Failed States and 

Casualty Phobia

Implications for Force 

Structure and Technology

Choices 

Jeffrey Record, USAF

October 2000

Occasional Paper No. 18

Center for Strategy and Technology

Air War College

Air University

Maxwell Air Force Base
FAILED STATES AND CASUALTY PHOBIA 

Implications for Force Structure and Technology Choices 

by

Jeffrey Record

September 2000

Occasional Paper No. 18

Center for Strategy and Technology

Air War College

Air University

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
Failed States and Casualty Phobia 

Implications for Force Structure and Technology Choices 

Jeffrey Record 

September 2000 

The Occasional Papers series was established by the Center for Strategy and Technology 

as a forum for research on topics that reflect long-term strategic thinking about 

technology and its implications for U.S. national security. Copies of No. 14 in this series 

are available from the Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, 325 

Chennault Circle, Maxwell AFB, Montgomery, Alabama 36112. The fax number is 

(334) 953-1988; phone (334) 953-2985. 

Occasional Paper No. 18

Center for Strategy and Technology

Air War College

Air University

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama 36112

The internet address for the Center for Strategy and Technology is:
Contents

Page

Disclaimer ........................................................................................................................... i

Author ................................................................................................................................ ii

I. Introduction..................................................................................................................... 1

II. Failed States .................................................................................................................. 2

III. Casualty Phobia..................................................................................... 7

IV. Implications for Force Structure and Technology Choices........................................ 13

Notes ................................................................................................................................ 22
Disclaimer 

The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do 

not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense, the 

United States Government, or of the Air War College Center for Strategy 

and Technology. 

i 
The Author 

Jeffrey Record is Professor of International Security Studies at the Air 

War College and former professional staff member of the Senate Armed 

Services Committee. The author of over 250 books, monographs, and 

articles, including Hollow Victory, A Contrary View of the Gulf War 

(1993) and The Wrong War, Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998), Dr. Record 

served as a civilian advisor in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, 

and subsequently as research associate at the Brookings Institution, 

legislative assistant to Senator Sam Nunn, and senior fellow at the Institute 

for Foreign Policy Analysis, Hudson Institute, and the BDM International 

Corporation. He received his BA from Occidental College, and MA and 

Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 

ii 
I. INTRODUCTIONi

The emergence of failed states as the principal source of international 

political instability and the appearance of mounting casualty phobia 

among U.S. political and military elites have significant force structure 

and technology implications. Overseas, intra-state and often irregular 

warfare is displacing large-scale inter-state conventional combat. At 

home, there has arisen a new generation of political and military 

leadership that displays an unprecedented timidity in using force. 

Yet the Pentagon continues to prepare to refight the Korean and Gulf 

Wars—simultaneously, no less!—and to invest heavily in force structures 

whose commitment to combat would invite politically unacceptable 

casualties. The air war over Serbia should be a warning to U.S. force 

planners: In contingencies not involving direct threats to manifestly vital 

U.S. interests—the post-Cold War norm, elevation of force protection to 

equal or greater importance than mission accomplishment mandates 

primary, even exclusive reliance on air power. It further mandates 

expanded investment in stand-off precision-strike munitions and other 

technologies providing greater range and accuracy. The Army’s combat 

arms were more or less irrelevant to the war against Serbia because of that 

service’s comparative strategic immobility, and because a casualty-phobic 

White House and Pentagon leadership had already decided to withhold 

U.S. ground combat forces from exposure to combat. Yet the war— 

against a tiny, isolated, third-rate military power—consumed almost onehalf the Air Force’s deployable combat assets. The defense budget debate 

of recent years has predictably focused on the scope and wisdom of the 

post-Cold War cuts in overall defense spending. But the debate has 

unfortunately sidestepped what is perhaps an even more important issue— 

namely, the continued sharing out of defense dollars in roughly equal 

amounts to the various services against the backdrop of dramatically 

altered international and domestic political landscapes. “Enough of 

What?” is just as important a defense budget question as “How Much is 

Enough?” 

1
II. FAILED STATES 

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the international political 

system was dominated by a half-dozen European great powers and Japan. 

Most of what subsequently became known as the Third World was 

governed from colonial offices in London, Paris, Lisbon, and Amsterdam. 

The primary source of instability in a system so constituted was great 

power rivalry in Europe and overseas. Indeed, with the formation of the 

modern state in the wake of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), great power 

war became the scourge of the international political system, and it was 

waged with increasing ferocity in the wake of the French and Industrial 

Revolutions. 

Since 1945, the international political system has dramatically 

changed. War seems to have disappeared altogether among advanced 

industrial states; Europe, the cockpit of large-scale interstate warfare for 

three centuries, has become a continent of near-universal peace. 

Explanations for this unexpected phenomenon abound, but most observers 

believe that Europe’s “pacification” is a function of some combination of 

economic integration, democratization, and war’s utter discreditation as a 

means of settling disputes among states. Michael Mandelbaum believes 

that sovereign states “remain a central presence in human affairs at the end 

of the twentieth century. But in the societies that waged the modern era’s 

major wars, the state has found a different purpose....The test of the 

legitimacy of governments [in these states] is likely to be economic rather 

than military. The Soviet Union was not defeated on the field of battle. It 

collapsed from within, in no small part because of economic failures.”ii 

John Mueller argues convincingly that the “psychic costs of war have 

increased dramatically over the last 200 years or so...in the developed 

world. Where people once saw great glory and honor in war—and 

particularly in victory—they are now often inclined to see degradation in 

it instead as war has increasingly come to be regarded as an enterprise that 

is immoral, repulsive, and uncivilized.”iii 

Russia and Switzerland excepted, all of Europe’s significant industrial 

states are members of the European Union, NATO, or both, and a war 

2
within either organization is inconceivable. This certainly does not rule 

out the possibility of war by EU and NATO members against outside 

states; members of both participated in the Persian Gulf War, and eight 

years later NATO fought its only war ever against Serbia. The point is not 

that Europe has become free of violence, but rather that it has become free 

of major inter-state war. All of the continent’s significant military 

powers, Russia again excepted, are now in economic and political-military 

alliance with each other and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable 

future. 

If Europe’s pacification removes what, for the three centuries 

preceding the end of World War II, was the world’s primary source of 

large-scale inter-state warfare, the emergence of weak and failed states has 

dramatically elevated the relative incidence of lesser, intra-state warfare. 

Such states are the products of three waves of imperial disintegration that 

have flooded the international system with over two-hundred new states, 

many of them frail or altogether unviable. The first wave was World War 

I’s destruction of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. The second was 

World War II’s destruction of Europe’s vast overseas colonial empires. 

The third was the Cold War’s destruction of the Soviet empire in Eastern 

Europe and then of the Soviet Union itself. 

All three waves produced states of questionable political and 

economic sustainability. The disappearance of imperial authority was 

often replaced by weak national political authority and in some cases even 

anarchy. Once-popular post-colonial regimes proved economically 

incompetent and sank into a mire of venality. And the arbitrary colonial 

boundaries that the new states inherited provided a source of disorder 

because they cut across tribal and ethnic lines as well as language and 

economic patterns. 

Nor does disintegration appear to have halted. Successor states to 

empires continue to disintegrate in Africa, Southeastern Europe, the 

Caucasus, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.iv It is an even bet that 

Indonesia and the Republic of South Africa will go the same way as the 

former Yugoslavia. Equally questionable is the long-term viability of the 

many Arab states whose governments have failed repeatedly to deliver to 

3
their mushrooming masses more than the barest minimum of economic 

and social security, to say nothing of political freedom. 

Iraq is a major case in point. The country is a failed state by virtue of 

the strategic incompetence of its leadership in starting two disastrous wars 

and because of a decade of effective international economic sanctioning. 

Its infrastructure is all but gone, its wealth destroyed or looted, its air 

space patrolled by hostile aircraft, and its Kurdish North transformed into 

a foreign military protectorate. Indeed, the Gulf War never really ended; it 

is simply being continued at a much lower level of violence. Consider 

also the inevitable emergence of a Palestinian state, which seems destined 

to be a failure absent—perhaps even in spite of—massive injections of 

international capital. Political divisions within the Palestinian community 

are severe, as they are within Israel, the chief enemy of a Palestinian state. 

Successful statehood presupposes not only success in dealing with 

enormous economic and social challenges but also Palestinian and Israeli 

leadership willing and able to curb die-hard extremists on both sides. 

These are tall orders. 

To repeat, strong states are no longer the problem; weak ones are. 

Failed states have become the primary source of instability in the 

international political system, not just because war within the advanced 

industrial world has drastically receded, but also because failed states 

invite intervention by stronger states. State failure inherently attracts 

humanitarian intervention even when no strategic interest is present. But 

because the United States and its allies also have a strong stake in the 

present global political and economic order, they therefore have a strong 

stake in containing state failures’ potentially adverse regional and strategic 

consequences. Thus the United States invaded Haiti not just to restore 

democracy but also to stanch the flow of unwanted Haitian refugees into 

America. Thus NATO moved against Serbia in 1999 not just to stop the 

ethnic cleansing of Kosovo but also to preserve the Alliance’s own 

credibility and to prevent Southeastern Europe’s further destabilization. 

As the world’s sole remaining superpower, the United States military 

today performs on a global basis essentially the same imperial policing 

task that the British military performed within the British empire. To be 

4
sure, the rest of the world is hardly a formal, territorial empire of the 

United States. But there is an American empire nonetheless: informal, 

voluntarily associated, and resting on political and cultural attraction as 

much as on military and financial clout. Scores of states and hundreds of 

millions of people around the world look to the United States for 

leadership and security, and it is in America’s strategic interest that they 

do so. 

Predictions are always dangerous in international politics, but the 

Gulf War of 1991 may be the last of its kind for the United States. 

Saddam Hussein did not expect war with America when he invaded 

Kuwait. But his crushing defeat established U.S. conventional military 

supremacy for all the world to see, and it is difficult to imagine a nonWestern state being so obtuse as to challenge the United States on its own 

military terms. Asymmetric approaches to neutralizing or defeating 

American military power are the most appealing way of doing so—a point 

acknowledged in the Pentagon’s Joint Vision 2020.

v Such approaches 

worked in South Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia—all failed states—and 

came close to working in NATO’s war against Serbia—a failing if not yet 

failed state. During the past decade, the Pentagon has been called upon to 

intervene in or against one failing or failed state after another—Somalia, 

Haiti, Bosnia, Serbia, and where it has encountered resistance, it has been 

resistance offered by non-state actors operating unconventionally or state 

actors pursuing non-military strategies to reduce potential U.S military 

effectiveness. 

None of this is to argue that the United States can dispense with 

preparation for large-scale conventional war with other states. The history 

of international politics is full of surprises. Maintaining conventional 

military supremacy deters in the short-term and offers long-term insurance 

against the emergence of aspiring military peer competitors. To abandon 

preparation for conventional warfare would simply invite others to return 

to it. Moreover, the possibility of conventional war on the Korean 

Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf, and across the Taiwan Strait cannot be 

entirely dismissed. In each of these areas, however, adversaries are 

conclusively outclassed by the United States and its allies. Regional 

5
conventional military balances have turned decisively against North 

Korea, Iraq, and Iran. Moreover, China’s potential to become a military 

competitor of the United States anytime soon has been significantly 

oversold by Cold War defense policy refugees and defense industry 

hucksters.vi America’s lead over both enemies and allies alike in the socalled “revolution in military affairs” is widening and may become 

unassailable because potential competitors are unable or unwilling to 

make the necessary investment in capital and talent. 

Even were China eventually to emerge in the coming decades as a 

hostile, military peer competitor—a postulation that itself rests on a 

questionable host of assumptions,vii

 a Sino-American war likely would be 

predominately, even exclusively, a naval and air contest. These are arenas 

in which the comparative U.S. conventional military advantage over China 

is likely to remain the strongest. Avoidance of ground war on the Asian 

mainland has long been a wise strategic injunction for the United States, 

whose strategic position in East Asia since 1945 has always rested on 

offshore and peninsular friends and allies. Moreover, for the foreseeable 

future it is difficult to imagine a Sino-American causus belli other than a 

forcible Chinese attempt to place Taiwan under mainland control. 

Taiwan’s defense, of course, is first and foremost a sea and air challenge, 

only secondarily a ground one. 

What the Pentagon calls “stability operations” in weak or failed states 

is likely to consume significant U.S. military resources as long as such 

states remain the primary source of instability and war in the world. 

Technology may change how America fights in the future, but it is change 

in the international political system that will determine who and why 

America fights. The United States achieved global military prominence in 

three victorious world wars (two hot, one cold) against other great powers, 

but all three of those wars had an unintended byproduct: the recurring 

subdivision of relatively stable empires into ever larger numbers of ever 

smaller national entities often beset from within by the threat of anarchy. 

There were 51 signatories to the United Nations Treaty in 1945, a number 

that has more than quadrupled since then. 

6
III. CASUALTY PHOBIA 

If small wars within failing or failed states have dominated demands 

on U.S. military power since the Cold War’s demise, a mounting aversion 

to incurring American casualties—and to inflicting enemy civilian and 

even military casualties—has come to dominate use-of-force decisionmaking in the United States. This aversion has been especially 

pronounced with respect to intervention in small wars, because such wars 

rarely involve direct threats to manifestly vital U.S. interests. Intervention 

is usually conducted in the general interest of global order and stability 

and often involves politically messy military enforcement of “peace” on 

those who have no vested interest in it. As such, public tolerance for such 

interventions and their potential for casualties is dramatically lower—or at 

least believed to be so by political and military elites—than for war on 

behalf of “real” interests. Even those committed to the use of force on 

behalf of promoting American values as opposed to protecting U.S. 

strategic interests take the pessimistic view that the American people are 

unwilling to accept significant casualties on behalf of toppling dictators, 

terminating genocide, and restoring civil order. This pessimism in turn 

has bred an American military timidity traditionally uncharacteristic of 

great power behavior and ultimately injurious to protection of U.S. 

strategic interests. 

Elite casualty phobia, manifest for at least a decade but never more 

glaringly than in the war against Serbia, has been much discussed in recent 

years. The fact of elite casualty phobia is not in dispute; it is reflected in 

the Pentagon’s obsession with force protection and confirmed by recent 

polling data. There is, moreover, substantial evidence that both political 

and military elites have convinced themselves that the American public’s 

intolerance is significantly higher and more intractable than is actually the 

case. Elites nonetheless make the use-of-force decisions. 

A strong aversion to casualties is, of course, rooted in American 

history and political culture. Americans value the individual much more 

than they do the state, and they have always sought, and with considerable 

success it might be added, to substitute technology for blood in battle. But 

7
only recently has aversion become, at least in the minds of those making 

war and peace decisions, a phobia—i.e., an aversion so strong as to elevate 

the safety of American troops above the missions they are assigned to 

accomplish. Casualty aversion is healthy; casualty phobia is not. 

Ironically, the phobia has been strengthened by the Persian Gulf War and 

even more so by the war against Serbia, both of which have suggested the 

possibility of war with little or no American death. 

The phobia is rooted in the Vietnam War, which has produced a 

generation of political and military leaders that is much more reluctant to 

use force, or at least use it effectively, than those for whom Munich and 

World War II were the great foreign policy exemplars. The message of 

Munich was the imperative of using force early and decisively against 

aspiring conquerors; the perceived message of Vietnam is that the risks— 

both battlefield and domestic political—of using force almost always 

outweigh the benefits. Much of the present U.S. political elite is 

suspicious of the very legitimacy of force, and therefore considerably ill at 

ease in using it.viii 

Ironically, this uneasiness borders on distress among much of the U.S. 

military leadership, especially that of the Army, which is still in the grips 

of the Vietnam Syndrome. The Pentagon’s determination to avoid 

repetition of that war even on the smallest of scales prompted 

implementation in the 1970s of the Total Force Policy, which was 

designed primarily to compel presidents to clear the domestic political 

hurdle of a reserve call-up before marching the country into a major war. 

The Total Force Policy was followed in the 1980s by proclamation of the 

Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which boils down to an elaborate 

intellectual excuse for not using force at all except in the most favorable 

strategic, operational, and domestic political circumstances. Reinforced 

by the Defense Reorganization Act of 1986, which increased the weight 

and quality of military advice to civilian authority, the Weinberger-Powell 

Doctrine remains popular within the Pentagon and among both Republican 

and Democratic foreign policy minimalists on Capitol Hill. 

The taproot of the Vietnam Syndrome as it has evolved since the war 

is the present political and military elites’ conviction that the public has no 

8
stomach for casualties, and therefore that use of force in situations of 

optional intervention should be prepared to sacrifice even operational 

effectiveness for the sake of casualty avoidance. This conviction 

produced almost a decade of American strategic fecklessness in the former 

Yugoslavia, culminating in a NATO war against Serbia in which force 

protection was accorded priority over mission accomplishment. The 

result: a bizarre disconnect between political ends and military means in 

which an exclusive and initially timid deployment of air power quickly 

provoked an acceleration of the very Serbian ethnic cleansing of Kosovo 

that formed NATO’s immediate causus belli. 

Consider the joint testimony of Secretary of Defense William Cohen 

and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry Shelton: “the 

paramount lesson learned from Operation Allied Force is that the wellbeing of our people must remain our first priority.”ix If indeed this was the 

premier lesson, then U.S. troops should never be exposed to combat in the 

first place. They should be kept at home—better yet, demobilized. Or, at 

a minimum, as in Operation Allied Force, policy makers should confine 

America’s enemies to those incapable of shooting back in the air while 

simultaneously offering those enemies nothing to shoot at on the ground. 

Consider also the postwar caution of NATO’s then Supreme Allied 

Commander, General Wesley Clark: “in an air campaign you don’t 

want to lose aircraft because when you start to lose these expensive 

machines the countdown starts against you. The headlines begin to 

shout, ‘NATO loses a second aircraft,’ and the people ask, ‘How long 

can this go on?’ ”x 

The presumption of public casualty intolerance—regardless of 

circumstances except for wars of national survival—prompts use-of-force 

aversion. It also removes force as a tool of coercive diplomacy, 

undermines the military ethic of self-sacrifice and mission 

accomplishment, disconcerts allies, emboldens enemies, and puts at risk 

foreigners who seek America’s protection. To be sure, it was Serbian 

thugs who victimized the Albanian Kosovars, but the latter were also 

victimized, if indirectly, by NATO’s casualty phobia.xi 

9
Indeed, casualty phobia reflects a perhaps willfully misperceived 

lesson of the Vietnam War that is unfortunately shared by the present U.S. 

political and military leadership. The lesson of Vietnam is not the public’s 

absolute intolerance of casualties, but rather that the American people’s 

level of tolerance hinges on such reasonable criteria as perceived strength 

of interests at stake and on visible progress, or lack thereof, toward a 

satisfactory resolution of hostilities. “There is no clear evidence that 

Americans will not tolerate many body bags in the course of intervention 

where vital interests are not at stake,” observes Richard K. Betts. “What is 

crucial for maintaining public support is not [the incursion of] casualties 

per se, but casualties in an inconclusive war, casualties that the public sees 

as being suffered indefinitely, for no clear, good, or achievable purpose.”

xii 

The contingent nature of the public’s casualty tolerance, heavily 

influenced by presidential leadership in mobilizing public opinion, is 

supported by study after study,

xiii

 though such studies seem to make no 

impression upon the White House and Pentagon. 

Indeed, presidential leadership and the conclusiveness of combat may 

be more important determinants of public tolerance of casualties than the 

presence of vital strategic interests (the definition of which is also mightily 

subject to presidential influence). Certainly, no such interests were 

present in Grenada in 1983, yet the quick and conclusive U.S. invasion of 

that island and overthrow of its Cuban-supported Marxist government was 

cheered by a majority of Americans. Even Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 

1990 posed no direct threat to the security of the United States, and 

President Bush initially had difficulty in mobilizing public and 

congressional support for his decision to force the Iraqis out of Kuwait one 

way or the other. But in the end he did so (though by only a five-vote 

margin in the Senate), leading the country into a war for which the 

public’s expectation of casualties turned out to be much higher than the 

number actually incurred.xiv 

Recent comprehensive polling data and other information marshaled 

by the Triangle Institute for Security Studies’ Project on the Gap Between 

the Military and Civilian Society confirms not only that “the strong belief 

of civilian and military elites that the American public will not support 

10
casualties is not supported by the survey data,” but also that the “mass 

public says that it will accept casualties” in such scenarios as defending 

Taiwan and stopping Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.xv 

The data further reveals that civilian policy makers, and even more so 

senior military officers, are much more casualty intolerant than the 

average American citizen.

xvi 

Elite casualty phobia is thus real, but it also may be self-serving. The 

assumption of public casualty intolerance excuses presidents and generals 

alike from taking the kind of battlefield risks that might invite casualties, 

even though the price may be mission frustration or failure. Indeed, 

casualty phobia has become an important ally of the Weinberger-Powell 

Doctrine: both serve, albeit less than perfectly, as self-deterrents to 

military action altogether, or, at least to risky military action, in 

circumstances not involving manifest threats to core U.S. security 

interests. 

The strategic consequences of elite casualty phobia as well as its 

implications for the military ethic have been treated elsewhere.

xvii Suffice 

to say here that they are averse and include: political vacillation in warthreatening crises, degraded military effectiveness, lowered deterrence, 

discouraged friends and allies, and a morally compromised professional 

military ethos—and above all politically inconclusive uses of force. In the 

short run it is always less risky to treat the symptoms of aggression rather 

than its political sources. Yet casualty phobia encourages strategically 

indecisive, even half-baked, uses of force. A refusal to take advantage of 

the opportunity of war to use the force necessary to topple the regimes of 

Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, both of whom senior American 

policy makers publicly compared to Adolph Hitler, simply invited more 

war later. To be sure, in both the Gulf War and the War Over Kosovo, 

U.S. political objectives were limited, and did not include enemy regime 

overthrow. Yet, surely, the exclusion of regime change was driven mainly 

by fear of the anticipated risks and costs involved. 

None of this is to suggest that commanders should not do everything 

in their power to avoid unnecessary casualties, but the standard of judging 

the difference between necessary and unnecessary must be mission 

11
accomplishment. There is wide ground between the recklessness of a 

George Armstrong Custer and the timidity of a George Brinton McCellan. 

Custer placed his own celebrity above the lives of his men, whereas 

McClellan placed risk avoidance ahead of mission accomplishment. The 

better model ought to be a Winfield Scott or a Matthew Ridgway. 

12
IV. IMPLICATIONS FOR FORCE STRUCTURE AND 

TECHNOLOGY CHOICES 

The displacement of large-scale inter-state conventional warfare by 

smaller, largely intra-state warfare argues strongly for abandonment of the 

two-major-theater-wars planning construct and greater investment in 

forces more suitable for the kinds of small wars and peace-enforcement 

enterprises that have come to dominate the Pentagon’s operational agenda 

since the end of the Cold War. Excessive casualty aversion argues equally 

strongly for increased investment in air power, standoff precision-guided 

munitions, and space power. 

It is the duty of force planners to respond to change in both the 

international and domestic political arenas. It is not their duty to insist that 

change conform to existing force structure and past technology choices, or 

to delude themselves into believing that mastery of conventional warfare 

provides sufficient military protection of U.S. strategic interests. Yet the 

construct of two simultaneous major theater wars based on past wars in 

Korea and the Persian Gulf is an apparition that hinders sound thought 

about, and ultimately American military effectiveness in, the post-Cold 

War international political environment. To be sure, one can conjure up 

all sorts of wars in all sorts of places,

xviii

 and it would be foolish to ignore 

completely the possibility of getting stuck in two of them at the same time, 

as the United States once did from 1941 to 1945. 

But the scenario of the post-Cold War U.S. military being called upon 

to wage two big conventional wars at the same time speaks more to the 

internal budgetary and bureaucratic interests of the armed forces than it 

does to the radically altered external strategic environment. The 

scenario’s main function has always been to offer a construct to preserve 

as much Cold War conventional force structure as possible during a period 

of inevitable cuts. The view of the National Defense Panel of 1997 is 

correct: the two-war scenario is “a force-sizing function and not a strategy. 

We are concerned that this construct may have become a force-protection 

13
mechanism—a means of justifying the current force structure—especially 

for those searching for the certainties of the Cold War era.”xix 

The scenario is also, however, historically most improbable. 

Furthermore, it ignores the changing state of the military balance in the 

Persian Gulf and on the Korean Peninsula as well as recent political 

developments in both Koreas. 

On the matter of historical improbability, it is first necessary to 

concede that during the Second World War the United States did indeed 

find itself fighting what amounted to two separate major wars, one against 

Germany in Europe and the other against Japan in the Pacific. But the 

circumstances of U.S. entry into World War II were strategically 

extraordinary, therefore most unlikely ever to be repeated.xx The two-war 

construct is simply no longer intellectually viable within the realm of 

reasonably acceptable strategic risk. At no time during the twelve years 

of the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991 did 

another adversary with whom the United States was not at war choose 

challenge to the United States militarily. States almost always go to war 

for reasons specific in time and place, and only rarely simply because an 

adversary happens to be at war with another state. 

The two-war scenario is being kept alive because the armed services 

need it to validate existing force structure and because the State 

Department doesn’t want to take the diplomatic heat of a one-war 

construct, which would imply, among other things, that if the United 

States was already at war in the Persian Gulf, it would not come to the 

assistance of Seoul if South Korea was attacked. The two-war scenario 

helps inside the Beltway, but it hinders those outside Washington who 

must implement the strategy. 

Moreover, one cannot even speak of a conventional military balance 

any longer in the Persian Gulf. There is little hostile power on the 

northern side left for American might to balance. Revolution, war, and 

international isolation destroyed Iran’s capacity to project conventional 

military power beyond its borders, and the Gulf War crippled Iraq’s once 

vaunted army. Even the State Department has demoted Iraq, Iran (and 

North Korea) from “rogue states” to “states of concern.” 

14
As for North Korea, it operates in an exceptionally unfavorable 

strategic environment. Its superpower patron has disappeared, its 

economy has all but failed, its military is obsolete, and it faces a much 

more powerful South Korea backed by a credible U.S. military guarantee. 

War would be suicide for the North’s communist regime, and there is no 

reason to believe that the North Korean leadership is blind to this reality. 

Estimates of war’s probability on the Peninsula must also take into 

account political change, and here the news is even better. Significant 

leadership change has taken place in both Seoul and Pyongyang, resulting 

in a publicly convivial face-to-face meeting between the two heads of state 

that would have been unthinkable just a couple of years ago. The meeting 

did not, of course, remove the mighty obstacles to Korea’s reunification, 

but the beginning of a direct political dialogue between Seoul and 

Pyongyang surely reduces the chances of war. 

The two-war construct could be replaced by a one-war-plus standard, 

the “plus” being one or more of what the Pentagon now terms “small scale 

contingencies,” the most demanding of which would be small wars like 

the war against Serbia and such peace-enforcement operations as those 

now being performed in Bosnia and Kosovo. The United States has never 

been prepared to fund the forces necessary to do justice to a realistic twowar scenario since it was first postulated in the mis-titled 1993 Bottom-Up 

Review. This ends/means gap has been the biggest open defense secret in 

Washington.

xxi A potential added advantage of moving to a one-plus 

standard would be moving the defense debate off the mantra of force size 

to that of force composition. 

Indeed, effective policing of failed states requires forces dedicated to 

that mission. Peace enforcement is as different from “real” war as are 

special operations, for which the United States retains dedicated forces 

under a separate command. To be sure, existing U.S. conventional forces 

already bring much to the peace enforcement table. Among the items they 

can and have provided are logistics support, transport, communications, 

and surveillance. And in the case of such things as major evacuations and 

enforcing “no-fly” zones, only conventional forces can do the job. Yet, 

conventional ground forces and operational/tactical doctrines are not 

15
suitable for peace enforcement operations. The starting point rules of 

engagement for such operations—as it is for counter-insurgency 

operations—is the imperative of utmost restraint and discrimination in 

applying force. Firepower is an instrument of last rather than first resort. 

There is no big enemy to close with and destroy, but rather the presence of 

threatened civilian populations that must be protected in a way that 

minimizes collateral damage. Conventional ground force preparation for 

peace enforcement accordingly requires major doctrinal and training 

deprogramming of conventional military habits and reprogramming with 

alien tactics, doctrine, and heavy political oversight of enforcement 

operations. Needless to say, forces so reprogrammed—commonly 

manpower intensive and relatively low firepower—will not be optimized 

for big, high-tech conventional conflicts. Peace enforcement operations 

require the patient performance of mostly non-heroic missions often under 

conditions of prolonged and severe stress. Satisfaction of a job well done 

hinges on dramatic events, such as resumption of hostilities, that don’t 

happen, that don’t make the headlines. 

Richard K. Betts objects that dedicated forces are impractical because 

Congress would not likely tolerate creation of significant forces that would 

not be available for standard conventional military missions but would 

require increases in defense spending. Yet Betts concedes that the only 

alternatives would be to minimize U.S. commitments to peace 

enforcement operations or accept the higher risk that other missions make 

come up short.xxii Moreover, there is no way to determine the level of 

future U.S. involvement in peace operations, which will be decided in part 

by a combination of presidential preference and the pressure of external 

events and other actors. The United States is also entering the strange new 

world of huge federal budget surpluses, which opens up the possibility of 

larger defense budgets. 

The post-Cold War era of small, mostly intra-state wars also suggests 

the need for a new look at the distribution of heavy, medium, and light 

combat forces within the Army. Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki has 

already initiated just such an assessment, though the direction in which he 

is headed has not been greeted with enthusiasm by the armor and artillery 

16
communities. The idea is to create “medium” forces that are much more 

quickly deployable than heavy units but have significantly greater 

firepower than light forces. An interim force of up to eight brigades will 

be organized around off-the-shelf armored fighting vehicles weighing no 

more than 20 tons (compared to the 60-70-ton Abrams tank) and mounting 

new technology guns of smaller than current tank caliber but of equal 

lethality. Each brigade, which would be carved out of existing Army force 

structure—largely at the expense of heavy divisions—would be 

deployable by air anywhere overseas in 96 hours, and a medium division 

within 120 hours.xxiii 

During the war against Serbia, the Army was embarrassed by its 

strategic immobility, epitomized by the fiasco of Task Force Hawk, which 

consumed five tons for each of the 6,200 troops deployed (300 C-17 

sorties).xxiv Gen. Shinseki sees medium forces as a solution. His bold 

force structure initiative moves the Army away not only from the Cold 

War but also from a decade of self-congratulation over the Gulf War, 

which undoubtedly accounts in part for the considerable internal resistance 

of the “heavies” (the Army’s armor and artillery “unions”) to the creation 

of medium forces. Gen. Shinseki originally envisaged a medium force of 

up to five divisions, all based on wheeled rather than tracked vehicles.xxv 

But he has had to settle for no more than eight brigades and a reopening of 

the issue of wheeled v. tracked vehicles. Too, Gen. Shinseki may be 

retired before his already reduced medium force initiative fully “takes” 

within the Army. 

Medium forces as envisaged by Gen. Shinseki might indeed have 

been usable with considerable effectiveness in the war against Serbia. But 

President Clinton’s prior political decision to exclude employment of any 

ground forces presumably would have included even strategically mobile 

medium forces. However, the unavailability of such forces may have 

reinforced his decision, and future presidents in different overseas crises 

might use them if they were available. 

Indeed, the war against Serbia revealed the Army to be the chief loser 

to elite casualty phobia. Commitment of ground forces conveys greater 

seriousness of political resolve than commitment of air and sea forces 

17
precisely because ground forces are the most manpower intensive and 

therefore the greatest source of casualties. The chief beneficiary of casualty 

phobia predictably has been air power in general and the Air Force in 

particular. For all the talk of “jointness” since passage of Goldwater-Nichols, 

presidents in the post-Cold War world of small wars have increasingly 

embraced air power as a substitute for ground power. Thus the emerging 

predilection for cruise missiles over manned aircraft, and manned aircraft 

over anything on the ground—a predilection greatly reinforced by air 

power’s single-handed victory in the war against Serbia at no cost in 

Americans killed in action. The U.S. Army was excluded altogether from 

combat, performing instead the postwar mission of peace enforcement. 

Even when Iraq challenged concrete U.S. strategic interests in the 

Persian Gulf a decade ago, Operation Desert Storm was crafted and 

conducted with casualty minimization as the first order of business. In 

fact, AirLand Battle was effectively disassembled into a sequential air 

campaign followed by a short ground war, with most of the air war serving 

as a gigantic artillery “prep” of Iraqi ground forces. The Army swept up 

Iraqi crockery smashed largely by air power.xxvi 

The argument here is not that the United States can or should rely 

from now on primarily, even exclusively, upon air power to do its military 

business; rather it is that the political attractiveness of air power to a 

casualty-phobic national leadership is likely to reduce National Command 

Authority consideration of ground combat options in a crisis. This will be 

true especially in small-war circumstances, which rarely include the 

presence of first-order strategic interests. 

Admittedly, an air-option-only approach to dealing with small wars 

would be a mistake. Aside from conveying reluctance of political will to 

adversaries and allies alike, the military effectiveness of such an approach 

would be inherently circumscribed by air power’s own limitations. Air 

power’s record as a tool of political coercion is not impressive in the 

absence of other factors at play,

xxvii

 including the presence of ground 

forces. And as the war against Serbia demonstrated, air power can 

influence but not control events on the ground. Withholding ground 

forces simply because of fear of casualties renders the United States a one18
armed superpower. It also reduces air power’s potential effectiveness 

because the very presence of U.S. ground forces, even if not actually 

committed to combat, forces the enemy to concentrate his ground forces, 

thereby increasing their vulnerability to air attack. 

Nonetheless, if the present level of casualty phobia persists among 

U.S. political and military elites, then those elites have an obligation to 

shift defense dollars away from ground power and toward air power. 

What is the point of continuing to maintain the present level of investment 

in strategically sluggish heavy ground forces in an era of markedly 

declining prospects for large-scale conventional wars involving the United 

States and of declining political will to place ground forces in general in 

harm’s way? This is not an Army v. Air Force issue; the U.S. Navy’s 

surface fleet is organized primarily around air power, and it made 

indispensable contributions to the air war against Serbia. 

Precedent for a budgetary redistribution toward air power may be 

found in the 1950s. Whatever the weaknesses of the strategy of Massive 

Retaliation, the strategy represented a conscious decision by President 

Eisenhower to base the security of the United States on deterrence via the 

instrument of nuclear-armed air power. From this decision flowed a 

dramatic redirection of defense spending away from conventional military 

forces and into the nuclear and air power (especially long-range 

bombardment) accounts. By the late 1950s, almost half of the U.S. 

defense budget was going to the Air Force, which was dominated by the 

now-defunct Strategic Air Command. 

The point is not whether Massive Retaliation was good or bad; rather, 

it is that the strategy had budgetary imperatives that Eisenhower 

recognized and acted upon. So too does the present national leadership’s 

de facto embrace of an air-only-if-possible-and-still-air-mostly-if-not 

strategy in precisely the kind of small wars that have come to dominate the 

international political landscape. If, from here on, air power is going to do 

America’s heavy military lifting with ground forces sitting along the 

sidelines, then the defense budget ought to reflect this new reality. 

Within the air accounts, moreover, additional money should be moved 

into technologies that reduce air crew exposure to possible loss. This 

19
means investment in ever longer-range stand-off precision munitions, and, 

above all, in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The greater the precision, 

the smaller the munition required, and therefore the greater the reduction 

of impact on people and things not intentionally targeted. 

Increased reliance on UAVs (which include cruise missiles) and on 

large stand-off platforms like the B-2 may encounter resistance among the 

so-called “fighter mafia” which dominates the Air Force leadership. 

Pilotless vehicles are just that, and the leadership values acquisition of the 

F-22 above all else, including a reopening of the B-2 production line and 

creation of precision munitions stocks on hand sufficient to preclude the 

risk of encountering wartime shortages (as was the case in the War Over 

Kosovo). Yet UAVs and the B-2 satisfy the imperatives of elite casualty 

phobia. Both are difficult to target; the UAVs in any event don’t have 

aircrew; and while B-2s do, the ratio of crew to capacity to deliver 

precision munitions swamps that of any “tactical” aircraft. During the war 

against Serbia, a total of 22 strategic bombers (6 B-2s, 6 B-1s, and 10 B52s) accounted for over one-half (12,000 out of 23,000) bombs and 

missiles expended against Serbian targets.xxviii 

Of particular priority is the need for an autonomously-piloted vehicle. 

Such a vehicle has been advocated for years, but the technology required 

is still out of reach, as is even some of the science. A UAV that is remotely 

controlled has great limitations because the situational awareness of the 

“pilot,” and to obtain that awareness would require a large data “pipe” that 

could be vulnerable and almost certainly would greatly increase the cost of 

the UAV. An autonomous vehicle solves these problems, yet introduces 

others because it would require a computer that could “think” and that would 

be asked to make life-and-death decisions on the battlefield. These are not 

insurmountable challenges, but they demand increased funding. 

Investment in the search for effective non-lethal technologies also 

needs acceleration, in part because dual-use targets are becoming 

increasingly important objects of air power’s employment as a tool of 

coercive diplomacy. “Brute force” bombs and missiles are fine for 

blowing up big fixed targets and large enemy forces out in the open, but 

they are not optimized to take down power grids, “fry” electronics, and 

20
“zap” communications in a manner that minimizes collateral damage. 

Here, lasers can play a role, but high-powered microwave systems hold 

the best promise because their dial-a-yield allows them to be tailored to a 

particular target. 

Finally, there is the issue of space. Space has become inseparable 

from air power, and it reinforces air power’s capacity to minimize friendly 

military and enemy civilian casualties. The question is whether space 

should continue to be kept weapon-free or integrated into the U.S. 

military’s overall offensive and defensive capabilities. The very use of the 

term “aerospace” power suggests the answer. 

* * * * 

In making decisions to use—or not use—military force, presidents 

must weigh considerations of both military effectiveness and domestic 

politics. The United States is, after all, a democracy, and, contrary to 

conventional wisdom, politics never stopped at the water’s edge. Yet if 

perceived domestic political considerations become the enemy of military 

effectiveness, to the point of arbitrarily excluding use of one form of 

military power in its entirety—and this is the direction where America 

unfortunately seems to be headed in the present era of small wars in outof-the-way places, then the United States must alter established force 

structure and patterns of defense spending to maximize the effectiveness 

of the forms of military power it is prepared to use. 

It is clear that the ground force component can devise new and 

interesting approaches to mitigate the casualty issue and make itself a 

more relevant tool for presidents in this interregnum of relative peace. 

The White House always needs as many politically usable military options 

in a crisis as it can get. For the moment, however, it is the air arm that 

offers the quickest and most viable solutions because of its intrinsic nature 

of being above the fight. 

21
Notes 

i

. This monograph draws on several of the author’s recent works, including: 

“Foreign Policy Incoherence and Military Timidity: Sources and Consequences,” 

Strategic Review (Fall 2000); “From Tet to Kosovo: How Defeat in Vietnam Altered 

America’s Use of Force Overseas,” The Long Term View (Summer 2000); “Force 

Protection Fetishism: Sources, Consequences, and (?) Solutions,” Aerospace Power 

Journal (Summer 2000); “Operation Allied Force: Yet Another Wake-Up Call for the 

Army?”, Parameters (Winter 1999-2000); Serbia and Vietnam, A Preliminary 

Comparison of the U.S. Decisions to Use Force (Center for Strategy and Technology, Air 

War College, 1998); and The Creeping Irrelevance of U.S. Force Planning (Strategic 

Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, 1998). 

ii .Michael Mandelbaum, “Is Major War Obsolete?”, Survival (Winter 1998-1999), 

p. 25. 

iii. John Mueller, Quiet Cataclysm, Reflections on the Recent Transformation of 

World Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 1995, p. 34. Also see Michael Mandelbaum, 

The Dawn of Peace in Europe (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996). 

iv. For a discussion failed states and their implications for the nature of war in the 

post-Cold War era, see Martin van Creveld The Transformation of War (New York: Free 

Press, 1991); Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging, Journeys Into the New 

Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993); Philippe Delmas, The Rosy 

Future of War (New York: Free Press, 1995; Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth, A 

Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy (New York: Random House, 1996); and Mary 

Kaldor, New Wars and Old Wars, Organized Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge, UK: 

Polity Press, 1999). 

v

. “We have superior conventional warfighting capabilities and effective nuclear 

deterrence today, but this favorable military balance is not static. In the face of such 

strong capabilities, the appeal of asymmetric approaches and the focus on the 

development of niche capabilities will increase. By developing and using approaches 

that avoid U.S. strengths and exploit potential vulnerabilities using significantly different 

methods of operation, adversaries will attempt to create conditions that effectively delay, 

deter, or counter the application of U.S. military capabilities.” Joint Vision 2020 

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 2000), p. 6. 

22
vi. See Chalmers Johnson, “In Search of a New Cold War,” Bulletin of Atomic 

Scientists (September/October 1999), pp. 44-51. 

vii

. The postulation presumes all of the following: the presence of historically 

unfounded Chinese imperial ambitions beyond East Asia; renewed Chinese double-digit 

annual GDP growth rates that vanished in 1997; continued autocracy in Beijing 

notwithstanding the information revolution, the emergence of a large middle class, and 

the growing material corruption of the communist elite; and the ability of any national 

government in China to accommodate explosive economic and social change. China-asthe-new-Soviet-Union also ignores China’s critical dependence on the global capitalist 

economy. Unlike the Soviet Union, post-Mao China has sought not economic autarky 

but rather integration in the international economic order. It is far more dependent on 

foreign markets than the Soviet Union ever was and has amassed huge trade surpluses 

with the United States. China’s stake in world trade would be threatened by any military 

confrontation with the United States and its East Asian allies. 

viii. See the author’s Perils of Reasoning by Historical Analogy, Munich, Vietnam, 

and American Use of Force Since 1945. Occasional Paper No. 4 (Maxwell AFB, AL: 

Center for Strategy and Technology, Air War College, March 1998). 

ix. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and General Henry H. Shelton, Chairman 

of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Joint Statement on Kosovo After Action Review,” before the 

Senate Armed Services Committee, October 14, 1999, p. 27. 

x 

. Wesley K. Clark, “The United Staes and NATO; The Way Ahead,” Parameters 

(Winter1999-2000), pp. 8-9. 

xi. To be sure, Milosevic was always in a position to accelerate Kosovo’s ethnic 

cleaning more quickly than NATO could put in place opposite Serbia a ground combat 

force option capable of stopping it. However, an early attempt to put one in place might 

have conveyed sufficient seriousness of intent to deter Operation Horseshoe. It could not 

possibly have been less discouraging that President Clinton’s public renunciation of a 

NATO ground force option. 

xii. Richard K. Betts, “What Will It Take to Deter the United States?”, Parameters 

(Winter 1995-96), p. 76. Also see Andrew P.N. Erdmann, “The U.S. Presumption of 

Quick, Costless Wars,” Orbis (Summer 1999), pp. 363-381. 

23
xiii. See, for example, the following studies performed by the Rand Corporation of 

Santa Monica, California: Mark Lorrell and Charles Kelley, Jr., Casualties, Public 

Opinion, and Presidential Policy During the Vietnam War, 1985; Benjamin C. Schwarz, 

Casualties, Public Opinion, and U.S. Military Intervention, Implications for U.S. 

Regional Deterrence Strategies, 1994; and Eric V. Larson Casualties and Consensus, The 

Historical Role of Casualties in Domestic Support for U.S. Military Operations, 1996. 

xiv. Though U.S. casualties were miraculously low (146 killed in action, over a third 

by friendly fire), both the public and Capitol Hill were prepared to accept a much higher 

toll. Operation Desert Storm was planned by the Pentagon and authorized by the 

President on the assumption that American war dead might number in the thousands. See 

Erdmann, op. cit., pp. 375-376; and John Mueller, Policy and Opinion in the Gulf War 

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 45, 124, 306-307. 

xv . Digest of Findings and Studies Presented to the Conference on the Military and 

Civilian Society, Catigny Conference Center, 1st Division Museum, 28-29 October 1999. 

http//www.unc.edu/depts/tiss/CIVMIL.htm, p. 5. 

xvi

. Peter D. Feaver and Christopher Gelpi, “How Many Deaths are Acceptable? A 

Surprising Answer,” Washington Post, November 7, 1999. 

xvii. See, for example, Edward N. Luttwak, “Where Are the Great Powers?”, Foreign 

Affairs (July/August 1994), pp. 23-28; James Nathan, “The Rise and Decline of Coercive 

Statecraft,” Proceedings (October 1995), pp. 59-65; Mark J. Conversino, “Sawdust 

Superpower: The Perceptions of U.S. Casualty Tolerance in the Post-Gulf War Era,” 

Strategic Review (Winter 1997), pp. 15-23; and Karl P. Mueller, “Politics, Death, and 

Morality in U.S. Foreign Policy” and Charles K. Hyde, “Casualty Aversion: Implications 

for Policy Makers and Senior Military Officers,” Aerospace Power Journal (Summer 

2000), pp. 12-16 and 17-27, respectively. 

xviii. In a 1984 professional conference, the author was berated by a noted defense 

policy analyst for dismissing the Bering Strait as a likely avenue of a Soviet invasion of 

the continental United States. More recently, he learned from a colleague that a hostile 

India will emerge as America’s next great strategic rival. 

xix. Transforming Defense, National Security in the 21st Century, Report of the 

National Defense Panel, December 1997, pp. 23-24. 

24
xx. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and Hitler’s utterly 

gratuitous declared of war on the United States four days later proved to be strategic 

disasters for both Tokyo and Berlin. This was hardly the first or last time the United 

States faced a strategically incompetent adversary, but it was the only time it faced two of 

them simultaneously. 

xxi. The author has participated in several war games in recent years designed to test 

the capacity of extant forces to handle two overlapping wars in the Persian Gulf and 

Northeast Asia. In each case, shortages in airlift, bombers, stand-off precision munitions 

and other critical items were offset by rigged and often unrealistic turns of events 

postulated by game controllers. 

xxii. Richard K. Betts, Military Readiness, Concepts, Choices, Consequences 

(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), pp. 202-204. 

xxiii. See “Highlights of the AUSA’s Annual Meeting,” Army (December 1999), pp. 

45-52; Edward B. Atkeson, “Main Battle Tanks, To be or Not to be?”, Army (January 

2000), pp. 37-40; Scott R. Gourley, “New Brigade Structure Begins to Emerge,” Army 

(February 2000), pp. 33-34; Scott R. Gourley, “The Army Stages a Kentucky Demo to 

Define ‘the Art of the Possible’,” Army (March 2000), pp. 20-26; Jason Sherman, 

“Dream Work,” Armed Forces Journal International (May 2000), pp. 25-28; Daniel L. 

Whiteside, “Slow Down!”, Armed Forces Journal International (May 2000), pp. 30-33; 

Mark J. O’Konski, “Enhancing Army Deployability,” Army (May 2000), pp. 29-31; and 

Theodore G. Stroup, Jr., “The Ongoing Army Transformation,” Army (July 2000), pp. 7-

10. 

xxiv. Dana Priest, “Army’s Apache Helicopter Rendered Impotent,” Washington 

Post, December 29, 1999; Sean D. Naylor, “Apache Task Force Deploys to Albania,” 

Army Times, April 19, 1999, p. 8; Sean D. Naylor, “On Our Way to Hell,” Army Times; 

May 3, 1999, p. 10; and Matthew Cox, “Troops and Tanks Beef Up Task Force Hawk,” 

Army Times, May 10, 1999, p. 14. 

xxv . “Highlights of AUSA’s Meeting,” op. cit., p. 49. 

xxvi

. This is certainly not to belittle the Army’s and the Marine Corps’ contribution 

to final victory. For Saddam Hussein, ground combat and the taking of territory is what 

war is all about, and it is more than coincidental that he ordered Kuwait’s evacuation only 

after Coalition ground forces had—unexpectedly to him—entered Iraqi territory. 

25
xxvii

. The War Over Kosovo is a case in point. Obviously, Milosevic would not have 

quit absent the bombing. Yet other factors of unknown relative importance were also at 

play: a softening of NATO’s original settlement terms; Russia’s diplomatic defection to 

the G-7 war termination position; indications that NATO was moving toward a ground 

combat option; and increased Kosovo Liberation Army activity on the ground. The 

coercive success of Operation Deliberate Force’s 1995 air strikes against Bosnian-Serb 

targets in Bosnia also must be seen in the context of other events, including Bosnian Serb 

defeat on the ground by Croatian and Bosnia Muslim forces, and Milosevic’s decision to 

cease Belgrade’s military and diplomatic support of the Bosnian Serb government. 

xxviii. Hans Mark, address before the Potomac Institute’s Conference on “Out of the 

Box and Into the Future: A Dialogue Between Warfighters and Scientists on Far-Future 

Warfare (2025),” June 27, 2000, Washington, D.C. Conference proceedings soon to be 

available at www.potomacinstitute.org. 

26
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implications for

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