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NATO 15 Air War for Kosovo: A Strategic and Operational Assessment By Benjamin S. Lambeth. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2001. ISBN 0-8330-3050-7. Charts. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxxiv, 250. $20.00.
The Conflict Over Kosovo: Why Milosevic Decided to Settle When He Did. By Stephen T. Hosmer. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, 2001. ISBN 0-8330-3003-5. Bibliography. Pp. xxxi, 138. $20.00.
The liberation of Kosovo in 1999 was the third conflict in a decade in which airpower played the decisive role. It was not, however, pretty. An old adage says that tactical and technical proficiency cannot overcome faulty strategy. Kosovo was an exception.
Ben Lambeth, a senior analyst at RAND Corporation and author of several books on airpower, provides an overview of the Kosovo air campaign, with all its warts, with authority and insight.
NATO was unprepared for the crisis in Kosovo. Because Slobodan Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies had collapsed quickly due to air attacks in 1995, NATO leaders assumed he would do so again in 1999. This was a serious miscalculation, worsened by their failure to devise a military plan to coerce Milosevic into submission if he did not collapse quickly.
Lambeth portrays General Wesley Clark, NATO's supreme commander, as parochial, myopic, and a micro-manager...