The Airstrike Option: Vietnam, Desert Storm and Serbia
Summary:
In threatening air strikes against Serbia over Kosovo, Bill
Clinton, the anti-war protestor, is following the same policies
as Lyndon Johnson, the man he protested against. Air strikes,
isolated from a general warfighting strategy, do not convince
adversaries of resolve but of weakness. Serbia, like North
Vietnam, is drawing the conclusion that the U.S. is not prepared
to wage war against Serbia in an effective way. Like Vietnam,
Serbia sees weakness in U.S. policy.
Analysis:
It is once again time to think about air power. President
Clinton made it clear on Friday that he felt that Serbia had
already gone over the line that justified air strikes. Over four
hundred strike aircraft are in theater and B-52s are standing by
in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Several cruise missile
armed vessels are in range. The stage is set. We have discussed
extensively the issue of intervention in Kosovo, ranging from the
complexities of peace keeping to possible Serbian responses to an
American air campaign. It seems quite likely that the United
States and NATO will, at some point, bomb Serbia. Regardless of
whether the air strikes go ahead, this is a propitious time to
consider the utility of air power as a force, by itself, for
influencing the behavior of adversaries.
The use of air power to compel political acquiescence has a long
but not particularly distinguished history. First, the Germans
launched an air campaign against Great Britain in 1940 intended
to force the British to accept a peace treaty that acknowledged
German domination of the European continent. The campaign failed
to achieve its end. Second, the Anglo-Americans launched a
massive air campaign against Germany in 1943-1945. The goal of
this campaign in the mind of some air power advocates was to
force unconditional surrender without the need for a land
assault. In the minds of most strategists, the goal was to
attack and destroy Germany's industrial infrastructure so as to
undermine Germany's ability to wage war. Unconditional surrender
required the death of many tankers and infantrymen, while the
post-war Strategic Bombing Survey cast serious doubt on the
effect of the air assault on German wartime production. Third,
the United States launched a massive air campaign against Japan
in 1945. Its goals were similar to the air campaign against
Germany. The Japan campaign has the greatest claim to success.
Even here, the outcome was ambiguous, since it is not at all
clear that it was the conventional air campaign that compelled
surrender. Surrender came only after atomic bombing, different
in nature from conventional air attack. The more serious
challenger for war-ender was the naval blockade, which was fully
in force by 1945.
All three of these campaigns are examples of great powers using
the air campaign as an instrument against other great powers. We
also have examples of the use of air power by a great power
against a secondary or even tertiary power: the U.S. air
campaigns against North Vietnam, and then against Iraq in 1991.
These may be more germane in evaluating a bombing campaign
against Serbia or any other minor power.
The initial theory of the campaign against North Vietnam was
divided into two parts. The first was the assumption that North
Vietnam did not take American resolve seriously, that North
Vietnam did not think the United States was truly committed to
the defense of South Vietnam. The second assumption was that
North Vietnam would not place at risk its own infrastructure,
industrial, military and social, merely to continue its support
of the National Liberation Front in the South. Therefore, the
theory went, once the North experienced an intense bombing
campaign, it would quickly understand American resolve and it
would also rationally calculate that continued support for the
NLF was not in its interests. The North would either abandon the
war in the South or negotiate an acceptable settlement.
The North Vietnamese saw the air campaign in a very different
light. They saw the air campaign as proof of a lack of will and
an inability on the part of the United States to risk serious
casualties. For both demographic and political reasons, the
North understood that the United States could not afford to lose
5,000 men a week in combat. From the North Vietnamese point of
view, the use of air power represented a desperate attempt on the
part of the United States to wage war without incurring the risks
and costs of warfare. The recourse to air power during the early
stages of war convinced the North Vietnamese that the Americans
lacked resolve. The North Vietnamese strategy, therefore, was to
absorb the American air attacks while drawing the United States
into a war of attrition on the ground in the South. They
understood fully that they would absorb much greater casualties
than the Americans in such a war. But they also understood that
the Americans, in the final analysis, would find almost any level
of casualty unacceptable -- while they were prepared to incur
massive losses.
The psychology behind this strange calculus had to do with
something social scientists like to call "issue saliency." In
simple English, this means simply the relative importance of an
issue to each side. To the United States the future of South
Vietnam was an important issue but not one on which the survival
of the United States in any way depended. For North Vietnam, the
absorption of South Vietnam into a united, communist Vietnam was
a matter of fundamental national interest. No other interest
superceded it.
Therefore, the idea that the United States could stage an air
campaign that could impose a level of pain sufficiently high to
dissuade North Vietnam to abandon a national obsession was
delusional. It was not clear that any level of pain would have
persuaded North Vietnam to capitulate on this subject. Second,
it is not clear that, short of carpet bombardment with nuclear
weapons, the United States possessed sufficient aircraft and
weaponry to impose the necessary level of pain. How much pain
would Washington's army have endured before surrendering at
Valley Forge? How much pain would the American Confederacy have
been willing to endure, even after Gettysburg, to secure
secession? How high a price were the Russians willing to pay at
Leningrad or Stalingrad? These are measurable, quantifiable
indications of national endurance. It takes a great deal to
compel capitulation where fundamental national interests are at
stake. Threats of bombing North Vietnam back to the stone age
not withstanding, it is simply not clear that air power has ever
had the ability by itself to impose levels of suffering that are
unendurable to a people committed to a national goal.
In Vietnam, to the contrary, the air campaign convinced the North
of the lack of American resolve. It understood that a nation
seriously committed to the defense of South Vietnam would not
take recourse to the air campaign as the foundation of its
national strategy. They understood, particularly in its early
stages, that the air campaign was a bluff, covering up American
weakness. Indeed it was a bluff. McNamara and Johnson both
hoped that the air campaign would persuade that North Vietnamese
to back down. For some reason, in spite of the fact that they
were fully aware of their own lack of resolve, the Johnson
administration genuinely believed that this lack of resolve would
not be apparent to their adversaries.
It is not that an air campaign cannot work. Its problem is that
it cannot work except as part of a comprehensive warfighting
program in which the air campaign operates as part of a single,
integrative, strategic, operational and tactical package. The
purpose of this package is, as Clausewitz saw clearly, to destroy
the enemy's ability to wage war primarily by rendering its armed
forces inoperable. Air power used as a weapon against
populations has consistently failed. Air power used in isolation
as an instrument against conventional military power has
similarly failed. However, air power, when it is used as part of
an integrated war fighting system, is invaluable.
In 1991 during Operation Desert Storm, air power was used as a
direct instrument of war, intended to reduce the ability of the
Iraqis to wage war. It was not intended to signal American
resolve nor was it intended to win the war by itself. Rather,
air power was an all out assault on the Iraqi war fighting
ability. Starting as an assault on Iraq's command, control,
communications and intelligence capabilities and on its air
defense system, it shattered the ability of Baghdad to command
its armies in the field. Following this, the air campaign turned
on the major formations of the Iraqi army in Kuwait, destroying
tactical command and communications, as well as killing soldiers
and destroying equipment. At the end of the air campaign, Allied
forces were able to encircle, engage and destroy Iraqi forces,
while aircraft cut off the retreat on the famed "highway of
death." Air power made the successful ground war possible, but
without the ground war, Kuwait would not have been liberated and
Desert Storm would have failed.
Political leaders seeking low risk ways to wage war are
constantly tempted by air power. They expect the other side to
collapse in fear at the very thought of bombing. During the
early stages of Vietnam, the Johnson administration seriously
hoped that the air campaign would constitute the essence of the
war or, to be more honest, as an alternative to waging war. Now,
there are some cases in which this may happen. That is a case
where the issue at hand is of only marginal importance to the
people being bombed. But it is not effective when the campaign
is against a country pursuing its fundamental national interest.
In that case, the only thing that can dissuade the nation is to
take actions that threaten the very survival of the regime or
even of the nation. It was when the Japanese realized that the
survival of the nation was at stake that they capitulated to the
air campaign. The North Vietnamese never felt that either the
nation or even their regime was at risk from the air campaign.
Therefore, the campaign was futile. In the later stages, in
1972, air power may have motivated the North to be more flexible
at peace talks, but it never caused them to abandon fundamental
national interests.
In this sense, Serbia reminds us of Vietnam. From the Serb point
of view, the introduction of NATO forces into Kosovo will end
their sovereignty over it. They see this as part of an ongoing
American campaign to dismember Serbia. Having blocked the
secession of predominantly Serbian regions from Bosnia, they are
now seeing support for the secession of predominantly Albanian
regions from Serbia. They see this inconsistency in American and
NATO policy as a sign of a desire to destroy Serbia as a nation.
The question of Kosovo, like the question of South Vietnam,
represents a challenge to a fundamental understanding of what the
Serbian nation means. Whatever other calculations might intrude,
the threat of air attacks will not cause them to surrender
fundamental national interests.
Serbia has studied both Desert Storm and Vietnam very carefully.
It is aware that Serbia's terrain and weather reduce the
effectiveness of an air campaign substantially, as compared to
what the U.S. was able to achieve over Kuwait and Iraq. They are
also aware that the United States has not deployed anywhere near
the ground forces it had available during Desert Storm. The
Serbs are fully aware that neither the United States nor NATO
have the stomach for the type of casualties that they would have
to absorb if they were prepared to attack Serbia. Finally, they
are aware that during a bombing campaign, stories about Kosovo
casualties in the Western Press would be replaced by pictures of
dead Serbian children; and that human rights protestors, eager to
be on both sides of any photogenic issue, would quickly begin
condemning the war on the Serbian people.
What makes all of this possible is the Serbian government's sense
that it has the support of the Serbian people. The Clinton
administration's dream is that a bombing campaign will drive a
wedge between the Serbian government and the Serbian people, with
the people demanding a change in policy because they were
unwilling to endure the pain. Milosovic knows his people better
than Holbrooke, Albright or Clinton. He also knows his history.
There is not a single instance in history in which an air
campaign caused a split between a government at war and its
people. It didn't happen during the Battle of Britain, in
Germany, in Japan, in North Vietnam and it hasn't yet happened in
Iraq. Milosovic is betting that it will not happen in Serbia.
Thus, an air campaign, isolated from a comprehensive warfighting
strategy designed to defeat the Serbian army is not only unlikely
to succeed. Its success would be unprecedented in history.
The
Serbs, as a nation, have too much at stake to permit their
territory to be occupied by foreign troops. Moreover, with
Russian winds shifting, the Serbs calculate that they may well
have a great power ally prepared to sustain them, just as North
Vietnam did. The U.S. could have defeated North Vietnam by
invading it. It chose not to, rationally understanding that the
prize was not worth the cost. The United States can defeat
Serbia by invading it, but again, the prize isn't worth it. The
problem is that as in Vietnam, the United States can neither
commit the forces needed to win nor abandon the issue. In search
for a solution at a cost the United States can bear, Clinton, the
anti-war protestor, is paradoxically following the precise policy
of Lyndon Johnson, the man against whom he protested.