The War for Kosovo: Serbia's Political-Military Strategy

The War for Kosovo Barry R. Posen Serbia’s Political-Military Strategy Why did Slobodan Milosevic decide he would rather ªght the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) than agree to the Rambouillet formula for Kosovo? Why did he agree to settle the war on June 3, 1999, after some eleven weeks of NATO bombing? This article examines these two questions through the lens of strategy. First, I argue that Milosevic probably had a political-military strategy for his confrontation with NATO; he had a plausible theory of victory or at least of partial success. Milosevic’s strategy was to split the coalition, and he had the political and military means to try, which he skillfully employed. Second, I argue that the strategy on the whole worked surprisingly well. For the most part, Yugoslavia ’s military machine lent excellent support to Serbia’s political efforts, though the Serbs did make one serious mistake: the early large-scale expulsion of Kosovar Albanians. Third, I try to show that an understanding of Milosevic’s strategy helps one understand how and why the war ended when it did. In particular, starting roughly in mid-May, Milosevic received a barrage of evidence that his strategy had stopped working—it had achieved what it could achieve. NATO was offering a compromise, and if Serbia did not accept it, meager though it was, the state would suffer serious damage in the coming weeks, with little chance of any additional concessions. This was not much, but it was something. The Serbs could not keep NATO out of Kosovo, but they did manage to get the United Nations (UN) Security Council into Kosovo. At that point, a continuation of the war held more chance of great costs than it did of signiªcant gains, as NATO was starting to pound Serbia’s economy to pieces. Scholars and policy analysts are already asking questions about what the war in Kosovo may teach us about coercion—the manipulation of the threat of force and the use of force to compel others to do what an actor wishes. The conºict may prove a particularly instructive case, because NATO was obviously much more powerful than Serbia, but had a difªcult time achieving its International Security, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring 2000), pp. 39–84© 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 39 Barry R. Posen is Professor of Political Science in the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I would like to thank my research assistant, Kelly Greenhill, for her energetic assistance. Thanks also to the participants in three seminars who helped me sharpen the argument, and to Robert Art, Aleksa Djilas, and Stephen Van Evera, who provided comments on earlier drafts. objectives. Clearly, NATO’s threats of force before the war did not elicit Serb cooperation, and its use of force during the war neither lent much succor to the Albanians, nor for many weeks put much pressure on Milosevic. NATO did, in the end, offer the Serbs a better deal than was tendered at Rambouillet. But this is no isolated instance; the United States tried to coerce many state and nonstate actors over the last decade, and coercion is thus an important public policy issue. But to study coercion thoroughly, it is necessary to think about the strategy of the other side. Although journalistic and ofªcial public relations material about most aspects of the Kosovo crisis and war is plentiful, much of this information is open to question. Without access to documentary evidence from all the key actors, it is difªcult to judge the reliability or signiªcance of the information that is available. Nevertheless, those most intimately involved in making and analyzing U.S. foreign and security policy will try to draw lessons from the Kosovo war. Given the panoply of bureaucratic and political motives that come into play in such exercises, it is by no means certain that they will do the best job that can be done even with the admittedly poor database that exists. In addition, such “lessons of the recent past” can easily lead policymakers astray in the not too distant...