Center of Gravity Schizophrenia Over Kosovo: An Eccentric War in Need of a True Clausewitzian Analysis

In mid-September the Washington Post carried a three-installment review on the conduct of the Kosovo conflict entitled The Commanders' War. 1 It alleged a telling division over military strategy between Lt. General Michael Short, USAF, operational air commander of the Allied air campaign, and General Wesley Clark, USA, NATO's chief military commander (SACEUR). The reported Short-Clark disagreement usefully exposed the dilemma of defining the enemy s center of gravity. For Short, a veteran airman, the center of gravity rested in Belgrade with Milosevic and strategic targets. For Clark, a former ground commander, the center of gravity resided with the fielded Serbian forces in Kosovo and operational targets. Dozens of articles have since appeared in military journals to reinforce this simplistic interpretation of the disagreement between the two generals. The analysis below attempts to show such a dichotomy is, at best, facile; at worst, it shows a lack of understanding of the framework for military strategy. What the generals' reported disagreement actually unveiled was the kind of complex political constraints that can be, and generally are, imposed upon military strategists. The imperative of maintaining cohesion among the 19-nation alliance, fears of civilian and allied casualties, etc., skewed a purely rational and comprehensive (read: clean-cut) approach to the conflict. It is this political skewing that explains the apparent center of gravity schizophrenia highlighted in The Commanders' War, just as it also explains why the allies prosecuted a limited, incremental air-only campaign.