Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Before a conflict, the military's job is to plan for the worst case. Yet obviously the minds behind Operation Allied Force didn't really think it would be as bad as this. After more than a week of NATO air raids, Kosovo was still hemorrhaging victims of horror. Ordered out of their homes at gunpoint, often separated from husbands and sons, ethnic Albanian women, children and old people were marched, bused, packed into trains. As the long columns stumbled into neighboring states, Serb soldiers stripped the refugees of passports, identity papers, even license plates to eradicate any trace...
...Washington insist they warned their political bosses all along that Milosevic would "cleanse" Kosovo. "We are not surprised," Secretary of Defense William Cohen reiterated on Thursday. He and others say it was the very knowledge that Milosevic was marshaling his forces for just such an onslaught that helped precipitate NATO's decision to start bombing March 24. "By the time our first planes took off," said NATO spokesman Jamie Shea, "thousands of ethnic Albanians were already fleeing toward the borders...
...would tolerate--Serbia could methodically eliminate the Kosovar population over a number of months. Analysts knew Milosevic would intensify his purge if bombing started. But they believed his intent was to crush the K.L.A. and then gradually drive out the entire ethnic Albanian population. Among political decision makers at NATO and at the White House, conventional wisdom also said Milosevic would cave after a few days of bombing. That scenario seemed so convincing that they settled on an air campaign of gradual escalation, beginning with limited attacks and building in sufficient pauses for Belgrade to capitulate. U.S. intelligence...
...though the blitzkrieg Milosevic launched didn't quite accomplish that, it has already remade the face of Kosovo. Some 40,000 regular Serb troops, special police, paramilitary units and ultranationalist gangs tore through Kosovo "with complete ferocity," says a NATO official. "The intensity was not anticipated." And now NATO is scrambling to revise its war plan in a race against time. "He's working very, very fast," said NATO commanding General Wesley Clark, "trying to present the world with a fait accompli...
...NATO and Serbia are fighting very different wars. While NATO was attempting to grind down Belgrade's air defenses, Milosevic was fighting the only war he really cares about. He refused to fire spasms of SAMs into the swarming skies over Yugoslavia. That kept NATO's low-and-slow tank- and troop-killing warplanes away and confined vaunted alliance firepower to Everest-high altitudes. In Belgrade government officials chortled that the damage to their air-defense systems was "minimal" despite a NATO expenditure of "230 grams of high explosives per head" of every Yugoslav. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia's well-armed infantry...