Further evidence (were it needed) that Kosovo stands as one of the greatest foreign policy debacles of all US history -- from today's NY Times:
Bombing Unites Serb Army as It Debilitates Economy
By Blaine Harden and Steven Lee Myers
The NATO bombing that was intended to cripple and demoralize Slobodan Milosevic's military machine has instead invigorated the Yugoslav Army and has helped him heal his long-poisoned relationship with the officers corps, American and NATO officials say.
The senior military and intelligence officials said that more than five weeks of bombing had rallied the Yugoslav Army to the defense of their country, sharply increased the willingness of recruits to serve in the military and given senior army officers a mission that they finally feel is legitimate.
The relationship between Milosevic and the senior officers had been soured by 10 years of distrust and purges, delayed paychecks and prosecutions for treason. The bombing has provided those officers and the Serbian leader with a common enemy, NATO.
"The 'rally round the flag' effect in Serbia has been profound," said a Government official who has been studying the Balkans for a decade and attributes the change in army morale to the NATO bombing. "It is not Slobo's war. It is the army defending the country."
Despite public assertions that the bombing is going well, intelligence reports provide a far less sanguine assessment. Longtime observers of Yugoslavia in the American Government said in a series of interviews that the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo had escaped crippling matériel damage and significant casualties by dispersing its units well before bombs began to demolish their bases, barracks and fuel depots.
The NATO campaign has also had the unwanted consequence of helping to restore the Yugoslav Army to the respected position that it enjoyed before the violent collapse of the Yugoslav federation began in 1991. Then the army was the primary glue holding Tito's multinational union together. As such, it was systematically weakened and humiliated by Milosevic to suit his nationalist ends -- until NATO's bombing changed his defense needs.
The campaign has had only "a marginal effect" in diminishing the capacity of Yugoslav contingents to force ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo or carry out attacks against insurgents from the Kosovo Liberation Army, one official said.
The supreme NATO commander, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, insisted in Brussels this week that the bombing had hobbled Yugoslav air defenses and was wearing away the resources of Milosevic's armed forces. But General Clark also acknowledged that despite the bombing, "you might actually find out that he's strengthened his forces in there."
American officials in Washington went considerably further this week. They characterized as "greatly exaggerated" claims by Western leaders and NATO commanders that the bombing had damaged Yugoslav Army morale and hampered the ability to conscript troops.
In Serbia, the army's image seems to have soared, most noticeably in Belgrade. Many capital residents had lost respect for the military because of its failures in unpopular ethnic conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia. But the army is now regarded as the defender of the nation.
"Yugoslav males did not want to get sucked into the fights in Croatia or Bosnia," said an American military official who has long experience in the region. "But indications are that young men are responding to the draft now and in significantly higher numbers than in the past. After five weeks of bombing in Kosovo, they are saying to themselves, 'Gosh, we are still standing.' It is easy to march to the drum if you don't think you are going to get killed."
NATO and Pentagon commanders maintain that the air war is slowly but steadily taking apart the Yugoslav military. They say the Air Force has been disabled and essentially grounded, especially after strikes overnight against aircraft found at an airfield in Montenegro. They concede that the Yugoslav Army is holding up relatively well, but pledge that the intensifying campaign will grind away its forces and morale.
"If they're not feeling it yet to the full extent, they will in time," a senior American military officer said. "These are hearty people. They're used to a certain amount of suffering. You're not going to crush their morale in 30 days. They're going to have feel some real pain before they collapse."
A factor in the army's success is that its commanders knew that they would have to absorb punishment and, the experts said, they prepared well for it.
When the bombardment began on March 24, the Yugoslav Army had built up its forces in and around Kosovo. It relied on a large number of reservists and conscripts to fill out a force of 40,000, including 24,000 army troops and 16,000 military police officers.
The initial barrages focused almost exclusively on air defenses. By the time that NATO turned to army targets, including barracks, staging areas and headquarters, those complexes had been emptied.
NATO and the Pentagon, one officer said, now believe that five weeks of bombing have caused casualties that number only "in the hundreds."
By the time General Clark asked for and received approval to intensify the strikes at the end of last month, the army and police units had routed the Albanians from most Kosovo villages and towns.
Then they hunkered down. Some have dug into defensive positions along the Kosovo borders with Albania and Macedonia. But most have dispersed, moving in relatively small units that are much harder for NATO's high-flying planes to strike.
"They're hiding their vehicles whenever they can, staying under cover, staying relatively immobile -- No. 1 to cover themselves from air strikes and, No. 2, to conserve fuel," a senior military official said.
Last week, the Pentagon estimated that NATO attacks had destroyed 10 to 20 percent of the 300 tanks that the Yugoslav Army has in Kosovo. To put it another way, that leaves 80 to 90 percent intact, by the Pentagon's count.
Although officials say the attacks have limited Yugoslavia's ability to mount effective military operations, the army does not have to mount offenses, at this point, having completed its campaign in Kosovo.
It simply has to hold on to the defensive positions that it has on the ground, which it could do indefinitely, as long as the army's soldiers remain motivated, despite the destruction of fixed targets like headquarters and barracks, officials said.
"It will be a while before you have any wear and tear on the foot soldier," a senior military officer said. "It's hard to do that with air power alone. That's the lesson of Vietnam. We pounded Vietnam and we never did stop the supplies along the Ho Chi Minh trail."
The Yugoslav armed forces, although badly overmatched, have effectively used churches, schools and hospitals to shield troops and equipment against strikes by pilots who are under orders to avoid killing civilians.
"They've taken their strengths and applied them against our weaknesses," a former Western military attaché to Belgrade said. "They know our loathing to lose pilots, and they've used their air defenses in a way that exploits that."
Intelligence reports indicate that the army is still able to dispatch fuel to its forces, although there are widespread shortages and rationing for civilians. Although the railway and bridge destruction has made transporting fuel much more difficult, two senior defense officials said the army was still shipping gasoline in small convoys of six-axle trucks, bypassing destroyed routes or building makeshift river crossings.
The ability to improvise and endure underscores how the war has revitalized the army officer corps.
Many officers have long grumbled about -- and in some cases flatly opposed -- the wars that Milosevic prosecuted in Croatia and in Bosnia. In the course of those conflicts in the early 90's, he shifted resources from the army, which has historically seen its mission as one of protecting the nation from outside aggression, to the more loyal and more pliable Serbian police.
Police officers are now significantly better paid and have better housing than army officers. The changes caused enormous morale problems among an officer corps that plucked its recruits from villages, trained them in guerrilla warfare in special schools and largely insulated them from the country's chronic economic problems.
Milosevic also purged scores of senior army officers to find generals who were willing to command troops that work with the police in savage attacks on civilians. Midlevel army officers have long questioned the professionalism of the loyalists, while quietly voicing doubts to Western military officers about the future of the army.
But American Government experts on the region said this week that the bombing of Yugoslavia had silenced the grumbling and erased the doubts, at least for now, while handing the army a mission that officers perceive as legal and just.
"Either by dumb luck or a stroke of genius, Milosevic has given the army a direction," said the American military official who spent time in the region. "Militaries respond well to crises. When you talk to senior Yugoslav Army officers, they always speak of the Constitution. They will talk about defending their borders against external threats and defending the country against internal enemies. It is not much of a stretch for the army to take the situation on the ground in Kosovo and feel they are doing the right thing."
Partly as a result of that, the army appears to have moved to the dominant command position in the war.
"The NATO campaign has put the Yugoslav Army in first place in the institutional command for the first time this decade," said James Gow, a specialist on the Yugoslav Army who teaches war studies at Kings College in London.
Military analysts, in and out of the United States Government, voice no doubts that a large NATO ground force could make short work of the out-of-date tanks and artillery pieces that would be the pillars of the Yugoslav Army defense.
[end of article]
Carl Remick