Moderne Kriegführung
Wer hatte das Sagen im Kosovo-Krieg: Die US-Regierung oder ein US-General?
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Buchbesprechung von:
Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat. By General Wesley K. Clark. Public Affairs; 512 pages; $30
(In: The Economist, 23.06.2001)
„A former NATO commander in Europa lays out some provocative views on command-and-control in modern warfare.
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Because it is accepted … that government ministers ought to be civilians, East European countries have been urged, as a price for closer links with NATO, to abandon the old communist practice of putting active generals in charge of defence ministries. Then again, service chiefs in NATO countries are expected to account more openly for how much and how well they spend taxpayers‘ money. Gone are the cold-war days when scrutinising military appropriations too closely could be made to seem unpatriotic.
But that, you could say, is the easy part. Good civil-military relations ought not to be judged by the fair-weather standards of peacetime but by the fog and urgency of war, when national survival itself may be at stake. What rules apply when generals must order soldiers to their deaths, and politicians have to justify these to the voters? The democratic experience seems to have confirmed that even in the bunkers where war cabinets meet a few simple distinctions are best observed: it is—surely— the job of generals to offer choices and explain risks, and of politicians to make decisions for generals to implement.
Well, no doubt. But anyone who thinks that this is accepted wisdom everywhere will get an alarm call from the memoirs of General Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander in Europe who, in 1999, led the 11-week air campaign which forced Yugoslavia to abandon control of Kosovo.
The Kosovo conflict was not a matter of survival for any of the 19 nations which, with varying enthusiasm, went to war against Slobodan Milosevic. Yet issues of principle were involved, and the general who oversaw the war thought of his own role as going far beyond giving advice and following orders. Especially after 1995, when General Clark helped broker a Bosnian peace deal, he regarded himself not merely as an executor but as a co-author of western policy in the Balkans.
In the run-up to the Kosovo campaign, he was frustrated by the shilly-shallying of governments who in his (probably correct) view wanted to benefit from a show of force without risking the messiness of war. Once the air war did start, General Clark had strong views on what to bomb and why, and he was enraged when his judgments were not fully heeded. The war, as he accurately observed, was not a contest of physical destruction but a battle of wills over how costly it would be for NATO to bend Mr. Milosevic to its shifting demands, and he felt he was best placed to make the necessary daily decisions.
A cerebral soldier whose formative experiences included study at Oxford and a war wound in Vietnam (where he concluded that America should have bombed harder and sooner), General Clark has thought a good deal about civil-military relations. In “Waging Modern War“, he argues that the information age has spawned a new type of limited warfare in which lines between political and military authority have become blurred, just as they would tend to be in an existential battle to the death. This is partly because modern communications allow viewers and voters to follow wars in more or less real time, putting politicians under pressure, as they see it, to micro-manage military conflicts, if only for fear of immediate blame when they fail.
But this blurring, General Clark believes, is a two-way business. “While it may seem desirable in theory“, he writes, “to separate military decision-making from policy formulation, in practice it is impossible...The top [military] leadership not only carries out the orders it receives, it may heavily influence their formulation.“
General Clark wants such influence to be greater still. In a bitter, though intriguing, work of self-justification, he describes backroom battles during and after the air war, for which he was punished a few weeks later by early retirement. He recalls his struggle with William Cohen, America‘s defence secretary, and with the service chiefs for permission to use Apache helicopters, which could have shattered Serb forces in Kosovo. He describes, too, his difficulty in persuading NATO leaders of the need to prepare for a land Operation.
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Many of General Clark‘s points are sound, and his underlying belief that politicians should listen to generals is not in serious dispute. His weakness is to confuse being listened to with having a free hand. If his aim was to show that soldiers in wartime should be insulated from civilian interference and allowed to “get on with the job“, he succeeds in doing the opposite. Many readers will shudder at the degree of power General Clark believed was his due.” …