STRATFOR's Global Intelligence Update April 26, 1999
Weekly Analysis -- NATO Summit Generates Gridlock
What has emerged from the NATO summit concerning Kosovo is pure gridlock. Three basic decisions were made: first, there will not be a ground war; second, there will not be a major redefinition of negotiating terms; and, third, there will be an intensified air war. Having bluffed and been called, NATO, rather than reshuffling the deck, has decided to keep pushing in money, hoping that Milosevic will eventually fold his hand.
The only new element to emerge is an agreement to embargo oil shipments to Yugoslavia. That decision in itself was shocking. Consider the extraordinary fact that NATO even considered going to war with Serbia without having established a blockade. That absurdity was compounded when it looked for a few days like NATO could not generate unanimity on the subject of a blockade. After intense diplomacy, everyone fell into line. Finally, NATO countries like Hungary will make the major concession of agreeing not to ship oil to Serbia. What is shocking is that this should have even required discussion.
Equally shocking was what was not discussed: what to do if the Russians, the Chinese, or, for that matter, any country decides to deliver oil. NATO has decided to board and inspect all ships. What does NATO plan to do if the Russians decline to be boarded? Will NATO use force against Russian ships? Chinese ships? It is not the decision that is shocking, nor the thought that ships will be boarded. What is shocking is that NATO has given very little thought to how these policies will be implemented by the Lt. Commanders who will be called upon to enforce them in split second decisions.
The issue here isn't thoughtful or thoughtless policymaking. The issue here is far more serious: whether NATO at fifty is institutionally capable of managing a military crisis. For the past month, what we have seen are individual NATO members trying to use the machinery and legitimacy of NATO to formulate and execute a war-fighting strategy. A strategy, by definition, requires flexibility, comprehensiveness and the effective generation of options in the face of unexpected or unpleasant events. NATO has shown itself to be inflexible, unable to provide a comprehensive approach to the war, and unable to face and respond to unexpected events and painful truths. NATO, as an institution, is in deep denial. This is not to say that the NATO officials and its military officers are in denial. They are painfully aware of the deep problems they are facing. The denial is being generated by the institution itself.
What is now obvious is that there will not be an institutional solution to the crisis. By this we mean that NATO, as an institution, which involves decisions by nineteen governments and operates on the bases of consensus, cannot generate a vision for either winning or concluding the war. NATO can neither shift its military strategy nor diplomatic strategy without losing the consensus its decision-making is predicated upon. Therefore, NATO is locked in to the existing policy that isn't working because flexibility has become impossible. If the United States were to stage a fight for a ground option, or Italy a fight for acceptance of Russian proposals, the entire political edifice of NATO would buckle. It is easier to evade problems than to face them.
It is important to understand how NATO went from being a solid bulwark against the Soviets into a herd of cats, unable to make any definitive decisions. The problem is rooted in the very nature of the institution. NATO's decision making structure was designed for a world in which major decisions were locked in by history and ratified by doctrine. NATO had a founding purpose: to prevent the Soviets from conquering Germany and Western Europe. NATO also had a fundamental concern, which was to make certain that all members carried out their military obligations in the event of war. The deepest problem facing NATO was to create confidence in the idea that in the event of war, each nation would automatically do what it was pledged to do. So, for example, a great fear of the Europeans was that in the event of a Soviet invasion, the United States might choose not to commit the forces promised to defend Europe. More important yet was the widespread concern that the United States would not carry out its guarantees at the last minute, being unwilling to risk U.S. troops, or the city of Chicago, to deter Soviet occupation of Bonn. The mission was known. What was not known was the extent to which members would commit themselves to their obligation at the moment of truth.
NATO solved this problem with what we might call a culture of planning. With a clearly understood mission, NATO planners analyzed every possible contingency. For every contingency, they generated a plan. For every plan, they allocated forces. For every force, NATO devised endless training exercises designed to make execution as automatic as possible. That is precisely what NATO did: they created a system of automated, conditioned responses that were to be executed so rapidly that participants did not have the time or opportunity to pause, reflect and potentially renege.
The planning and exercise process, quite apart from being necessary for military preparedness, was also an instrument that psychologically and operationally locked in the actors. Under such and such circumstances, given the doctrine and the particular plan that applied, units in North Carolina, the Netherlands, and Sicily all went into motion. In operational terms, the goal was to make the commitment of forces as thoughtless as possible. Even complex war fighting doctrines like Air-Land Battle, which foresaw a fluid and unpredictable battlefield, still contained highly routinized, automated procedures for the initiation of conflict. NATO's internal battles were referred to countless planning cells that packaged a basic strategic challenge into an array of automated responses. In many respects, scenario construction, contingency planning, war gaming, and repetitive exercises was the glue that held NATO together, staving off the fear of a last minute doublecross.
The rock on which the church rested was the Soviet threat. Without that threat, contingency planning collapses. War gaming is built on a base of sand. Exercises become intellectual in nature, not preparatory. NATO now operates in a highly undefined set of circumstances. Having debated the meaning of NATO ever since the collapse of communism, NATO suddenly found itself with a mission, one wholly unanticipated. There were no plans, there were no wargames, there had been no exercises and no one was on automatic pilot. Therefore the inevitable happened: everyone became wholly unreliable.
Nevertheless, NATO decided to intervene in Kosovo. However, NATO's exquisite preplanning process with its branching logics and pre-negotiated solutions was not in place. Rather, Yugoslavia required planning on the fly. Basic strategic decisions have to be made in parallel with operational implementation and tactical deployment. NATO was simply unable to cope with that because its strategic planning process assumes a dramatic separation in time between strategic planning and operational implementation. The strategy is to be discussed at various levels in dozens of working groups, hammered out over years and locked into place. In Kosovo there was no time for that planning and no time to generate the political consensus to support a strategic concept. The result is not so much chaos as paralysis.
Behind this, there is a fundamental problem of political theory: the problem of sovereignty. National sovereignty does not simply mean that a government has the right to make the decisions it wants without being overridden by a higher authority. Sovereignty means that the internal processes of a country define how that country will respond. During the Cold War, the automated process of NATO was specifically designed to suspend national sovereignty. At the crucial moment, when Soviet tanks crashed across the Fulda Gap, it would have been disastrous to have individual nations exercising their national sovereignty by turning over the decision to commit forces to their internal political process. NATO's planning process was designed to automate the commitment of forces so as to avoid the problem of national sovereignty.
That curtailing of national sovereignty was, in turn, the cost the members were willing to pay in order to protect Western civilization from a menace, the Soviet Union, which threatened its very foundations. The suspension of national sovereignty to multinational organizations and their bureaucracy makes a great deal of sense when the stakes are as high as they were from 1948 until about 1990. But the suspension of national sovereignty in the interest of a peacekeeping, humanitarian mission is quite another matter.
Thus, not only has NATO's mechanism for short-circuiting sovereign decisions broken down because of a lack of strategic focus, but the willingness of NATO members to suspend sovereignty without a fundamental threat to civilization has dissolved. Try as Prime Minister Blair might to brand Milosevic, he is not a threat to civilization. If every charge leveled against him were completely true, then he would be a vicious, genocidal thug. But he would still not be a threat to civilization in the sense that Hitler or Stalin was. He just doesn't have the battalions. Since he is not a fundamental threat to the whole, NATO simply doesn't have the political consensus, decision making structure or flexibility to craft strategies, operations and tactics in real- time. That is the weakness of any multinational grouping and why NATO cannot function as the speechmakers in Washington might wish. To put it simply, since NATO is not sovereign, it cannot make sovereign decisions. Its rapidly generated responses represent the lowest common denominator. Generating a subtle diplomacy and a flexible war-fighting strategy is simply beyond its institutional energy.
The essence of success in war is surprise. The essence of success in diplomacy is subtlety. The essence of both is secrecy, timing, and above all, somebody in charge who can make decisions. The relevant joke might be, what has 19 mouths and no brain? Answer: NATO leaders at a summit. Individually, each of them might well be brilliant in every way. Collectively, the pathetic spectacle of speechifying coupled with a complete lack of imagination could only have encouraged Milosevic.
The summit meeting was a time to forge a dramatic change in war plans. Plan A failed. That happens. That calls for Plan B: perhaps a ground attack, perhaps a new diplomatic initiative. But something must be done to break the gridlock. All that NATO could decide on was to do what they had done unsuccessfully for a month, and to add an oil embargo that should have been in place before the first bomb fell. The issue now is not what NATO will or won't do. We have the answer to that: it will do what it did yesterday in the hope that what failed before will succeed now.
Since the multinational entity is paralyzed, it follows that sovereign states will step in. The United States and Britain may well mount an invasion of Kosovo. If they do, it will be as it was in Iraq: a coalition built as needed, bypassing Brussels. The Germans and Italians may launch a diplomatic offensive with the Russians. If they do, it will be as Germans and Italians on behalf of their own national interests. NATO may or may not ratify the results of war and diplomacy. It will not be the front.
NATO's operational failure is a deep blow to multinational entities and a reminder of the primacy of the nation-state. As much as Clinton wanted to justify his Balkans adventure under the guise of multilateralism, in the end he will have to justify it in terms of the American national interest. As much as Germany would like to cover its abandonment of a failed strategy with NATO sanction, it will try to make its peace with Russia because German national interest requires it.
One of the odd outcomes of this marginal military enterprise is that is it is pushing the nation-state to the fore, almost by default. NATO was designed to cope with a predetermined threat in a predetermined way. The spectacle of NATO trying to execute a war against an unexpected enemy in an unplanned way should not surprise us. It was not built for this mission and the nation- states that constitute it will not permit it to act as a super- state. They will hold on to their sovereignty and will act in their national interest. Germany and Italy will not consent to a ground war simply because NATO planners suggest it. Nor will the United States agree to a cease-fire for that reason. Policy will be set between Bonn, Rome, Washington and London. Brussels and Mons must be bypassed if anything is to be achieved. Whatever the outcome of the Kosovo affair, statesmen will think twice before trying to use NATO's machinery to wage unanticipated wars. We are approaching a peace agreement that will occur in spite of NATO's machinery and not because of it.
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