I would say that your points in this post are well taken. So, I agree. We don't really know what would happen in the event of an actual ground force invasion some months from now, if one were to happen. I have been pounded on this matter here by a progressive anti-war friend who was in the military for a long time
and claims that the latest US high-tech gizmos would zap the Yugoslav military like pathetic lambs, if the full force of the US military were to really get in there. Maybe.
However, I would note that the Serbian force in Krajina was not the regular Yugoslav military but an irregular Serbian militia. Any ground invasion would indeed be dealing with the actual Yugoslav military on its home turf---much better armed than those militias in Krajina, I imagine. So, we don't know.
But those who predict an easy victory should be cautious. After all, some of those (not all) were already predicting that air power would do the trick,
Nowell:
Your point is picked up today in a letter to the LA Times which hammers at some Senator, McCain maybe, who wrote something apoparently similar to what I wrote. But usually the notion of sustained guerilla operations doesn't really depend on the notion of a professional conventional army heading to the hills. The whole point of sustained guerilla is the "fishies swimming in the sea of the people." In theory Serb fish in Croatia could swim in the sea of whatever Serb people were left after the 300,000 killed, unless they were *all* moved out, which might be the case. I've read a couple books on Yugo which makes me 1000% more informed than the avg person but my personal sentiment is that I know less now than ever. Sustained guerilla warfare by a conventional army? Hmm. That would mean that they were getting what they needed from the towns and that as the 90% Albanians moved back into Kosovo the 10%, plus funneled supplies from Serbia, would be enough to keep things hot in Kosovo. Maybe, mabe not. Rather different from Viet Nam, I should think.
Ditto with Serbia itself. One might have expected guerrilla operations from the fanatical devotees of either the Japanese or the Germans. But in fact, one must say, that an "occupier" who moves in, lays groundrules like "no broadcasts about how bad we are", and then says "but you can organize a fairly large spectrum of parties and have elections, even though we want our people to win and will give htem money to make sure they do" well, look at it this way. The US occupation of Germany and Japan was much more "accepted" than the German occupation of Serbia. And partially, I think we must leave room for the fact that there is a different modus operandi at work. We took out a few top people and shot, hanged, and imprisoned them; their top lieutenants moved into great positions in postwar industry. Go along to get along.
Other factors also matter in assessing the viability of guerilla resistance, such as the extent to which outsdie powers want to pour resources into the conflict. I don't think Russia is well positioned for this. China's opposition is primarily of the order of "we don't like the precedent because one day we may wish to wump on Taiwan". So who else is there? Therefore, the sustenance delivered to a theoretical guerilla resistance might be substantially less than Viet Nam received, than China received from the US and UK, and so on. Which means it might not be successful.
For it is ever thus. There is capitalist imperialism and capitalism imperialism, just as in antiquity. But scholars reserve a special place for the savagery of the Assyrians. In a world in which bad things were the norm, they stood out.
Final concluding thoughts: Mao's essay On Guerilla Warfare is a classic but one shouldn't read it without also reading Thompson's Defeating Communist Insurgency. He lays out the counterattack and also notes writes about Viet Nam mostly in a past tense, as a failed counter insurgent strategy that would lead to defeat (the book was published in 1965, so he gets credit for foreseeing disaster before the bulk of the escalation). As for our own US military: many of us came out of the Viet Nam thing with a vision of the US military as incompetent and stupid. I won't deny it (see today's WSJ on strattegic debates in the army), *but* I must say that the military students (graduate students) both at MIT and here at SUNY havae been some of the smartest people I've encountered in my academic career, and they're all still on active duty. There are a lot of smart people in the army, which means that we should not *totally* discount the theoretical possibility of their achieving strategic objectives.
-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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