I still don't understand the idea that NATO "won the war with air power." When the war started, NATO's objective was to get Milosevic to sign the Rambouillet document. When "air power" failed to achieve this outcome after about three weeks, NATO started to cut a deal.
In the end, according to most of the reporting on the secret negotiations, Milosevic decided to sign the Ahtissari-Chernomyrdin plan because it left out most of the objectionable features of the Rambouillet plan. These included: 1) The referendum on Kosovo's independence; 2) The notorious "Appendix B" of Rambouillet's implementation portion; and 3) The lack of U.N. authority.
> 1) PREDICTION ONE: An Air War cannot be won and terror bombing will just
> harden Serbian resistance: Well, whatever one thinks about the morality
> of
> the NATO intervention, the empirical fact is that the basic goal of
> forcing
> Serbia to accept a NATO troop occupation of Kosovo was achieved through
> the
> pure application of air power, something most analysts (including a strong
> suspicious by myself I admit) thought was unlikely. Clinton and his NATO
> cohorts were on that point smarter than many of those "experienced
> military
> analysts" who were trotted out to denigrate his military planning and
> tactics. And the estimated 6000 Serbian deaths is far less than the
> Serbian
> population would likely have suffered with a ground war invasion. (Whether
> there would have been fewer Kosovar deaths with such a strategy is a more
> open question.)
>