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Wednesday, September 13, 2000

NATO watching Yugoslavia
closely, USAFE commander says

By Chuck Vinch
Washington bureau

WASHINGTON — NATO’s deeply ingrained "defensive culture" would make it almost impossible for the alliance to pre-empt a potential explosion in the increasingly tense relationship between Montenegro and Serbia, a senior U.S. military official said Tuesday.

Although NATO launched the first offensive campaign in more than half a century of existence with its airstrikes on Yugoslavia last year, "reaching a consensus before something serious has already occurred is very difficult for the alliance," said Gen. Greg Martin, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe.

"This is a very delicate area," Martin said at a breakfast meeting with defense reporters. "The alliance was established initially as a defensive mechanism, and that remains its culture. Getting the alliance to take pre-emptive actions or even make a decision to posture forces before a major event is, I think, very unlikely."

But Martin, who took over USAFE in January, said U.S. and NATO officials are closely monitoring the situation in Yugoslavia as the clock ticks down to the potentially volatile Sept. 24 presidential elections there.

Last week, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright issued a thinly veiled warning to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic about the safety of Montenegro, his independence-minded junior partner in the Yugoslav rump state.

Recently, tensions in the region have risen after Montenegro’s President Milo Djukanovic, a leading foe of Milosevic, and his ruling coalition announced a boycott of the presidential election, and Milosevic himself declared that no observers from "hostile" Western countries would be allowed to monitor the voting.

Albright denied reports that she offered specific security guarantees to Djukanovic in a meeting last week, although the Clinton administration has provided financial assistance to Montenegro in the past. However, Albright stressed that the United States is "concerned about the security of Montenegro and of President Djukanovic. Nothing is off the table."

NATO will follow through on a naval exercise with Croatia off the Montenegro coast later this month involving about 300 U.S. Marines, which officials said had been in the planning stages before the election was called in Yugoslavia.

Martin said there are "a lot of people thinking through the kinds of things that could be done" should Milosevic decide to escalate his standoff with the Montenegrin government either during or after the election season.

Using their experience from the campaigns in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia in recent years, Martin said NATO and U.S. wargames in Europe have done "a pretty good job" of isolating and targeting Serb military forces in simulations to "bring to bear what we think would be a successful military outcome."

"How you would define a successful political outcome is for someone else to answer," he said. But military planners have been careful not to rely too heavily on previous campaigns in the Balkans to prepare for hypothetical actions in Montenegro. "Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia are three separate and completely different models from an ethnic and political standpoint," Martin said.

There are other differences as well. If NATO troops did go into action in Montenegro, they presumably would be able to count on the support of some 15,000 well-armed, well-trained Montenegrin paramilitary troops and police.

Martin would not discuss how NATO has taken that factor into account, except to say that military planners "understand the differences in the situation."

From a broader perspective, Martin said any future NATO operations in the Balkans will draw on two huge lessons learned from Kosovo — the need to keep open all military options, including the use of ground forces, and the need to apply maximum force early in the conflict.

In the war on Yugoslavia, NATO struggled to reach a consensus on how to prosecute the battle. Ultimately, the allies ruled out ground forces and could agree only on a phased air campaign of escalation that officials hoped would break Milosevic’s will to hang onto Kosovo.

"I would never eliminate any feature of force that I might use," Martin said. "I’m not in the business of trying to affect somebody’s will to fight the war. I’m in the business of trying to take away their ability to fight the war.

"In general, the best way to pursue a war is to use full force. I think the allies understand the importance of, and believe in, integrated force application."

In recent years, the Air Force has taken some hits for its perceived cockiness in the belief that airpower alone can decisively win wars. Martin’s support for integrated, full-spectrum warfighting could be seen as a move in the other direction, but he made it fairly clear that Air Force leaders haven’t changed their thinking about who among the services should be the battlefield hammer.

He suggested that in future conflicts such as Kosovo, the other services could act as herders for the Air Force, flushing mobile ground targets into the open to be more easily engaged and destroyed by airpower.

"The most significant challenge for the Air Force remains mobile [ground] targets," Martins said. "It may very well be that by the use of other force elements, whether Navy, Marine or Army, you can force the enemy into areas where you can use weapons effectively on mobile targets."