Luttwak - Round Two

Edward Luttwak
Round Two - April 11, 2000

Lenin once accused Trotsky of being "administrative minded" for interrupting a lofty discussion of Bolshevik war aims with prosaic remarks about the acute limitations of the Red Army. Evidently I am just as narrow-minded because I do not see much point in the discussion of desirable ends when the means are so restricted. At present, and so long as the "post-heroic" rules apply, the armed forces of the United States and other

From Post & Riposte:

"Humanitarian intervention is a fiction created to justify a powerful nation's interference in the affairs of others. Bosnia being a case in point. Like smaller body politics, the international community works to better the lot of the individual members. In most cases, there are one, or two, and sometimes three members who basically set the agenda of the community and reap the majority of the benefits. The benefits obtained by the remainder are granted to keep them from disrupting the community."
--Marty Halvorson, "Yugoslavia, War Crimes, and International Justice" (04/05)

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advanced, low birth-rate countries are not available for combat operations except insofar as they can be conducted without casualties. That may not apply to all conceivable situations, but it is certainly true of disinterested humanitarian interventions. The ever-bellicose British and residually martial French may accept as many as twelve or thirteen combat deaths while the Dutch or Italians might call off an intervention after just one (the Belgians famously withdrew their "paracommandos" from Rwanda as the genocide was starting when eleven were killed), but the difference is of no consequence because all those numbers are below the minimum threshhold of military utility. As for the United States, the Kosovo record should be sufficient.

On February 20, 2000, a detachment of 350 U.S. Army troops joined in the search for weapons in the Serbian part of Mitrovica. The Americans were pelted with bottles and stones but none required medical attention. General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then wrote to General Wesley K. Clark, NATO Supreme Commander, to tell him that U.S. troops should no longer be employed outside their sector in southern Kosovo. Earlier, during the 1999 Kosovo war itself, as the bombing campaign continued with no sign that Milosevic would surrender, Shelton enjoined Clark to stop speculating about the possible participation of U.S. troops in ground combat to liberate Kosovo. To insure against the possibility that the Clinton Administration might reverse its own opposition to a ground war, the Joint Chiefs then established that it would require six months of prior logistic preparations.

Earlier still, when Serb police and militia with armored vehicles started to expel Albanian villagers, General Clark requested authorization to employ twenty-four U.S. Army anti-armor Apache helicopters in Kosovo. The Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed Clark's request, arguing that the Apaches were too vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire (the Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Charles C. Krulak, later spoke of "white crosses" in explaining his opposition). On April 3, 1999, the tenth day of the war, Clark was finally authorized to send the Apaches from their German base to Albania, but not to employ them in combat without further authorization. But the U.S. Army then determined that the twenty-four Apaches, though supposedly kept at very high readiness, were in fact "unready" to deploy. It was not until April 26 -- the thirty-third day of the war -- that the Apaches reached Albania. To protect and support them, the U.S. Army sent a total of 6,200 troops with 26,000 tons of equipment -- including fourteen battle tanks, forty-two infantry fighting vehicles, and twenty-seven Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters for airmobile troops and for search and rescue -- carried in 550 flights by C-17 heavy transports at a cost of $480 million. But no combat missions were flown. The U.S. Army had decided that the crews needed more night training, and in any case it would not accept target tasking from the U.S. Air Force. The Army insisted on using its own scout helicopters, except that it would not send them to scout targets because they might be shot down. When the Kosovo war ended, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had still not authorized General Clark to send the Apaches into combat.

The Albanian terror campaign against Serb and Roma civilians started as soon as the Serb forces withdrew. General Clark and the British Kosovo Force Commander therefore urged NATO forces to deploy as quickly as possible, and to patrol intensively to stop the mayhem. British troops maximized control of their sector by patrolling on foot in half squads by day and by night. But the U.S. Joint Chiefs insisted that the first priority was to ensure the protection and comfort of the U.S. garrison. While $36 million was being spent to erect the defenses and comfort facilities of Camp Bonesteel (complete with two PX stores, fast-food cafeterias, etc.), U.S. troops were only sent out on patrol in large detachments mounted on vehicles, which remained on the main roads. Albanian ethnic cleansing was virtually unopposed in the U.S. sector, in which no Serbs or Roma now remain.

French patrol practices at first resembled those of the British. Once the French realized that the other NATO forces were avoiding effort and risk, they too stopped their intensive patrols. The phenomenon of "multi-national troop degradation" had set in.

The refusal of soldiers to act as such leaves two other possibilities: remote bombardment by elaborately protected manned aircraft and/or cruise missiles; and the employment of "regional" forces, now very popular with academic commentators. As to the former, the Kosovo war itself proves that it can be effective, albeit only in unique circumstances: an enemy sufficiently developed to offer targets worth bombing, and sufficiently democratic to respond to the inconvenience thereby inflicted on civilians at large, yet sufficiently primitive and authoritarian to become the target of a humanitarian bombing campaign. In most cases, from the Taliban's Afghanistan to Kabila's ex-Zaire, there are no high-contrast (i.e., identifiable), high-value, and relevant targets, as there were none in Rwanda or Sierra Leone. The routine precision of modern air bombardment is therefore ineffectual for the purposes of humanitarian interventions, unless we would wish to bomb the Russian Federation over Chechnya or China over Tibet.

As for "regional" forces, it is remarkable that this solution is still being advocated in the wake of the Sierra Leone and Liberia debacles. West African ECOMOG troops alternated between private and organized thievery on behalf of Nigerian traders, while rigorously abstaining from any attempt to protect civilian victims of massacre, mutilation, and rape; much more recently, West African troops expensively assisted by U.S. funds allowed themselves to be disarmed without a fight in Sierra Leone where their mission is to disarm rebels. Earlier, during the prolonged tragedy of Bosnia, the world was exposed to a prolonged education in the meaning of "post-heroic" by the behavior of almost all troop contingents in UN service, which did little or nothing to protect civilians while engaging in every possible form of misconduct, from black-market trafficking to cowardly passivity in the face of mass murder.

Given these means, or rather the lack of them, it seems useless to debate the proper aims and limits of humanitarian interventions.

What do you think?

Join the debate in a special conference of Post & Riposte. We'll highlight selected readers' remarks as the Roundtable progresses.

Edward Luttwak is Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition to several books, he has published many articles, including a number of widely discussed articles on intervention.