-Caveat Lector-
"James Anderson, national security analyst at the conservative Heritage
Foundation, says it may take 500,000 NATO ground troops to conquer Kosovo."
NATO Reconsiders Size of Ground War
By ROBERT BURNS
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) -- NATO military planners are reviewing whether their
months-old estimate of how many troops it would take to win a ground war in
Yugoslavia -- 200,000 in the worst-case scenario -- is still valid, taking
into account the results of NATO bombing and Serb ``ethnic cleansing.''
NATO and the Clinton administration insist they have no intention of giving
up on the air campaign, now in its second month, and at the NATO summit that
ended Sunday the administration's opposition to committing combat troops
remained firm. Even so, NATO has not ruled out the ground option.
The alliance says it has not begun any detailed planning for ground
operations in Yugoslavia, but as a first step it is recalculating what it
might take if air power alone fails to break President Slobodan Milosevic.
Harry Summers, a retired Army colonel who writes about military affairs, said
NATO's high-end estimate of 200,000 troops is likely to become its low-end
estimate once it takes into account the threshold for pain the Yugoslavs have
shown during the air war. NATO thought Slobodan Milosevic ``would fold at the
first push,'' he said, but instead he has remained defiant and shown no sign
of caving.
James Anderson, a national security analyst at the conservative Heritage
Foundation, says it may take 500,000 NATO ground troops to conquer Kosovo if
the mission requires seizing Belgrade and fighting throughout the country. To
seize Belgrade but not occupy the entire country would take up to 200,000
troops, he says.
NATO has fewer than 20,000 troops in the region now, including a U.S. Army
combat force of Apache helicopters, airborne infantry, anti-tank missiles and
armored vehicles in Albania that soon will total 5,300 soldiers.
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana also wants a new assessment of how many
troops might be required if their mission were to keep a negotiated peace in
Kosovo rather than to impose a peace by engaging in a ground war. The
estimate last summer was 25,000 to 30,000 troops for a peacekeeping mission.
As Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said last week, current conditions are a
long way from the ``permissive environment'' that NATO wants before
committing ground troops. The official NATO position is that it won't do that
until Milosevic bows to NATO's demands, which include pulling out of Kosovo
and accepting a NATO-led peace force.
``As much as I wish he would stop the fighting, the killing, and take all his
troops out tomorrow, we don't have any evidence that's about to happen,''
Bacon said. ``Should it happen it would take him some time to get the troops
out, and I think we would have plenty of time to mobilize'' a peacekeeping
force.
It remains possible, however, that NATO leaders will change their minds and
decide to launch a ground war or use troops to resettle Kosovar Albanians
without a peace agreement. It is that possibility, remote as it seems now,
that motivated Solana to order a reassessment of what it would take to enter
Kosovo, either in peace or in combat.
Much has changed since NATO military authorities made their first assessment
of ground options:
Four weeks of allied bombing have largely isolated the Yugoslav army and
special police forces in Kosovo by destroying ammunition, fuel and other war
resources and knocking out many of the bridges, roads, airfields and rail
lines needed to resupply the troops inside Kosovo.
The cumulative effect of NATO bombing on the Serb army would suggest a
smaller ground troop requirement than before the air war started March 24. On
the other hand, some Pentagon officials believe the Serbs' resilience and
will to resist in the face of relentless bombing suggest just the opposite.
The Serb military forces in Kosovo have driven hundreds of thousands of
ethnic Albanians from the province and left hundreds of thousands of others
homeless in their own land. Bacon said the Serbs' ``depopulation campaign''
in Kosovo would be taken into account in the NATO assessment.
The number of Serb forces in and around Kosovo has grown since last year, to
roughly 40,000, by the Pentagon's estimate. And in recent weeks they have
been digging defensive positions along the Albanian and Macedonian borders in
apparent preparation for a NATO land invasion, Bacon said.
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