Civilian Objectives Were Meant to Be Hit

The NATO doctrine of assault in the 1999 air war against Yugoslavia violated international law

by Jürgen Rose *

If you want to understand the process of the 78-day air war waged by the NATO over Kosovo and against Yugoslavia, it is indispensable to cast a glance at the US Air Force doctrine of air war. This was written down by US Air Force colonel John A. Warden III, who was later promoted to be commander of the Air Command and Staff College at Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, following the preceding considerations from the twenties and thirties of the last century, as presented by the Italian Giulio Douhet, the British Hugh Trenchard, the American Billie Mitchell, or the German general of the Army of the Reich (Reichswehrgeneral) Walther Wever. These ideas made their breakthrough in the 1991 war against Iraq; and until today they  have shaped the prevailing US doctrine of air war. This latter doctrine was also at the base of the concept for the air war operations against Yugoslavia in 1999, against Afghanistan in 2001/2002, and once more against Iraq in 2003.

The concept of the five rings

The concept of the five rings is the quintessence of Warden’s strategic approach: starting from a systemic  point of view, the former  Air Force Colonel describes a potential enemy as a system of concentric rings the strategic relevance of which decreases from the middle outwards. Warden defines this system of concentric rings, as applied to an enemy state, as follows: In the centre you find the political and military leadership. Around them the key industries are grouped, primarily power generation plants, water supply installations, the petrochemical industry and, interesting enough, the financial sector of a state, the transport infrastructure as the third ring, next  the civilian population and as a last one, on the very outside, the military services.
The order of target priority can be derived from the importance of these elements for a state’s capability for survival and from the targets’ vulnerability under air attack. It must be pointed out that this doctrine of air war is quite deliberately aimed at the destruction of the livelihood resources of a state and of a society, and that it notably names the civilian population as an explicit target. The air attacks on the civilian population and their basis of existence aim at undermining their loyalty and obedience to their political leaders.
On the other hand, the enemy’s military is moved to the farthest end of the list of target priorities. The reason that Warden offers for this order follows ice-cold rationality: “Contrary to Clausewitz, destruction of the enemy military is not the essence of war; the essence of war is convincing the enemy to accept our position, and fighting his military forces is at best a means to an end and at worst a total waste of time and energy.”
The salient point, however, is the fact that a strategy of war which deliberately and pointedly targets the civilian population blatantly overrides all humanitarian law. The reduction of the inhibition level regarding the choice of target swiftly leads to the reduction of the inhibition level regarding fighting strategies. It would seem that in the reality of modern air war, basically any means is permissible, if it leads to victory, be it laser-controlled precision bombs on apartment buildings, cluster bombs on villages, ammunition made from depleted uranium, “fuel-air-explosives” (aerosol bombs that abruptly generate an enormous excess pressure and annihilate any life in close vicinity to the explosion), or even white phosphorus against “soft targets”, as they are cynically referred to in the jargon of the air war planners.

Civilian population is the target

Now such methods of waging war are plainly breaking international law according to the 1949 Geneva Convention including the supplementary provisions of 1974 to 1977 and also the Convention On Certain Conventional Weapons (Ccw) of 10 October 1980. By now, the number of civilian casualties – usually euphemistically called “collateral damages” – consistently exceeds the military losses of the alleged “surgical war” many times over.    •

Source: This text is a short excerpt from a lengthy article published in the newspaper “junge Welt” on 3 April 2009.
(Translation by Current Concerns)

*Jürgen Rose is a qualified pedagogue and lieutenant-colonel of the German armed forces. In this article he is expressing his own personal opinion.