Matthew C. Waxman

Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate

The capitulation of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic on June 9, 1999, after seventy-eight days of bombing by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), is being portrayed by many as a watershed in the history of air power. For the arst time, the use of air strikes alone brought a foe to its knees—and at the cost of no NATO lives. The prophecies of Giulio Douhet and other air power visionaries appear realized.1 Lieut. Gen. Michael Short, who ran the bombing campaign, has argued that “NATO got every one of the terms it had stipulated in Rambouillet and beyond Rambouillet, and I credit this as a victory for air power.”2 This view is not conaned to the air force. Historian John Keegan conceded, “I didn’t want to change my beliefs, but there was too much evidence accumulating to stick to the article of faith. It now does look as if air power has prevailed in the Balkans, and that the time has come to redeane how victory in war may be won.”3 Dissenters, of course, raise their voices. Noting the failure of air power to fulall its promise in the past, they are skeptical of its efacacy in Kosovo. Instead, they point to factors such as the threat of a ground invasion, the lack of Russian support for Serbia, or the resurgence of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) as key to Milosevic’s capitulation. Without these factors, dissenters argue, air strikes alone would not have

Coercing Saddam Hussein: lessons from the past

Saddam Husseins Iraq has repeatedly been coerced in the past and can be again in the future. The historical record is clear: in conflicts with Iran and with the US and its allies, Saddam has repeatedly bowed to outside pressure when it threatened his relationship with his power base, which is essential to his control over Iraq and very survival. To extract concessions from Saddam in the future, the US and its allies must target this power base by continuing containment to keep Iraq weak, by striking Iraq aggressively when Saddam challenges containment, and by supporting the Iraqi opposition to ratchet up pressure on Baghdad.

The Legal Legacy of Light-Footprint Warfare

Candidate Barack Obama pledged in 2008 to end the Bush administration’s heavy military deployments, but not to end the war against al-Qaeda and its associates. He said that as President he would keep a small residual force in Iraq to target al-Qaeda remnants, and promised to “tak[e] the fight to alQaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” a goal that required, among other things, “more troops, more helicopters, more satellites, more Predator drones in the Afghan border region.” The troops Obama had primarily in mind were “Special Operations resources along the Afghanistan–Pakistan border, including intelligence-gathering assets.” He wasn’t bluffing when he said that “if Pakistan cannot or will not take out al-Qaeda leadership when we have actionable intelligence about their whereabouts, we will act to protect the American people.” These were some of the hints on the 2008 campaign trail about what the Obama administration would later call its “light footprint” alternative to the large and expensive deployments of the Bush era. Under Obama, “drone strikes, cyber attacks and Special Operations raids that made use of America’s technological superiority” became “the new, quick-and-dirty expression of military and covert power,” says David Sanger of the New York Times. While President Bush deployed these tactics to some extent, President Obama expanded their use significantly and made them central to U.S. counterterrorism operations and to projecting U.S. military force more generally. Undergirding Obama’s use of drones, cyber-operations, and Special Operations forces are constitutional and statutory innovations that enhance the President’s

Temporality and Terrorism in International Humanitarian Law

It is widely agreed that the United States’ armed conflict against al Qaida and its allies—if it is legally an armed conflict at all—does not fit neatly within contemporary jus as bellum and jus in bello (international humanitarian law, or IHL) regimes. The thinking goes that transnational conflicts with non-state terrorist groups and tactics do not correspond well to the categories comprising those regimes, and wide debate then proceeds about whether and how it is appropriate nevertheless to apply them.