“The enemy that we’re fighting is different from the one we’d war gamed,” U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace told the Washington Post a couple days ago. “We knew they were there-the paramilitaries-but we didn’t know they’d fight like this.”
In addition to chagrin, for those of us who follow military affairs and national security issues, I think this comment couldn’t help but recall 
the “Millennium Challenge” war games and the leaked remarks of General Paul Van Riper, who headed up the “red” or enemy team in that mock war. Basically, Van Riper complained that the folks running the war game stopped him when he tried to think outside the box with the sorts of low-tech, asymmetric tactics an outnumbered and outgunned enemy might use. In the most notorious instance, when Van Riper knocked out several US navy vessels in the Persian Gulf with suicide speed boat attacks, the war-gamers stopped the exercise and “re-floated” the ships.
Anyway, I’m not going to say more about this particular point because Fred Kaplan has an excellent piece on this issue in Slate which covers it admirably. (Just a side note: Kaplan’s reporting on the war has been invaluable. If you haven’t checked him out, you should.)
As I’ve noted, I think Don Rumsfeld has a great deal to answer for in all this. But the war-game mini-scandal clearly goes beyond just Rumsfeld. This was also the sort of group-think, bureaucracy and lack of accountability which is endemic to all vast bureaucratic organizations — not least of which the military. In retrospect, the conduct of that war game looks very, very bad.
Here’s another point. Many people on the web have been buzzing about this Russian website, which has reports on the war said to be based on information from Russian military intelligence, the GRU. The site is similar to Debka, out of Israel. In any case, it’s impossible to know precisely where they’re getting their info and the tone of the reportage is unmistakably hostile to the US position (the headline of the site is “Aggression Against Iraq.”) But there is one piece of strategic analysis on their site, which a reader sent me, which I am sure is quite valid.
The first myth is about the precision-guided weapons as the determining factor in modern warfare, weapons that allow to achieve strategic superiority without direct contact with the enemy. On the one hand we have the fact that during the past 13 years the wars were won by the United States with minimum losses and, in essence, primarily through the use of aviation. At the same time, however, the US military command was stubborn in ignoring that the decisive factor in all these wars was not the military defeat of the resisting armies but political isolation coupled with strong diplomatic pressure on the enemy’s political leadership. It was the creation of international coalitions against Iraq in 1991, against Yugoslavia in 1999 and against Afghanistan in 2001 that ensured the military success.
It’s hard to see those who wish the US ill having such a perceptive analysis of our folly. But this is about as perceptive as it gets. And it recalls a exchange retired General Wesley Clark had with a senior Pentagon appointee just after the turnover of administration’s in 2001.
The official mocked the conduct of the Kosovo war, telling Clark, “We read your book … And no one is going to tell us where we can or can’t bomb.” (I know, but am not in a position to say, who the official is. But let’s just say he’s really senior.)
Let me quote at length from an article Clark wrote a few months ago in the Washington Monthly …
That day at the Pentagon, the senior official and I never had the opportunity to complete the discussion. But it was clear that he had totally misread the lessons of the Kosovo campaign. NATO wasn’t an obstacle to victory in Kosovo; it was the reason for our victory. For 78 days in the spring of 1999, the alliance battled to halt the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Albanians being carried out by the predominantly Serb troops and government of then-President Slobodan Milosevic. It was the first actual war NATO had fought in its 50-year history. Like the U.S. war in Afghanistan, it was predominantly an air campaign (though the threat of a ground attack, I believe, proved decisive). America provided the leadership, the target nominations, and almost all of the precision strikes. Still, it was very much a NATO war. Allied countries flew some 60 percent of the sorties. Because it was a NATO campaign, each bomb dropped represented a target that had been approved, at least in theory, by each of the alliance’s 19 governments. Much of my time as allied commander was spent with various European defense officials, walking them through proposed targets and the reasoning behind them. Sometimes there were disagreements and occasionally we had to modify those lists to take into account the different countries’ political concerns and military judgements. For all of us involved–the president, secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and me–it was a time-consuming and sometimes frustrating process. But in the end, this was the decisive process for success, because whatever we lost in theoretical military effectiveness we gained manyfold in actual strategic impact by having every NATO nation on board.
NATO itself acted as a consensus engine for its members. Because it acts on the basis of such broad agreement, every decision is an opportunity for members to dissent–therefore, every decision generates pressure to agree. Greece, for example, never opposed a NATO action, though its electorate strongly opposed the war and the Greek government tried in other ways to maintain an acceptable “distance” from NATO military actions. This process evokes leadership from the stronger states and pulls the others along.
Of course, this wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of the participants. For U.S. leaders during the war, it meant continuing dialogue, frictions, and occasional hard exchanges with some allies to get them on board. For some European leaders, the experience must have been the reverse: a continuing pressure from the United States to approve actions–to strike targets–that would generate domestic criticism at home. There was no escaping the fact that this was every government’s war, that they were intrinsically part of the operation, and each was, ultimately, liable to be held accountable by its voters for the outcome.
In the darkest days before the NATO 50th anniversary summit in late April in Washington, British Prime Minister Tony Blair came to our headquarters in Belgium on very short notice. To be honest, it wasn’t altogether clear why he was coming. But as he and I sat alone in my office, it quickly became apparent. “Are we going to win?” he asked me. “Will we win with an air campaign alone? Will you get ground troops if you need them?” Blair made it very clear that the future of every government in Western Europe, including his own, depended on a successful outcome of the war. Therefore, he was going to do everything it took to succeed. No stopping halfway. No halfheartedness.
That was the real lesson of the Kosovo campaign at the highest level: NATO worked. It held political leaders accountable to their electorates. It made an American-dominated effort essentially their effort. It made an American-led success their success. And, because an American-led failure would have been their failure, these leaders became determined to prevail. NATO not only generated consensus, it also generated an incredible capacity to alter public perceptions, enabling countries with even minimal capacities to participate collectively in the war. As one minister of defense told me afterwards, “Before Kosovo, you couldn’t use the word ‘war’ in my country. War meant defeat, destruction, death, and occupation. Now it is different. We have won one!”
The victory in Kosovo was complicated and messy. But it worked. One doesn’t have to agree with that approach or think it couldn’t be improved upon. The issue with Rumsfeld and his deputies is less their difference of opinion than their arrogance. They repaid advice with ridicule, assuming that they knew everything. Now we’re seeing some of the results.
