Peace in the Posavina, or deal with us!

Military Review, July-August, 2007 by Gregory Fontenot

I HAVE SHAMELESSLY APPROPRIATED the title of this article on battle command at the brigade level in Bosnia from then-Lieutenant Colonel (now Brigadier General) Tony Cucolo, who commanded the 3d Battalion, 5th Cavalry (Black Knights), one of the battalions assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, in 1995-96. Painted on a sign prominently hung over the entrance to the largely destroyed communal farm just south of Brcko that the Black Knights called home, Cucolo's pithy phrase served as the battalion's informal motto. The Posavina is what the locals called the Sava River valley, the region in northeast Bosnia where the brigade served from December 1995 until November 1996. The motto described Cucolo's perception of what the Nation asked of him and his troops in Bosnia. It resonated with both his troops and me. Simply put, the mission in Bosnia in that first year of operations required the Implementation Force (IFOR) to compel peace if required to do so. IFOR did not deploy to Bosnia to monitor a peace agreed to by the warring parties, but to "implement" peace, by force if necessary. Cucolo had it dead right: peace in the Posavina or, by god, deal with all of us, including the Black Knights.

Prelude to the Mission

Even in the last months before troops deployed, the very idea of a NATO-led mission in Bosnia seemed improbable, but a series of events in 1995 ultimately made the improbable a fact. Richard Holbrooke's self-serving To End a War aside, the contesting parties--Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs, in particular--agreed to the Dayton Accords for three reasons: force employed by the United Kingdom and France on the ground and NATO fighters in the air, the successful Bosnian Croat spring offensive, and exhaustion. (1) The embarrassment and outrage stemming from Srebrenica, where the Serbs humiliated UN troops and slaughtered Bosnian Muslims in a supposed UN safe haven, galvanized NATO. After more than three years of savage civil war, NATO, with UN approval, moved in to enforce the agreement Holbrooke and his team had negotiated. (2)

In today's "war on terrorism," it is sometimes hard to recall the sense of dread and uncertainty the mission to Bosnia called up in the minds of those who led the way in December 1995. United States Army Europe (USAREUR), which provided the vast majority of the U.S. troops assigned to IFOR, had long anticipated some kind of mission in Bosnia. Soon after Yugoslavia began to unravel in the early 1990s, USAREUR began nearly continuous preparations for various contingencies in the Balkans generally oriented toward rescuing UN troops assigned the impossible task of keeping a peace that never existed. To be fair, the Soldiers who worked in the Balkans in the various contingents assigned to the UN Protection Force and to smaller missions monitoring fighting elsewhere, including eastern Croatia, struggled with inadequate resources and equally inadequate mandates. From 1992 onward, the Army in Europe examined the means and practiced plans designed to either succor those forces or support various peace efforts. (3)

The focus of this article is command at the brigade level in a stability and support operation that constituted a major departure from the mistaken notion that U.S. Armed Forces should not be involved in these kinds of operations. This account is personal, anecdotal, and not intended as a template for others; rather, I offer it so that what we learned might be passed on for others to consider, and possibly to apply. There is more to say about this challenging and in some ways wonderful mission than space here allows. Accordingly, this discussion concentrates on the early days of the mission at the expense of attempting to address battle command over the long haul. Finally, these few pages reflect my personal judgment about what worked and what did not. It is also an attempt to describe the conditions in which the Ready First Combat Team (RFCT) (1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division) operated.

The mission to Bosnia evoked dread and uncertainty for several reasons. Partly this dread stemmed from the sheer difficulty of operating in the rugged terrain of Bosnia, but it was a difficulty much enhanced by the mythology that emerged from the World War II experience of German forces in Yugoslavia--the popular histories of that experience conjured images of Serbian Chetniks lurking behind every tree in the craggy, densely forested hills of Bosnia. Such worries blended seamlessly with the U.S. Army's more recent, and equally unpleasant, experience in Somalia. "Mission creep," a term made famous by Mark Bowden in Black Hawk Down but little heard now, emerged from the Rangers' fight in the streets of Mogadishu and had already become the "elephant in the room" for Soldiers from private to general.

As planners and commanders considered what to do if sent to Bosnia, they brooded over concerns that troops might be ordered into a maelstrom of fire from the ubiquitous and apparently savage militias indiscriminately killing each other and civilians. Ambiguity about what could happen, more than fear of the fighting capacity of the militias, stimulated unease. Despite more than a little healthy anxiety about the unknown, the Army in Europe planned and trained hard to fight, if necessary, and to transition rapidly to what in those days was called Military Operations Other Than War (MOOTW).