Compellence Failure or Coercive Success? The Case of NATO and Yugoslavia

Abstract

What is coercion? How does it work? Much recent work in this regard has centered on two issues: the relative merits of punishment versus denial strategies, and whether air power can work in the absence of forces on the ground. These are important issues, but they also convey the misleading impression that coercion is something that occurs after the first bomb is dropped. This paper argues that an air war is better viewed as a last resort that occurs only after the failure to deter and/or compel by means of verbal threats and threatening gestures. Whether such verbal threats and threatening gestures are done well or poorly will go a long way toward explaining 1) whether an air war is necessary at all, 2) how long and how hard the target will resist, and 3) whether the target can be coerced at a price the coercer is willing to pay. To illustrate these points, the paper re-examines four instances of deterrence and compellence that preceded NATO’s 1999 air war against Yugoslavia over Kosovo. These four episodes are used to shed new light on why the air war was necessary, why it took much longer than expected for air power to “work,” and why the Yugoslav government led by Slobodan Milosevic thought it could get away with depopulating Kosovo of its ethnic Albanian majority.