How We Fight

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Key military questions revolve around Milosevic's ability to survive without what NATO is now destroying. The Pentagon's plans to drain Yugoslavia of oil, for example, only make sense if Serbian forces need fuel to prevail and don't have much stockpiled. "We have destroyed all their big reserves and refineries, but they have a whole network of smaller storage reserves," a French official says. "We thought they'd only have petrol for a month, but now it turns out they have a capacity far greater than that." And the pulverizing attacks against Serbia's command-and-control network may not be as successful as Pentagon targeteers think. After the Gulf War, the Air Force found out that Iraq's command network "had not collapsed," despite 500 strikes, and that "the system turned out to be more redundant and more able to reconstitute itself" than the Pentagon thought.

Contingency forces which are heavily armored and highly mobile through strategic airlift will be a necessity in contingencies entailing mid-intensity combat. --FROM CLARK'S THESIS

Of all Clark's ideas, this is the most seductive. A small, powerful force that can be quickly moved anywhere around the globe seems a perfect match for problem spots like Kosovo. The Army has been trying to pull it off for two decades, reaching back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which made Washington planners nervous about conflicts in that part of the world. But the idea died amid Army politics and lean budgets.

Some in the Army argue that building a smaller armored force is foolish until key advances have been made, especially in the areas of fuel and ammo, which armored forces devour. Electromagnetic guns, lasers, and new fuel types could allow the Army to achieve its goal of fielding such a force that could fight for two weeks without resupply. But until then, the speed of deployment is mostly dependent on how quickly the Army can set up logistics links. Napoleon's old dictum that an army travels on its stomach remains true today.

The Army's current fast-deploying force is the 82nd Airborne's ready brigade, which is set to move within 37 hours. But the Army couldn't deploy such a unit to Kosovo for action. In recent years, the Army scrapped the aging but light Sheridan tank it once used, and canceled the air-droppable Advanced Gun System that was to have replaced it. That means the 82nd has to seize and hold a major airfield within four hours of parachuting in, to allow C-17s carrying M-1 tanks to land. The Army's latest study on the subject isn't much use either. It's titled, "Enabling Rapid and Decisive Strategic Maneuver for the Army After 2010."

So what would the 30-year-old Wes Clark think of the war his 54-year-old twin is conducting? Hard to say. In public, the general says he's been pleased with events so far, confident that NATO is "degrading" Milosevic's war-fighting ability. But the campaign has violated many of his basic rules--dogma certified not just in his thesis but in most post-Vietnam strategic thinking. And as the campaign plays out, demanding more and more of NATO's men and munitions, the general may reflect on some other words from that 1975 thesis: "Reliance on air and naval forces is unlikely to prove wholly satisfactory."

--With reporting by Greg Burke/Aviano, James L. Graff/Tirana and Thomas Sancton/Brussels