NATO's Gamble: Combining Diplomacy and Airpower in the Kosovo Crisis, 1998-1999

by Dag Henriksen

In this revealing work, Dag Henriksen discloses the origins and content of NATO's strategic and conceptual thinking on how the use of force was to succeed politically in altering the behavior of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). The air campaign, known as Operation Allied Force, was the first war against any sovereign nation in the history of NATO and the first major combat operation conducted for humanitarian purposes against a state committing atrocities within its own borders. This book examines the key political, diplomatic, and military processes that shaped NATO and U.S. management of the Kosovo crisis and shows how air power became the main instrument in their strategy to coerce the FRY to accede to NATO's demands. The book further shows that the military leaders set to execute the campaign had no clear strategic guidance on what the operation was to achieve and that the level of uncertainty was so high that the officers selecting the bombing targets watched NATO's military spokesman on CNN for guidance in choosing their targets. Henriksen argues that structures preceding the Kosovo crisis shaped the management to a much greater degree than events taking place in Kosovo and that the air power community's largely institutionalized focus on high-intensity conflicts, like the 1991 Gulf War, hampered them from developing strategies to fit the political complexities of crises. Because fighting and wars in the lower end of the intensity spectrum are likely to surface again, study of the Kosovo crisis offers lessons for future international conflicts in which the combination of force and diplomacy will play a very significant role.

304 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

Reviews

[Jeremy Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great examination of Operation Allied Force, the role of airpower, and the changing character of warfare. It's concise, well-researched, and laid out clearly.

[Abby · Rating 3 out of 5]

So this book talks as much about Bosnia as it does Kosovo...which makes sense since the author's aim is to contextualize the decisions made by NATO in the lead up to the Kosovo intervention.

[Raj Agrawal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heriksen looks at Operation ALLIED FORCE in the context of Schelling’s compellence strategy, and provides his readers a few lessons learned regarding the handling of the air campaign. He determines that Lt Gen Short’s air campaign was too reductionist in its design, closely mirroring the Industrial Web Theory and Warden’s propositions – a war that probably should have been based more on the threat of force rather than the actual use of it. The author paints OAF as a similar strategy as Rolling Thunder, with “hope” being the ultimate end state. He pins the majority of the blame on NATO’s air component, portraying Gen Clark as the principal and Lt Gen Short as the shirking agent (see Feaver).

This book is as much history as it is IR theory, and provides a very helpful guide in analyzing the OAF air campaign. I do feel that Henriksen should have refrained from making somewhat reductionist conclusions himself regarding the effects of latent force and how coercion might have worked better with diplomacy as the supported effort. The lesson learned should be that war is complex, and strategists should not bring a pre-cut plan to any conflict. The patterns are there for us to refer to in hopes they might shed light on how to approach a new problem, but they rarely provide a gift-wrapped solution for us. Therefore, it might be that Henricksen would have made the very same mistakes that Lt Gen Short (or really, President Clinton) made in OAF – “hoping” that the preferred strategy will coerce the enemy to do something they otherwise would not do, using a theory that has never really been proven to work.

[Trav · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't about air power so much as it is about how the politicians viewed air power and the military viewed politics in the lead up to Operation ALLIED FORCE. For those without a background in this area, this is an excellent compliment to the RAND study that focused on the actual conduct of the air campaign over Kosovo. (NATO's Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment)

The thrust of Henriksen's argument is that NATO began the campaign without a clear strategy. The desire that "something must be done" and the attractiveness of the zero-causality but high visibility option of air power together led to the decision to bomb the FRY in order to coerce Milosevic into negotiations. The issue was that there was a divergence between the US and its European allies on the use of force, divergence between the US administration and the US military about the wisdom of limited versus decisive force, and conflict between the airmen and the US commanders over the conduct of the bombings. The absence of a clear strategy exacerbated these differences of opinion among the key players in the campaign creating an excellent example of how not to wage an air campaign.

A useful read to gain insight into Civ-Mil relations, alliance politics, and coalition warfare.

[Rich · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent book about Kosovo that hardly talked about anything other than the missteps at the beginning. For a book about Allied Force, it hardly spoke about the causal chains within it that drove the outcome, but instead spent that time referring back to a lot of Deliberate Force.

Great civ-mil study on Lt Gen Short (USAF) though, and how he just didn't seem to understand that his personal beliefs on air power were inappropriate for the political context. So, for that reason alone, its a good read.