The Imperial Army use Kosovo for a training ground to "sharpen their skills" -- the skills especially useful for the kind of military operations prevalent in the post-Cold War era, managing fallouts of neoliberal capitalism whose destabilizing effects have & will dissolve many states. The Progress of the Empire has made the Real Thing a Simulation for another time (or this is what Jean Baudrillard should have said, if he had wanted to be taken seriously).
***** The New York Times January 18, 2001, Thursday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 8; Column 3; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: Troops Say Kosovo Duty Sharpens Their Skills BYLINE: By MICHAEL R. GORDON and STEVEN ERLANGER DATELINE: GNJILANE, Kosovo, Jan. 16
...Most of the scores of young American officers and senior commanders interviewed for this article said they believed that their mission was important. Most striking, many insist that their work here is making them better soldiers.
"The units that come out of the Balkans are better than the units that have never done a Balkan deployment," said Lt. Col. Jim Embrey, chief operations officer for Task Force Falcon, as the American force here is known.
Kosovo is a good test case of the effects that peacekeeping is having on the American military. With a doctrine that requires the military to prepare for two nearly simultaneous regional wars, the armed forces have plenty to do even without peacekeeping.
Commanders here say duty in Kosovo offers something that their troops would never receive in training, the chance for young officers and soldiers armed with live ammunition to operate in a politically complex and potentially risky situation, making decisions that affect people's lives.
"There are things that will gather rust in our conventional war-fighting skills during our six months here," the task force commander, Brig. Gen. Kenneth J. Quinlan, said. "But by my calculation, the pluses overwhelm the minuses. In terms of junior-leader development, there is no better training environment than where we are today."
For all the debate that Balkan peacekeeping has generated among American politicians, the 5,245 American troops here make up 13 percent of the multinational force.
The current American force is part of the First Armored Division, one of the Army's premier combat units. The divison spent the cold war training to go toe-to-toe with the Warsaw Pact and joined in 1991 in the Army's famous left-hook against the Iraqi Republican Guard in the Persian Gulf war.
The troops are dispatched on six-month tours and leave behind their families. Most of the force operates from Camps Bondsteel and Montieth, two sprawling bases equipped with Burger King restaurants, gymnasiums and movie theaters to ease the strain of operating far from home. Almost a fifth of the force spends the night in one of the smaller 53 outposts and satellite camps in the province.
Critics have portrayed peacekeeping as a poor substitute for intensive combat training at the vast ranges that the Army has established in Europe and the United States. Some troops in Kosovo agree, saying they are soldiers, and not police officers.
But others stress that the mission is far more varied than many critics recognize, taking a view that is widely shared by their European NATO counterparts.
Peacekeeping in Kosovo not only means staffing checkpoints and escorting frightened Serbian civilians to markets, schools and hospitals in Albanian areas. It also involves armed patrols along the rugged boundary with Serbia, actions that are intended to stop the flow of arms, food and supplies to Albanian insurgents, who operate in a three-mile strip of Serbian territory that adjoins Kosovo and where Serbian armed forces are banned by the agreement that ended the Kosovo conflict in 1999.
Containing that insurgency has become an increasingly important NATO mission because of the need to limit the possibility for another explosion of ethnic violence that could destabilize the new democrats in Belgrade.
With their boundary mission and other tasks, American helicopter pilots fly three to five times as many hours each month as they do at their bases in Germany, General Quinlan said.
One Kiowa helicopter pilot, Rob Smith, who helped capture a group of Albanian insurgents this month, said his reconnaissance missions provided a good opportunity to train in mountainous conditions.
"Our flying skills are developed a lot better here than in a sea-level environment," he said, and the pilots operate without the restrictions common in purely peacetime exercises.
Artillery might seem out of place in a peacekeeping force. But American troops are using their 155-millimeter guns to fire special illumination rounds to light up the wild boundary region. Combat engineers have been blowing up smugglers' trails....
But some skills do fade. To preserve combat skills, the Army arranged for intensive combat training before the deployment. Training ranges have also been set up in Kosovo where troops can fire tanks, machine guns and other weapons.
But the Americans will not be able to maneuver large armored units and coordinate operations with American helicopters, planes and artillery, a limitation that will affect the soldiers' ability to fight a major war.
"We will go out of Kosovo with some of our skills degraded at the company and battalion level, combined arms stuff that we won't get to do here," General Quinlan said. "Companies can't operate as companies here. Battalions can't operate as battalions in a conventional sense with tanks."
General Quinlan said it would take 90 days for his soldiers to regain their previous combat proficiency after they have completed their Kosovo assignment and return to Germany. Asked what would happen if his troops were called on to fight, he said that, if needed, they would be ready to go to war.
With the ambitious training regimen and a steady series of overseas deployments, there has also been concern that extended time away from families will prompt many young soldiers to conclude that the Army life is not for them. So far, that problem seems to be under control here, at least in terms of re-enlistment rates.
The First Armored, which provided the troops for the previous American peacekeeping deployment in the Army, as well as the current one, has the highest retention rate in the Army, according to Sherman J. Fuller, command sergeant major for the task force.
The often generous bonuses that soldiers receive for re-enlisting are tax free if they re-enlist while in Kosovo. And the Army has tried to give the soldiers more predictability about their lives by developing a five-year deployment schedule for Kosovo.
At Pones, Captain Cantello and his men are taking steps to maintain their combat skills. Captain Cantello's 75-member company drives its 14 tanks once a week, and the troops train on tank simulators at least once a week.
His commander, Lt. Col. Clemson G. Turregano, is also planning a 19-mile trip to a firing range in which the soldiers will practice offensive and defensive maneuvers.... *****
Yoshie