Latest from Stratfor.........MUST READ....Shows how delusional the NATO leadership is and the lies they have been spewing at us...
GMT, 990624 BDA Refutes Claim that
NATO Bombed Serbs into Submission
Now that NATO forces are on the ground in Kosovo, they
finally have an opportunity to observe the effects of the 79
day bombing campaign. Readily apparent is that NATO
was successful in targeting buildings, fuel depots, and
other fixed infrastructure. This comes as no surprise, since
there was ample video footage of the damage available
throughout the conflict. What has also become apparent is
that NATO's bombing campaign did strikingly little
damage to Yugoslav military equipment, troops, and
capacity to wage war.
Despite NATO claims that it had damaged or destroyed
some 40 percent of Yugoslavia's main battle tanks and 60
percent of Yugoslav artillery and mortars, KFOR troops
have thus far found only three damaged, and outdated,
T-55 tanks left behind in Kosovo. The Yugoslav military
admits to an additional 10 damaged tanks, though they
were considered sufficiently repairable to be removed
from the province on trailers. What NATO did find was a
massive amount of decoys – fake tanks, trucks, artillery
pieces, missile launchers, roads, and even bridges – on
which NATO had expended its weaponry. NATO troops
entering Kosovo also described the Yugoslav Army's
defensive fortifications as "formidable."
NATO's attacks on fixed infrastructure, while successful,
were of questionable value. Yugoslav forces quickly
abandoned their known headquarters, and both Serbian
and KLA sources reported through the campaign that
NATO was attacking empty buildings – repeatedly. And
while NATO repeatedly struck Yugoslavia's limited number
of petroleum infrastructure targets, reports late in the
conflict indicated that the Yugoslav Army still retained
ample stockpiles of fuel to facilitate armor and aircraft
combat maneuver. Strikes against the hardened airbase
at Pristina were also evidently less successful than NATO
had hoped. On June 11, six MiG-21s flew out of Pristina
airport, and on June 12, what NATO initially reported as
eleven MiG-29s but later called MiG-21s departed
Pristina. And despite NATO assertions that its bombing
campaign had crushed the spirit of the Yugoslav Army, the
47,000 troops that withdrew from the province appeared
to observers to be in good shape and high spirits.
In spinning the Serbian withdrawal, a U.S. official insisted
to the International Herald Tribune that if the Yugoslav
soldiers "still looked defiant retreating to Serbia, it reflects
the kind of self-delusion that Serbs have been living in, and
the fact that our air war was designed to make Belgrade
surrender without our having to physically destroy all the
Serbian forces first." While NATO argued, and continues
to argue, that its bombing campaign was one of the main
forces that drove Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic
to the table, according to Michael Evans of the London
Times, the bomb damage assessment has some NATO
officials wondering why Milosevic did surrender.
As Stratfor has written previously, Milosevic did not think
he was surrendering. He thought he was agreeing to the
compromise G-8 agreement, which, through the Russian
and UN roles, would guarantee ultimate Yugoslav
sovereignty over Kosovo. It was only after NATO troops
began moving into Kosovo that NATO successfully
reinterpreted a compromise as a capitulation. NATO
politicians, eager to portray the last three months as an
unabashed victory, are ignoring the facts and sticking to
the tale of the overwhelming air campaign – despite clear
evidence to the contrary. As NATO attempts to collect and
absorb the lessons learned from the Kosovo conflict, it
runs the serious risk of institutionalizing the fantasies of its
spin doctors. Yugoslavia was more than capable of
waging a ground war to the day it withdrew from Kosovo.
The air campaign succeeded in destroying a lot of fixed
targets, but not in pummeling Milosevic into submission.
NATO's victory came from compromise, followed and
covered by duplicity. Spin doctors must spin, but for
politicians and planners to build future policy on the idea
that KFOR has PGM to thank for its deployment to Kosovo
would be, to paraphrase an anonymous U.S. official,
"self-delusion."
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