Bombs over Bosnia 

The Role of Airpower in Bosnia-Herzegovina 

MICHAEL O. BEALE, Major, USAF

School of Advanced Airpower Studies 

THESIS PRESENTED TO THE FACULTY OF 

THE SCHOOL OF ADVANCED AIRPOWER STUDIES, 

MAXWELL AIR FORCE BASE, ALABAMA, FOR COMPLETION OF 

GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS, ACADEMIC YEAR 1995–96. 

Air University Press


Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama


August 1997 
DISCLAIMER 

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied within are solely those of the 

author(s), and do not necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United States Air 

Force, the Department of Defense, or any other US government agency. Cleared for public 

release: distribution unlimited. 

ii 
Contents 

Chapter Page 

1


2


3


4


5


DISCLAIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii


ABSTRACT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v


ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix


A HISTORY OF DIVISION AND CONFLICT . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1


THE DEATH OF YUGOSLAVIA ACCELERATES . . . . . . . . . . 9


DENY FLIGHT: THE DETERRENT USE OF AIRPOWER . . . . . 19


OPERATION DELIBERATE FORCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31


CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43


BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53


iii 
iv

Abstract 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiated Operation Deny Flight

at the request of the United Nations (UN) Security Council in April 1993, in

response to the ongoing war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Two and one-half years later, in

December 1995, Deny Flight officially ended after an almost continuous 970-day

aerial presence constituting over 100,000 aircraft sorties. In that time, NATO

aircraft dropped more than 3,000 bombs while participating in combat operations for

the first time in alliance history.

Deny Flight’s initial mission was to enforce a UN Security Council mandated

no-fly zone over Bosnia. This mission expanded in the ensuing months to include

close air support when requested for UN protection forces (UNPROFOR) on the

ground and to deter Serb aggression against six UN-designated safe areas. By

August 1995, warring Croats, Muslims, and Serbs had consistently violated the

no-fly zone. The UN had documented over 5,000 airspace violations, primarily by

helicopters. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims had killed or wounded over 100 UNPROFOR

soldiers and aid workers, and the Serbs had overrun three of the six designated safe

areas. Serbs had also used UNPROFOR soldiers as human shields to guard against

NATO air strikes. 

NATO took a more forcible stance with Operation Deliberate Force which was

designed to break the so-called siege of Sarajevo and get peace negotiations back on

track. Whereas Deny Flight was generally ineffective in its mission, Deliberate Force

was, in the word’s of US Secretary of Defense William Perry, “the absolutely crucial

step in bringing the warring parties to the negotiating table at Dayton, leading to

the peace agreement.”

To understand the role Deny Flight and Deliberate Force played in getting a peace

agreement signed, one must understand the political and historical context of the

war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Ethnic animosities, severe economic hardships, and

opportunistic leadership, combined with an uncertain post-cold-war landscape,

merged to create a confusing and dangerous situation in Bosnia. By the late summer

of 1995, the Bosnian Serbs, who early on controlled 70 percent of Bosnia, were in

retreat. Serbia cut off its economic and political support of the Bosnian Serbs and a

Bosnian/Croat Confederation Army had been gaining ground against the

beleaguered Serbs throughout the spring and summer. Facing defeat and

domination, the Bosnian Serb Army was a ripe target for a coercive bombing

operation. Deliberate Force proved to be the coercive catalyst that led to the Dayton

peace agreement and the current cessation of hostilities. 

v 
vi

About the Author 

Maj Michael O. Beale (bachelor of science, USAF Academy; master of science,

Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University) is an F-16 fighter pilot. Major Beale’s initial

assignment was as an A-10 pilot at RAF Bentwaters in 1984. While there, he spent

much of his time at Leipheim and Ahlhorn air bases in Germany as part of NATO’s

first line of defense against a Warsaw Pact invasion.

Following that tour, Major Beale served as an instructor pilot and flight examiner

at Vance Air Force Base (AFB), Oklahoma, from 1987 to 1989. From 1989 to 1992,

Major Beale flew the lead solo position on the USAF Aerial Demonstration Team, the

Thunderbirds, at Nellis AFB, Nevada. In 1992, Major Beale rotated to Ramstein Air

Base, Germany, where he served as an F-16 fighter pilot. While there, he

participated in Operation Provide Comfort, a Kurdish relief mission over northern

Iraq, and in Operation Deny Flight, an aerial deterrent mission over

Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In 1994, Major Beale attended Air Command and Staff College before his

assignment to the School of Advanced Airpower Studies. He is a senior pilot with

4,000 hours of flight time and is married to the former Karen Leslie Quinton of

Martlesham, England. They have three children: Daniel, Dominic, and Bronte. 

vii 
viii

Acknowledgements 

I thank my professor, Maj Mark Conversino, for his tireless efforts and support on

behalf of my research on Bosnia-Herzegovina. He was always there to help and for

that I am grateful. 

ix 
Chapter 1 

A History of Division and Conflict 

English persons, therefore, of humanitarian and reformist disposition constantly 

went out to the Balkan Peninsula to see who was in fact ill-treating whom, and, 

being by the very nature of their perfectionist faith unable to accept the horrid 

hypothesis that everybody was ill-treating everybody else, all came back with a pet 

Balkan people established in their hearts as suffering and innocent, eternally the 

massacree and never the massacrer. 

—Rebecca West 

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon 

He had not slept much the night before. He was too excited about this

morning’s mission. With jet fuel in short supply and flying hours limited,

Zvezdab Pesic knew that this was the most important mission of his life. The

munitions factory at Bugojno was the only such plant that the Bosnian

government had. A successful strike, coupled with the ongoing United

Nations (UN) arms embargo, would severely diminish the Bosnian

government’s offensive striking power. Bombing deep in Bosnia-Herzegovina,

in direct violation of UN resolutions, was risky, but the target was never more

important, or the timing ever better. The crew of the American aircraft

carrier was on shore leave in Trieste. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization

(NATO) units at Aviano Air Base, Italy, would probably not turn a wheel all

day due to bad weather. Besides, the Vrbas valley was deep and wide enough

that the planned six-ship formation could fly down it and avoid enemy radar

with ease, popping up just long enough to deliver munitions on the target that

Zvezdab had memorized in every detail. Even if enemy fighters engaged his

flight, what were the chances of them actually shooting? NATO had never

fired at anyone in anger and the UN had done nothing to counter any

aggressive acts, yet. 

Briefing, taxi out, takeoff, and join up were uneventful. Four minutes later,

as the Serb flight entered Bosnian airspace flying into a gorgeous sunrise,

Zvezdab’s senses were alive. It was great to be flying again but his head was

on a swivel, keeping his flight lead in sight and scanning the horizon for

enemy aircraft. Twenty-five minutes later, the Jastreb pilot was releasing his

weapon within perfect altitude, angle, and airspeed parameters. Looking over

his shoulder, he watched with pride as his bombs exploded five seconds after

he hit the pickle button, right on top of the factory. In 30 minutes he would be

shutting down his engine and reuniting with his fellow pilots. It was at this

moment of euphoria, that Zvezdab watched the number six aircraft explode 

1 
twice, once as an advanced medium-range air-to-air missile (AMRAAM) air

intercept missile (AIM)-120 slammed into its fuselage, and three seconds later

as the aircraft hit the ground 200 feet below. Forty-five seconds later, number

four exploded in the same fashion, but from where? The Jastreb pilot did not

have long to contemplate as beads of sweat were replaced by expanding rods

from an AIM-9M Sidewinder perforating his body. His last conscious sight

was the earth rushing up to meet him. 

Zvezdab died on 28 February 1994. NATO F-16s shot down four of the six

Serb aircraft in that organization’s first-ever combat engagement, as part of

Operation Deny Flight, which lasted from 12 April 1993 until 20 December

1995. During that time, NATO aircraft flew more than 100,000 sorties in

support of the United Nations in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Deny Flight was

initially implemented to enforce a no-fly zone over Bosnia-Herzegovina. As

the operation evolved, the UN authorized NATO to fly additional missions

providing close air support (CAS) to UN protection forces (UNPROFOR)

soldiers on the ground, if requested, and to protect UN designated safe areas.1 

Geopolitically, Operation Deny Flight demonstrated the UN’s resolve to get

more forcefully involved in ending the deadly ethnic fighting on Europe’s

doorstep. Operationally, Deny Flight escalated from primarily a deterrent

operation towards a more coercive use of airpower. It culminated in Operation

Deliberate Force, a two-week bombing campaign designed to lift the siege of

Sarajevo. As a deterrent, NATO aimed Deny Flight at the Bosnian Serb Army

(BSA), which the UN considered the aggressor in the war in BosniaHerzegovina. The BSA had achieved most of its operational objectives prior to

April 1993 and controlled nearly 70 percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Serb

leadership was interested in keeping this territory and negotiating politically

to legitimize their gains. Deterrence initially worked well under these

circumstances, but as strategic reversals replaced BSA successes, the

deterrence threshold rose. In essence, the Bosnian Serbs were more willing to

violate UN resolutions and risk a NATO response as they saw their military

power eroding. UN and NATO inconsistencies in responding to violations

underscored the lack of an internationally unified and resolute political

stance, thus doing little to discourage or deter the Serbs. 

By the late summer of 1995, much of this had changed. The combined

Bosnian Government Army (BIH) and Bosnian-Croat Army (HVO) outnumbered

the Bosnian Serbs. NATO and the UN were also more politically united

following a series of humiliations at the hands of the Serbs and were thus

more willing to use force to coerce the Serbs. Slobodan Milosevic, an

ambitious Communist Party apparatchik, had also earlier cut off Serbian aid

and support to the Bosnian Serbs. Alone, outnumbered, and facing imminent

defeat and domination, the BSA was a ripe target for a coercive bombing

operation; one designed both to break the siege of Sarajevo and to bring the

Bosnian Serb leadership to the bargaining table. Deliberate Force proved to

be the coercive catalyst that led to the Dayton peace agreement and the

current cessation of hostilities. 

2 
For the purposes of this study, Bosnians are those people within Bosnia

fighting on the side of the government of that newly recognized country,

whether they are Serb, Croat, or Muslim. Serbs, Croats, and Muslims are all

nationalities, while Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina are nations.

Admittedly, the Muslim religion is a faith, but Muslims were designated a

nationality by the Yugoslav constitution in 1974.2 In this study I use Bosnia

and Bosnia-Herzegovina interchangeably, although in reality, Herzegovina is

the southwestern part of the country, where Croats are the majority

nationality. Because Serbia and Montenegro are the only republics left in the

former Yugoslavia, now known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY),

some speak of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) as the Serbian army. The

JNA, by default, is now mainly Serb and Montenegrin, especially since

Yugoslavia disintegrated into five separate countries with many soldiers from

those respective countries returning to their native lands. 

To gain an appreciation of the impact of Operation Deny Flight, one must

look at the complex history of the Balkans to distill the important historical

points that led to the death of Yugoslavia and the subsequent war in Bosnia.

John Allcock of Bradford University in England wrote, “Unfortunately, one

real truth about Yugoslavia is its incredible complexity and any attempt at

simplification results in distortion.” Allcock analyzed coverage of Yugoslavia

in the British press for a whole year and found that each report contained at

least one error.3 

Seventeen hundred years ago the emperor Diocletian divided the vast

Roman Empire in half for administrative purposes. The new eastern capital

was at Byzantium, later Constantinople, and the western capital remained in

Rome. The fissure placed modern day Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the

west and Serbia in the east. In the eleventh century, the old Roman world

that had embraced Christianity divided over ideological issues with the

Orthodox church forming in Constantinople and the seat of the Catholic

Church remaining in Rome.4 

In 1389, the Ottomans swept up the Balkan peninsula from Turkey and

defeated the Serbians at Kosovo-Polje on 28 June. This humiliating defeat

represented the start of five hundred years of domination of the Serbians by

the Ottoman Empire. The battle of Kosovo-Polje is the most important date in

Serbian history, not because the Serbians lost, but because Kosovo-Polje

ushered in a dark epoch of Ottoman oppression of Serbs. The Serbians take

great pride in emerging from that period with their language, culture, and

values intact and, ironically, draw great strength and inspiration from their

subjugation.5 Serbian resistance during this time is a romantic part of their

identity, much as the Wild West is a part of America’s. 

Geography, which has played such a large part in the history of the

Balkans, was especially significant in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Balkan is a 

Turkish word meaning mountain and is a good description of the area.

Bounded on the north by the Sava River, in the east by the Drina River and

in the west by the Dinaric Alps which run from Austria through Greece,

Bosnia-Herzegovina is physically isolated from much of the land around it. 

3 
On their relentless strategic march up the peninsula, the Ottomans

conquered Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1463. Previous to this, the Bosnian people,

due primarily to their geographic insularity, had practiced a puritanical form

of Catholicism, known as Bogomilism. By papal decree, they, along with the

Ottomans, were declared heretics and condemned by Rome. By contrast, the

Ottomans offered the Bosnians land, tax relief, education, and jobs in

exchange for adopting the Muslim faith. Most Bosnians converted. For the

next five hundred years, the majority of wealthy landowners, military officers,

and politicians within Bosnia practiced the Muslim religion and commanded a

peasant class of Serb Orthodox serfs.6 

From the 15th to the 19th century, many of those Serbs who did not

convert to Islam left the land under Ottoman rule and settled farther north in 

the Krajina, or military frontier, in Croatia. This was essentially the buffer

zone between the Hapsburg (latter-day Austro-Hungarian) Empire and the

Ottoman Empire. The Hapsburgs, seeking fortified garrisons in southern

Croatia and Hungary to hold back the Turks, offered tax relief, release from

feudal obligations, and freedom from religious persecution. In exchange,

settlers in the Krajina provided a permanent military force. Noted for their

fierce nature and fighting skills, the Krajina Serbs did their job well.7 

As the Ottoman Empire declined in power, the Austro-Hungarian Empire

prospered and spread its influence throughout Croatia and into

Bosnia-Herzegovina. To check the growing influence of a rival Serbia, a newly

independent state which had played a prominent role in defeating the

Ottoman Empire in a series of wars in the nineteenth century, and to deny

Serbia access to the Adriatic Sea, the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed

Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. Vienna was also fearful that an independent

Serbia would serve as a magnet for Slavs within the Austro-Hungarian

Empire. Many Serbs who had settled in Bosnia were enraged at seeing the

Ottomans, whom they had defeated in battle throughout the nineteenth

century, replaced by yet another foreign imperial power. Furthermore,

Vienna kept the Muslim-dominated Bosnian government in power when the

Ottomans left, since the bureaucratic apparatus was already in place to

administer the country. The tensions created by Vienna’s annexation of

Bosnia finally broke several years later. When Archduke Ferdinand of

Austria visited Sarajevo on the anniversary of Kosovo-Polje in 1914, Bosnian

Serb nationalists killed him.8 

Serbian soldiers fought on the Allied side in the ensuing First World War

and were pushed off the Balkan peninsula by a combined force of Austrian,

German, and Bulgarian units in 1915. Over one hundred thousand Serb

soldiers perished in the punishing winter retreat as they abandoned their

country; but like the Russians before Napoléon, they were never truly

defeated. Two years later, the Serbs fought back up the peninsula as part of

an Allied army driving back the Central Powers in the Balkans.9 When the 

war ended, the Austro-Hungarian Empire no longer existed. This left a power

vacuum in a region filled with starving Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes. The Serb

Army was the only local force strong enough to restore order. Although 

4 
ethnically diverse and without a history of living together under the same

government, the Southern Slavs’ collective security as a single country

countered potential threats from western Europe, Russia, or Turkey. Thus, in

1919, the Allied victors recognized the new “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and

Slovenes.” 

In the federation, the Serbs were a majority of the population; the other

groups felt dominated by them. The Croats and Slovenes, in particular, saw

themselves as better educated and more cultured than the Serbs and bitterly

resented Serbian domination.10 By contrast, the Serbs argued that they had

liberated the Croats and Slovenes at a great cost in Serbian blood. Liberated

people were supposed to be grateful; nonappreciative citizens were therefore

despised.11 

Trying to forge a consensus in this new nation proved to be nearly

impossible. Despite the principle of equal status among the various

nationalities, there was only one five-month period in the 23 years between

the two world wars when a Serbian was not prime minister.12 The King of

Yugoslavia, Alexander Karageorgevitch, dissolved parliament in 1929 and

assumed dictatorial powers in part to establish a political structure which

could effectively govern Yugoslavia, as the country was now known. Five

years later, the Ustase, a Croatian nationalist group, born of his 1929 coup,

assassinated Karageorgevitch. The emblem of the Ustase was the Savonica, a

checkerboard shield symbolic of the medieval kingdom of Croatia, and the

dream of an independent Croatian nation. A Serbian ultranationalist group

composed of World War I veterans, the Chetniks, also grew after the

assassination of Karageorgevitch. Their aim was to protect Serbians against

the growing nationalistic hatred arrayed against them. 

Yugoslavia was on the point of civil war when Adolph Hitler invaded in

1941. Hitler exploited ethnic tensions masterfully. After less than two weeks

of fighting, Yugoslavia capitulated with the Germans listing no more than

558 casualties. The Croatians and Slovenes put up virtually no fight and

welcomed the Germans. One Croat brigade even held a party in their mess to

welcome the German troops.13 

The period between 1941–45 is particularly bloody in Yugoslav history and

is a central factor in much of the modern day fighting in Bosnia. After the

Germans subdued the Balkans they moved on to a larger objective—Operation

Barbarossa, the conquest of the Soviet Union. The Third Reich annexed

Slovenia and created the Independent State of Croatia, which encompassed

both Croatia and Bosnia. The Ustase served as Croatian foot soldiers. Along

with several German and Italian divisions, they were responsible for security

in the region. The Ustase initiated their own program of genocide against the

Krajina Serbs and eliminated almost three-quarters of a million Serbs during

their four-year reign. Ante Pavelic, the “Fuhrer” of Croatia, had a recipe for

fixing the Serb problem in Croatia. “One third must be converted to

Catholicism, one third must leave, and one third must die.”14 Even German 

officers were repulsed by Croatian concentration camps and were generally

disgusted with the Ustase’s treatment of their fellow Slavs.15 

5 
Two groups countered the Ustase and German occupation forces. Gen

Draza Mihailovich led the Chetnik army fighting in Serbia early in the war.

The British supplied Mihailovich in his fight against the Germans. Following

a series of brutal German reprisals against Serbian civilians whenever the

Chetniks killed a German soldier, General Mihailovich redirected his fight

towards both the Ustase and any other groups that may have attempted to

gain influence at Serbia’s expense. Josep Broz Tito led a partisan group

countering the Chetniks, Ustase, and Germans. Tito, the son of a Croat father

and Slovene mother, proved to be a skilled leader, surviving at least five

German offensives. His power base increased throughout the war. Through

superior organization and brutal partisan tactics, Tito kept 13 Axis divisions

tied down in the country. Ironically, most of the fighting in Bosnia was among

the various indigenous groups. At one point, Mihailovich was even allied with

the Germans against Tito’s partisans.16 By the end of the war, 1.7 million

people, 11 percent of Yugoslavia’s prewar population, were dead. One million

of these deaths were self-inflicted.17 

Tito came out of World War II with a tough objective: keeping Yugoslavia

together as a nation. He used Communism and the slogan “Brotherhood and

Unity” to refocus ethnic differences on a common ideology. He also liquidated

most of those responsible for the genocide within Yugoslavia during the war

years, including Mihailovich. 

Forty percent of those in postwar Yugoslavia were Serbian. To dilute their

influence, Tito created six republics: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina,

Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. He recognized the Muslims in Bosnia as

an ethnic group and further created the autonomous regions of Vojvodina and

Kosovo within the Republic of Serbia, incorporated in constitutional change in

1974.18 These republics and provinces shared equal power under a rotating

presidency within the government. Ultimate power rested with Tito and the

Communist Party. 

The 1974 constitution minimized centralized control and effectively

reduced the influence of Belgrade as the capital of both Serbia and

Yugoslavia, with the introduction of the two new autonomous regions. Any of

the eight republics could now also veto any federal legislation they did not

favor.19 Once Tito died, there would be no opportunity for a new communist or

nationalist leader of his stature to emerge under the collective arrangement.

With individuals representing provincial interests, there would be little

chance of swift or authoritative leadership whenever crises might call for it. 

Breaking in 1948 with the Soviet-sponsored Comintern, or worldwide

communist movement, over issues of direction, Tito became a leader of the 

global nonaligned movement and profited handsomely by balancing between

the US and USSR. Both superpowers provided hefty economic aid to curry

Tito’s favor. However, throughout Tito’s rule, underlying ethnic tensions

remained, and he used strong political control, backed up by a formidable

police apparatus, to keep the nation together.20 

The army, including the officer corps, was a demographically ethnic mirror

of Yugoslavia throughout the Tito years. Serbs represented about 40 percent 

6 
of the nation’s population and that percentage was generally maintained in

the military force. As the nation broke apart, the percentage of Serbs

increased proportionately as the other republics’ soldiers resigned or deserted

from the national army. Essentially, Serbian dominance within the

contemporary Yugoslav army grew primarily by default.21 

After Tito’s death in 1980, the Serbs continued to be frustrated with a 

power sharing arrangement where they had 40 percent of the population, but

only one-eighth of the vote. With veto power, any republic could override any

proposed legislation, so nothing of substance came out of the government. As

both Yugoslavia’s economy and Communism declined in the late 1980s,

Slovenia and Croatia pressed for more autonomy from a Serbia which was

clamoring for tighter central control. The economic disparity between Croatia

and Slovenia on the one hand, and Serbia on the other, exacerbated these 

tensions. Serbia had one-half the per capita gross national product (GNP) of

Croatia and Slovenia.22 The richer republics in the north were not happy to

see their tax revenue going into coffers in Belgrade or supporting a national

army that did not have their republics’ best interests at heart. The republics

in the south wanted to see a redistribution of wealth while Croatia and 

Slovenia wanted to invest in their own infrastructure.23 Double-digit

inflation, spiraling foreign debt, and eight republics jealously guarding their

own interests with the liberal use of veto power further destabilized the

Yugoslav economy. Nationalism grew well in this soil. 

Notes 

1. “Operation Deny Flight,” Reuters News Agency Article, 21 December 1995. 

2. Snezana Trifunovska, ed., Yugoslavia through Documents from Its Creation to Its 

Dissolution (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 845. 

3. Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia (London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1971), 20. 

4. “Black History,” The Economist, 22 August 1992, 36. 

5. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on European Affairs, Civil Strife 

in Yugoslavia, 102d Cong., 1st sess., 21 February 1991, 43. 

6. Glenn E. Curtis, ed., Yugoslavia: A Country Study (Washington, D.C.: Federal Research

Division, Library of Congress, 1992), 22. Many Bosnians, both converted Muslims and Serbs,

were also employed as Janissaries, an elite fighting force, within the Ottoman system. In his

Nobel prize winning book, The Bridge on the Drina (New York: Macmillan, 1959), Ivo Andric

graphically details the Janissary mission: 

The Aga of the Janissaries, with armed escort, was returning to Istanbul after 

collecting from the villages of eastern Bosnia the appointed number of Christian

children for the blood tribute. It was already the sixth year since the last collection 

of this tribute of blood, and so this time the choice had been easy and rich; the 

necessary number of healthy, bright and good-looking lads between ten and fifteen 

years old had been found without difficulty, even though many parents had hidden 

their children in the forests, taught them how to appear half-witted, clothed them 

in rags and let them get filthy, to avoid the Aga’s choice. Some went so far as to 

maim their own children, cutting off one of their fingers with an axe. 

7. Alexandra Stiglmayer, “The War in the Former Yugoslavia,” in Mass Rape, ed. by

Alexandra Stiglmayer (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 4. 

7 
8. “Black History,” 36. For a further perspective on Serb anger at the Austrian annexation

reference Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (New York: Viking Press, 1943). On

page 312 she says,

The Moslems were given the finest schools and colleges, the best posts in the 

administration were reserved for them, they were invited to all official functions

and were treated as honored guests, the railway trains were held up at their hours 

of prayer. The Turkish land system, which grossly favored the Moslems at the 

expense of the Christians, was carefully preserved intact by his Catholic Majesty 

the Emperor Franz Josef. And it was a special source of bitterness that the 

Austrians had forced their way into Bosnia after the Slavs had driven out the 

Turks, on the pretext that they must establish a garrison force to protect the

Christians there in case the Turks came back. That they should then humiliate the 

Christians at the hand of those Moslems who had stayed behind seemed to these 

men an inflaming piece of hypocrisy which could never be forgotten or forgiven. 

9. Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia 

(Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine, 1994), 72.

10. Alan Palmer, “Operation Punishment,” The History of the Second World War, pt. 17, 1973,

374. 

11. Hall, 72. 

12. Palmer, 374. 

13. Ibid., 391. 

14. Hall, 23. 

15. Curtis, 38. 

16. Phyllis Auty, “The Rise of Tito,” The History of the Second World War, pt. 50, 1973, 1393.

17. Curtis, 42. 

18. Trifunovska, 845. 

19. James Gow, Yugoslav Endgames: Civil Strife and Inter-State Conflict (London:

Brassey’s, 1991), 10.

20. Auty, 1395. 

21. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, television documentary, January 1996.

22. Payam Akhavan and Robert Howse, eds., Yugoslavia, the Former and Future: 

Reflections by Scholars from the Region (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1995), 11.

23. Gow, 12. 

8

Chapter 2 

The Death of Yugoslavia Accelerates 

The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That 

wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of 

law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the 

barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was 

tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried 

out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a 

limited number of men of a particular type and belief. 

—Ivo Andric 

The Bridge on the Drina 

The 1980s represented a period of economic turmoil within Yugoslavia and

continuing ethnic problems within the autonomous province of Kosovo.

Ninety percent of Kosovo’s population was ethnically Albanian and wanted to

merge with Albania, where they felt their rights would be better protected.

Yugoslavia, with its historic and symbolic ties to Kosovo, would never let this

happen. Periodically, the JNA mobilized in Kosovo throughout both the Tito

and post-Tito eras to quell ethnic unrest there. Politically, anytime a vote

came up in the collective communist leadership, the Kosovo representative

could always be counted on to vote against any measure of substance that the

Serbians favored. 

In 1987 Milosevic went to Kosovo from Belgrade to investigate a charge by

the Albanians of human rights violations by the minority Serbs there.

Instead, he sided with his brother Serbs, who felt they were being mistreated

and made a famous speech that propelled him to ultimate leadership within

the Yugoslav Communist Party. Milosevic told the Serbs in Kosovo that they

would not be treated as minorities within their own country because he would

not allow this to happen. “You will not be beaten again” was his battle cry.

The furor that this caused within the multiethnic Yugoslav government

opened a Pandora’s box of nationalist aspirations within the various republics

and is generally cited as the flash point for the breakup of Yugoslavia.1 

Kosovo reawakened the old Chetnik dream of “Greater Serbia” with Milosevic 

providing the leadership. Kosovo, and then Vojvodina, lost their autonomous

status through Serb strong arm tactics such as threatening those who spoke

out against reintegration of the two provinces within Serbia. Slovenian

representatives saw that Serbia was trying to gain political leverage at the

expense of the other republics and walked out of the Communist Party 

9 
Congress in 1991. This all occurred in the context of the collapse of

Communism within the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.2 

The dream of a modern Greater Serbia was actually formulated by Kosta

Pecanac, the leader of the Chetniks in the 1920s and 1930s. Their ideology

only recognized the Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian nations which would be

ruled in a centralized state under Serb leadership. Greater Serbia would

include “old Serbia,” Bosnia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Montenegro, the

Batschka, the Barrat, the Sandzak, approximately one-half of Croatia and

some Bulgarian and Romanian border areas. The remaining area of

Yugoslavia would consist of a federation. In order to “Serbianize” this new

country, the Chetniks would forcibly move or “ethnically cleanse” 2.5 million

Yugoslavs from Greater Serbia and resettle 1.3 million Serbs from non-Serb

territory. In this way, Greater Serbia would constitute about two-thirds of the

population and territory of Yugoslavia.3 Milosevic rekindled this Greater 

Serbia dream among his people as Yugoslavia’s economy and Communist

ideology began collapsing in the late 1980s. 

Croatia and Slovenia held presidential elections early in 1990 for the first

time in over 50 years citing irreconcilable differences over the political direction

of Yugoslavia. Over the course of 1990, the other major republics held

presidential elections, helping to accelerate the disintegration of Yugoslavia.

Slobodan Milosevic was elected as president of Serbia, Franjo Tudjman,

president of Croatia, and Alija Izetbegovic, president of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Ironically, other than Izetbegovic, the five other presidents elected were all 

former high-ranking members within the Yugoslav Communist Party. 

Within Bosnia-Herzegovina, voting was so much along ethnic lines that it

appeared to be more of a census than an actual election. When Izetbegovic

became the new president of Bosnia, he formed a coalition government of all

three parties. From the beginning, the government was stalemated over

issues of its relationship with the other republics, organization of police and the

bureaucracy, economics, and everything else of substance. Croatia and Serbia

moved towards more militant positions but Bosnia-Herzegovina was paralyzed.4 

Croatia’s President Tudjman campaigned with the slogan, “We alone will

decide the destiny of our Croatia.” The new flag of Croatia featured the

medieval checkerboard Savonica, now more symbolic of Ustase atrocities in

World War II than older national traditions. Government officials within 

Croatia, including police and judges, had to sign a loyalty oath to Croatia and

those who did not were fired. The new Croatian constitution changed the

status of the Serbs living within Croatia from that of a nation to that of a

minority.5 Many Serbs living there rightfully feared for their safety and

domination at the hands of the Croats. Within the Krajina region centered on

the town of Knin, Serbs set up roadblocks and refused to acknowledge the

leadership of Tudjman. Instead, they formed their own independent Krajina

Serb Republic. 

In June 1991, war erupted when Slovenia and Croatia declared their full

independence. Slovenia’s withdrawal was relatively bloodless due to their

population’s ethnic homogeneity, their distance from Belgrade, and their 

10 
preemptive defensive actions. Yugoslavia accepted European mediation under

the European Community’s (EC) threat to cut off one billion dollars in

scheduled aid. The EC also used the implied threat of recognizing the

breakaway republics if mediation was replaced by fighting.6 Eventually,

Slovenia was recognized even though Yugoslavia withdrew and allowed

Europe to broker a peace treaty. 

Croatia was a different story. The JNA entered Croatia in July 1991,

ostensibly to protect the Serb minorities and maintain order, but what

followed was an ethnic cleansing campaign which started in Croatia and

reached fruition a year later in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The European

Community consequently agreed to recognize republics within Yugoslavia if

these republics agreed to independence in nationwide referendums and also

to protect all citizen’s human rights. In both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina,

a majority did vote for independence. However, in both republics, voting was

largely along ethnic lines. Serbs living there did not partake in the

referendums, and instead, set up their own governments. 

Following four months of savage fighting, representatives of Croatia, the

Krajina Serbs, and Yugoslavia signed a peace treaty. In February 1992

UNPROFOR soldiers entered Croatia on a peacekeeping mission under the

mandate of UN Security Council Resolution 743. The US and other Western

nations on the council wanted to include a statement from chapter 7 of the

UN Charter that would force countries to obey security council mandates

concerning Yugoslavia under penalty of economic sanctions or military force.

That statement was deleted when India and some Third World countries 

objected.7 

Pictures of Serb attacks on Croat territory, combined with Serb paramilitary

atrocities against civilians, branded them, in the world’s view, as the

aggressors and war criminals. Scenes from the Croatian cities of Dubrovnik

and Vukovar that flashed across TV screens throughout the world during the

war showed the indiscriminate nature of Serbian artillery barrages. From a

strategic viewpoint, Dubrovnik provided access to the sea for the landlocked

Serbs. In the Krajina, Vukovar was the gateway across the Danube River into

Croatia, so Zagreb massed its limited forces here.8 The JNA initiated a 

relentless artillery barrage to break Croatian resistance as well as limit their

own casualties upon taking Vukovar. According to Canadian Gen Lewis

MacKenzie, the JNA was the product of the “Soviet mentality of never

sending a man where a round can go first. They like to use artillery and

mortars. They don’t like face-to-face operations. If they fight you, it will be

from a distance and they will take innocent victims hostage in the face of

intervention.”9 

On 7 April 1992, in the midst of a tentative Serb-Croat ceasefire, the US

and the EC recognized Bosnia-Herzegovina. UNPROFOR was using Sarajevo

as its main base of support operations for troops in Croatia. They were now

put in the difficult position of trying to provide humanitarian relief to a

growing refugee population with no mandate for action in Bosnia. Meanwhile,

the Serbs quickly gained ground in eastern Bosnia, displacing hundreds of 

11 
thousands of Muslims from their homes. Their army comprised 80,000 former

JNA soldiers. Yugoslavia organized, trained, and equipped this force, but, for

the most part, the soldiers fighting in Bosnia were native Bosnians.10 

The broader question was whether the Bosnian war was a civil war, which

the Serbians felt it was, or a war of aggression by Serbia against the people of

Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Bosnian government felt it was. Yugoslavia

was providing support to the Krajina Serbs in Croatia and had a limited

number of troops keeping the strategic Posavina corridor opened in northern

Bosnia. But, by far the majority of the fighting in Bosnia was between

indigenous Serbs and Muslims, and later Croats. This author’s analysis

shows that the war was a civil war with Muslims, Serbs, and Croats all 

fighting for ultimate political control. Yugoslavia, Croatia, and an Islamic

coalition were the major external actors providing support to fuel the Bosnian 

war. 

Debate on the crisis in Bosnia offered a variety of solutions. The US was

the most enthusiastic about using offensive air operations against the

aggressor Serbs, NATO less enthusiastic, and the UN least enthusiastic of all.

Bombing in a peacekeeping or peacemaking environment would have

enormous strategic and political implications. Donald Snow, a professor at the

US Army’s War College, said “Impartiality is perhaps the most important

aspect of peacekeeping operations and will be exceptionally difficult under the

best of circumstances, since almost any action will benefit one side at the

expense of the other. To march unprepared into a strategic maelstrom could

do enormous harm.”11 Was it even possible to be impartial? Different cultures

perceive reality through different lenses and a notable factor in Bosnia was

that much of UNPROFOR’s information was being filtered through Bosnian

government “lenses” since they had, by far, the most contact with the UN

force. 

The divergence of operational perspectives in coalition warfare worked

directly against the US strategy of injecting force into the former Yugoslavia.

Within NATO, most of the allies, with the notable exception of the US, had

UNPROFOR soldiers on the ground in the region. A US air strategy to strike

at the Bosnian Serbs to enforce peace would put UN and humanitarian aid

workers on the ground directly into a more threatening environment.

UNPROFOR was spread throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina supporting the

humanitarian relief being provided by numerous organizations, and they

were often caught in the crossfire. Directly targeting the Bosnian Serbs could

provoke retaliatory responses against these personnel who had no effective

means of self-defense. 

By the summer of 1992, numerous organizations and countries were taking

a more active interest in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Rhetoric increasingly centered

on stopping Serbian aggression by military means, if necessary. Widespread

human rights abuse, a growing refugee problem in western Europe, and the

threat of Islamic extremists taking a more active interest in the Balkans were

three of the biggest factors mobilizing anti-Serb sentiment. 

12 
Reports coming out of Bosnia-Herzegovina suggested that widespread acts

of genocide were occurring within Bosnia. The emaciated bodies of inmates at

the Serb-run Manjica concentration camp, revealed in the summer of 1992,

reminiscent of the Nazi holocaust, stirred passions and a strong desire to do

something. Presidential candidate Bill Clinton shared these feelings and

promised to pursue a more active role in Yugoslavia if elected. On 5 August

1992, Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, called for the UN to authorize the

use of airpower in Bosnia to counter Serb aggression. The White House

jumped on the bandwagon making the same request of the UN, although

President George Bush was also sounding the familiar theme that “America

was not going to get bogged down in some guerrilla warfare.”12 Clinton 

exploited a weakness in Bush’s policy saying that he had “failed to develop

intermediate policies to deal with an unsettled world of foreign crises that fall

between the extremes of the need for invincible force and the possibility of

doing nothing.” New York Times writer Anthony Lewis was even more critical

of President Bush. 

The greatest failure, the one that will forever stain George Bush’s reputation, has

been in the former Yugoslavia. Bold American leadership, exercised in a timely

way, could have prevented much of the political and human disaster. Mr. Bush

wrung his hands yet it happened on George Bush’s watch. How is it possible to

square the feeble, feckless Bush of these events with the gung-ho President who

rallied the world against Saddam Hussein? Does the difference come down to oil?13 

Because a US core security interest was not at stake, a military

commitment to peripheral and vaguely definable objectives created a fertile

ground for political opportunists.14 The media influence also played a more

significant role under these circumstances. Public emotions fed on images of

hapless war victims and alleged atrocities clouding rational action and

complicating political decisions.15 

Getting political mileage out of the Balkans at the expense of an incumbent

was both tempting and easy to do. Nightly footage on CNN showed hideous

scenes of ethnic cleansing which made talk of doing something more vocal and

strident. On 4 August 1992 in public hearings on “Developments in

Yugoslavia,” Congressman Tom Lantos, commenting on the previous day’s

news footage showing two children who had allegedly been killed by Serb

snipers, said, “All you have to do is flip on your television set. And if you can

force yourself to look away from the Olympics for ten minutes, there are those

two little children in the bus with their plaintive little eyes looking at you and

looking at me, and months after months after months we get this diplomatic

garbage saying caution and reluctance, and no proof.”16 He went further to 

state that allowing acts of genocide to go unpunished would be equivalent to

appeasement, just as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain appeased

Hitler in 1938.17 

Many of those Yugoslavians ethnically cleansed or fleeing the fighting were

leaving Yugoslavia altogether. Germany, with its liberal immigration laws,

received over 700,000 Yugoslav immigrants in 1990 and 1991, while dealing

simultaneously with reunification. Many of these refugees going abroad were 

13 
the people Yugoslavia could least afford to lose. On 3 May 1993, Yugoslav

President Dobrica Cosic said, “We are suffering a huge brain drain.”18 

Thousands of university students emigrated or were looking to do so. In

another study, of the 830 top Yugoslav scientists who had left the country in

the last 14 years, one-quarter of them had departed in 1992 alone.19 

The Islamic factor was also a consideration. Croat officials uncovered 4,000 

guns and one million rounds of ammunition on board an Iranian aircraft in

Zagreb in September 1992. The plane was ostensibly delivering humanitarian

supplies to Bosnian refugees. According to a 26 September Washington Post 

report, Turkish, Afghan, Syrian, Saudi, and Bahrainian volunteers were

fighting in Bosnia.20 Graham Fuller, in his book, A Sense of Siege, summarized 

the Islamic interest succinctly: 

The second potential catalyst for Muslim consolidation emerges from foreign policy

crises that produce severe setbacks, humiliation, or suffering to Muslims. Traditional Muslim issues have consistently included the Palestinians’ unresolved grievances, Western military attacks against Muslim states, and most recently the

Bosnian crisis. Because the Bosnian Muslims are broadly perceived as the chief

victims in the broader Yugoslav crisis and because the West is seen as having done

little to improve their position, the Muslim world perceives such inaction as tantamount to a Western desire to eliminate one of the last centers of Muslim population

and culture on Western soil. For a long time to come the Bosnian question will

remain a running sore and symbol of anti-Muslim religious oppression in the West.

It is becoming the “new Palestinian issue” in terms of its emotionalism and symbolic significance to Muslims everywhere precisely because it is in Europe. Unless

dramatically and justly resolved from the Muslim point of view, the Bosnian issue

will complicate Western diplomatic intervention elsewhere in the Muslim world for

the indefinite future.21 

Sheikh Mustafa Ceric, the top Islamic official in Sarajevo made a compelling

argument as well: 

If Christians were being massacred in any Islamic country like the Muslims are

being killed here, the world community would have quickly found the means to

condemn the Muslims as fundamentalists, and fighters of a holy war, and things

would be taken care of overnight. A Muslim’s life is now worth the least on the

world market. Bosnia’s Muslims are the new Jews of Europe. This is the first

world-class crime to be carried out like a football game before the eyes of the entire

world on television. The Serbs are doing the dirty work of dealing with Bosnia’s

Muslims for all of Europe.22 

With initially no means of self-defense, the Bosnian government’s strategy

relied on an extremely effective information campaign to present their

situation to the outside world and get world opinion firmly on its side. The

diary of Zlata Filipovic, a young Muslim girl living through the siege of

Sarajevo, became a bestseller in America and was reminiscent of another

young girl, Anne Frank, in another war. Although Izetbegovic was the prime

minister of Bosnia, the face on CNN was that of the vice president, Haris

Silajdzic, a good-looking man who pleaded the Bosnian government’s case

both in perfect English and less stridently than Izetbegovic. Even

UNPROFOR soldiers on the ground in Sarajevo spoke of the Bosnian strategy

for getting on the evening world news. The Muslims on at least one occasion 

14 
fired on Serbian positions from the vicinity of a hospital, knowing that the

return fire would fall on or near the hospital. They then made sure that the

media was there to film the ensuing barrage.23 

In February 1993, the town of Srebrenica became a global symbol of

Bosnian Muslim resistance to Serbian aggression. Serbians had the town

surrounded and were shelling indiscriminately to force people to leave. Gen

Phillip Morillon, UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia, went on a personal visit

and ostensibly stayed for almost two weeks as a symbol of the UN stand

against the Serbian ethnic cleansing. In reality, General Morillon was held

there as a hostage of the Muslims to focus world attention on their plight.24 

Within the US, congressional records reflected the success of the Bosnian

government’s information campaign combined with actual Serb aggression. In

February 1991, while the US was engaged in Operation Desert Storm, the

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Senator Joseph Biden, held

a well-balanced hearing on the problems within Yugoslavia to “thoroughly

reconsider American interests and policy in the area.”25 Experts expressed a

variety of opinions supporting all sides within Yugoslavia in the context of a

potential civil war. From 1992 through 1993, the discussion within both the

Senate and House of Representatives became more one-sided. In at least 10

congressional hearings focused on the war in the former Yugoslavia, only one

testimony, that of Canadian Gen Lewis MacKenzie provided a balanced view

of the conflict. There was also a one-page letter written by a Serbian

American, Stevan Kovac, representing the Serbian perspective within

Yugoslavia, and submitted for the record.26 All other testimony virtually

corroborated the Bosnian government’s theme of Serbian aggression and a

defenseless Bosnia-Herzegovina. 

At a ceremony for the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington,

D.C., on 22 April 1993, Elie Wiesel, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and

Holocaust victim, said to President Clinton, “Mr. President, I cannot not tell 

you something. I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep

since what I have seen. As a Jew I am saying that. We must do something to

stop the bloodshed in that country.” Clinton’s inclination for the month after

this ceremony was to bomb the Serbs and arm the Bosnian government, but

he had a change of heart when advised by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, Gen Colin Powell, of the necessity for well-defined objectives, a

timetable of action, and a clearly defined exit strategy. In the face of the

United States’ continued inaction, Senator Daniel Moynihan later

sarcastically remarked that at a future date the US would be dedicating a

new museum to honor Serbia’s victims.27 

Notes 

1. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation, television documentary, January 1996. Milosevic, a

Communist Party protégé to the collective president, Stombolic, went to Kosovo to investigate

alleged human rights violations being directed against the Albanians. He also agreed to listen

to the complaints of Serb minorities there and actually staged a riot to coincide with this 

15 
meeting. When he, as a party member, acknowledged and spoke out for Serbian rights, he

violated the Communist doctrine espousing brotherhood and unity among the various ethnic

groups and enflamed nationalist Serbs’ passions. In the Tito era, this was taboo, but with

Yugoslavia sliding into economic turmoil, it was a powder keg waiting to explode or be

exploited as Milosevic did.

2. Ibid. 

3. Walter Manoschek, Serbien Ist Judenfrei: Militarische Besatzungspolitik und Judenvernichtung en Serbien 1941/1942 (Munchen, Deutschland: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1993), 114–15. 

4. Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia 

(Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine, 1994), 129. 

5. Ibid., 95. 

6. “Yugoslav Rebel Republics Freeze Independence,” Facts on File, 4 July 1991, 489. 

7. “UN Security Council Votes Croatia Peace Force,” Facts on File, 26 February 1992, 154. 

8. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. 

9. House Committee on Armed Services, The Policy Implications of US Involvement in 

Bosnia: Hearings before the Committee on Armed Services, 25–26 May 1993, 103d Cong., 1st

sess., 1993. 

10. Yugoslavia, Death of a Nation. 

11. Donald M. Snow, Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Peace-Enforcement: The US Role in the 

New International Order (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: US Army War College, February 1993), 262.

12. Christopher M. Gacek, “Logic of Force,” Dilemma of Policy (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994), 253–54. According to Undersecretary of State Thomas M. T. Niles,

“The principal components of US policy in Yugoslavia today are to work with our friends in

Western Europe and other members of the UN and the international community, to achieve a

peaceful settlement to the crisis, to secure the recognition of the independence of the various

republics under conditions acceptable to the international community, and to prevent the

further spread of the violence which has racked the region.” Testimony before House

Committee on Foreign Affairs, 4 August 1992, 2. 

13. Anthony Lewis, “Bush’s Greatest Failure,” New York Times, 28 September 1992, A14.

14. United States, President, A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement 

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, February 1996), 11–12. President Clinton’s

stated objectives are to enhance the US’s security, promote prosperity at home, and promote

democracy abroad. Where Bosnia fits into this strategy is not entirely clear. The linkage to

enhancing US security is that this is a war on European soil where history’s two most terrible

wars have been fought. By keeping the fighting contained, the US might avoid a larger battle

in the future. Genocide and halting excessive human rights abuses, both counter to democratic

principles, are another linkage of national security strategy to the conflict in Bosnia and

Croatia. 

15. Air Vice Marshal T. A. Mason, “Air Power in the Peace Support Environment,” paper

presented at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, January 1996, 2. 

16. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Developments in Europe and the Former 

Yugoslavia, 4 August 1992, 102d Cong., 2d sess., 1992, 52. On 3 August a busload of Sarajevo

orphans was ambushed by Serb gunners and two children were killed. The Serb gunners then

took Serb children off the bus after it had stopped. No news source questioned why the bus was

proceeding through a war zone in the first place with so many children on board. How

responsible were the Bosnian government officials who allowed the bus to proceed, knowing the

inherent dangers in such an act? Analysis indicates that it was a win/win proposition for the

government. If the bus got through, world opinion would applaud their efforts, and if the bus

was targeted, world opinion would still be firmly in their court, with the Bosnian Serbs viewed

as baby killers. The Bosnian government must share some blame by exposing those children to

such a risk. 

17. Ibid. 

18. “Bosnian Serbs Again Reject Peace Plan Despite US Military Threat,” Facts on File, 6 

May 1993, 321. 

19. Ibid. 

20. “Iranian Weapons Intercepted,” Facts on File, 19 November 1992, 874. 

16 
21. Graham E. Fuller and Ian O. Lesser, A Sense of Siege: The Geopolitics of Islam and the 

West (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 111.

22. Sheik Mustafa Ceric, New York Times, 25 June 1993, A3. 

23. Recollections of author, talking on numerous occasions with UNPROFOR soldiers on

leave at Aviano Air Base, Italy, 1993–1994.

24. Yugoslavia, Death of a Nation. 

25. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Civil Strife in Yugoslavia: The United States 

Response, 21 February 1991, 102d Cong., 1st sess., 1991, 1. 

26. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Yugoslavia: The Question of Intervention, 11 

June 1992, 102d Cong., 2d sess., 1992, 52–53.

27. Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West (New York: Routledge Press, 1994),

32–33. 

17

Chapter 3 

Deny Flight: The Deterrent Use of Airpower 

The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not 

remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed which is 

perpetually to be conquered. 

—Edmund Burke 

By April 1993, the war in the former Yugoslavia had been going on for

almost two years. It also marked the first anniversary of the Bosnian war.

The UN and EC strongly favored the Vance-Owen Peace Plan which divided

Bosnia-Herzegovina into 10 cantons split evenly between the Serbs, Croats,

and Muslims. The Bosnian Serbs were against it because the plan left most of

Bosnia’s natural and industrial resources in Muslim and Croat hands. The 

Bosnian government was against it because it partitioned Bosnia, which

directly countered the government’s vision of a single multicultural nation.

The Bosnian Croats were the big winners in the peace plan as they stood to

gain a fair amount of land and recognition despite representing only 17

percent of the Bosnian population. The US was against the plan because it

ceded land gained by the Bosnian Serbs through “acts of aggression.”1 There 

were elements of truth in all these arguments. The Vance-Owen plan

necessitated compromise, primarily between the Bosnian Serbs and the

Bosnian government. Compromise, however, was still a long way off.

The US had started unilaterally dropping pallets of food to besieged

enclaves in eastern Bosnia two months earlier in February. This represented

a significant escalation on the part of the United States, just one month into

President Clinton’s term of office. The Bosnian government was overjoyed. In

the words of one government official, “The Americans are now in the game,

and they can’t leave.” Bosnian Vice President Zlatko Lagmdzija said, “The

star has walked onto the court and decided to play with the good guys. . . .

Michael Jordan is in the game.”2 

Attempting to level the playing field and protect humanitarian operations

on the ground, the UN Security Council (UNSC) had passed UN Security

Council Resolution (UNSCR) 781, “Prohibiting Unauthorized Flights over

Bosnia-Herzegovina,” in October of 1992. It prohibited flights over Bosnia

that were not authorized by the UN. NATO cooperated by providing aerial

surveillance. By April 1993, NATO had documented over 500 airspace

violations. This flaunting of UN resolutions coupled with continued fierce

fighting throughout Bosnia, led to UNSCR 816 which directed participating

nations, particularly those within the NATO alliance, to take more active 

19 
measures to control unauthorized flights over Bosnia. Operation Deny Flight

began officially on 12 April 1993 as NATO’s response to UNSCR 816.3 

The initial objective of Operation Deny Flight as explicitly stated was to

conduct aerial monitoring and enforce compliance with UNSCR 816, which

banned flights by fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft in the airspace of the

Bosnia-Herzegovina no-fly zone. The operation’s implied objective was to

demonstrate UN and NATO determination to stabilize the situation in Bosnia 

so that a peaceful settlement could be achieved. An air option was the

cleanest way to get NATO involved without exposing its troops to a hostile

ground environment. Further, if the situation deteriorated badly, an air

armada could be pulled out more easily than one positioned on the ground.

UNPROFOR soldiers on the ground were lightly armed and had suffered

casualties while escorting relief convoys throughout Bosnia. The US wanted

badly to be engaged but would not send ground troops except as part of an

international force after the warring parties signed a peace agreement and

observed a cease-fire.4 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), Gen Colin

L. Powell, considered peacekeeping and humanitarian operations a given.

This signaled US commitment to its allies and its resolve to potential

violators of the peace.5 

Stopping Serb aggression with airpower was the preferred solution within

the new Clinton administration. US success in Operations Desert Storm and

Provide Comfort helped strengthen the airpower option. In northern Iraq,

Provide Comfort was effectively checking Iraqi aggression against a lightly

armed Kurdish population. Since the end of Desert Storm two years

previously, a combined task force of British, French, and US airpower had

been providing a protective umbrella. Jean Kirkpatrick, former US

ambassador to the UN, equated Milosevic to Saddam Hussein and advocated

using force as the only thing he would understand. She wanted to punish

Serbia for aggression, for concentration camps, for human rights abuses, and

for taking land illegally. 

I do not think the use of American ground forces would be necessary to deal with

this problem, though I have no objection to the US participation in peacekeeping

forces if that seems desirable at some later point. I do believe that the highly

focused selective, limited, and restrained use of US or NATO or EC or Franco-German, whoever is competent, airpower to enforce some of the provisions that have

already been provided by the Security Council is appropriate.6 

A huge and virtually insurmountable problem for NATO from day one was

stopping unauthorized flights by helicopters. Deny Flight rules of engagement

(ROE) required that the engaged fighter needed to physically observe the

helicopter committing a hostile act to shoot it down. Flying on an

unauthorized mission over Bosnia was not enough justification. The violators

quickly learned the ROE and would play cat and mouse games with NATO.

When intercepted, the violator would heed the warning to land but would

wait until the interceptor left to continue on his flight.7 

All three warring sides in the conflict possessed helicopters which they

used frequently to resupply and move troops, as well as evacuate casualties 

20 
and refugees or shuttle diplomats and force commanders. Sometimes the UN

flight coordination center in Zagreb authorized these flights but often they did

not. The Croatians flew MI-8 Hip helicopters painted white and similar in

color to UN helicopters, while the Bosnian Serbs flew Gazelles with red

crosses on the side. Whether ferrying general officers or medical emergencies,

the red cross remained. A picture in one magazine prominently showed the

internationally recognized symbol painted on the side of Serb Gen Ratko

Mladic’s personal helicopter.8 Helicopters were a tactical necessity in the

mountainous terrain. Roads were few and treacherous and getting supplies

through could take a long time. Snipers could anticipate avenues of resupply

and seriously delay logistical lines. 

The number of unauthorized helicopter flights climbed throughout Deny

Flight and by July 1995, the number of apparent violations since monitoring

began in November of 1992 had climbed to 5,711.9 Often, there was no time to 

coordinate helicopter operations through Zagreb. On 8 April 1993, 300 angry

Serb civilians surrounded UNPROFOR commander General Morillon. He was 

in a relief convoy destined for the besieged enclave of Srebrenica. Prevented

from going any farther, Morillon was airlifted out in the helicopter of Serb

Gen Manojlo Milovanovic. The flight technically violated the UN no-fly zone

over Bosnia.10 The rule of thumb for NATO pilots was thus basically to track

helicopters and make an obligatory radio call on the emergency frequency

that all pilots were required to monitor. After the Blackhawk helicopter

shootdown over northern Iraq in April 1994, the Deny Flight combined air

component commander again reiterated the strict rules of engagement

regarding helicopter engagements over Bosnia.11 

Stopping fixed-wing aircraft was an easier problem to overcome. Assuming

that Serbia and Croatia did not fly into Bosnia, only the Bosnian and Krajina

Serbs had fixed-wing aircraft. Most estimates placed the combined total of

fixed-wing fighters possessed by both the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs at

thirty-two. All of these fighters were ground-attack models with virtually no

air-to-air capability. To employ ordnance, the aircraft were limited to daytime

and good weather conditions. Before Operation Deny Flight, the Krajina Serbs

had suffered almost 50 percent attrition to shoulder-fired Croat surface-to-air

missiles (SAM) and had ceased most of their air operations.12 Their superiority

in heavy arms and a complete lack of enemy air opposition gave the Serbs a

tremendous military advantage without using airpower. When Serb fighters did

bomb targets in Bosnia on 28 February 1994, NATO rules of engagement were

clear and well executed. The F-16s did actually observe hostile activity, so they

were cleared in “hot” to shoot the Serb fighters down.13 

On 6 May 1993, the Bosnian Serb parliament officially rejected the VanceOwen Peace Plan. That same day, Milosevic condemned the Bosnian Serbs for

causing problems for all Serbia and closed the Serbian/Bosnian border to all

supplies except food and medicine. Milosevic felt that the Bosnian Serbs had a

guaranteed future under Vance-Owen and that continued fighting would just

cause further suffering for all Serbian people.14 The UN also passed a new

resolution demanding that six areas, Sarajevo, Tuzla, Gorazde, Bihac, Zepa, 

21 
and Srebrenica, be treated as safe areas, free from hostile acts which 

endangered the inhabitant’s safety. The model for these safe areas was

Srebrenica where UNPROFOR had disarmed the citizens in exchange for a

Serb cease-fire guarantee.15 

The tension between the US and its European allies over the use of

airpower to broker a peace agreement was readily apparent here. The

Europeans, with peacekeepers exposed on the ground, wanted to use

Milosevic to pressure the Bosnian Serbs and get American troops into Bosnia

to help defend the UN safe areas. The US wanted to mount air strikes against

the Bosnian Serbs and rearm the Bosnian government to coerce the Serbs

into reaching an agreement. This political failure to unite over the issue of

using force or diplomacy did not bode well for NATO. As Clausewitz had said

nearly two centuries before, military force is an extension of the political

process by other means. In Bosnia, with widely differing political agendas,

military options were at a standstill. British Air Vice Marshal Mason, a noted

expert on peacekeeping operations, offered that airpower may be used as a

force equalizer before a political settlement has even been identified. The air

commander’s objective is to neutralize the warring parties to assist in

implementing a peace settlement, while the politicians work out the political

objectives. When using military force, it is imperative to coordinate air and

ground actions to provide a symmetric, concerted effort regardless of the

political objectives.16 

UNSCR 836, passed on 4 June 1993, was a response to the fighting

primarily initiated by Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces. It directed that

NATO provide close air support (CAS) “in and around the safe areas to

support UNPROFOR in the performance of its mandate.” That mandate

directed UNPROFOR to deter attacks against the safe areas, monitor the

cease-fire, and, if necessary, use force to ensure freedom of movement of

UNPROFOR or of protected humanitarian convoys.17 The UN authorized 

additional troops to help implement the resolution. These troops were still

lightly armed, outnumbered, and limited in their capacity to defend

themselves. Later that month, the North Atlantic Council directed NATO to 

begin planning for air strikes in and around the safe areas to enforce UNSCR

836 and to provide air support for UNPROFOR. By August, the Deny Flight

operations plan had been modified to allow for close air support of

UNPROFOR and air strikes within Bosnia with UNPROFOR approval. 

The implementation of UNSCR 836 proved contentious. The NATO

chain-of-command went from the fighter aircraft, through an airborne

command and control C-130, to the Combined Air Operations Center at

Vicenza, Italy, where the combined force air component commander was the

approving authority for employing ordnance. The other chain-of-command

went from the UNPROFOR forward air controller on the ground through the

Bosnian Air Support Operations Center located in Kiseljak, Bosnia, and then

to Zagreb. There, the UNPROFOR commander asked UN Headquarters in

New York for permission to employ ordnance. The seven-hour time difference

between New York and Bosnia caused even greater coordination problems. 

22 
Essentially, getting clearance to execute CAS in a timely fashion proved

nearly impossible from the beginning. By 1994, in an attempt to streamline

the process, UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali delegated release

authority to his special envoy in Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi. Most air operations

in support of UNPROFOR on the ground needed to happen immediately when

the fighting was in progress and the two chains of command were too

unwieldy to support prompt actions.18 

Nevertheless, the international community was still widely divided over

using airpower for either close air support or attacking the Serbs directly.

Britain, France, and Russia objected to the US position on bombing the Serbs.

Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s special envoy, stated that the US position was

having a very negative impact on peace talks. On 7 August 1993, under

intense diplomatic pressure and perhaps to deflect growing pressure for air

strikes, the Serbs withdrew from some of the territories they had seized,

making NATO air strikes unlikely. Many observers accused the international

community of talking tough but not taking action against the Serbs.19 Lord 

David Owen, the EC’s chief negotiator and architect of the original

Vance-Owen Peace Plan, criticized the US early on for “employing high moral

standards on the basis of absolutely zero involvement. When the US had the

opportunity, at the start in 1991 to go in, guns blazing, and to take a

dominant military role, they declined to do so, saying it was Europe’s

problem.” Owen also advocated a much earlier use of airpower, disagreeing

with the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense that airpower could not be

employed without putting in ground forces. Once ground forces were in place

as part of UNPROFOR, the air options were more limited because of the

threat to outnumbered and lightly armed ground forces.20 

While the Serbs may have been guilty of initiating much of the fighting

within Bosnia, there was plenty of blame to go around. Following the

breakdown of the Vance-Owen plan in mid-April of 1993, Croat paramilitary

forces within Bosnia, backed by regular Croatian Army units, attacked

Muslims in western Bosnia. The Croats sought to carve out their own

independent state, closely allied with Croatia, and with its capital in Mostar.

Radovan Karadzic and Mate Boban, the Serb and Croat leaders within 

Bosnia, had met in Austria shortly after the Croat offensive began apparently

to deconflict and coordinate Serb and Croat military actions.21 In north 

central Bosnia, there were coordinated Serb and Croat artillery attacks

against Muslim enclaves, most notably around the town of Maglaj.22 Muslims 

in the Bihac pocket of northwest Bosnia, led by Fikrit Abdic, actually broke

away from the Bosnian government in the summer of 1993 and formed their

own alliance with both Croatia and the Serbs in the region. Abdic was

anxious to end the fighting, which was causing widespread economic

devastation. The Bosnian government declared Abdic a traitor and ordered its

Fifth Corps in Bihac to destroy Abdic’s renegade Muslims.23 

By November 1993, diplomatic handwringing and the confusing ground

picture ensured that the UN and NATO accomplished little militarily or

politically. All three sides targeted UNPROFOR soldiers. The majority of the 

23 
aid workers and UN personnel on the ground who lost their lives were caught

in Muslim and Croat crossfires.24 Lord Owen said on 15 November that 

international intervention in Bosnia might actually be prolonging the conflict

since the humanitarian aid is helping to feed the warriors on all sides.25 

From the spring of 1993 until February 1994, the Croats, Muslims, and

Serbs were essentially fighting against and allied with each other at various

points throughout the country. In Bihac, it was Abdic’s Muslims allied with

Serbs, fighting Bosnian government soldiers. In Mostar, it was Croats

fighting Muslims; in north central Bosnia, it was Serbs and Croats fighting

Muslims; and in Croatia, it was Krajina Serbs fighting Croats. This was in

addition to Serbs and Muslims fighting in eastern and northern Bosnia. The

battlefield maps and intelligence scenario changed daily. Frustrated NATO

and UN personnel kept searching for solutions. 

On 5 February 1994, a mortar round, allegedly fired by the Serbs, exploded

in the crowded Mrkale marketplace leaving 68 people dead in the highest

single casualty incident of the war. One month prior, at a NATO summit

meeting, ministers had reiterated a warning first made to the Serbs in

August 1993 that they would mount air strikes to prevent the strangulation

of Sarajevo. The marketplace bombing, with its wide media coverage, put

western public opinion squarely in favor of using force if necessary.26 NATO 

gave the Serbs 10 days to pull back heavy weapons from around the city or

risk being bombed. General Mladic, the Bosnian Serb field commander, said

“we Serbs have never accepted any ultimatum and never will.”27 Greece, a 

NATO member, threatened to pull its aircrews from NATO surveillance

flights over Bosnia if the Serbs were bombed. Romania and Russia both

denounced the proposed NATO air strikes.28 In fact, Russia was furious with 

NATO over the threatened air strikes. Russia persuaded the Bosnian Serbs to

pull back in exchange for putting Russian peacekeepers on the ground around

Sarajevo.29 Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was “grateful to Russia for

its involvement in the resolution of the crisis,” and accepted Russia’s

“request” to withdraw heavy weaponry around Sarajevo. Prior to Russian

involvement, and just one day before the issuance of the ultimatum, the Serbs

had not budged on moving their weapons. NATO was going to have to either

strike or back down from coercive air strikes. Russian peacekeepers arrived

one day after the ultimatum’s expiration, greeted as brothers and protectors

by the Serbs. NATO could not now strike without inflicting casualties on the

Russians peacekeepers in the area.30 

It was within this context that the US accomplished its most significant act

of “realpolitik” of the war. The US negotiated an agreement between the Croats

and Muslims to link their armies and territories together after almost a year

of fighting. “Right away, many of our problems went away,” according to chief

negotiator, Charles Redmon.31 Bosnian Serbs condemned the alliance as a 

“further escalation of crisis.” In a sense they were right. Bosnian government

forces released from action against Croats mounted an offensive against the

Serbs in north central Bosnia the same month that the new alliance was formed.32 

24 
One of the major areas of interest and supply buildup for the Bosnian

government was Gorazde, just southeast of Sarajevo, and one of the six

UN-designated safe areas. This was part of a key line of communication for

the Bosnian government, linking Muslim communities in the Drina valley

and farther east into the Sandzak area of Serbia. For the Serbs, Gorazde was 

the last major Muslim presence in the Drina valley and a significant pocket of

Muslim resistance. In early April 1994, the Bosnian Serbs launched an

offensive against Gorazde. US and UN officials stated that they were not

prepared to launch air strikes or take military action to curb the Serb assault

on the enclave. Speaking on Meet the Press, Defense Secretary William Perry

said the US would not take military action to save the Gorazde enclave or

protect its inhabitants. “We will not enter the war to stop that from

happening.”33 For one year, NATO had been threatening air strikes and then

backed down when the Serbs violated this safe area. In a New York Times 

article on 5 April, analysts argued that countering the Serbs would force them

to accept a peace agreement, while others argued that it would only

antagonize them further. This waffling was a reflection of the same confusion

going on at higher political levels and highlighted the dilemma of a deterrence

policy not backed by action if needed.34 

Group Captain Andy Lambert, an expert on deterrence and coercion theory,

argued that an operation begun for deterrence purposes, such as NATO’s

Deny Flight, needed to anticipate being tested by the party they were

attempting to deter, in this case the Bosnian Serbs. If NATO was going to

deter the Serbs, they needed to be ready to back up threats with force.

“Credibility is paramount and when credibility fails, thence goes

deterrence.”35 This theory appeared to hold true, at least with the

UNPROFOR on the ground. Relief convoys had a much higher chance of

getting through Serb checkpoints when UNPROFOR pulled up with their

armored units and dictated to the guards that the convoy was authorized to

proceed. Often guards would not quibble over paperwork or authorization if

the convoy escort appeared determined. Convoys acquiescing to vehicle and body

searches, and accommodating the checkpoint guards, were often turned back.36 

One week into the Serb offensive on Gorazde, Serb artillery shelling killed

an UNPROFOR soldier. NATO had not been willing to counter the Serb

offensive against the town, but it did respond to protect UN soldiers. NATO

fighters dropped bombs for the first time in alliance history on 10 April 1994.

The targets were a Serb mobile command post and a tank shelling the town

from the position believed responsible for the UNPROFOR soldier’s death.

Serb commander Mladic was furious and ordered his troops to surround 150

UNPROFOR soldiers positioned in Gorazde. He raged by telephone that if

NATO did not stop its actions, not one UN soldier would leave alive.

According to Michael Williams, a UN special advisor, it “brought home to us

the limits and difficulties of using airpower when you had such an exposed

force on the ground.”37 In the ensuing week, the Serbs badly damaged a

French fighter aircraft and shot down a British Harrier. By 17 April, the

Serbs had captured Gorazde despite NATO threats and Russian intervention 

25 
to stop the Serb offensive. Russian Envoy Vitaly Churkin described the Serbs

as “extremists, drunk on the madness of war.”38 

UNSCR 913 extended the weapons exclusion zone in place around Sarajevo

to all five remaining safe areas and forcefully warned the Serbs to pull out of

Gorazde or face direct attack. That, combined with NATO ultimata and Russian 

pressure, forced the Serbs to pull out of Gorazde on 23 April, but not before they

had burned numerous buildings and destroyed a water pumping station.39 

The idea of a multiethnic cantonized Bosnia had, by early 1994, faded.

There was too much hatred, too many refugees, and no common ground on

which the factional leaders could unite. The hope that the UN could keep the

warring sides apart simply by declaring safe areas and positioning monitors

in those areas was also vanishing. Bosnian government forces and renegade

Muslim units would often sortie out from the safe areas to attack surrounding

Serb forces. They could always retreat to these “safe havens,” where Serb

counterattacks would be condemned by the UN.40 

All designated safe areas were locations under siege by Serb artillery

and troops. Ironically, the most savagely wrecked city in 

Bosnia-Herzegovina was Mostar. Early on in the war in 1992, Serbs shelled

the city from the eastern high grounds, but the majority of the damage was

done after the Muslims and Croats started fighting there in 1993, with the

Serbs watching from the sidelines. Flying over Bosnia at 24,000 feet, the

only city where one could readily see major destruction was Mostar. All five

bridges across the Neretva River were gone, including the world-famous

Stari Most bridge, which Croatian militia destroyed. The Muslim

inhabitants on the east side of the river suffered more privations than

perhaps any other group in the country. Mostar should have been

designated as a safe area along with the other six safe areas that the UN

Security Council decided on. Such an action would have shown more

impartiality on the part of the international community.41 

On 25 April, following Gorazde, the US, France, Great Britain, Germany,

and Russia formed the Balkan Contact Group and started pushing a new

strategy. New strategy would focus on persuading the Serbs to give up

approximately 20 percent of the territory they controlled. This would leave a

49/51 percent division of Bosnia between the Bosnian Serb Republic and the

confederation. UN representatives were excluded from the group which

planned punitive measures against any side that would not accept an

otherwise nonnegotiable map built by the Contact Group.42 

In late July 1994, the contact group persuaded the UN Security Council to

tighten economic sanctions against Serbia. On 4 August, shortly after the contact

group initiated sanctions, Milosevic broke relations with the Bosnian Serbs. 

They have rejected peace at a time when their Serb republic has been recognized

within the half of the territory of former Bosnia-Herzegovina and when by accepting

peace, they would have ensured the lifting of the sanctions against those without 

whom they could not survive. Their decision to reject peace can only be in the interests

of war profiteers and in the interests of those who do not have a clean conscience, and 

who fear the arrival of a peace in which all crimes will come to the surface.43 

26 
Serbia had been suffering terribly by the economic embargo, with inflation

rates in excess of 200 percent per month and over 50 percent unemployment.

The three-year-old embargo and breakup of the country had almost totally

destroyed Serbia’s economy and significantly undermined Milosevic’s

credibility. The security council subsequently lifted some of these sanctions

two months later when Serbia showed that it had effectively sealed its border

and aid to the Bosnian Serbs.44 

Karadzic responded that the Bosnian Serb Republic was a “child being

separated from its mother. The child doesn’t want it to happen but the child

has to stand on its own two feet.”45 Thus, by the summer of 1994, the Bosnian

Serbs were effectively isolated from the rest of the world and were extremely

vulnerable to a bombing strategy that targeted their war-making potential.

The Bosnian Serbs had very few means to replace heavy armor and artillery,

since they had almost no autonomous war-production capability. Without the

weapons, confederation forces outnumbered them two to one.46 

August 1994 was perhaps the ideal time to coerce the Bosnian Serbs to the

negotiating table. They were politically isolated, but Serbia may not have

been able to keep the border closed for long. The powerful far right Serbian

Nationalists Party was pressuring Milosevic to reopen the border. The

Bosnian government army was also making gains on three fronts during the

first week in August, including the area around the Sarajevo exclusion zone.

Unfortunately, the BIH initiated most of the offensive actions around

Sarajevo in direct violation of UN resolutions. The UNPROFOR commander

at the time, British Gen Michael Rose actually condemned the Bosnian

government’s actions and warned them of a possible NATO response. Rose

was furious that the Bosnian government was directly violating NATO and

UN policy concerning the Sarajevo safe area. Many UN officials were appalled

with Rose for even thinking about attacking Bosnian government forces and

called for his replacement.47 

Politically isolating the Bosnian Serbs and building a consensus for a

coercive air operation was difficult with the Bosnian government violating

UN mandates around Sarajevo. If the Bosnian government had exercised

restraint, there may have been a more concerted effort at this point to coerce

the Bosnian Serbs to sign the peace agreement. President Clinton was

continuously calling for a greater use of force by NATO in Bosnia if the

Bosnian Serbs would not lift the siege of Sarajevo. In response, General Rose

said “Patience, persistence and pressure is how you conduct a peacekeeping

mission. Bombing is a last resort because then you cross the Mogadishu line.”

This was a reference to US and UN casualties sustained in Somalia, when 

they elevated a humanitarian mission to one of going after rebel warlord,

Mohammed Farah Aideed.48 

The Croats and Muslims achieved major victories in October and November

1994. The Serbian blockade was apparently having a significant impact on

the Serbs. In western Bosnia, the Confederation displayed an unprecedented

level of cooperation and routed the Bosnian Serb Army. In the Bihac pocket,

according to UN spokesman Lt Col Tim Spicer, the BSA “crumbled. Their 

27 
command and control system is gone. They’ve abandoned a lot of equipment,

which is very unusual for them.”49 The Bosnian Serbs countered with their 

heaviest artillery barrage on Sarajevo since the February 1994 ultimatum.

The Serbs still controlled the high ground around the city. Losing this

territory would imperil the five Serb suburbs within Sarajevo, along with

about 200,000 Serbs living there. 

Airpower now confronted NATO and the UN with another dilemma. Both

Bihac and Sarajevo were being shelled with weapons prohibited by UN

ultimata. The deterrent effect of NATO airpower at this point was virtually

nil. Serbs threatened peacekeepers in both areas and the political and

military precedent had been set to strike the Bosnian Serbs. However, the

BIH initiated most of the offensive action in the two regions. If NATO bombed

government forces who were violating UN resolutions, it would add an

entirely new and unwanted dimension to the conflict. In effect, the Serb

perception that NATO and the UN were on the side of the Muslim-Croat

Confederation was valid. Yet, the Bosnian parliament was also calling for

Rose’s ouster as UNPROFOR commander in Bosnia. Bosnian government

political parties accused Rose of having “done everything to water down the

decisiveness of the free world in punishing crime and fascism. We will be

asking for an impartial, objective commander, one who will implement UN

resolutions on the ground.”50 

The Bosnian Serbs were able to counterattack in coordination with the 

Krajina Serbs and retake much of their lost territory in the Bihac region.

Karadzic closed public schools and mobilized the entire Serbian population,

including school-aged children. The self-proclaimed Bosnian Serb Republic

had been suffering from a dearth of manpower since the start of the war.

Some accounts stated that there were 50 percent less Serbs in Bosnia than

prewar estimates so the pool of available manpower was low. The Serb forces

were in need of fuel and supplies and used the renegade Muslim, Fikrit Abdic,

to resupply them because of his business connections.51 

In support of the combined offensive, the Krajina Serbs launched air

strikes from Udbina to bomb the Bihac pocket on several occasions. The

cluster bombs and napalm their fighters employed did not explode, however.

This was a good indicator of the dismal state of weapons in the Serb aerial

arsenal as well as the training of its pilots and maintainers. The

unauthorized use of Croatia-based, fixed-wing fighters over Bosnia presented

a problem for NATO. With the Bihac pocket bordering on Croatia, these

fighters were able to drop bombs and get back across the border before NATO

fighters could engage them. In response, UNSCR 958 increased the UN

mandate to protect UNPROFOR in Croatia as well as in Bosnia and set the

stage for NATO to strike Udbina directly to compel the Serbs to quit using

that airfield for offensive operations.52 

In the biggest air strike in the history of NATO, 39 aircraft damaged the

runway at Udbina, along with antiaircraft artillery and SAM sites on the

perimeter of the field. According to Adm Leighton W. Smith, the NATO Allied

Forces South commander, “Our intention was to try to limit collateral 

28 
damage. We did not want to go outside of the airfield area, and we wanted to

limit the number of people on the ground who might be casualties.”53 

When the Serbs overran the Bihac pocket they took UN hostages. The

Bangladesh UNPROFOR troops there did not have the equipment or

procedural knowledge to call in air strikes. Dutch peacekeepers, well-versed

in NATO CAS procedures, were ordered to move there, but were blocked by

the Serbs surrounding the enclave. NATO conceded that it would launch no

more air strikes and the UN declared that it could not stop the Serb assault

on Bihac. NATO’s hands were tied, consequently, and once again, the limits of

airpower in a peace operation, with a humanitarian mandate, became

glaringly obvious. The Bosnian Serbs detained approximately 300

UNPROFOR and used them as human shields forcing two of them, in one

case, to lie down on a runway for eight hours, to deter NATO strikes.54 

In a total reversal of policy, the UN and NATO suspended flights over Bosnia

on 2 December and went to Pale to talk to Karadzic. The contact group also

indicated that they were willing to negotiate the previously unconditional map

on the future division of Bosnia. In essence, not only was NATO unable to deter

Bosnian Serb aggression or counterattack, but the Bosnian Serbs actually forced

the contact group to change their negotiating strategy to one more favorable to

the Serbs. Continued fighting throughout Bosnia had also caused a severe

shortage of supplies and fuel for the UN, much of which the warring parties

hijacked. Near Gorazde, British peacekeepers were patrolling on foot and using

mules to move supplies.55 Not only was the peacekeeping mission threatened in

Bosnia-Herzegovina with the British and French looking for a way to get their

peacekeepers out of country, but NATO’s reputation was so severely tarnished

that the entire alliance was threatening to unravel. 

Notes 

1. “Bosnian Cease-fire Agreed but Peace Plan Falters,” Facts on File, 1 April 1993, 223.

2. “US Airdrops Relief Supplies Over Bosnia,” Facts on File, 4 March 1993, 133. 

3. “No-Fly Zone Enforcement Approved,” Facts on File, 1 April 1993, 224.

4. “Serbian President Orders Blockade against Bosnian Serbs,” Facts on File, 13 May 1993, 345.

5. Colin L. Powell, “US Forces: Challenges Ahead,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 5 (Winter 92/93): 36.

6. Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 

American Policy in Bosnia,18 February 1993, 103d Cong., 1st sess., 1993, 11.

7. House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Developments in Europe and the Former 

Yugoslavia: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East of the Committee 

on Foreign Affairs, 15 September 1993, 103d Cong., 1st sess., 1993, 17.

8. Barbara Starr, “CAS: The Only Way to Hit Serb Artillery,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 12 

February 1994, 6.

9. “Resolution 998: Rapid Reaction Capacity,” UN Chronicle, September 1995.

10. “UN Commander Stopped by Mob,” Facts on File, 15 April 1993, 263.

11. Five ATAF Operations Plan (OPLAN) 4101 (NATO Secret), special instructions to ROE,

April 1994. In April 1994, two F-15 pilots from Bitburg Air Base in Germany mistakenly shot

down two US Army Blackhawk helicopters involved in a humanitarian mission. Both pilots

visually misidentified the helicopters as Iraqi MI-24 Hinds and shot them down. A similar

mistake in Bosnia would have even more catastrophic consequences. Information extracted is

unclassified. 

29 
12. “Just In Time To Be Too Late,” Jane’s Defense Weekly, 16 January 1993, 18. 

13. Capt Bob Wright, interview with author, Aviano Air Base, Italy, 2 March 1994. 

14. “Serbian President Orders Blockade against Bosnian Serbs,” Facts on File, 13 May

1993, 345. 

15. “Srebrenica Standoff Continues,” Facts on File, 29 April 1993, 303. 

16. AVM T. A. Mason, “Air Power in the Peace Support Environment,” paper presented at

the University of Birmingham, U.K., January 1996, 11. 

17. UN Security Council Resolution 836, 4 June 1993. 

18. Steve Irwin, Maj, USAF, “DENY FLIGHT Bluffer’s Guide to Operations Law” (Naples,

Italy: Allied Air Forces Southern Europe, 26 April 1995), 5–6.

19. Geoff Simons, UN Malaise: Power, Problems, and Realpolitik (New York: St. Martin’s

Press, 1995), 85. 

20. “Bosnian Moslems, Serbs, Croats Meet in Geneva,” Facts on File, 25 November 1993, 881. 

21. Yugoslavia. Death of a Nation, television documentary, January 1996. 

22. Author recollects flying over Maglaj late in 1993. Nightly airdrops into the town were

met by fierce artillery shelling encircling the town and the drop zone. Order of battle and

intelligence estimates assessed that both Croat and Serb forces were taking part in coordinated

shelling on the primarily Muslim inhabitants of the town. 

23. “Serbs Break Presidency Ranks,” Facts on File, 5 August 1993, 569. 

24. Government Accounting Office (GAO), Humanitarian Intervention: Effectiveness of UN 

Operations in Bosnia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1994), 15. 

25. “Bosnian Moslems, Serbs, Croats Meet in Geneva,” 881. 

26. Elaine Sciolino, “US Said to Plan Bosnia Ultimatum Urging Air Strikes,” New York 

Times, 9 February 1994, A1. 

27. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. 

28. “Deadly Mortar Attack Prompts Ultimatum,” Facts on File, 10 February 94, 77. 

29. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. 

30. “NATO Strikes Averted,” Facts on File, 24 February 1994, 117. 

31. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. 

32. “Enclave Pounded by Artillery, Tanks,” Facts on File, 7 April 1994, 237. 

33. William J. Perry, US secretary of defense, Meet the Press, 3 April 1994. 

34. “UN Balks at Intervention,” Facts on File, 7 April 1994, 237. 

35. Group Capt Andrew Lambert, Royal Air Force, interview with author, Maxwell AFB,

Ala., 9 January 1996. 

36. GAO, 15. 

37. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. 

38. “Balkan Contact Group Set,” Facts on File, 28 April 1994, 293. 

39. “More Shelling as Serbs Retreat,” Facts on File, 28 April 1994, 293. 

40. “Sarajevo Siege Worst in Seven Months,” Facts on File, 29 September 1994, 711. 

41. Author recollects flying over Bosnia-Herzegovina, April 1994. 

42. “Bosnian Factions Sign New Peace Treaty Accord,” Facts on File, 16 June 1994, 422. 

43. “Milosevic Condemns Bosnian Serb Decision,” Belgrade TANJUG Domestic Service, 

trans. from Serbo-Croat, 4 August 1994. 

44. UN Security Council Resolution 943, 23 September 1994. 

45. “Serbs Again Reject Peace Plan,” Facts on File, 21 July 1994, 554. 

46. “Order of Battle,” Croatian News Service-Globus, 15 August 1995. 

47. “Sarajevo Siege Worst in Seven Months,” 29 September 1994, 711. 

48. Ibid., 711. 

49. “Bosnian Serb Fuel, Morale Are Low,” Facts on File, 3 November 1994, 810. 

50. Ibid., 810. 

51. “Rebel Moslem Back in Bihac Pocket,” Facts on File, 15 December 1994, 910. 

52. UN Security Council Resolution 958, 18 November 1994. 

53. “NATO Planes Bomb Serb Airfield in Croatia,” Facts on File, 24 November 1994, 874. 

54. “UN Soldiers Still Held Hostage,” Facts on File, 8 December 1994, 909. 

55. “Serbs Hijack UN Fuel Convoy,” Facts on File, 15 December 1994, 934. 

30 
Chapter 4 

Operation Deliberate Force 

The presidency and the Government of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 

greatly embittered, warn once again that the aggressors, Serbia and Montenegro, 

despite all the Security Council resolutions passed against them, continue to understand the language of force alone, and that therefore force is the only successful 

method of confronting them. 

—Statement by Bosnia-Herzegovina’s

MultiEthnic Presidency, 1993 

On 30 August 1995, at 0210 hours Central European time, 60 NATO strike

and support aircraft attacked targets in southeast Bosnia-Herzegovina

initiating Operation Deliberate Force. Two weeks later on 14 September,

NATO suspended operations when the Bosnian Serb forces largely complied

with UN demands that they cease attacks on the designated safe areas of

Sarajevo, Gorazde, and Tuzla; remove their heavy weapons from a

20-kilometer exclusion zone around Sarajevo; and open Sarajevo airport and

roads leading into the city, which had been cut by Serb sniper and artillery

fire. Within two months of the end of Deliberate Force, the UN had all three 

warring parties represented at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, to initial a peace

agreement on the future of Bosnia-Herzegovina. To paraphrase the chief

negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, airpower broke the back of the Bosnian Serbs

and directly led to the outcome in Ohio.1 

With the decision to launch NATO air strikes now delegated to the UN and

NATO military chain of commands, what was needed, on the part of the

Serbs, was a clear violation of one of the UN resolutions. An attack on one of 

the safe areas or the use of heavy artillery in the weapons exclusion zone

would constitute such a violation and act as a trigger for Deliberate Force.

Two days prior to Deliberate Force, a mortar attack on the Mrkale market in

Sarajevo galvanized US Adm Leighton Smith, commander in chief, Southern

Europe (CINCSOUTH), and British Lt Gen Rupert Smith, UNPROFOR

commander in Bosnia, into responding to this overt and provocative act of

violence. Admiral Smith saw the results on CNN immediately after the attack

occurred. This was the trigger event that initiated Operation Deliberate

Force. Angered by the marketplace shelling, Admiral Smith coordinated with

British Gen Rupert Smith, acting UNPROFOR commander in the absence of

French Gen Bernard Janvier, to approve NATO air strikes against Bosnian

Serb positions, if they were the culprits behind the mortar attack. UN

ballistics experts could not determine conclusively who fired the mortar 

31 
round, but the burden of proof was low after countless shells had already

been falling on Sarajevo in the course of the preceding three years. Both

commanders now agreed to act against the Serbs who they thought were most

likely responsible for the mortar attack. The two commanders jointly ordered

the execution of Operation Deliberate Force.2 

Operation Deliberate Force represented a significant break from past

NATO and UN actions in the region. Previous strategy had focused on the

deterrent use of airpower to maintain a somewhat stable status quo while

political negotiators hammered out an equitable solution to the crisis. In May

1995, UN and NATO strategy changed. News footage of UNPROFOR soldiers

held hostage by Serbs and chained to potential NATO targets flashed across

television sets worldwide. In July, the Serbs overran Srebrenica, a

UN-declared safe area, thus angering the western powers. With deterrence

failing, a stronger response was needed. 

Many proponents of airpower point to the Balkan peace accord following

Deliberate Force as clear proof of NATO’s aerial victory. This operation,

together with Desert Storm before it, is “expected to serve as a template for

future US conflict with a greater reliance on airborne technology, precision

strike and integrated planning, and a deemphasis of the American military’s

ground role.”3 Secretary of Defense William Perry said “DELIBERATE

FORCE was the absolutely crucial step in bringing the warring parties to the

negotiating table at Dayton, leading to the peace agreement.”4 

To understand the impact and effectiveness of Deliberate Force on the

Bosnian Serbs, one must look at events in the Balkans that took place in the

spring and summer of 1995 that led, in turn, to the first bombs falling on 30

August. There were at least three other important influences that directly led

to the Dayton peace accords: Milosevic’s dropping of political, economic, and

military support to the Bosnian Serbs; the coordinated Croat/Muslim

offensive throughout Bosnia; and the previously mentioned Croat-Muslim

Confederation. Some even argue that Deliberate Force was unnecessary and

there is documented proof that the day before Deliberate Force began, the

Bosnian Serbs had accepted the US framework for a peace settlement,

including a 49/51 percent territorial split.5 

In the summer of 1995, the war in Bosnia was in full swing, and both NATO

and UN credibility were suffering. The previous December, former President

Carter had brokered a four-month cease-fire among the warring factions in

the country. All sides honored the cease-fire until the Bosnian government

launched a major offensive in late March 1995.6 The resumption in fighting

also coincided with the good weather months of spring and summer. For the

past three years, the warring sides had generally spent the winter months

bivouacked, recuperating and training while waiting for better weather. Thus

the four-month cease-fire, although at first hailed as a breakthrough, was not

as effective as may have been perceived by the UN and NATO. 

On 1 May, Croatia launched a major offensive against Serb forces in

western Slavonia, Croatia. This was the Zagreb’s first major offensive in more

than three years. Within Bosnia itself, government forces initiated large-scale 

32 
offensive action against the Bosnian Serbs in the areas of Sarajevo and the

strategic Posavina corridor that linked Serbia with the northern Bosnian

Serb stronghold around Banja Luka and the Krajina in Croatia.7 

In defiance of a UN ultimatum, Bosnian Serbs seized heavy weapons from

a UN-guarded weapons depot near Sarajevo. Seemingly justified by the new

Croat and Muslim offensives, and outnumbered in manpower, the Serbs were

nevertheless countered by NATO air strikes on their Pale weapons depot on

25 and 26 May. In response to the aerial strike, they seized UNPROFOR

personnel as hostages. The images of helpless UN soldiers chained to

buildings sparked further outrage throughout most of the world. Ironically, it

was the only way that the Bosnian Serbs could counter NATO bombs. The

Serbs had no other effective means to counter NATO bombing of their

essential war stocks other than to relocate the stocks. This was logistically

impractical.8 Combined with the above events, the Bosnian Serbs felt 

trapped. According to one NATO general, “The Bosnian Serbs have declared

war on the UN. They’ve made it hard to back off.” UN Secretary General

Boutros Boutros-Ghali spoke of increasing troop strength in Bosnia and

giving them a mandate to more forcefully impose a peace settlement.9 

The dilemma presented by hostages on the ground did make NATO leaders

pause to think. Although NATO and the UN denied it, Bosnian Serb hostage

taking had once again exposed the weakness of UNPROFOR against a

determined foe, and exposed the weakness of an offensive air strategy tied to

a peacekeeping and humanitarian mission on the ground. It also suggested a

major lesson that air and surface operations in the same theater needed to be

unified under one command structure to ensure that all operations were

mutually supporting instead of mutually inhibiting.10 

These precipitous events at the end of May forced the UN to look for a

better way to carry out its mandate and also protect its troops on the ground.

The outcome was a heavily armed UN Rapid Reaction Force (RRF) with a

more aggressive ROE to counter hostile acts. The new ROE would allow the

RRF to enforce the peace by targeting any of the warring parties who violated

it. Previously, UNPROFOR had to standby, unless acting in self-defense, as

the warring parties fought. By the end of July, the RRF had moved onto the

high ground of Mount Igman southwest of Sarajevo. Their mission was peace

enforcement, not peacekeeping, and represented a fundamental shift in the

UN’s mission in Bosnia.11 

NATO was not invulnerable to Serb ground to air threats despite having

almost total air supremacy over Bosnia. On 2 June 1995, a Bosnian Serb SA-6

battery shot down Capt Scott O’Grady’s F-16 over northwest Bosnia. By

coincidence or perhaps fearing escalation, two hours later Bosnian Serbs

released 121 UN hostages. Consequently, NATO sent high-speed antiradiation

missile (HARM) equipped aircraft into Bosnian airspace and reassessed the

intelligence failure that contributed to the shootdown. With all the electronic

emissions-gathering sources in theater and on board the F-16, the pilot had

adequate warning of incoming missiles.12 One important outcome of the

O’Grady shootdown was that aircraft would stay out of Bosnia unless 

33 
suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD) assets were on station. The Serbs

had now shown their ability to counter NATO’s frontline fighter force and

Deliberate Force planners took this into account, as will be discussed later. 

In July, Bosnian Serb forces took the safe areas of Srebrenica and Zepa and

threatened the town of Gorazde. Their forces also launched a new offensive on 

the Bihac pocket in northwest Bosnia. The fall of both Srebrenica and Zepa

was a humiliating event for the UN. In agreement, the UN and NATO drew a

“line in the sand” at Gorazde during the London Conference held at the end of

July 1995. 

The London Conference was the pivotal turning point in getting a decisive

air operation turned on. Foreign and defense ministers of 16 nations involved

in the conflict in Bosnia met to discuss new developments in the war.

Secretary of State Christopher put the Serbs on notice that “an attack on

Gorazde would be met by substantial and decisive air power.”13 More 

significantly, five days later, UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali delegated

strike authority for the UN to the military commander of all UN troops in the

former Yugoslavia, French Gen Bernard Janvier. Previously, authority had

rested with Boutros-Ghali’s special envoy to Bosnia, Yasushi Akashi. Admiral

Smith, the commander of NATO forces in southern Europe, made NATO’s

military decisions. This new authority did not contradict any UNSC resolutions 

already in place because it still required joint decision making between the

UN and NATO. It simply took out several layers of coordination between

Boutros-Ghali and Janvier. In any event, the Russians, who were the Serbs’s

traditional allies, would have vetoed any new UNSC resolutions. Moscow

vehemently opposed NATO air strikes against Serb targets.14 

Following the fall of Zepa on 25 July, the North Atlantic Council extended

NATO’s threat of decisive aerial bombardment if Serbs threatened any of the

remaining four safe areas: Sarajevo, Gorazde, Bihac, or Tuzla. “Military

preparations which are judged to represent a direct threat to the UN safe

areas or direct attacks upon them will be met with the firm and rapid

response of NATO air power,” said NATO Secretary General Willie Claes

after the meeting.15 

The widely condemned Serb offensive against Zepa and Srebrenica

represented a significant change in the status quo. The Serbs had agreed two

years before not to take Srebrenica, if the Muslims in the pocket disarmed.

UNPROFOR soldiers were in the area to deter Serb aggression and ensure

Muslim disarmament. The UNPROFOR commander at the time promised UN

protection for the beleaguered town. When the Serbs attacked Srebrenica on

11 July 1995, the Dutch UN commander in the town repeatedly asked for

CAS through UN channels. The UN did not approve the request until noon on

11 July, just as Srebrenica was about to fall. NATO planes arrived two and

one-half hours later, destroying one tank and damaging another, but their

response came too late. NATO scrambled more CAS aircraft, but by that time

Serb General Mladic had warned the UN that any more strikes against his

troops in Srebrenica would result in the death of 30 Dutch UN peacekeepers

that he now held hostage.16 

34 
The Serb offensive was a major escalation but also an act of desperation.

Serb power, since the start of the Bosnian war, had been waning vis-à-vis the

Croats and Bosnian government forces. The confederation had been

expanding its armies and receiving arms, despite the arms embargo, and

were thus growing in strength. According to the Croatian weekly magazine, 

Globus, the Bosnian/Croat Confederation outnumbered the Serbs as much as

six to one in manpower (counting reserves), two to one in tanks, and almost

two to one in heavy artillery.17 In his article, “Making Peace with the Guilty,”

retired Air Force Gen Chuck Boyd pointed out that it was “a remarkable

achievement of Bosnian diplomacy, and one reinforced by the government’s

rhetoric after the fall of Srebrenica, that the Muslims have been able to gain

significant military parity with the Serbs, while nonetheless maintaining the

image of hapless victim in the eyes of much of the world community.”18 

To counter the offensives mounted by their adversaries throughout Bosnia

and Croatia, the Serbs needed to invest the safe areas in the east. This would 

secure their rear flank. Those troops around Srebrenica and Zepa could then

be used as reinforcements to help the outnumbered BSA elsewhere. The BSA

also needed their military hardware, then under guard by the UN in storage

areas around Sarajevo. Milosevic and the rump state of Yugoslavia had

earlier cut off support for the BSA. The UN monitored the border between

Serbia and Bosnia, at the invitation of Serbia, to ensure that military

supplies and personnel were not entering Bosnia.19 

On 4 August, the Croatian Army launched a hugely successful offensive

into the Krajina and within a matter of days pushed the Krajina Serb Army

out of Croatia altogether. The exodus of more than 200,000 Krajina Serb

refugees out of the region was the largest example of ethnic cleansing to date

in the Yugoslav war. Now both the Croatian Army and Croat paramilitary

units were positioned inside Bosnia, heady from an easy victory, and preparing

for further offensive operations.20 The Bosnian Serbs now had an additional 

200,000 Krajina refugees to deal with and a much more formidable security

challenge. Despite UN and NATO assertions that they were maintaining

impartiality, it was apparent to the Serbs that both organizations were very

much on the side of the Confederation. With Bosnian government and

Croatian forces growing stronger daily and world opinion of the Serbs

continuously souring, the situation in August of 1995 was growing desperate

for the Bosnian Serbs. 

The deteriorating situation in theater kept planners busy considering

possible contingencies. Two plans, Dead Eye and Deliberate Force, were built

and put on the shelf. Dead Eye was designed to reduce the Integrated Air

Defense System (IADS) of the Bosnian Serbs so that NATO warplanes could

then safely bomb designated targets in the Deliberate Force plan. Under

Dead Eye, key air defense communications nodes, early warning radar sites,

known SAM sites and support facilities, and air defense command and control

facilities, were all on the target list and would be first priority. Deliberate

Force was a denial campaign designed to reduce the offensive military

capabilities of the BSA. Targets included the heavy weapons of the fielded 

35 
forces, command and control facilities, direct and essential military support

facilities, and the supporting infrastructure and lines of communication for

the BSA. In order to avoid excessive casualties, the actual fielded forces would 

only be targeted if they were massing for attack.21 Throughout the tense

summer of 1995, both NATO and UN personnel refined the target list and

joint UN-NATO implementation arrangements were nailed down. In addition,

a joint air-land coordination document specifying the necessary operational

details of joint/combined operations between the RRF and NATO was also

refined.22 To avoid the repeated humiliation of hostage taking, UN

headquarters tasked its soldiers to evacuate isolated outposts before

operations began. One hour before the actual execution, French peacekeepers

blew up an eastern observation post, Krupac 1, and slipped away to safety.23 

By the end of August, the number of UNPROFOR soldiers on the ground in

Bosnia had also been reduced from over 20,000 personnel in May to

approximately 4,000 personnel, now deployed in better defensive positions.24 

The objectives of Operation Deliberate Force were limited. According to

NATO Secretary General Claes, the main objective was to reduce the threat to

the Sarajevo Safe Area as well as any of the other designated safe areas.25 On 

6 September, after Operation Deliberate Force was one week old, Admiral Smith

explained the three conditions necessary to stop the operation. The Bosnian

Serbs would have to stop attacking designated safe areas, withdraw heavy

weapons from within a 20-kilometer exclusion zone of Sarajevo, and allow

complete freedom of movement for UN forces distributing humanitarian aid.26 

Working from UN and NATO objectives and in the context of the ongoing

war, Lt Gen Michael Ryan, the combined forces air component commander

working for Admiral Smith, developed the planned air operation objective to:

“Execute a robust NATO air operation that adversely alters the BSA’s

advantage in conducting successful military operations against the BIH.”

Ryan’s end-state was one where the Bosnian Serbs sued for cessation of

military operations, complied with UN mandates, and agreed to negotiate.

His planning assumptions recognized the Bosnian Serbs as the aggressors

and exploited the Serbs historic “fear of domination” by the Muslims. The

Serbs main advantage was their ability to “swing a more capable but less

numerous, heavy weapon equipped force to places of need or choosing.”

Attacking this capability would change the balance of power. Further

assumptions were that the Serbs would not realize this shift in the balance of

power and sue for termination of hostilities unless they were subjected to a

“robust attack.”27 

At 0212 central European time, the first bombs exploded as strike and

supporting aircraft attacked targets in southeast Bosnia as part of Operation

Dead Eye. Shortly thereafter, another 28 aircraft struck Deliberate Force

targets. Four more strike packages totaling more than 40 strike aircraft hit

targets over the course of the next 16 hours. For 48 hours, NATO hit targets

on a list of 56 preapproved targets and their 338 associated desired mean

points of impact (DMPI). All strikes were in a southeast zone of action

centered on Sarajevo and Pale.28 

36 
Another dilemma facing planners was using aircraft without a precision

capability. Many NATO aircraft had no precision capability and consequently

could not be employed as accurately. Since Deliberate Force was a coalition

effort, it was imperative that NATO show a combined front to the UN as well

as the warring parties within Bosnia. Targets located close to concentrated

populations were hit by precision weapons and the nonprecision weapons

were used where the risk of collateral damage was lower. By the end of the

campaign, approximately one-third of the weapons used were unguided

bombs. This allowed NATO countries, such as the Netherlands, to participate

in an offensive role. According to Brig Gen Dave Sawyer, the deputy director

of NATO’s Combined Air Operations Center in Vicenza, Italy, “There were

many targets attacked by Dutch Air Force F-16s with unguided bombs, which

did better than anything in the history of air warfare.” Because of on-board

smart computer systems, even unguided bombs were highly accurate. The use

of either smart munitions or unguided bombs dropped from smart systems

made for outstanding bombing accuracy and results.29 

Actual operations required making tough targeting and weaponeering

decisions. NATO and the UN wanted to use airpower to coerce the Serbians

into cooperating but collateral damage and casualties needed to be

minimized. General Ryan personally approved every DMPI. At Dayton, the

Bosnian Serb representative brought up the issue of collateral damage and

casualties suffered by his people, as one of the first orders of business.

Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic angrily told him to “Shut-up. Only

twenty five people were killed.” The subject was never brought up again.30 

The weapon of choice for eliminating mobile artillery systems was the

CBU-87, a cluster bomb containing 202 submunitions which would blanket an

area. The problem was that the fragmentation pattern was too large to

sufficiently limit collateral damage and there was also the further problem of

potential unexploded ordnance. Even if 90 percent of the submunitions

functioned properly that would still leave 20 potential bombs lying around the

area that would have to be cleaned up later at a high risk to someone. One

A-10 unit did employ two cluster bombs on the first day of Deliberate Force

before being told by Ryan’s combined air operations center (CAOC) to cease

using that munition.31 

Militarily, Deliberate Force was an excellent example of using airpower

coercively, to get the Serbs to lift the siege of Sarajevo. For the first 48 hours,

NATO aircraft bombed key military targets around Pale with an overabundance

of force and were generally impervious to Serb retaliation. One French

Mirage aircraft was shot down by a shoulder-fired infrared missile. The Serbs

dug in, and consequently some of their equipment was hard, if not impossible,

to get at. Hitting communication nodes, weapons and ammunition storage

areas, and lines of communication took away Serb mobility and did not allow

them to respond to BIH or HVO offensives elsewhere in Bosnia. 

After two days, NATO temporarily paused bombing at the request of

Janvier who was attempting to get Mladic to remove his heavy artillery from

around Sarajevo. Mladic refused unless he could have guarantees that the 

37 
BIH around Sarajevo would cease any military activities. Negotiations broke

down when Janvier would not guarantee Mladic’s request, and NATO

reissued its ultimatum to the Serbs to remove heavy artillery within two

days, or bombing would resume. Only about 20 of the estimated 300 Serb

artillery pieces in place around Sarajevo were moved by the deadline. NATO

issued a statement that those moves “failed to demonstrate the intent to 

comply with the ultimatum.” NATO resumed bombing on 7 September.32 

On 13 September, one day before a cease-fire actually took effect, the Serbs

had still not moved from around Sarajevo. Bosnian Serbs in Sarajevo feared

attack by the BIH if they withdrew their weapons. General Mladic, responding

to the UN, asked about UN assurances regarding the BIH massed north of

Sarajevo if he withdrew. Mladic’s fears were well founded, since the UN had

not responded when his own forces had taken Srebrenica. In fact, the year

before, the BSA had given up Mount Igman, and now there were BIH gun

emplacements where formerly there had been BSA artillery, even after the

UN had assured the Serbs that the UN would occupy the ground.33 

On 14 September, NATO halted air strikes when General Mladic agreed to

move his weapons from around Sarajevo, after refusing for weeks to accept

terms. One day prior, on 13 September, NATO planners were running out of

authorized targets to hit and the BSA had still not moved. The situation on

the ground complicated the political and military situation for the Serbs. On

10 September, the BIH and HVO launched new offensives in western Bosnia

with surprising success. UN spokesman, Alexander Ivanko said the BSA did

not appear to be putting up a fight. “It was more like an organized retreat.”

Another UN official said that “It’s easier to scare people into moving out of an

area that is going to be given up, than to try and make them leave in

peacetime.”34 

The confederation offensive complicated NATO targeting procedures.

NATO coordinated with confederation forces to make sure they did not bomb

newly overrun positions. At the same time, the UN condemned these same

offensives. General Ryan told representatives of the BIH to make sure they

shut down one captured SA-2 site as they rolled through the area so that

NATO planes would not have to bomb it.35 The offensive moved quickly

through Bosnia, almost to within artillery range of the largest Bosnian Serb

town of Banja Luka, before Mladic agreed to move his equipment from around

Sarajevo. 

Combined with Deliberate Force and the confederation offensive, 

Milosevic’s rejection of support for the Bosnian Serbs was perhaps the most

decisive factor of all. The Serbian rejection came shortly after the Bosnian

Serb parliament rejected the Vance-Owen Peace Plan in May 1993. After the

Serbs’ Gorazde offensive in April 1994, Serbia was even more eager to

distance itself from the Bosnian Serbs. By August 1994, the UN began lifting

some of the embargoes against Serbia in exchange for Serbia closing its

border with Bosnia. Bosnian Serbs realized that Milosevic was under a lot of 

pressure from the international community but still had some hope of his

support if they were desperate and in danger of losing their war of 

38 
independence. After the Croats pushed all the Krajina Serbs out of the

country without a significant response from Serbia, the Bosnian Serbs

realized that they truly were on their own.36 With almost no outside 

logistical, moral, or political support, the Bosnian Serbs were left to fend for

themselves, as NATO bombs fell. 

Notes 

1. Christopher Hill, Special Assistant to Amb Richard Holbrooke, interview with Lt Col

Robert Owen, USAF, Washington, D.C., December 1995. 

2. Rick Atkinson, “Air Assault Set Stage for Broader Role,” Washington Post, 15 November 

1995, A01. Many UN experts think the Muslims committed this terrorist act of their own

accord when it looked like the Bosnian Serbs were ready to negotiate a peace treaty. The 5

February mortar attack on the same location had caused a similar hard-line approach on the

part of NATO in dealing with the Serbs. UN officials now concede that in all probability that

attack was also launched by the Bosnian Muslims. A UN investigation concluded that several

bombing incidents within Bosnia were launched with the approval of Bosnian government

officials and staged for the western media to dramatize Sarajevo’s plight. In all the cases, such

as the Mrkale marketplace bombing on 28 August 1995, as well as on 5 February 1994 and 27

May 1992, Serbian forces were out of range, and the weapons actually used were not those of

Bosnian Serbs as claimed by Bosnian Muslim authorities and western media. Yosef Bodansky,

Offensive in the Balkans (London: International Strategic Studies Association, 1995), 16. Col 

Andrei Demurenko, a Russian artillery officer who is the chief of staff for the Sarajevo sector of

the UN Peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, formally stated that “technical analysis shows that a

120mm mortar bomb which killed 27 people and wounded 85 on Monday could not have come

from Bosnian Serb Army positions.” A Canadian military expert pointed to “anomalies with the

fuse” which, to his expert opinion, suggested that both fuse and shell “had not come from a

mortar tube at all.” Ibid., 17. Finally, according to a New York Times article dated 1 August,

French UN peacekeepers in an antisniping unit in Sarajevo concluded that Bosnian

government snipers had deliberately shot at their own civilians. UN officers believed that the

Bosnian government was trying to build up international sympathy for the people of Sarajevo

and for that government’s cause. 

3. David A. Fulghum, “Glosson: US Gulf War Shortfalls Linger,” Aviation Week & Space 

Technology, 29 January 1996, 58. 

4. MSgt Merrie Schilter Lowe, “America on Verge of Introducing New Way of War,” Air 

Force News Service, 22 March 1996. 

5. “Serbs Receptive to Peace Plan,” Facts on File, 31 August 1995, 630. The self-proclaimed

Bosnian Serb Parliament August 29 announced that it would accept as a basis for peace talks a

US-sponsored plan that would reduce the amount of Bosnian territory they controlled.

Karadzic relayed the decision to former President Jimmy Carter who was acting as an

independent mediator in the Bosnian war. Serb leaders had previously refused to negotiate

surrendering any of the 70 percent of land they controlled. The US plan called for a 49/51

percent split to which the Serbs now agreed in principle. 

6. “Former US President Carter Visits Bosnia on Peace Mission, Negotiates Cease-fire,”

Facts on File, 22 December 1995, 953. The Bosnian Serbs went to Carter who had just that

summer successfully negotiated with the North Koreans to diffuse a politically tense situation

over North Korea’s potential nuclear proliferation. The Bosnian Serbs did not feel like they

could negotiate directly with the US or the UN because of their bias towards the Muslims.

Carter was criticized by the western media when he expressed concern for the Bosnian Serbs’

perspective on the war. “It may be that today is one of the rare chances to let the world know

the truth and to explain the commitment of Serbs to a peace agreement.” He also went on to

say that the American people had heard primarily one side of the story. 

39 
7. “Battle Called Worst in Two Years,” Facts on File, 18 May 1995, 362. Bosnian Serbs

shelled Sarajevo and killed 10 people on 7 May. Gen Rupert Smith wanted NATO air strikes

authorized but that was not approved by Boutros-Ghali because of the repercussions in Croatia

and the threat to UN peacekeepers on the ground in Sarajevo. US delegate to the UN,

Madeline K. Albright condemned Boutros-Ghali’s decision. 

8. AVM T. A. Mason, “Air Power in the Peace Support Environment,” paper presented at

the University of Birmingham, U. K., January 1996, 2. 

9. “NATO Air strikes Trigger Reaction,” Facts on File, 1 June 1995, 385. 

10. Mason, 9. 

11. Tim Ripley, “A DELIBERATE FORCE on the Mountain,” Jane’s International Defense 

Review, October 1995, 27. 

12. Capt Bob Wright, F-16 flight lead of Capt Scott O’Grady, interview with author,

December 1995. Captain O’Grady’s rescue made big headlines in the US. Lost in the euphoria

was the exposure of a large marine rescue contingent that went in to pick up O’Grady. The

NATO mission in Bosnia was still one of protecting UNPROFOR on the ground in its

humanitarian relief mission and in denying flight to any unauthorized aircraft. Another,

perhaps safer option, to pick up O’Grady may have been one helicopter versus the armada that

flew in. Single helicopters flew over Bosnia all the time, so a lone helicopter was not as

remarkable or targetable as a fleet. Second guessing may not be appropriate, and the mission

was a success but discussion over making the rescue footprint smaller and less interesting

definitely needs to be considered, especially in low intensity operations. 

13. USAF chief of staff, Operation Deliberate Force Information Pamphlet, Washington,

D.C., December 1995. 

14. “Allies Meet, Threaten Air Strikes,” Facts on File, 27 July 1995, 529. 

15. “NATO Extends Air Strike Threat to All Safe Areas in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Facts on 

File, 3 August 1995, 549. 

16. “Protecting the Peacekeepers on the Day Srebrenica Fell,” Washington Post, 20 

November 1995, A20. In April of 1993, French general and UNPROFOR commander Phillip

Morillon promised UN protection of Srebrenica but the cost was Muslim disarmament in

exchange for Serb assurances that they would not take over the area. The UN had agreed to

protect the enclave as part of the agreement. Srebrenica was the first so-called safe area and

established the framework for the establishment of five more UN declared safe areas in 

Gorazde, Tuzla, Zepa, Bihac, and Sarajevo. 

17. “Order of Battle,” Croatian News Service-Globus, 15 August 1995. Five hundred and

thirty-five thousand soldiers in HVO and BIH combined including reserves versus 80 thousand

in BSA, although reserves in BSA were unknown. HVO/BIH had 720 tanks although only 20

belonged to BIH, compared to 350 possessed by BSA. HVO had 900 heavy artillery pieces along

with 150 belonging to BIH, BSA had 700 pieces with about 300 of these around Sarajevo.

Picture presents a vastly outnumbered BSA on the ground contrary to claims that BSA was

outnumbered in manpower but superior in firepower. 

18. Gen Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs, 

September/October 1995, 31. 

19. “Refugees Flood Serbia,” Facts on File, 17 August 1995, 591. 

20. “Croatia Retakes Serb-Held Krajina Region,” Facts on File, 10 August 1995, 565. 

21. Lt Gen Mike Ryan, Briefing on Operation Deliberate Force, Maxwell AFB, Ala., 12

February 1996. 

22. Operation Deliberate Force Information Pamphlet. 

23. Atkinson, A01. 

24. Ryan. There is not much literature on the humanitarian nature of UNPROFOR during

this period. Always spread thin, the UNPROFOR was nevertheless tasked with providing

security for the UNHCR and other nongovernmental and international agencies in their

humanitarian relief mission. Reducing UNPROFOR in the region must have had some impact

on this mission but with the fall of Zepa and Srebrenica in the east and the Croatian offensive

in the west, the influx of refugees into the central area of Bosnia was now not as spread out and

within more secure lines. It was thus probably easier for humanitarian operations to proceed.

NATO support for a less exposed UNPROFOR could now proceed more easily and with less 

40 
potential for hostage situations. There are no reports of mass starvation before and during

Deliberate Force so the refugees must have had some support.

25. NATO Secretary General Willie Claes, “Public Statement on Operation Deliberate

Force,” 30 August 1995.

26. Adm Leighton W. Smith, “NATO Recommences Air Strikes against Bosnian Serbs,”

press conference in Naples, Italy, 6 September 1995.

27. Ryan.

28. Ibid. 

29. “Air Power Vindicated,” Flight International, 1 November 1995, 38–40. 

30. Hill, interview with USAF Lt Col Robert Owen. 

31. Ryan.

32. “NATO Resumes Air strikes against Bosnian Serbs,” Facts on File, 7 September 1995, 645.

33. “Bosnian Government Offensive Shatters Truce,” Facts on File, 30 March 1995, 221. 

34. “Serbs Flee Western Bosnia,” New York Times, 14 September 1995, 1.

35. Ryan.

36. “Refugees Flood Serbia,” 591. 

41

Chapter 5 

Conclusions and Implications 

NATO’s actions are pushing all the countries of the former Soviet Union—and not 

only them—to establish a new bloc to protect themselves. Here’s the picture that 

comes to mind: A big, drunk hooligan is in a kindergarten. He is the only grown-up 

and thinks he can do whatever he wants. The world needs a counterbalance. 

—Russian General Alexander Ivanovich Lebed, Retired 

Operations Deny Flight and Deliberate Force were key elements within the

broader Yugoslav War, but not, by themselves, the decisive factor resulting in

the current peace agreement. To understand airpower’s role in Bosnia, one

must understand the nature of the war in Bosnia and the events that led to 

the escalating involvement of the UN, NATO, and US in the region. Factors

equal in importance to airpower were the role international and domestic politics

played, the difficulty of forging an acceptable military option agreeable to

both the UN and NATO, economic sanctions against the former Yugoslavia,

and the growing military superiority of the Bosnian/Croat Confederation. 

The US position on the breakdown of Yugoslavia lacked consistency over

time. On 27 June 1991, US presidential spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater,

condemned both the Slovenian and Croatian moves towards independence.

Three years later, on 4 July 1994, the US opened its embassy in Sarajevo, two

years after recognizing the independent nation of Bosnia-Herzegovina.1 This 

represented a major US shift in strategy. President Bush approached the

situation in Yugoslavia much more cautiously than did President Clinton

later. The Clinton administration, by recognizing Bosnia-Herzegovina and its

government, primarily Muslim, as sovereign, heightened the security

concerns of a sizable Serb population within Bosnia. These Serbs did not wish

to secede from Yugoslavia. The “war of aggression” that followed in Bosnia

was fought primarily by an indigenous Serb population. Their brutal ground

campaign, including widespread incidents of rape and murder, and their

intentional starvation of concentration camp inmates, reminiscent of World

War II, were reprehensible. Serb atrocities also negated their tactical successes

on the battlefield in the long run by diminishing their valid security concerns

in western eyes. Federal structures in place during the Tito years, established

to diffuse ethnic and nationalist tensions, served to gestate a series of

embryonic states. The West needed to understand sooner the reality that

Yugoslavia was not one country, according to one Yugoslav expert speaking in

1989, but several.2 Instead of simply recognizing the various independent

republics springing from the old Yugoslavia, the international community 

43 
needed to provide both the leadership and the framework for a new country or

countries where all citizens had guaranteed rights. Unfortunately, although

easy to state in theory, building a new framework required cooperation and

compromise, two ingredients sorely lacking in Yugoslavia. 

US Cong Helen Delich Bentley put forward an equally compelling

argument for maintaining a whole Yugoslavia, one that also illuminated the

Serb point of view: 

Imagine if millions of Mexicans in Texas were to demand an ethnic 51st Latino

State in those areas where they had a majority. How would the US react if they

openly planned on secession of that future state from the Union and its merger with

a foreign country. And finally, let us imagine how we would react to any foreign

legislature which had the effrontery to condemn us if we took decisive steps to

prevent such an outcome. This is precisely how the Serbs feel today.3 

The UN was initially on the ground in Bosnia prior to the start of the

Bosnian War to act as peacekeepers within Croatia, following a cease-fire

between the Krajina Serbs and Croatia. UNPROFOR’s mission of providing

humanitarian relief escort in Bosnia came about only when the Bosnian Serbs

initiated offensive operations in April of 1992. This was essentially the first

time the UN had ever attempted large-scale peacekeeping and peace-support

missions in an active war zone. 

The UN’s humanitarian relief mission often directly countered warring

parties’ strategies, especially the Bosnian Serbs. Indiscriminate Serb artillery

fire and a huge refugee problem led to a UN decision to declare selected

enclaves as safe areas. Often times, Muslims within the six designated safe

areas would use them as a base of operations from which to attack the Serbs

surrounding the area. Provoking a Serb response would sometimes cause

casualties that, in turn, were broadcast on CNN and sure to keep Bosnian

Serb atrocities center stage in the ongoing war.4 

According to Canadian peacekeeper and former UNPROFOR commander,

Gen Lewis MacKenzie, “Dealing with Bosnia is a little bit like dealing with

three serial killers. One has killed 15. One has killed 10. One has killed five. 

Do we help the one that has only killed five?”5 While he was in Bosnia, 

MacKenzie was disappointed because no one ever told him what the political

objectives within Bosnia were. Everyone wanted the military to recommend

something, but that can be dangerous. During Bosnian hearings before

Congress, General MacKenzie recalled his 

year at your Army’s war college in Carlisle when the Chairman of your Joint Chiefs

of Staff during the early days of the Vietnam war described to us in livid detail how

he met with President Johnson once in the elevator at the White House. The 

President stuck his finger in his chest and said, “General, I want your boys to stir

things up in Vietnam.” That is not my idea of clear political direction and it sounds

a little like today’s collective international plea to the military, “For God’s sake, do

something in Bosnia.”6 

That “something” was implementing Operation Deny Flight. Ineffective at

stopping unauthorized overflight of Bosnia by helicopters, Deny Flight did

show direct UN and NATO involvement in the region. The air threat in 

44 
Bosnia posed by fixed-wing fighters was minimal. Both the Bosnian

government and the Croats had no fixed-wing fighters. The BIH and HVO

effectively neutralized the Serb air threat with antiaircraft artillery (AAA)

and infrared SAMs. NATO’s shootdown of four Krajina Serb Jastrebs in

February 1994 was executed according to UN mandates and NATO ROE. It

was the only significant military event in the course of the Bosnian war that

met unanimous approval from all the key players in the region, except, of

course, the Krajina Serbs, who were silent on the issue. Serbia even

condemned the no-fly zone violation.7 

By contrast, use of helicopters was widespread and virtually untouchable

since all sides were using them, including the UN and NATO. Most of the

missions these helicopters flew, unauthorized or otherwise, were resupply and

evacuation. Their use minimized casualties on all sides. Helicopters could

avoid the dangerous lines of communications in country, rife with snipers and

road blocks. Expecting the combatants to cease flying operations over Bosnia,

especially in conjunction with military operations, was demanding more than

Deny Flight could back up without a high risk of collateral damage or

fratricide. Consequently, early on, NATO “defined away” the helicopter

problem, with its stringent ROE that required approval of the combined force air

component commander, to authorize weapons employment against helicopters.8 

NATO’s decision to expand the Deny Flight mission five months after its

inception, to provide CAS for UNPROFOR soldiers in their humanitarian

mission, and to protect the safe areas was not properly thought out or

implemented. For CAS to be effective, it needed to be immediately responsive

to the needs of the ground troops. With the unwieldy dual chain of command

requiring the UN secretary general’s personal approval, CAS was dead on

arrival. Protecting the safe areas also proved difficult when all warring

factions were initiating artillery barrages. As a deterrent against assaults on

the safe areas, Deny Flight was partially effective but when challenged,

airpower could neither deter assaults on the safe areas, nor protect

UNPROFOR soldiers and civilians on the ground against a determined foe.

Consequently, UN and NATO credibility was undermined. 

From the beginning of Deny Flight and the establishment of the safe areas,

it was apparent to the Serbs that UN actions were directed only against

them, even when the BIH or HVO were also violating the integrity of the safe

areas or harassing UNPROFOR soldiers and aid workers. The Serbs

generally honored the cease-fire agreements, but would retaliate in response

to BIH offensive actions. According to General MacKenzie, “God knows,

overall, the majority of the blame does rest with the Serbs; however,

whenever we arrange any type of cease-fire, it’s usually the Muslims who

break it first.”9 

Economic sanctions directed primarily against Serbia were probably the

most decisive factor affecting the situation in Bosnia, although they took time

to become effective. UNSCRs 757 and 820 cut off virtually all outside aid

other than humanitarian assistance to Serbia and put immense pressure on

Milosevic to help broker a satisfactory settlement in Bosnia. The Yugoslav 

45 
economy had been built on the economic integrity of the six republics all

economically intertwined. When the two most prosperous republics, Slovenia

and Croatia, seceded, followed shortly thereafter by Bosnia and Macedonia,

the remaining republics of Serbia and Montenegro were left devastated

economically. Furthermore, Yugoslavia had been receiving billions in foreign

aid from both the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war years. This

aid was no longer available after the breakup of the Soviet Union. With

Yugoslavia’s breakup, Serbia was even more reliant on outside aid.10 

In 1994, the UN offered Milosevic incentives to lift some economic sanctions 

if Serbia would close its border with Bosnia and quit resupplying the BSA. By

1994, the majority of Serbians considered the BSA a liability, so Milosevic

acceded to the UN request. The UN offered Bosnian Serbs their own territory

and a continued existence within a republic. This satisfied Milosevic when the

Serbian leader weighed that against the economic hardship Serbia and

Montenegro were suffering for their continued support of the Bosnian Serbs.

Serbia’s termination of aid and support crippled the Bosnian Serbs.

Admittedly there was some leakage of aid along the border but the overall

impact was severe and sharply curtailed Serb offensive operations within

Bosnia. When Serbia failed to respond to Croatia’s sweep through the Krajina

in August of 1995, the Bosnian Serbs suffered a major psychological blow. 

Another decisive impact was the growing qualitative capabilities of both

the Croat and Muslim armies added to their already considerable quantitative

superiority. When allied from February 1994 on, their confederation and

subsequent battlefield successes severely threatened the Bosnian Serbs. In

May of 1995, NATO’s pinprick attacks against the Bosnian Serbs for retaking

their heavy weapons within the Sarajevo exclusion zone created a hostage

crisis. Although UNPROFOR soldiers had been taken hostage before, the UN

and NATO had not been able to effectively counter this Serb asymmetric

strategy against airpower. By August of 1995, with UNPROFOR troops on

the ground in secure positions, the Bosnian/Croat offensive provided

unintentional synergism to NATO air strikes during Deliberate Force.11 

Bosnian Serb morale was inevitably broken down by not being able to respond

to NATO raids together with its inability to respond effectively to widespread

Bosnian and Croat offensives throughout the country in August and

September. By September, the Bosnian Serbs realized that they were not

going to be able to keep the 70 percent of the country they once held and

ordered a strategic withdrawal in western Bosnia to more secure positions

around Banja Luka. Amazingly, they now controlled almost exactly 49

percent of Bosnia, the percentage called for in the proposed peace 

agreement.12 

Consequently, Deliberate Force was the coercive catalyst that forced the

Bosnian Serbs to lift the siege of Sarajevo and brought all three warring

parties to Dayton. It was the cumulative effects of a combined ground

offensive, economic and political isolation, and the Serbs’ inability to respond

to a joint air/ground operation that provided the incentive for the Bosnian

Serbs to capitulate. However, to emphasize the NATO airpower presence to all 

46 
three warring parties when they arrived at Dayton, Ambassador Holbrooke

had every fighter in the US arsenal on static display and fully loaded on the

VIP ramp at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio. As the various Bosnian, Serbian,

and Croatian leaders deplaned, they walked past the most formidable Air

Force in the world. That night, at a dinner set up in the aviation museum at

Wright-Patterson, these same leaders ate surrounded by past and present

fighters and bombers of the United States Air Force.13 

Airpower has many advantages as well as limitations. Its mobility,

precision, and destructive capability combined with air superiority make it a

formidable weapon. But, as this study shows, airpower without political

consensus in a hostile environment can be more of a liability than an asset.

To use airpower as a deterrent, expect that the party one is trying to deter

will challenge the strategy. Attempting to use airpower to deter or coerce an

opponent can be seriously undermined if there is a different strategy at work

on the ground such as that of humanitarian relief supported by lightly armed

and outnumbered ground forces. If the deterrent and coercive warnings or

actions are started and stopped in a seemingly random fashion, due to a

failure between air and ground components to coordinate activity, the result

is mixed signals and possible confusion in the mind of the party one wants to

deter or coerce. 

Implications 

All of the organizations involved in Bosnia throughout the course of

Operation Deny Flight were often working at cross purposes. UNPROFOR’s

humanitarian support operations helped keep thousands of refugees from

starving but severely hampered NATO’s ability to respond at those times it

was authorized to do so because of the retaliatory threat to UNPROFOR and

aid workers. The US, noncommittal early on, grew to be the major power

broker in Bosnia, often recommending actions which could seriously affect the

ground situation where there was virtually no American military presence.

For example, the US, backed by extensive Bosnian government lobbying,

tried repeatedly to get lifted the UN arms embargo against Bosnia, which was

no longer a part of Yugoslavia. The British and French, in particular, with

large contingents of UNPROFOR soldiers on the ground, were constantly and

consistently opposed to that strategy. The US argued that it would level the

playing field, but the European response was that it would elevate the killing

field.14 The UK and France threatened to pull out their peacekeepers if the

arms embargo was lifted. 

Lifting the arms embargo may, ironically, have brought the war to an

earlier conclusion. With Bosnia essentially landlocked, Croatia could screen

virtually all arms going into Bosnia. During the arms embargo, the Croats

allowed a sizable arsenal, minus substantial amounts of heavy weaponry, to

flow through their border to Bosnia.15 To get more of the heavy equipment 

47 
and arms through to Bosnian government forces would have probably

required airlift into Sarajevo. The Bosnian Serbs would have surely countered

this threat by targeting the Sarajevo airport, thus closing it to flights, and

arms deliveries as well as humanitarian aid. The UN and NATO would have 

had to respond. Nevertheless, the UN Security Council never rescinded the

arms embargo and Bosnia was still able to rearm to a large extent. 

Ambassador Holbrooke and General Ryan, two of the key players during

the period of Deliberate Force, were also working at cross purposes at times.

General Ryan and his staff hit targets during the operation as fast as

possible, fearing that the UN or NATO would order a halt to the bombing at

any time. Amb Christopher Hill, Holbrooke’s right-hand man from August

1995 onward, said that diplomats were worried that NATO was going to run

out of targets and take away Holbrooke’s “big stick” before he was through

with tough diplomatic negotiations. In turn, Ryan was extremely sensitive to

collateral damage and did everything he could to avoid casualties on all sides.

Ambassador Hill said they were not as worried about collateral damage as

Ryan appeared to be.16 To his credit, Ryan’s approach was more realistic.

Holbrooke and Hill were representing the US position. Ryan was directing a

NATO operation with allies that would have been much more alarmed than

the US by significant amounts of collateral damage. 

The impact that Deliberate Force had on Russia cannot be overestimated.

Russia was essentially marginalized during that operation. They would surely

have vetoed any new UNSCR intended to strike at the Serbs, although

bombing the Serbs in the vicinity of Sarajevo, where the majority of the

targets were, was consistent with past UNSCRs that were designed to protect

the safe areas. The Russians considered the Dead Eye campaign, while

perhaps a military necessity, as a serious escalation and a misinterpretation

of UNSC resolutions. President Boris Yeltsin publicly criticized the NATO

bombing operation. “Those who insist on an expansion of NATO are making a

major political mistake. The flames of war could burst out across the whole of

Europe.”17 The Russian parliament, which had been very vocal in its

opposition to NATO’s participation in Bosnia throughout Deny Flight,

likewise condemned Deliberate Force. In April of 1993, it voted for Russia to

use its security council veto against any UN resolution authorizing force

against Bosnia’s Serbs. Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Vitaly I. Churkin

said, however, that cabinet members “receive their orders only from the

president and obey only him.”18 Nevertheless, Russian popular sentiment was

firmly allied with the Bosnian Serbs. General Lebed’s quotation at the

beginning of this chapter may sound an ominous warning of Russian feelings

that the US is going to have to try to understand. 

At the grand strategic level, Russia has stated that it will protect the rights

of Russian nationals living abroad. For example, a sizable portion of

Lithuanian citizens are Russian, the result of Soviet colonization and Joseph

Stalin’s efforts to “Sovietize” the country after the Soviet Union annexed it.

These Lithuanian Russians are complaining to Russia that they are being

discriminated against and harassed by Lithuanians who would like to see 

48 
them leave. This situation is analogous to that of the Serbs living outside

Serbia. Russians, with their own ethnic problems, view themselves as

protectors of fellow Slavs and are very interested in seeing Serbs throughout

the former Yugoslavia treated equitably.19 

Many Bosnians roundly criticized Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic for

agreeing to a partition between the Serbs and the confederation. Izetbegovic’s

long-term goal is a reunified Bosnia with a multiethnic constituency. He

signed the peace agreement to “stop the killing.” With the new balance of

power now shifted towards the confederation, there will be cries for reunification

if the political process and economic restructuring are unsatisfactory.

International organizations and states must continue to send aid and

encourage dialog and reconciliation. Rebuilding Bosnia will cost billions of

dollars, $1.2 billion in 1996 alone, of which so far only $500 million has been

pledged.20 “Clear messages of reconciliation and confidence-building are also 

needed. That is not happening,” according to one UNHCR representative.21 

For future operations of this sort, the US needs to develop a balanced

military/economic/political approach to emerging security concerns. The

humanitarian element is important, but going in to “do something” without a

coherent strategy can lead to more death and destruction than before.

Ironically, most of ethnic cleansing was done by the time NATO arrived. The

US put its stamp on Bosnia by using military force to get the three sides to

sign a peace agreement. Now, time, continued dialog, and a strong peace

enforcement presence are necessary for an indeterminate period, but

certainly longer than one year. 

Peace enforcement versus peacekeeping is going to continue to be a

controversial issue for the UN. Somalia and Bosnia are both examples of

environments in which the UN did not have a clear mandate for action. 

Warring parties in both countries had not agreed to a cease-fire. If the UN or

the security council feels it is important to enter contested areas, then an

increased emphasis on peace enforcement will be necessary. 

Deny Flight was essentially a peace enforcement mission, intended initially

to prohibit unauthorized flights over Bosnia-Herzegovina and, subsequently,

to protect UNPROFOR soldiers and designated safe areas. Impartiality was

always suspect. Now that the warring parties have ratified a peace

agreement, the US is in a peacekeeping and peace building posture helping to

organize, train, and equip a Bosnian government military force. Many

European nations do not support the US effort in this regard.22 Determining

how much organizing, training, and equipping is needed to “level the playing

field” is the toughest problem that the US is wrestling with now.23 

Counter to American interest in checking the spread of radical elements of

Islam, there is mounting evidence that Bosnia has become a solid

fundamentalist foothold in the Balkans. “We knew it was bad, but it is worse 

than we thought,” one senior US administration official said. Iran has the

largest foreign diplomatic presence in Sarajevo. According to the US

Information Agency, 83 percent of Bosnian Muslims have a favorable view of

Iran, which is second only to the 95 percent approval rating of the US. The 

49 
Iranians provided the bulk of arms to the Bosnian government during the

war. Implementation force soldiers uncovered an Iranian sponsored terrorist

training facility on the ski slopes near the 1984 Olympic village.24 

One continuing theme of future US operations is coalition warfare. America

will be fighting within a coalition and divergent coalition interests could

hamper military strategy. Deliberate Force would have been much easier if it

was a US-only operation but that was not feasible given the politics of the

situation. In the words of General Ryan, “It may not have been an efficient

use of airpower, but it was effective.”25 Efficiency may have to be sacrificed to

sustain a coalition effort. 

Two questions to ask in the aftermath of Deny Flight are the efficacy of an

air presence and when or if to attack an IADS. For two and one-half years,

NATO kept fighters airborne over Bosnia-Herzegovina, for almost 23,280

straight hours over the course of 970 days. In that time, there were over 5,000

unauthorized flights actually tracked and untold flights that were not

documented. Helicopters were virtually untouchable and fixed-wing aircraft

flights were rare. Both the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs based their fighters at

one of two airfields, either Banja Luka or Udbina. The UN had monitors at

both fields to watch for unauthorized flights. Because Banja Luka was in

Bosnia, the Serbs could not fly aircraft without UN authorization. The Serbs

could fly in the Krajina region of Croatia without violating UN mandates.

One of the four NATO aerial gates into Bosnia tracked in almost directly over

Udbina. Often, NATO pilots going in or coming out of the country could

actually observe flight operations if the Serbs were flying. Since Udbina was

virtually the only base the Serbs used, fighter combat air patrols (CAP)

monitored the field from the northern part of Bosnia, in case Serb fighters

strayed across the border. The UN Security Council finally passed a resolution 

so that NATO was able to bomb Udbina when that airfield was supporting

combat operations over the Bihac pocket of Bosnia in November of 1994. 

Thus, the question future strategists must answer is whether an

around-the-clock air presence over Bosnia or a punishing, coercive strike on a

violator’s support facilities is more effective or, in the long run, more

politically viable. Unauthorized flights over Bosnia undermined NATO’s air

presence. When the Serbs started using their fighters on Bihac, NATO took

out their runway. A better use of airpower may have been to minimize

NATO’s air presence and take out the Serb airfields when the Serbs used

them to violate UN resolutions. 

On the issue of IADS, the Air Force has invested much into targeting an

enemy’s integrated air defense network. Part of gaining and maintaining air

superiority is taking out an enemy’s ground-to-air capability. Because

optically guided antiaircraft artillery and infrared hand-held missiles are

harder to target, NATO aircraft stayed high to avoid this threat, exposing

themselves to a radar threat which HARM-shooters could target and

electronic countermeasures platforms could jam. With the older systems that

the Bosnian and Krajina Serbs employed, onboard systems were effective at

countering most threats. Without support from Serbia, BSA equipment, much 

50 
of it inherited from the routed Krajina Serb, broke down. Targeting the area

around Banja Luka, to help break down the IADS may have made doctrinal

sense, but it definitely caused consternation among our allies, and enraged

the Russians.26 Avoiding the radar SAM threat by changing ingress and

egress routes may have been a better option, politically. 

Finally, statements that the US can win wars through the use of airpower,

and then pointing to Desert Storm and Deny Flight as examples on which to

build, can be misleading. One needs to understand the context in which

airpower is used. Ethnic animosities, politically acceptable solutions, and

impartiality on the part of the international community are issues that

demanded more fidelity than airpower could provide in Bosnia. Airpower did

coerce the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims to sign a peace agreement in October of

1995. However, a confederation army, Milosevic’s cut-off of economic and

political support, and a more unified international consensus to target the

Serb, provided the environment for airpower to be most effective. Airpower

does not operate in a vacuum, but its synergistic effect when combined with

other instruments of power makes it a trump card in America’s strategic

arsenal. 

Notes 

1. “Other News About Bosnia,” Facts on File, 21 July 1994, 519. 

2. James Gow, Yugoslav Endgames: Civil Strife and Inter-State Conflict (London: Brassey’s,

1991), 60.

3. Cong Helen D. Bentley, testimony before Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 21

February 1991, 53.

4. Gen Lewis MacKenzie, Peacekeeper: The Road to Sarajevo (Toronto, Calif.: Douglas &

McIntyre, 1993), 5.

5. General MacKenzie testimony before the House Armed Services Committee, 25 May

1993, 41. 

6. Ibid., 39. 

7. “Fate of Bosnian Serb Pilots Described,” Paris AFP, 1 March 1994. 

8. Five ATAF OPLAN 4101 (NATO Secret), Special Instructions to ROE, April 1994.

Information extracted is unclassified. 

9. MacKenzie, Peacekeeper, 255. 

10. “Serbia in Economic Slide,” Facts on File, 21 March 1991, 174. 

11. Air Vice Marshal T. A. Mason, RAF, interview with author, Maxwell AFB, Ala., 19 

January 1996. 

12. “Moslem-Croat Drive Regains Land,” Facts on File, 21 September 1995, 685.

13. Christopher Hill, special assistant to Amb Richard Holbrooke, interview with USAF Lt

Col Robert Owen, Washington, D.C., December 1995.

14. “Allies Debate Military Response,” Facts on File, 20 July 1995, 513. 

15. Brian Hall, The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia 

(Boston, Mass.: David R. Godine, 1994), 222. The Croats and Serbs were generally taking hard

currency in exchange for letting weapons through. In one ironic situation, the Serbs were

providing ammunition to the Muslims, or letting it go through their lines while taking part of

the ammunition along with money as a tax. In effect, the Muslims were in part funding the

BSA war effort against themselves! 

16. Ibid., 223. 

17. “Russia Predicts Broader War,” Facts on File, 14 September 1995, 662. 

51 
18. “Russia Withholds Endorsement,” Facts on File, 6 May 1993, 321.

19. Stjepan G. Mestrovic, The Balkanization of the West (New York: Routledge Press, 1994), 181.

20. Tim Zimmermann, “A Bosnian Sort of Peace,” US News & World Report, 1 April 1996,

36–37. 

21. Ibid., 37. 

22. Professor Jim Corum interview with author on peacekeeping and peace enforcement

operations, Maxwell AFB, Ala., 29 February 1996.

23. Maj Mark Dippold, telephone interview with author, Maxwell AFB, Ala., 10 January 1996.

24. Tim Zimmermann, “An Iranian Foothold in the Balkans,” US News & World Report, 11 

March 1996, 39–40. 

25. Lt Gen Michael Ryan, USAF, interview with author, Maxwell AFB, Ala., 12 February 1996.

26. Alan Cooperman and Sander Thoenes, “Russia’s Colin Powell?” US News & World 

Report, 9 October 1995, 60. 

52

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54 
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