When Secretary of State Warren Christopher toured European capitals last week, the allies expected him to produce a fairly detailed plan of action. They thought it would include air attacks against Serbian military targets in Bosnia, perhaps combined with an effort to insert United Nations troops into besieged Muslim communities, securing them as “safe areas.” The Europeans assumed that Washington was prepared to escalate, if necessary-all the way to airstrikes against military targets in Serbia itself-but that it would also offer some sort of political “carrot” if the Serbs accepted Vance-Owen. And the allies expected that Washington would urge the United Nations to lift the arms embargo, asking Britain and France to limit their disapproval to abstentions in the Security Council. “If Christopher had arrived with something like that, he’d probably have got it,” said a senior European official. Instead, according to allied sources, Christopher stunned his listeners by presenting a vague plan that focused on lifting the arms embargo, indicating that some airstrikes might also be necessary.
The allies have ample force at hand for an air war of almost any scope. NATO has numerous bases in the region, built during the cold war to oppose a potential Warsaw Pact thrust into Germany through Austria. In addition, three aircraft carriers are on station in the Adriatic: America’s Theodore Roosevelt, Britain’s Ark Royal and France’s Clemenceau, along with a U.S. Marine amphibious assault group, with 2,200 troops and a helicopter carrier. U.S. military planners think it would take about three days of airstrikes, at a brisk sortie rate, to eliminate the Bosnian Serb army as an organized entity. But they cannot guarantee that individual Serb units would not fight on as well-armed guerrillas, capable of inflicting a steady stream of casualties on foreign troops.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Marine Corps Maj. Gen. John Sheehan said U.S. reconnaissance can “clearly” locate only about a quarter of the Serbs’ 600 artillery pieces. To destroy even those guns with some “degree of predictability,” Sheehan said, “requires people on the ground” to identify targets for the warplanes. Another Pentagon witness, Maj. Gen. Michael Ryan of the air force, predicted that if the allies use “airstrikes alone,” the Serbs “would just ride it out.”
The French told Christopher that if Washington is serious, it should contribute ground troops to help protect the six besieged cities declared safe areas by the Security Council last week: Sarajevo, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde, Bihac and Srebrenica. Paris was willing to consider airstrikes to defend the enclaves, but it had no illusions about winning the war from the air. “We hear a great deal from the Americans about avoiding another Vietnam,” said a French official. “Why, then, does Washington think it can bomb the Serbs to the conference table? It did not work in Vietnam. It will not work in Bosnia.”
For a year now, NATO planners, many of them Americans, have been sketching out the contingencies for intervention on the ground in Bosnia. They plan an “inkblot strategy,” in which forces would be dropped into key cities and then fan out into the countryside until eventually all the blots merged into one. Among various scenarios, the one that currently seems most realistic calls for up to 300,000 troops to impose peace on Bosnia. “You would announce that number to make an effect,” says a NATO source, “but you would probably send no more than 200,000.” NATO planners think the fighting would be over in a few days, costing only a small number of allied lives.
But then what? Serb guerrillas would probably fight on. There would be a steady trickle of American and European casualties from sniper fire and land mines, and some allied aircraft might be shot down by shoulder-fired missiles. Most victims of “ethnic cleansing” probably would not dare to return to the homes from which the Serbs drove them, even if the allies wanted them to. Bosnia could remain in a perpetual state of siege, with U.S. ground troops stuck there for as long as Congress and the American people were willing to tolerate it. Last week Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was quoted as saying: “Boy, was the gulf war easy compared to this!” If military intervention reaches from the sky to the ground, the clear-cut ending promised by Bill Clinton could turn out to be nowhere in sight.
At sea and on shore, the NATO allies have more than adequate resources for an air war over Bosnia-and no shortage of targets in areas controlled by the army of the Bosnian Serbs.
Rhein-Main Air Base: C-130 transport planes could supply weapons to Muslims via Italian bases.
Spangdahlem: U.S. fighters could be used for strikes on Serbian forces from Italian bases.
French air bases are being used for support missions to help enforce no-fly zone; they could also figure in bombing strikes.
U.S., British and French carriers and U.S. amphibious assault group are heavily equipped with aircraft; U.S. Marines could be the first troops to fly into Sarajevo.
Bombers would fly to Italian air bases before striking Serbs.
Serbian army head-quarters; also home to a number of anti-aircraft batteries.
Heavy buildup of artillery in the hills around Sarajevo; there may be antiaircraft batteries here as well
Servian political headquarters
Other Serbian forces and artillery around Gorazde, Srebrenica and Tuzla
Underground army bunker in Hans Pijesak
Supply route to Serbian forces in southern and central Bosnia
Supply route to Serbian forces in western Bosnia
