The first has been the conduct of the air campaign. NATO has eschewed the shock and psychological impact of a massive air assault. Instead, it has opted for what a colleague of mine at the Naval War College, Air Force Col. The fact is that the intensity of the current air campaign is about one fifth that of Desert Storm. While there is no question that Serbia is suffering, Milosevic may calculate that he can outlast NATO in what is being portrayed as a one-sided war of attrition.
Air power can be effective only if employed as part of a comprehensive war fighting strategy.
When air power is isolated from such a general strategy as it was in Vietnam and now in Kosovo, it is bound to fail. Vietnam is usually invoked as an example of the inherent limits of air power, but in a paper delivered at a Wilson Center symposium on the Vietnam War in January 1983, Douglas Pike, the foremost American expert on Vietnamese communism, showed what might have happened had air power been properly employed in that conflict. They feared the North was to be visited by intolerable destruction which it simply could not endure. But the US air campaign was severely constrained, a fact that became increasingly apparent to Hanoi. The North Vietnamese leaders co ncluded that the US lacked the will to bear the cost of the war.