The Military: How We Fight

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Once committed to actual combat, anything less than overwhelming and rapid military success for the intervening power will be diplomatically disastrous.

That's how young army captain Wesley Clark urged that war be waged in his 1975 thesis on "Military Contingency Operations: The Lessons of Political-Military Coordination." Back then, he was a student at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Today, the four-star general is NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, based in Belgium. He's running a much different war than the one he advocated a generation ago. It is a war of contrasts, one that pits the firepower of history's most powerful military alliance against a scorched-earth campaign. It is a war of double-checking all targets yet still blowing civilians into clots of gore and shreds of clothing as they flee their homeland, seeking to escape both Serbian wrath and NATO impotence.

Every hour of every day, warplanes take off from bases across Europe--and some in the U.S.--bound for Balkan targets. The sweep of weapons is impressive. Not since World War II has the U.S. military hurled three types of heavy bombers--B-1s, B-2s and B-52s--at an enemy. The fleet of 430 allied warplanes that began this war will soon grow to more than 1,000 planes. The escalation will force the Pentagon to call up as many as 33,000 reservists.

But if that seems like the kind of overwhelming force Clark had in mind in 1975, still fresh from being wounded in Vietnam and winning a Silver Star for valor, it's not. This campaign is all about controlled force--controlled by politicians in everything from target selection to level of intensity--and that control is making Clark's job more complicated than he could have ever imagined in 1975.

U.S. policymakers apparently overestimated the coercive effects which the air attacks could generate [in Vietnam]...Graduated escalation allowed time for the enemy to react to the U.S. pressures and sustain its morale, will and physical support of the war." --FROM CLARK'S THESIS

As the G-force presses you back into your seat at takeoff from the air base at Aviano, Italy, or from an aircraft carrier in the Ionian Sea, you are really never flying solo. You and your wingmen move into a complicated choreography charted for each of the 400 daily sorties. Depending on how far you've had to fly--B-2s fly more than 15 hours from the U.S.--it's likely your plane will slow down to gulp fuel from an aerial tanker before your final run into hostile airspace. One of every three flights is an aerial tanker sortie--more of them than attack flights.

You'll head in behind a SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) package. These Navy EA-6B radar-jamming planes and Air Force radar-killing F-16CJs scour the skies for electronic clues betraying a SAM radar. As you plunge deeper over enemy territory between 15,000 and 25,000 ft., there's an aerial ballet taking place far above: a layer of F-15Cs ensuring that no Serbian pilot gets close enough to take a shot.