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Douglas - 18
only did these strikes fail to coerce Milosevic, they prompted the Serbian military to kill
thousands of Kosovars and expel almost a million from the country.
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There are a host of problems with this characterization. To begin with the targets of the
first three days of NATO bombing in Kosovo could fit anything but a “decapitation” target
profile. Those near Belgrade were few and air defense-related (the airfield at Batanjica), or
justified as such (Pancevo) even if they fit a regime targeting profile better. Otherwise, the target
set, if anything, would best be characterized in Bombing to Win’s terms as a either a part of the
pre-cursor air defense suppression effort or as part of a military denial approach (ammunition
dumps, barracks, and so forth) located more in the south than near Belgrade. Therefore, the first
three days of NATO’s campaign in Pape’s terms ought to be deemed either neutral for the
purposes of hypothesis testing (air defense suppression comes before either denial or punishment
can be pursued) or, given the location and type of the targets, characterized as “theater” rather
than “strategic interdiction.” On a minor note, it is also unclear how Pape is accounting for
targets (perhaps target complexes rather than aim points) since NATO claimed to have struck
fifty targets on the second night of bombing alone.
More importantly, but still related to this semantic confusion, Pape’s argument is causally
questionable. It is highly unlikely from the evidence available that NATO’s bombing sparked
the FRY’s (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) expulsion campaign. Therefore, his line of
reasoning stretches a dubious claim (the first three days of NATO bombing are best
characterized as a decapitation campaign) to enlist an implausible reading of the evidence
(NATO bombing caused the expulsions) to argue with unnecessary certainty that a competing
hypothesis is not only unlikely to work, but is also harmful.
To further the point, he follows this passage with an argument for why decapitation will
remain an irrelevant and counterproductive strategy for bombing:
The development of increasingly precise weaponry has not made decapitation strategies
any more viable, for three reasons. First, killing leaders and accurately attacking
communications networks depends more on military intelligence than precision in
combat. Without precise intelligence, precise weapons may precisely destroy targets that
are not in use. Second, there are generally so few leadership targets that they can be
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Pape, “True Worth of Air Power,” 118.
Convention