WAGING MODERN WAR.

By Wesley K. Clark. PublicAffairs. 479 pp. $30

As Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, General Clark was the chief architect of the 1999 war for Kosovo, an odd conflict that produced victory of a sort but no heroes. Least of all Clark: When the war ended, he was effectively cashiered. Now the general aims to salvage something of his lost reputation by providing a detailed revisionist account of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s first real war. Operation Allied Force, he insists, was an unqualified triumph. Though Clark capably settles scores with those Pentagon officials who either let him down or actively conspired against him, his attempt to recast his own efforts in a more positive light fails. Yet his very failure raises important questions about the role of senior military leaders in an era of U.S. global primacy.

Clark depicts himself as a "strategic commander," situated at the nexus between politics and operations. His experience in Bosnia had convinced him that the United States could no longer base its security policy on the mere existence of military power; the nation needed to put its armed might to work. In formulating the strategy for doing so, though, Clark proved to be a naif—as his own narrative makes abundantly clear. Like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, he believed at the outset that a bit of muscle flexing would spook Slobodan Milosevic. "I know him as well as anyone," Clark quotes himself instructing a White House official. "He doesn’t want to get bombed." Wrong on that count, Clark found himself in a shooting war.

But to what end? As hostilities began, Clark identified three priorities for his commanders: to avoid losing aircraft, "impact the Yugoslavian military and police activities on the ground," and "protect our ground forces." He did not tell his subordinates how this cautious approach would bring victory. Although he publicly vowed to "attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate, and ultimately destroy" the Yugoslavian army, the limited bombing at the outset only led to accelerated ethnic cleansing and the exodus of refugees from Kosovo. These results caught Clark flatfooted. His response was to escalate, with more aircraft and talk of a possible ground invasion. But the goal of "impacting" Serbian forces in Kosovo remained elusive—he kept urging his air commanders to try harder, with few apparent results (and perhaps less than all-out efforts on their part).

NATO’s eventual success, against an isolated Serbia weakened by a decade of perpetual crisis, was preordained. But when victory came after 11 weeks, it did so despite the leadership displayed at the top, not because of it. "Strategic commander" Clark was simply out of his depth. Schooled to fight a major war against the Soviets, and obsessed with avoiding another Vietnam, he possessed neither the intellectual framework nor the grammar to formulate strategy in circumstances where the canonical lessons of the Cold War didn’t apply. The supreme commander didn’t even know what he didn’t know.

For a nation that, like it or not, exercises global military power, a strategically illiterate officer corps represents a serious danger. By calling attention to that danger, albeit unwittingly, Waging Modern War deserves recognition as an important book.

—Andrew J. Bacevich