of the doctrine and concepts, I will let the Members draw their own conclusions because I don't believe it is the role of retired officers to critique the performance of those now serving. If asked directly, I will offer personal opinions and observations about the current situation. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Cohen.
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STATEMENT OF DR. ELIOT COHEN, DIRECTOR OF STRATEGIC STUDIES, SCHOOL FOR ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
Dr. COHEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Chairman, Members of the committee, I want to thank you for inviting me here today to discuss the role of air power in the war with the former Yugoslavia; if I could, I would like to pay particular tribute to Mr. Skelton, who served on the review board for the Gulf War Air Power Survey, which I directed. He held us to very high standards of integrity and accuracy; and as a result, I think, the work was considerably more valuable.
With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to supplement my testimony with a copy of an article that I published some 5 years ago that summarized the work of the Gulf War air power survey, that adds some further reflections on air power which upon rereading I think remains relevant to our situation today.
[The information referred to can be found in the appendix on page 74.]
Dr. COHEN. Let me begin by offering some comparisons between where we are today in the war in Yugoslavia and where we were at a comparable point in Desert Storm, with the caveat that, of course, the data that we have available for analysis of what is going on in Yugoslavia is considerably more scanty than what we know about Desert Storm.
What I thought I would do would be to offer you four different comparisons, comparisons of numbers of sorties and strikes, comparisons of numbers of aircraft and the weight of effort between the United States and its allies, some technological comparisons, and a comparison of the operational concept.
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Sorties and strikes. During the Gulf War, coalition aircraft flew something like 118,000 sorties over a period of something over 6 weeks. Some 42,000 of these were strike sorties, that is to say, attacks on discrete targets.
In roughly 5 weeks, NATO has flown something like 11,000 sorties, according to General Clark, of which approximately 4,400 have been strikes. If you do the arithmetic, that indicates that the level of effort that we are exerting in Yugoslavia is something like an eighth that of the Gulf War. Even allowing for the smaller size of the target, the increased use of precision guided weapons, the absence of a large fielded Army like that possessed by the Iraqis in Kuwait, the air effort that we are seeing in Yugoslavia remains a fraction and a rather small fraction of that of the Gulf War.
Number two, weight of responsibility and effort, number of aircraft. According to Pentagon statistics, the United States supplied something over 50 percent of the aircraft initially involved in Operation Allied Force, of which there were several hundred. This compares to a figure of about 1,800 American aircraft and perhaps 800 allied aircraft in Operation Desert Storm. With the additional reinforcements Operation Allied Force recently announced, my rough calculation, and it is quite rough, is that the United States will be supplying something like three-quarters of the air effort, which is roughly comparable to the effort that we provided in Desert Storm, although with less of an excuse, given the proximity of Western Europe to the Balkans and the stake that presumably the Europeans have there.
As in the Gulf, the United States provides virtually all of certain unique assets like the EA-6B aircraft for suppression of enemy air defenses and, of course, stealth aircraft such as the F-117 or the B-2.
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Technology. Unlike Desert Storm, the American portion of Allied Force has been almost entirely a precision weapon campaign. The same is not true, I hasten to point out, of our allies, with the exception of the British. Most of the allied effort, as far as I can tell, has been using dumb bombs.
The technologies used do not, in my judgment, represent a quantum change in type from the Gulf War, although new aircraft such as the B-2 have been used, which together with global positioning system aided munitions has made an important contribution to our ability to attack fixed targets in poor weather conditions, which is a major improvement. But by and large as one steps back, the technological leap was first visible in the Gulf; and one doesn't see a comparable leap between the Gulf War and today.
Fourthly and perhaps most importantly, the operational concept. The Desert Storm concept for air operations was initially devised by Colonel John Warden of the air staff. It involved a massive use of air power from the very outset of the war and simultaneous attacks on the integrated air defense system and major targets such as leadership and command and control. This plan evolved and matured in the 6 months leading up to the war, but these essential qualities remained.
By way of contrast, the Allied Force opened with sustained attacks on the enemy air defense system and only then broadened out to other target sets, and that is a process that continues today.
It is a far more incremental and even hesitant use of air power than we saw in 1991. The attacks on ground forces which consumed slightly more than 50 percent of all strikes in Desert Storm were directed in that war against large armored forces deployed in the desert, in generally good if not perfect weather conditions. Here, the ground forces being attacked are small, dispersed, concealed in villages, cities, and forests, shielded by hostages and cloaked by extremely poor weather conditions.
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To sum up, the air effort in the Balkans has been a fraction of that of Desert Storm, measured by virtually any standard. The technology employed is more sophisticated but not by a dramatic margin. The strategic object is different and more difficult, the higher direction of the war infinitely more diffuse and hence timid and incoherent; the operational concept incremental and very traditional.
Allocate responsibility for it as one will, one cannot escape the conclusion that Allied Force represents a poor use of air power, one which cannot and, indeed in my judgment, could not achieve the central objective with which this war began, namely, the rescue of the Kosovar Albanians from mass murder, rape, and deportation.
With your permission, Mr. Chairman, I would like to conclude my testimony by offering one suggestion for a practical step this committee might undertake. It seems to me that Congress, in its exercise of its oversight function, has an extremely important role to play not only in shaping the public debate about next steps but also in extracting lessons from what has already occurred. In particular, I hope that Congress will commission a formal, independent, rigorous and, if at all possible, unclassified study of Allied Force, which will examine such critical issues as the planning of the operation, the weight of American versus allied efforts, the command arrangements and the military advice solicited by and offered to civilian leaders.
Left to its own devices, the executive branch is highly unlikely to do this. Without such an honest accounting, however, the country will lose the benefit of what I suspect will be some uncomfortable but extremely important lessons about how we wage war at the dawn of a new century. Thank you.
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The CHAIRMAN. Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Cohen can be found in the appendix on page 65.]
The CHAIRMAN. Dr. Cohen, your suggestion, I think, is very good. As a matter of fact, we have been reading, on a daily basis different commentators' suggestions about what has happened that brought us to this place that we are right now. The negotiations that preceded all of our active military involvement, what could have been done there to bring about a peace settlement, the threats that finally culminated in air strikes and, in the views of a lot of people, in an untimely manner.
I know already we have heard from our military leaders in the Pentagon the advice that they gave the administration on this matter, and that helps to form some of my conclusions. For instance, the military advised the administration against ground troops in Yugoslavia unless there was a peace agreement and both sides invited us in as peacekeepers.
And relative to the air campaign, they advised the administration that they could bomb Yugoslavia but they couldn't bomb them to the peace table. Evidently, this advice was ignored and other things were ignored that went into the planning, whatever kind of planning there was. It would be very revealing to see if there was any planning in the details to which you refer. I think it is very important that we do this. But in the meantime, we have got to try to extract ourselves from a very difficult situation that we have gotten ourselves into, I think.
Page 28 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2Personally, I don't think we should have been there in the first place, for a number of reasons. We have got much more serious threats in the world today. If this is a threat to our national security, it does not rise to near the level of the threats we have otherwise in the world today, with weapons of mass destruction and all of these things that we have to contend with from the other sources we have threats emanating from. And we are unprepared, in my estimation, to defend against those threats.
This further jeopardizes our ability to do that, by getting involved in this other conflict we are involved in the Balkans right now. And quite frankly, the NATO situation has been raised on many occasions, the credibility of NATO is at stake now, and we can't afford to lose, even though we are involved. Of course, I think that is true. NATO cannot afford to lose now. Its credibility is at stake. I might add parenthetically, ours is, too. So the question is how do we get out of this thing.
I think back on our experience in Vietnam and that kept escalating along. The lessons we should have learned there looked like we haven't learned them yet and we are falling down that same path again. And I remember what happened back then, after getting so involved so much, losing so many lives, we finally voted to cut off funding. I couldn't believe it. I was here then. The Congress voted to cut off funding.
That resulted in those pictures of our people reaching for a ride on helicopters at the embassy trying to get out of there. Under those conditions, our military was forced to leave that battle because of what we did here in cutting off funding. So I don't want to see that kind of situation happen again. But there is a way out, I think. And I think that we can still have NATO get itself out of this situation that it shouldn't have gotten into in the first place, going against its charter and getting out-of-area, that was just overlooked in the process, dragging us along or we drug them along, quite frankly. The study is going to reveal in the future that we, this administration, got NATO into this situation, and then we used that as an excuse for us being involved militarily.
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We can still declare victory and negotiate a peace settlement. And NATO can take care of all of these refugees and the humanitarian crisis that has been brought about, partly in response to what we have helped to bring about, with the air campaign that we didn't foresee when we got into this mess. And NATO can save a lot of face by trying to take care of this crisis, the humanitarian crisis, and get out of it peacefully and learn a lesson, a big lesson, from it. That was just my thoughts about it, but I want to get yours. And so I will go to Mr. Skelton at this time.
Mr. SKELTON. Mr. Chairman, I will yield to the gentleman to my left my time.
Mr. SISISKY. Mr. Chairman, I will temporarily pass.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Reyes.
Mr. REYES. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. I am sorry. We jumped Mr. Taylor. We don't want to overlook Mr. Taylor.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I apologize for being out of my seat, but I was here when the gavel went down.
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General Link, in your prepared text you had some words in there that I think Members of Congress need to pay some attention to, and I certainly agree with the Chairman that I wish this had never happened, but a lot of things happen in our lives that we wish did not happen. So I am going to quote you, ''Today our sons and daughters are at war in the air. They are placing their lives at risk and taking the lives of those they have been ordered to attack. Despite our impatience with the current pace of operations, we should not overlook the magnificent job they have been doing and are doing in the skies over Kosovo and Serbia.''
Now, going on to quote you, ''At present, we find ourselves involved in a chess game in which our opening moves have been badly played. By initially precluding options and limiting our level of effort, we gave our plainly inferior opponent the idea that he could achieve his evil ends by forcing a stalemate. We certainly can still win; but victory will require more time, more military effort and more patience on our part.''
I want to ask each of you gentlemen, given the four options that are going to be voted on in Congress today, none of them can be amended and I am sure every one of us would write it a little bit differently if we could: Complete withdrawal, declare a war, continue the air strikes, and the fourth one escapes me; but if you were elected by your peers to be a Member of Congress how would you vote?
General Link, we will start with you.
General LINK. Sir, at this point I would vote to continue the air strikes; and if given any room there, I would vote to intensify the air strikes.
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Mr. TAYLOR. I have been advised by Congressman Skelton that the fourth is to prohibit the introduction of ground troops—ground elements. Excuse me, sir.
General Link, your vote would be?
General LINK. I would vote to continue; and if possible, intensify the level of air strikes. I would not vote for complete withdrawal. I would not vote to declare war at this point because it is too complicated a factor at this point.
We are operating as a member of a coalition which has declared war on our behalf. I think this is something we need to sort out in calmer times, how this operates. I don't think it is a good idea to leave unattended the situation in which the executive can commit forces in acts of war without broader consultation with the Congress.
On prohibiting land forces, I would not vote to support the prohibiting land forces. I can't imagine a conclusion to this effort without the introduction of some kind of security force in the Kosovo province.
Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, sir.
General.
General VAN RIPER. Mr. Congressman, I would vote for withdrawal. The object of war is to impose our will on the enemy, and war must serve policy. The means of war must meet the political ends. As I understand from the media, the ends of this war was to prevent ethnic cleansing. We have lost the war.
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Mr. TAYLOR. Thank you, sir.
General VAN RIPER. If we want to do something different, we need to step back and decide what are the ends we are trying to achieve? What are the ends, as the Chairman has indicated, this country needs and wants to pursue? If they are, we need to follow Clausewitz' dictum that you must have the Army, Armed Forces in general, the people, and the government all pulling in trace; and until we reach that condition we should not go to war.
Mr. TAYLOR. General, should that motion fail, the next vote is to declare war. How then would you vote?
General VAN RIPER. If that fails, I would reluctantly vote to go to war; and I would insist that we prosecute it as a war.
War entails all elements: Air, naval, and land. The strength of this country and its Armed Forces has always been combined arms, and any time we have tried to fight with a single element, we have met disaster.
Mr. TAYLOR. Dr. Cohen.
General VAN RIPER. Nathan Bedford Forrest said, ''War means fighting and fighting means killing.'' What we are seeing is what people wish war was, not what it is in reality. It is a terrible, bloody, dangerous business; and until this country and its leadership recognizes that and is willing to commit, we ought not to get engaged.
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Dr. COHEN. I suppose I am closer to General Link, although I think General Van Riper makes an important contribution when he is quite blunt in saying that a decision to withdraw or come to a settlement means confession that we lost the war. And we should think about what that means. I think the most important contribution I can make to your deliberations, because at the end of the day you will be making those decisions and not me, is that I think we should be very clear that any of the outcomes are bad and your unenviable task, it seems to me, is going to be to decide which is the least bad of all of these alternatives.
Now, at the end of the day, my conclusion is that the least bad alternative is for us to end up establishing some sort of protectorate over Kosovo, and the reason why I feel that way—
Mr. TAYLOR. That is not an option, Mr. Cohen. I laid out the four options.
Dr. COHEN. I understand.
Mr. TAYLOR. I asked you to address the four options.
Dr. COHEN. At the end of the day, the executive branch is going to run this thing. I would certainly not vote to withdraw. I don't think I would vote to go to war.
I think it would be a terrible mistake to have on the record a vote prohibiting the introduction of ground forces. The message that that sends to the other side and to everybody else in the world for that matter is dreadful. I also feel, as you know from my testimony, that air strikes are not going to finish this thing, or if they do finish them it will be at a cost that will not be acceptable to us.
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I would not have gotten involved in this war. Nobody asked me. I think it was begun in an extraordinarily irresponsible way, has been extraordinarily badly managed, and that is one of the reasons why I would like to see on the public record a documentation, an elaborate, scholarly, incontrovertible documentation, about how it all came about.
But being where we are now, it seems to me that the problem of letting this go is really threefold.
There is a humanitarian issue. We may feel differently about that.
The credibility issue is a huge one. I would remind you that as we look back on the Gulf War, one of the reasons why Saddam Hussein thought that he would be able to get away with it and why he thought down to the last moment that he could face us down was because of the experience of Beirut. There is documentation on the record in which he has given speeches, and so forth, and he is quite clear about that. He said the Americans took a couple hundred killed and they left and they will do the same thing here.
Now, the Gulf War turned out quite well from our point of view on the whole. Of course, we did take casualties; but the point is that credibility is a real thing. If the record that we put out there for people to see, which will be the record of the United States, not the record of the Clinton administration, fairly or not, is that the United States is willing to go to war, but is not willing to take any casualties; that the United States and its allies are willing to make firm, resolute, uncompromising declarations of what their intentions are and then back down that the United States will allow itself to be defeated, and again I think General Van Riper has been quite forthright in saying it is a defeat; that we will allow ourselves to be defeated by a country whose gross national product is one-twelfth the size of our defense budget. That is something that will reverberate around the world and not just for months but for years and more than years, and I have a terrible feeling that we will pay for it in some other quarter.
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And as I said, I don't think any of the outcomes are good. I think all of the outcomes are bad, and the only question really is which is the least bad.
Mr. TAYLOR. Would you vote for any of the least bad options?
Dr. COHEN. I would vote against withdrawal, and I would vote against a declaration of war, and I would probably vote against prohibiting the introduction of ground forces. I am not sure, on the other hand, that I would care to go on record as saying that a continued air war is really going to bring this thing to a successful conclusion because I am not sure that I believe that. So I would probably abstain on that one.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Buyer.
Mr. BUYER. I thank you gentlemen for being here today. I have a couple of comments and then a question.
First comments are based on my own observation when I traveled over there to Europe with the Secretary of Defense. And I was doing some extensive reading, not only there but on the way back, of the histories of the Balkans, not only with the German occupation but starting from the Crusades.
I can summarize the thousands of pages in about one sentence. A bad situation always gets worse in the Balkans when there is an outside intervening source. That is my personal observation from thousands of pages. So I will save those who don't want to read a thousand pages some time. That concerns me because I don't want to repeat history.
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The other thing that concerns me is the total mismatch between political rhetoric, NATO's political objectives, and the military use of force. To the Marine Lieutenant General, I will concur with you in the post-Vietnam era. I was educated by you and your peers when you came out of Vietnam, and you were the company commanders. And you were pretty spirited in how you wanted to cure the world and never again would you permit that scenario to occur. So I was taught at the Citadel about Clausewitz, that the use of military force is the instrumentality of a political decision. It is the means to that end.
So, now I find myself in the political world as also a soldier, but I wear the political hat. And I go to Europe, and I see this total mismatch between the rhetoric and this use of force and whether through the use of air power alone could achieve NATO's noble, political objectives. In my observation, they cannot, but I will ask you, General Van Riper, for your personal opinion.
General VAN RIPER. Sir, this is Strategy 101, and all the external appearances indicate it is amateur hour.
There is no indication that from the top leadership there was any clear idea of what the ends were to be, and I enjoy using quotes. Let me use one from the famous strategist Julian Corbett. He said, The greater the problem to be solved, the more resolute must we be in seeking points of departure from which we can begin to lay a course.
We didn't seek a point of departure. We didn't understand the ends; and then, to make it worse, we selected a means which was totally inappropriate for the vague goal that we did state.
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Mr. BUYER. I am concerned when I hear—I will be kind when I refer to these individuals as doves on the ''Meet the Press'' and other type shows that are out there. And they will say things like, well, are you in it? If we are in it, we are in it to win, and if you are going to back out, inferring some cowardice, win what?
What do you want it to look like? I am stunned that we get briefed on multifaceted scenarios. Take Belgrade, take all of Serbia, take only Kosovo, what do you want? I am concerned that none of this was laid out before we ever got in, and how we could now be in a position of choosing. That, right now, is pretty dumbfounded to me.
If we are going to go by NATO objectives, I think that is what is to be the guiding light here, and I am concerned that people don't refer back to what are NATO's political objectives; and it is Kosovo and Kosovo only.
So I think—I want to be helpful here and constructive. If it is Kosovo is the political objective, on the ground, Germany—it didn't take them very long to roll across Yugoslavia. It was holding the ground. My concern here at the moment is, there is this rhetoric out there about, oh, it is Vietnam. Well, in Vietnam you didn't know who the enemy was. We let this go any bit further, if it moves in Kosovo, it is probably a Serb.
Let me listen to your personal opinion about a ground occupation force in Kosovo and Kosovo only. What would that take?
General VAN RIPER. Sir, if you are asking in terms of numbers, I think the numbers that I have seen in the open literature are perhaps high. I would say something in the neighborhood of a hundred, maybe 150,000. If we are looking for heavy, armed forces, we are looking for the wrong forces, not that we wouldn't need some. This is light infantry trained, the forces we can most rapidly deploy and get on the ground.
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I have seen nothing in the media that indicates there are large tank formations that we would go against with larger formations. I think our light to medium forces, backed with a minimum of heavy forces, would be adequate.
Mr. BUYER. Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Ortiz.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I know that for the past months there has been a lot of debate about what we should do and shouldn't do in Kosovo. The only thing I know is that we have a lot of young men and women in harm's way, and all I know is that we only have one commander in chief. All I know is that morale is very important to our troops who are stationed there, and I know that all of you have served.
Don't you think that—and this is my personal opinion—what we are doing now is not doing much to help the morale of our troops. And the perception that we send worldwide that we are the big guy, but with no guts if we were to withdraw?
General VAN RIPER. Sir, if we would transport ourselves back in history, and this was the 1960s and we were in the first stages of Vietnam—
Mr. KUYKENDALL. Could you pull that microphone closer to you so it is easier to hear you? Thanks.
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General VAN RIPER. We were in the first stages of Vietnam, and we came to the same conclusion that you have articulated. Think of the tragedy we could have avoided if we had spoken up and said what needed to be said and either decided what we needed to do and put the resources and the will to it. As I indicated before, the people, the government and the military for simply don't do it.
Mr. ORTIZ. But what is this debate? I mean, you-all served. Do you think that this debate we are conducting—I know this is very, very, very important, but let us place ourselves there. Is this helping the morale of our troops who happen to be in harm's way? I am just asking. I don't know. I am asking you.
General VAN RIPER. I am sure it does not, but I am certain the gentlemen to my left and right believe it is important to resolve this and avoid a further, longer tragedy that even comes close to paralleling what we saw in Vietnam.
Mr. ORTIZ. General Link.
General LINK. Sir, we have a fairly sophisticated fighting force today. I think the majority of them understand why this kind of debate has to occur. I think most of them would say it is probably late, that it is the sort of debate, that should have been resolved prior to committing the forces, but I think we understand why it must be done.
I am a little concerned about the extent to which we become a council of despair here. There are fundamental differences between what is going on in Yugoslavia today and what went on in Vietnam. We are not losing here unless we choose to say we lost. On the 23rd of April, there was nothing—excuse me, the 23rd of March, there was nothing that we could have done, short of ignoring the problem that would not have resulted in an acceleration of ethnic cleansing.
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Let us say that on that date General Van Riper's advice would have been followed and we would have said, We are going to invade Kosovo to save the Albanians. In the 3 to 6 months that it would have taken to assemble that force, Milosevic would have very likely carried out the same actions that he carried out this time, and at the end of that period, since we would not have begun an air campaign, he would have been just as militarily capable.
It is important to understand that modern aerospace capabilities give us the ability to attack the enemy's capability to make war. That is a different center of gravity than we are accustomed to thinking about. Each passing day—with each passing day Milosevic is less and less militarily capable. We are not doing this as well as we could do it, but we are doing it. And we are not losing forces on our side. It is important to remember that.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you.
Dr. Cohen.
Dr. COHEN. I think I largely agree with General Link. My observation would be that I think it is a terrible mistake to use the Vietnam analogy. That was a different place, a different time, a different set of strategic contexts.
We are dealing with a much smaller country. We are dealing with a different part of the world. We are dealing with a different set of allies. We are dealing with a much less resolute government and society. We are not dealing with the situation in which you have a China and a Soviet Union which are going to write a blank check in terms of supporting an opponent with their most advanced technology and resources.
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That is not to say it could not very well be a mess. It could very well be a mess. And I by no means want to encourage anybody to think this would be a trivial kind of operation or walkover or that it might not turn into something pretty ugly. But the point is whatever it is going to be, it is not going to be Vietnam. It will be a different kind of mess, and I am just urging us all to focus on the problem as it is before us rather than resort to historical analogies, which I think are not going to be terribly helpful.
Mr. ORTIZ. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
My time is up. Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Pitts.
Mr. PITTS. If you could give us some advice as to the best way to exit, an exit strategy, what would it be, General?
General LINK. You want us to work our way down the panel, sir?
Mr. PITTS. Yes.
General LINK. I happen to believe at this point that we have to disarm the Serb tyrant, and I think that we can do that if we will state that as our military goal and organize our capabilities around it. We can do that prior to the introduction of any kind of ground forces.
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Mr. PITTS. General?
General VAN RIPER. Mr. Congressman, I would go back to the theme I've maintained all morning. What is the purpose of the withdrawal? Are we simply going to walk away? That is a simple thing to do. You could withdraw—the military would know how to do that. If there is some purpose to the withdrawal, if it is to lead to some political goal, then I would need to know what that is and then put together the appropriate means to accomplish that end.
Dr. COHEN. I am not sure there is an exit strategy. There are basically three outcomes—there is one exit strategy, which is that you simply drop it and walk away. The President announces tomorrow, we decided it was a big mistake and that we are suspending air operations and we are just going to stay out of Kosovo. Of course, we will still have forces in Bosnia, but the repercussions for that would be pretty substantial.
I think in just about any of the other scenarios I can imagine, including one in which basically the Russians rescue us with a brokered deal of some kind, American forces will be involved in some kind of peacekeeping, long-term peacekeeping, peace enforcement kind of operation in Kosovo for one main reason.
If you were a Kosovar-Albanian, bear in mind everything that happened in Bosnia under the eyes of UN peacekeepers wearing blue helmets and driving white infantry fighting vehicles at places like Srebrenica and Gorazde. You will not return to your home unless you see at least a few American soldiers walking around because you know that at least they mean business.
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And it seems to me in any of the other scenarios beyond just dropping this and scuttling, if we want to do anything to stabilize that situation to get any of those refugees back to where they were, we will be in on the ground. So, unfortunately, I don't see an exit strategy and probably a good reason for not having started this to begin with, but it started and so that is the situation we have to deal with.
Mr. PITTS. I agree with some of your comments about this being poorly planned and poorly coordinated and unfocused; the strategy is not clear. I have one basic question, though, that you might help with. General Clark, to whom does he answer? Who is in charge here? Is it the commander-in-chief of the United States? Is it the NATO Secretary-General? Is it the North Atlantic Council? Can any of your clarify that, who is the proper authority here to whom he answers, General?
General LINK. Go ahead.
Dr. COHEN. Mr. Pitts, I think that is a wonderful question, and I don't think anybody really knows the answer. And it is one of the reasons why I would really love to see Congress dig into this, these kinds of issues and put something out there on the record for your colleagues and for the American people to consider because I suspect that it is an enormously messy—it is an enormously ambiguous mess, and that may have something to do with why we are where we are.
Mr. PITTS. General?
Page 44 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2General LINK. He answers to the Secretary-General in terms of the military mission, but it is the North Atlantic Council that has to be of one voice in terms of options, targets, et cetera, or their representatives. I think the key thing to remember here is that this is an arrangement that would have worked well when NATO was under attack because one could assume a community of interests among all the then 16 nations.
When we use NATO in the way that it is being used now, that particular command construct really gets blurred because, as we have seen, each of the member nations may have, since they are not concerned about their own security in a direct way, they may have other economic, political, or social interests that color their views towards the central theme of action.
So I think a good after-action study would turn up the idea that we either need to abandon out-of-area uses of NATO, which I think would be a mistake; or we need to develop a better way of establishing unity of command over those operations.
Dr. COHEN. If I could just add one more thought, it seems whenever—and I have, in the course of my academic work, looked at various systems of high command. There is always a set of formal relationships, and then there is a whole sort of informal relationships and back channels. And some people count more than others and so on, and that seems to me one of the things to uncover here as well because the two may not, in fact probably do not, match up entirely.
Mr. PITTS. You mention the unity of command problem, also the committee of 19 or however many have to approve targets. Can you explain how long this takes? I mean, is this—what is the effectiveness of the process they are using?
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General LINK. I can't claim any special competence over the exact process that is underway right now. I understand that there are—there have been established phases of operations which involve categories of targets. Whether or not each representative from each nation has to approve each target, I think that is probably not the case; but I would be willing to guess that each representative has the opportunity to veto a particular target or set of targets.
Mr. PITTS. And what is your opinion of that?
General LINK. Oh, I think it is crazy, sir. Particularly in air operations, you lose the advantage of speed, range and the ability to shift your focus rapidly when you have to go through a great exercise. It is also very difficult to keep your plan secure when you spread it around that number of people.
This is a situation in which there should have been a community of interests involving a military objective which could then be turned over to a commander who uses the means at his disposal to accomplish that objective. That is clearly not the case here.
Mr. PITTS. General, did you want to add?
General VAN RIPER. The only comment I would offer, Congressman, is all of these things that you have raised, these issues were certainly known at the outset of this venture, why weren't they taken into consideration then?
Page 46 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2Mr. PITTS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The CHAIRMAN. Yes. Mr. Reyes.
Mr. REYES. I get another shot?
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I find it somewhat ironic, on the one hand, and I am thankful, on the other hand, to be here this morning. Although I look around at the committee, and I can't help but think that the smart ones aren't here, and I say that with a bit of trepidation because of a bit of confusion that I am trying to sort through, and I did lean over and speak to my colleague, Mr. Snyder, who is a Vietnam vet like myself, a couple of times trying to see if I was understanding this process or this procedure correctly. And I don't want to speak for him, but I think we are as confused as anybody else here.
I will tell you, let me just express some frustration myself, because having been in Vietnam for 13 months and having had to deal with the second-guessing and the political maneuvering of the time, I can remember then having been in uniform and having to go out and fight for our lives and the lives of our comrades.
It was disturbing. It was very frustrating and aggravating to have to do that and to have to continuously be badgered by the enemy about the things that were being said in Congress, about the things that were being done in this country to undermine our very presence in Vietnam.
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And I think the best word I can use this morning is that I resent being in that same situation when our men and women are over there fighting for their lives, and I can't help but want to scream out that war is hell. And I know that firsthand. And it is not pretty, and it shouldn't be entered into on a lark. And I, for a minute, do not believe that anyone in this country, the President or members of his administration, entered into this situation on a lark.
I think we are there for the right reasons because I have got to remind people that hundreds of thousands of people were being killed, and the same people that today are second-guessing were saying, why aren't we doing something at just a couple of months ago.
And so I am frustrated being here, number one, to on the one hand—thinking how men and women in uniform that are carrying out the missions daily must feel when they hear what we are discussing here this morning on all the second-guessing and all the things that have been spoken about that we have lost this, we ought to get out, that I would abstain from voting, et cetera, et cetera. And it just—it makes me—it aggravates me to a point to where I had wanted to just get up and join with the rest of my colleagues that aren't here in saying it is not worth it to be here.
But it is worth it to me to express frustration that I felt 30 some-odd years ago at the scholars and the politicians and all those others that not for one minute were in the situation that I was in or my comrades were in but yet were so gleefully telling everyone that would give them an opportunity to speak and to be heard how they would prosecute a war, how they would do this or how they would do that.
Page 48 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2I am a Member of Congress. I will vote on these things. I do believe that we are in there. I would not for a minute entertain the thought that we have lost anything. I think to do that would be to undermine the morale of the finest men and women that I have ever met and that I continue to meet as I go around the world talking to our forces.
So, Mr. Chairman, I don't have a question, but I did hope to at least put some perspective on at least this Member of Congress' feelings about what we are engaged here, and I will admit to you, Mr. Chairman, that I am still somewhat confused as to why we have to go through this process.
Thank you very much.
The CHAIRMAN. You always bring a good perspective, Mr. Reyes. I might add, too, that a lot of our Members who aren't here this morning are on the floor probably debating these resolutions we have, and that probably accounts for their absence here this morning.
Mr. Snyder.
Mr. SNYDER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I think maybe to continue a little bit the tone of Mr. Reyes, I agree with you. I think our Members are on the floor, and I think it is unfortunate we are having this Monday morning quarterbacking session looking backwards when we all could be—I know Mr. Skelton would probably be on the floor and feels an obligation to be here.
Page 49 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2I would think we would be better off by being on the floor and dealing with looking ahead of where we are going to now. There will be plenty of time, I think, later on to evaluate this whole question of the first 35 days, but I consider myself a good committee Member. I have never missed a MILCON committee, and so I am here because we have got this meeting. But I don't think the timing is so good.
It is interesting and I think this—while I think there is some value in asking the kind of questions you-all are asking, the image of the Monday morning quarterback is fine. We all do that. The problem seems to me is we are about halfway through the first quarter, and you know, we are 35, 36 days into this. We have had 10 or 11 days of decent weather, and I guess I am more patient than some people in the country. I never thought this thing would be over in 35 days anyway. I thought it would be weeks to months at a minimum.
And so where we are at is we have had no allied casualties. We now have, I think, the Vice Premier of Serbia on State TV saying, you know, we have got to start being honest with our own people, we are isolated, the Russians aren't going to help us, NATO is holding together. Not too bad for the first quarter.
Acknowledging General Van Riper's comments and yours, General Link, that the Kosovar/Albanians have had a terrible time. But as you made the point and as what led to this, we knew Milosevic was going to do that all along no matter what we did. If we did nothing, if we did an air war, if we did a 3 to 6-month buildup, he was going to do it. That is the nature of the evil that we are dealing with.
So I think it is fair to have all these discussions. I question the timing of it. General Link, I want to be sure I have got straight on what you said. You made a comment that you think it would be a terrible statement to make for us to support that Goodling amendment that is on the floor today that says that there would be a prohibition put on ground troops. I want to be sure that that point was made because I fear that some of our Members would be lured into thinking that that is a good thing.
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Dr. Cohen, and maybe I will pick on you for just one quick phrase, but you start talking about the irresponsible leadership, and it kind of came across—and General Link talked about the 19 political leaders, that none of them with experience of air campaigns. We may not like the people that get elected in democracies, but we have got 19 democracies.
I had a guy come to me the other day in the grocery store and say, Why don't we have in the Constitution you have to be war veteran to be elected president. I said, well, you might find some support for that amendment, but I don't think so. I think we kind of like the way we do it. Sometimes we vote for veterans, sometimes we don't. But we have never thought in any democracy that you have to be a war veteran to be elected president. And so it seemed to me, Dr. Cohen, there is a little bit of this everybody is irresponsible but me.
We have 19 democracies. This is the leadership. It is a very, you know, these are alliances.
You talk about the Iraq war. I am very, very proud of what our troops did there, but there was also General—I am sorry, President Bush had limits by his allies, too. I mean, we are still dealing with Saddam Hussein. He is a survivor. He is still there. We did not overthrow him, and part of the same thing was President Bush was trying to hold the Alliance together.
So I appreciate the comments that are being made. I am perhaps not as pessimistic or perhaps not so ''Pollyannaish'' to think at the beginning of this that we could have come up with the perfect strategy that 19 countries would support, the American people support it, and I appreciate you-all being here today. I hope we all have this discussion in 6 months or a year.
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General LINK. Could I expand on that point about the 19 political leaders?
Mr. SNYDER. Yeah.
General LINK. I fully agree with you, and I understand that. My point is, not so much that I would expect them to be air campaigners, it is that we have failed to realize we need to put an air campaigner in charge; that they are capable of developing a military objective; that that has to be turned over to somebody who knows how to do it.
And if, in fact, we were to put forces on the ground, we would never permit 19 different nations to figure out what the rudimentary ought to be. My point is, we need to take that same sense of appropriate, military, civil interaction and apply it to the air campaign.
Mr. SNYDER. General Link, if I might—and maybe I am overreading your statement here, but this is a—I mean, this is a political—this is an alliance that has come to these conclusions, and I don't think—I don't think the President and General Clark are satisfied with the constraints they have had. I think it is better now than it was at the beginning of it, but that is the board game that they are dealing with.
And it is very easy as part of this Monday morning quarterbacking to say, gee, we sure would like General Clark to be able to go in there and choose any target whatsoever in the very day with unlimited resources, but that was not the choices that the President had. The choice the President had was within these constraints, knowing you are going to have these limits, is it better to go ahead or to do absolutely nothing and let Milosevic do what he was going to do? And I think the President made the choice, we understand these constraints, we will try to work through them and they have had all these intense relationships.
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I think your written statement comes across perhaps a little harsher than your comments that you made right there. I appreciate all of your input today.
General Van Riper, you were with Second Battalion 5th Marines, weren't you?
General VAN RIPER. Seventh Marines, yes, sir.
Mr. SNYDER. Seventh Marines.
General VAN RIPER. Congressman, if I could respond and certainly to both Congressmen, I am equally frustrated, but my frustration is that we learned a hard lesson in Vietnam. We came back, and we began to think it through and study and debate and write the doctrine, and the success in that effort was demonstrated very well in Desert Storm. My frustration is that we didn't follow that same model, not just in Kosovo but in all of the contingencies we have become involved in since then.
I don't think any of the Members—and I detect some of those—your strongest comments were directed at me—come here this morning wanting to second-guess. We are invited to offer our opinions. I would be disloyal to—in the oath I took as an officer—to what I think the committee is asking me this morning if I didn't voice those opinions, and I do feel very strongly about them.
My wife and I have a wonderful son, a young captain in the Marines. I am certainly—if I thought what we were saying this morning, were going to undermine the morale of him and those he serves with in all the services, I wouldn't say it, but I feel compelled to put forth an honest opinion that I strongly believe in.
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Dr. COHEN. Since you addressed a remark to me, Congressman, let me respond. I think it is—the first thing is it is quite clear the administration did not anticipate what was going to happen. The idea that this was predetermined, that you would see these kinds of efforts in Kosovo, if that was indeed the case, one would have thought that the administration would have engaged in some prior planning for much larger humanitarian relief efforts, for a substantial increase in the level of air forces that we were going to send over. In fact, I think they would not have begun saying at the very outset of the operation, as they did, that this would just last a very short time.
The truth of the matter is they were surprised, not that surprise has happened. Let us not rewrite the history of this.
Mr. SNYDER. Dr. Cohen, if I might interrupt, I personally asked Sandy Berger at one of our meetings here at the Capitol on, I think, day one of this, what are the possible reactions of Milosevic.
He said, option one, which is the one we would like—Mr. Reyes was there, also—is that he will cave in. The other two are not such good scenarios.
Number two, he will aggressively pursue his campaign of terror, which we know he is going to do sometime anyway.
Number three, he may even extend that and try to gin things up in a big time way in Bosnia and try to kill our troops there.
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So I was put on notice, on the first time I asked, that they had clearly thought through these possibilities. So I think it is the—that they didn't even consider the possibility that Milosevic might act out? Give me a break.
Dr. COHEN. If they had thought it through, then why was there absolutely no preparations made, as far as we can tell, to deal with the human consequences?
Mr. SNYDER. Because of what General Link said, if we took 2 or 3 or 5 or 6 months to prepare, it was going to happen.
Dr. COHEN. So we have been able to deploy substantial humanitarian relief effort over there in the space of the month. It was clearly much more that could have been done. The other thing is, it seems to me that when one goes to a war in which 19 countries are going to be involved, then it is irresponsible to go do that and then sort of be surprised that, lo and behold, there are all kinds of constraints in the effective use of air power.
It is quite true that to some extent President Bush was constrained by his coalition, but on the whole, he dominated it. And that is what you want a President of the United States to do. We should not be in a situation where Luxemburg gets the same vote of the United States does on the exercise of military power.
The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Skelton, and before we break.
Page 55 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2Mr. SKELTON. Yes. Let me correct or restate, the Goodling amendment that will be discussed today on the floor prohibits ground elements, which is far beyond ground troops, and with all the implications thereof. I just wanted to make that clear, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you.
The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. We better break for this vote. It is on the rule that we are considering, and we will come right back.
Thank you.
[Recess.]
The CHAIRMAN. Meeting will please be reconvened. Mr. Hostettler.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And with regard to the idea of Monday morning quarterbacking, I don't think, General, that our colleague was talking specifically about this panel but rather maybe this committee meeting and this committee as a whole because we thank you all collectively for your service to our country and—But with regard to Monday morning quarterbacking, I would say that this is a situation where it seems like the coach has put the team in a game that the general manager nor the owners nor anyone else scheduled because the owners of this team, that is, the people of the United States through their elected representatives, decide what the schedule is, decide what the games are, and our coach, the commander in chief, according to Article 2 of the Constitution, has decided virtually unilaterally to play a game and put our team members in harm's way.
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So, we are not Monday morning quarterbacking. We are just trying to arguably do our job that the owners of this team have elected us to do.
That being said, there was a lot of discussion about if we should withdraw from this, from this fight and we can't call it a war because Congress hasn't declared war, it is interesting that everyone in this room on that side of the table is saying war, everyone in the country is talking about war, but there are about 536 people in the United States of America who don't use the term ''war.''
But if we were to pull our troops out, there has been a lot of talk about the integrity of NATO, about saving face, about losing face, and the like, but, in reality, if the United States of America, if the Congress felt that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—and if I could have each of you answer this question in turn—if we believe that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was, by their action, a direct threat to the existence of the geopolitical entity that is the United States of America, if we felt that, could we not convert that lush countryside, that mountainous terrain into essentially a barren, desolate plain as a result of our military capabilities?
General Link, could you—
General LINK. We could do that, but I am troubled answering the question that briefly. If I could expand?
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Sure. Now, if we felt, for example, that, as we did when Japan invaded Honolulu, that the territory of the United States of America, and we felt that the existence actually of the nation itself was in peril, that is what I am asking. I am not asking about—
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General LINK. No, no, I understand. You are saying if the will and the perceived need was there to vanquish, to banish the Hittites, as it were, could we do that? We could, but we don't need to.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Right. I understand that.
General LINK. We also have the valuable intermediate capability of being able to dismantle his military capability without enduring the moral problem of destroying his population. This is something that is available to us today that wasn't available to us in World War II. We had to kill entire cities in order to have the effect that we would have liked to create.
We don't understand, I don't believe, at any useful level the value of the capabilities we have today to go after the enemy's capacity to act, to kill his horse, so that we don't care how much he likes to ride. He can't ride because his horse is gone.
I am waiting for General Van Riper to say, yea, verily, but I've got a feeling he is not going to do.
General VAN RIPER. General Link and I have had numerous discussions, public and private. And fortunately, we always wind up having a beer afterwards. But there is a fundamental disagreement, and his words now have hit on that disagreement, and it is what is the utility of air power. He used the sort of analogy of the coach. If I could use a further analogy of experts in the game of football who were advising that coach, I think that is where the real problem lies, and some may have interpreted my remarks or perhaps other remarks this morning as going against the administration.
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I think a great amount of the fault lies with those who wore the uniform, as I did until recently. Those who talk about and try to understand the defense establishment and military matters, and let me give you a couple of examples.
If the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says on numerous occasions, and believes it, the previous vice-chairman, if you see the battlefield, you win the war. And our leadership, our civilian leadership hears terms like that of a service chief—and General Link doesn't like me to say this, but this is an accurate quote. ''In the first quarter of the 21st century, you will be able to find, fix or try to target in near real time anything of consequence that moves or is located on the face of the earth.'' Quite frankly, I can tell you we can do most of that today. That was about four years ago.
I don't see us doing it today. So my analysis of this is that our civilian leadership, who obviously doesn't want to incur casualties, has listened to these types of promises for a number of years, has begun to see them as possibilities, misanalyze what happened in Desert Storm, certainly misanalyzed what happened in Bosnia and took the same template and laid that template over Kosovo and were amazed at a different result.
So the blame—and I have here on the right side a stack of documents, very slick documents, which have phrases very similar to this. ''Air forces and space forces have the potential to dominate the conduct of any operations in all mediums, operations on the land, at sea, and air and through space and operations by enemy leaders in exercising sovereignty over their country.'' It goes on and on. Some of these paid by government funds, some of them paid by private funds.
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What is distinct about the idea of a base of operations in the third dimension, space and air, is that it frees joint forces from the need to engage in a contest to seize or control ground as a means to achieving military and political objectives.
I won't bore the committee. If you are interested, I will provide more and more documents like these, all very slick documents, that are in the public literature. And it is this constant drumbeat, this promise of technology. In those two paragraphs I alluded to in Robert Scale's article. That is the problem. That is why we have gone down that track. We have oversold unrealistic promises.
Dr. COHEN. I guess, Mr. Hostettler, I maxed out as a captain in the United States Army Reserves so it would be highly imprudent for me to get caught in the cross-fire between two, two general officers.
One observation, though, that I would make to you is that although this air campaign, like the Gulf War campaign, is really—is relying on some quite remarkable technologies which allow a lot of precision and, on the whole, minimal collateral damage, you know, given the fact that accidents do happen, I think it is important to remember that we are inflicting some serious suffering on the people of Yugoslavia. And we are going to be inflicting more because one of the things that we cannot do is to disentangle a lot of the military infrastructure from a lot of the civilian infrastructure.
Of course, the best example of this from the Gulf War was we shut down the electrical power grid, particularly in the area around Baghdad, not throughout the country but throughout most of the country, and that was done for some good military reasons having to do with the air defense system and so on. What we forgot about was that electrical power grid also serviced water purification plants and hospitals.
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To begin breaking all the bridges in Yugoslavia, you will certainly impede military movement. The chances are you are also going to impede people trying to get to hospitals. You probably will begin interfering with the water supply system and so on and so on.
So, there are going to be those second and third ordered consequences. One has to expect them. We have killed a fair number of Serb civilians. I am sure the administration is not going to try to give you a count. Those numbers will mount up. That has long-term consequences in terms of our relationship with, not just with the former Yugoslavia but with Russia and other countries. And even if we have not been taking casualties it is quite important to remember that we are inflicting a fair bit of suffering on the civilian population, and in my view, that is inescapable.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. I think if we would pull out that we know what the headlines in papers across the world would be. We know what the news stories on 24-hour news programs would be, but in fact, in the mind of any possible aggressor to the United States of America and our vital national interest would still have to deal with the ultimate reality of the maximum capability of the defense of the United States of America as opposed to a limited air campaign at this point that we are showing in Yugoslavia. Would you not agree?
Dr. COHEN. Well, I would agree, but I am not sure that it is entirely relevant because I don't think that the United States is going to face, in the near future, a direct assault on the continental United States or its cities by some other state.
Our interests around the world are going to be such that you can always make a case that vital interests are not concerned, and we forget that. In fact, plenty of people made that case before the Gulf War, that our vital interests were not concerned. And there was some very important hearings that were held in this room, in fact, at which I had the honor of participating in, and also on the Senate side where very serious, responsible people, with a lot of experience in the military and in government, made exactly that case, that this wasn't worth fighting a war over.
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So all of our wars are going to be limited wars. Our interests are always going to be limited interests. There will always be a case to be made that they are not vital. So the fact that we could turn Yugoslavia into a howling wilderness I don't think will deter lots of the things that we would like to deter.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. I mean, ultimately the idea of any type of expansionism whatever we will have to deal with, but there isn't expansionism going on here in Yugoslavia. They are actually sealing the borders. So I didn't want you to think that—I was going for the extreme when I said that we do, in fact, have the capability. But since we are not talking about expansionism such as going into Kuwait or North Korea, going into South Korea or Taiwan, since we are not talking about that type of expansion, that is something that would be in our vital national interest.
And so what I was trying to do was trying to say that, in fact, those potential aggressors to the vital national interest of the United States would, in fact, know that even if we pulled out our forces from Yugoslavia, they would still know that they would have to deal with us at some time when the will of the Congress and the will of the people was behind winning a conflict at any cost.
Dr. COHEN. I wish I thought that was the case, but I don't for two reasons. One is a lot of the situations that you describe can also be blurred. Would a Chinese attack on Taiwan really be crossing a border? Well, both the Taiwanese and the Chinese say Taiwan is part of China, so maybe not. The Iraqis were insistent that Kuwait was the 19th province, and in fact, members of the Iraqi opposition still will tell you that. That is one thing.
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I think the second thing is that one has to be concerned about the lesson that other countries and people will draw from what happens here if we simply let go. And the basic lesson that I believe they will draw is the Americans will not do anything that incurs the risk of casualties, you know, beyond half a dozen. That may be a price that you are willing to pay. I think the only contribution I can make is just to say it is a price, and you have to decide whether you think that price is worth paying.
General LINK. They may also learn that America is capable of exacting a high military price on an opponent without taking many casualties. Not a bad lesson.
General VAN RIPER. Sir, if I may, I would like to come back and assure Colonel Harry Summers will address this in great detail and much more eloquently than I can. And I don't agree the American public is unwilling to accept casualties. The American public is unwilling to accept casualties if it doesn't understand the reason for the outcome. If it agrees with the outcome—and I talked Clausewitz at a very elementary level, not certainly as he wrote, but I repeat myself—if the government is able to convince the people that the ends are worth it and identifies the means, the Armed Forces—and you get that trinity in—pulling in the same direction in trace, this country will endure casualties that we can't imagine.
Mr. HOSTETTLER. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Page 63 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2The CHAIRMAN. Thank you. Mr. Turner.
Mr. TURNER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. As most of on the committee know, I was among those who went with the Secretary of Defense to Brussels and down to Aviano and upon the conclusion of that trip joined some of the members of this committee and some members of the Senate in a letter to the President urging that he begin planning and urge NATO to begin planning for the use of ground troops.
I joined in that letter because I believe, I think, if I am hearing General Link correctly, because I believed from the beginning that it was unwise to take the option of the use of ground troops off the table, that it hurt our bargaining position, hurt our ability to convince Milosevic that it was time to come back and reach a diplomatic solution.
Having said that, it does appear that it is very easy, as we have all acknowledged, to be a Monday morning quarterback about various aspects of this campaign. I know just from reading and listening to your statement, General Link, you feel that our air campaign has not been as aggressive as it could have been and yet I guess at the same time you would acknowledge that when you are trying to bring Milosevic to the table that an all out assault on the Yugoslav people may not be the kind of win that we ultimately would want to be able to sit back and brag about.
It disturbs me, I guess, a little bit when I heard the discussion from Dr. Cohen about admittedly it is difficult to wage a war with a group of 19 member nations, but I am not sure I believe, as you shared, Dr. Cohen, that we allow Luxembourg to veto a target.
Page 64 PREV PAGE TOP OF DOC Segment 2 Of 2I am sure that major members of the alliance have a lot to say about targeting. We had an opportunity to visit with some of the ambassadors of the NATO Council when we were in Brussels, and I got the distinct impression that they all fully respect the fact that the United States is the main contributor of military power to this alliance and that there is a lot of effort that takes place by the Secretary General to reach consensus, knowing that the constitution itself says any member can veto any action. But I am not sure in practical everyday workings of the NATO alliance that it happens that way.
I guess what I would kind of like to get back to with all three of you is do all three of you acknowledge, number one, that the NATO alliance is a worthwhile venture for the United States and, secondly, if you recognize that, are you willing to—or are you not required to accept the political constraints that go along with such an alliance?
General LINK. Absolutely. Coalition maintenance, I am sure, is probably as heavy on General Clark's mind as any other task at hand.
My concern is that over the past 4 or 5 weeks we have judged air power not on the basis of its capability but on the basis of political constraints that have been placed on it. My concern is that we may arrive at an incorrect conclusion that because air power is so limited our only recourse is to put sons and daughters in harm's way on the ground well before a time that we should do so.
I am also concerned, as I have said before, that we haven't learned how to use air power appropriately. If, in fact, we had forces on the ground, we would insist on knowing the name of the ground force commander, the Army officer, whose special competence was being brought to bear on the use of those ground forces. For some reason, we think that we can conduct air strikes in an entirely different way.
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General Clark is a marvelous commander. He has great judgment. He has had a number of very important positions, and he has unchallenged competence in one medium of warfare, land warfare.
On top of him are the 19 NATO nations. What I am looking for is a construct in which we would resolve our political differences in a way that we arrive at an expressible military objective before we begin sprinkling bombs around, not knowing to what purpose. As long as we are willing to do the latter, we can continue to fail to reap the benefit of the American people's investment in their technology.
Does that make my point clear?
Mr. TURNER. I think I understand. I know General Clark acknowledged to our group that if he had ground troops in the region, I mean we are talking about 2 or 3 weeks ago now the meeting we had, if he had ground troops positioned in the region he would not use them to date, that there is still much that can be done from the air.
General LINK. And his hand would be fuller. I mean, he would have placed Milosevic at a larger disadvantage if he had ground troops ready to deploy because Milosevic would have to consider that.
Mr. TURNER. General Van Riper.
General VAN RIPER. Congressman, I believe sincerely that you don't link, and those who support his argument, the intellectual argument, is bankrupt. The approach they are providing is ahistorical. If we look back over the history, we find that Billy Mitchell said in 1927, we must relegate armies and navies to a place in the glass case of a dusty museum. We must not entrust our national defense to those honored but obsolete services. Those honored and obsolete services went on, of course, to fight the tremendous engagements of World War II.
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The air power advocate, a Russian immigrant by the name of Major Alexander DeSaversky, said in 1942, the era of troop landings in war fronts and struggles for a few miles of disputed soil has ended forever. Of course, we saw those same war fronts in both Europe and the Pacific for three more years, as well as Korea.
General Curtis LeMay brought back the idea of massive retaliation and stated, ''The era of limited wars is over.''
Colonel John Warden, who is given credit for planning the air campaign, or at least the intellectual foundation for it, and was the author of a well received book that people speak of, page 13 of chapter 1 says, ''Air superiority is a necessity. Since the German attack on Poland in 1939, no country has won a war in the face of enemy air superiority. Conversely, no state has lost a war while it maintained air superiority.''
I wonder what John was thinking about in the case of the American experience in Korea and in Vietnam. I left Vietnam with no idea that we had won that war.
I would be, I guess, more at ease here this afternoon if I thought that same drumbeat that has gone on now for 60 years had changed, but I have a copy here of an Air Force publication, a doctoral publication, signed on September 1997 by the current Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and though it gives a lot of what I would say is lip service to joint operations, where people focus who want the easy answer, who see war as they wish it to be, not war as the terrible phenomena it is, they come to these lines: ''The main objectives of counter land operations are to dominate the surface environment and prevent the opponent from doing the same.'' Although normally associated with support to friendly surface forces, ''counter land'' is a flexible term that can encompass the identical missions without friendly surface force presence.
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That is why we arrive at the situation we do today, is the belief that this is true. It is intellectually bankrupt.
Mr. TURNER. Dr. Cohen.
Dr. COHEN. Mr. Turner, I won't address your question about NATO. I refuse to get involved in this fight.
It seems to me the critical issue is this: Are coalitions means or ends? If you remember in the initial declaration of what our objectives were, one of them, somewhat absurdly I think, was to demonstrate NATO's solidarity. That is, I t