Ground-troops: the dilemma of NATO politicians and generals
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
3/30/99
LONDON, March 30 (AFP) - NATO leaders, which have firmly ruled out deploying ground troops against the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, may have to eat their words, experts say.
The reluctance to move from the current air campaign to a ground war is essentially political.
From a strictly military point of view, there is no hope of resolving the conflict in Kosovo just by dispatching planes and Tomahawk missiles, defence specialists based in London agree unanimously.
Three scenarios could force the Alliance -- which has neither the mandate nor the wish do so -- to venture onto enemy soil.
The failure of bombardment to knock out the Serb military machine, an intolerable upsurge in the bloody repression of ethnic Albanians -- which the NATO action aimed to end -- or a Serb attack against NATO troops massed in Macedonia or neighbouring Bosnia.
"Although they hate the idea, they may eventually have to do it," said Paul Beaver, an expert with the respected Jane's defence publisher.
"They" refers to the leaders of the 13 NATO countries involved in the air raids who are confronted with a "humanitarian catastrophe" which they could "in fact be exacerbating".
Jonathan Eyal, director of the Royal United Services Institute, agreed.
"Nobody is telling me that we are going to destroy all the pistols from the air, you need people on the ground to follow up the air raids, to capture arms," he said.
"In order to ethnically cleanse you don't need very sophisticated equipment. As we've seen in Racak massacre it's enough to have a pistol," Eyal added.
None of the experts questions the aerial superiority of NATO, even if the sight of Serb peasants dancing over the wing of a downed US Stealth bomber punctured the myth of American invincibility.
But faced with a Yugloslav army of 115,000 men, a ground force will also be required to bring Milosevic to heel, says Andrew Brookes, from the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
"NATO has the power to destroy the Yugoslav forces but only if they bring them to battle", he said, recalling that in Iraq in 1991, six weeks of bombardment was followed by a ground invasion of occupied Kuwait.
Some 150,000 to 200,000 soldiers from NATO would be required, according to various diplomatic sources. Probably with the risk of high casualties, unacceptable for a volatile public opinion.
Just 14 deaths -- GIs and pilots -- were required for the Americans to hurriedly withdraw from Somalia, Jonathan Eyal recalled.
The supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, US General Wesley Clark, himself a Saigon veteran, is unlikely to treat lightly the threat from Arkan -- the notorious Yugoslav warlord -- who has threated to turn Kosovo into "a new Vietnam, in Europe".
NATO has "no plans or intent to introduce our forces into a hostile environment," insisted US Defence Secretary William Cohen last week, four years after NATO troops in Bosnia in 1995 .
The German and French governments also dismissed "the hypothesis of a ground war" And the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, like NATO chief Javier Solana, ruled out dispatching ground troops except to police a settlement.
"Is Europe going to provide the troops to do the job or is it going to sit back and say we expect America to lead on this," Andrew Brookes asked.
"If the European Community means anything then Europe has to provide the bulk of the troops, otherwise the European defence identity is...just hot air," he inveighed. |
