Ground war next?

The Washington Post 

March 27, 1999, Saturday, Final Edition 

U.S., Allies Weigh Use of Ground Forces; Commanders Fear Bombing Won't Stop
Serb Offensive 

Dana Priest, Washington Post Staff Writer 

The deteriorating situation in Kosovo has prompted discussions among senior
NATO and U.S. officials about the possibility of introducing U.S. and
allied ground forces into the three-day-old air campaign against the
Yugoslav military. 

Senior officials said a decision on a deployment was still unlikely and
that the subject has not yet been broached with President Clinton, who said
this week he did not intend to send U.S. troops to Kosovo to fight. But
officials said some senior NATO and U.S. military commanders fear that the
ongoing bombing campaign cannot stop the offensive by Serbian-led forces
against Albanian villages in the rebellious province, and that ground
forces might be needed to halt the Serbs or prevent the war from spreading
to neighboring countries. 

Officials said the very fact that a ground war is under consideration is a
measure of the seriousness of the difficulties now facing the commanders of
Operation Allied Force. "Nobody at anything like a senior level, the
principals' committee or deputies' committee, has looked the president or
the secretary of state in the eye and said, 'This isn't going to work; we
have to reconsider,' " said a senior administration official involved in
the planning. "Here, and in Brussels, people have said, 'What if the
limitations of air power are such, and the atrocities are such, that we
have to consider [troops]?' " 

In an appearance last night in New Hampshire, Vice President Gore said
there are no plans for U.S. soldiers to fight in Yugoslavia. "We are not
going to put any ground troops into a combat situation," Gore said.
"Neither are our allies." 

However, certain NATO commanders are being briefed on military contingency
plans for combat and preparing their troops for entry into Yugoslavia in a
hostile environment, said U.S. officials. Kosovo is a province of Serbia,
Yugoslavia's dominant republic. 

"You have to make a distinction between what they are told to plan for and
what they prudently plan for," said one military officer. 

A NATO force that includes 4,000 British, 2,800 German and 2,500 French
troops is already deployed in Macedonia, a country that borders on Kosovo,
in anticipation of peacekeeping duty under a Western peace plan. In recent
days, it has been reorganized with a new command-and-control structure and
with additional reconnaissance and intelligence assets, officials said. New
levels of supplies have been flown in to accommodate a longer stay by the
force, whose deployment in Kosovo has been repeatedly rejected by Serb
leader and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. 

Also, 38 U.S. officers, including a U.S. brigadier general who is the
assistant chief of staff for operations, will be in Macedonia to help
direct troops in NATO's Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, the headquarters for a
contingency force planned by the alliance that could be assembled from
units stationed around Europe. A second Marine Expeditionary Unit, made up
of 2,200 Marines, will arrive in the vicinity soon, on its way to relieve
the current Marine unit afloat in the Adriatic. 

Another 350 U.S. soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division-Mechanized who were
part of a separate U.N. peacekeeping force in Macedonia are now on scouting
missions on the Macedonia-Kosovo border. Yesterday, 100 combat-equipped
Marines flew to Macedonia to augment U.S. Embassy security there. 

In Bosnia, where the United States has 9,800 troops from the 1st Cavalry
Division in the international peacekeeping force, U.S. forces are on what
one senior official described as a ready-to-go stance. 

The 1st Cavalry is one of the most heavily equipped divisions in the U.S.
Army, and it is now deployed in Bosnia in unusually large numbers because
of a scheduled rotation. The units now in Bosnia include 13 combat
companies and 30 tanks, 60 Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicles and one Apache
helicopter battalion of 24 combat attack helicopters. 

Also, elements of the U.S. 1st Infantry Division have begun training at one
of Europe's premier combat training fields, at Hohenfels in Germany, for
possible deployment as peacekeepers in Kosovo. 

U.S. military officials are in a particularly awkward spot. From the
beginning of the Kosovo crisis, officials said, senior commanders have
warned Clinton and his top advisers that air power has its limits. Now the
events of the past two days, which have seen Yugoslav forces step up their
attacks in Kosovo in spite of NATO bombing raids, may be proving them right. 

To avoid a last-minute scramble to get ground forces ready for combat in
Kosovo or neighboring countries in the event the situation deteriorates
further, officials said, NATO commanders have begun taking quiet steps on
their own, hoping they will not disrupt NATO's fragile political consensus
on Kosovo or provoke opposition in Congress. 

Military officials said the heightened Serb atrocities in Kosovo -- again a
scenario NATO and U.S. military planners anticipated -- have cast the
limits of an air war into clearer focus. To avoid pilot casualties,
military planners have focused the first several days of bombings on the
Yugoslav air defense system, rather than on Serb troops. 

Yesterday, facing reports of mass killings in Kosovo by Serb special
police, the Clinton administration urged NATO to increase the pace of the
bombing campaign so it can more quickly begin to target the troops and
tanks involved in the reported atrocities. 

But administration and defense officials say such targets will remain
difficult to destroy from the air because the perpetrators are often small
gangs of special police using guerrilla tactics, including mixing deeply
within populated civilian areas. 

In fact, it is just this type of urban, guerrilla warfare that is more
effectively countered by ground troops. "We're going to do everything we
can through air operations," said one senior military official, speaking to
this fact. 

Staff writers Thomas W. Lippman and Ceci Connolly contributed to this report. 

 


Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)