Things don't look so good to me. I think Clinton bit off more than he can chew. Air strikes will not accomplish the objective and if what the world fears is true as far as the amount of killing that has been done by Milosevic (genocide) then he is going to be tried for crimes against humanity and he knows this. What then is his motivation to cease hostilities? The article below hints at what I think the future of this situation will be unfortunately.
U.S., Allies Weigh Use of Ground Forces
Commanders Fear Bombing Won't Stop Serb Offensive
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 27, 1999; Page A01
The deteriorating situation in Kosovo has prompted discussions among senior NATO and U.S. officials about the possibility of introducing U.S. and allied ground forces into the three-day-old air campaign against the Yugoslav military.
Senior officials said a decision on a deployment was still unlikely and that the subject has not yet been broached with President Clinton, who said this week he did not intend to send U.S. troops to Kosovo to fight. But officials said some senior NATO and U.S. military commanders fear that the ongoing bombing campaign cannot stop the offensive by Serbian-led forces against Albanian villages in the rebellious province, and that ground forces might be needed to halt the Serbs or prevent the war from spreading to neighboring countries.
Officials said the very fact that a ground war is under consideration is a measure of the seriousness of the difficulties now facing the commanders of Operation Allied Force. "Nobody at anything like a senior level, the principals' committee or deputies' committee, has looked the president or the secretary of state in the eye and said, 'This isn't going to work; we have to reconsider,' " said a senior administration official involved in the planning. "Here, and in Brussels, people have said, 'What if the limitations of air power are such, and the atrocities are such, that we have to consider ?' "
In an appearance last night in New Hampshire, Vice President Gore said there are no plans for U.S. soldiers to fight in Yugoslavia. "We are not going to put any ground troops into a combat situation," Gore said. "Neither are our allies."
However, certain NATO commanders are being briefed on military contingency plans for combat and preparing their troops for entry into Yugoslavia in a hostile environment, said U.S. officials. Kosovo is a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.
"You have to make a distinction between what they are told to plan for and what they prudently plan for," said one military officer.
A NATO force that includes 4,000 British, 2,800 German and 2,500 French troops is already deployed in Macedonia, a country that borders on Kosovo, in anticipation of peacekeeping duty under a Western peace plan. In recent days, it has been reorganized with a new command-and-control structure and with additional reconnaissance and intelligence assets, officials said. New levels of supplies have been flown in to accommodate a longer stay by the force, whose deployment in Kosovo has been repeatedly rejected by Serb leader and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Also, 38 U.S. officers, including a U.S. brigadier general who is the assistant chief of staff for operations, will be in Macedonia to help direct troops in NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, the headquarters for a contingency force planned by the alliance that could be assembled from units stationed around Europe. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, made up of 2,200 Marines, will arrive in the vicinity soon, on its way to relieve the current Marine unit afloat in the Adriatic.
Another 350 U.S. soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division-Mechanized who were part of a separate U.N. peacekeeping force in Macedonia are now on scouting missions on the Macedonia-Kosovo border. Yesterday, 100 combat-equipped Marines flew to Macedonia to augment U.S. Embassy security there.
In Bosnia, where the United States has 9,800 troops from the 1st Cavalry Division in the international peacekeeping force, U.S. forces are on what one senior official described as a ready-to-go stance.
The 1st Cavalry is one of the most heavily equipped divisions in the U.S. Army, and it is now deployed in Bosnia in unusually large numbers because of a scheduled rotation. The units now in Bosnia include 13 combat companies and 30 tanks, 60 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles and one Apache helicopter battalion of 24 combat attack helicopters.
Also, elements of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division have begun training at one of Europe's premier combat training fields, at Hohenfels in Germany, for possible deployment as peacekeepers in Kosovo.
U.S. military officials are in a particularly awkward spot. From the beginning of the Kosovo crisis, officials said, senior commanders have warned Clinton and his top advisers that air power has its limits. Now the events of the past two days, which have seen Yugoslav forces step up their attacks in Kosovo in spite of NATO bombing raids, may be proving them right.
To avoid a last-minute scramble to get ground forces ready for combat in Kosovo or neighboring countries in the event the situation deteriorates further, officials said, NATO commanders have begun taking quiet steps on their own, hoping they will not disrupt NATO's fragile political consensus on Kosovo or provoke opposition in Congress.
Military officials said the heightened Serb atrocities in Kosovo -- again a scenario NATO and U.S. military planners anticipated -- have cast the limits of an air war into clearer focus. To avoid pilot casualties, military planners have focused the first several days of bombings on the Yugoslav air defense system, rather than on Serb troops.
Yesterday, facing reports of mass killings in Kosovo by Serb special police, the Clinton administration urged NATO to increase the pace of the bombing campaign so it can more quickly begin to target the troops and tanks involved in the reported atrocities.
But administration and defense officials say such targets will remain difficult to destroy from the air because the perpetrators are often small gangs of special police using guerrilla tactics, including mixing deeply within populated civilian areas.
In fact, it is just this type of urban, guerrilla warfare that is more effectively countered by ground troops. "We're going to do everything we can through air operations," said one senior military official, speaking to this fact.
Staff writers Thomas W. Lippman and Ceci Connolly contributed to this report.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
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