The Airstrike Option: Vietnam, Desert Storm and Serbia
March 22, 1999
stratfor.com
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.
>>>Birinyi was again on CNBC just now touting the bullish view and
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>>>using the AIQ market breadth builder. The advance decline for the
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>>>to the lows again. The A-D lines for the supercaps is clearly in a
>>>downtrend. |
