NRA Life of Duty Frontlines Episode 3: Kosovo
The folks at NRA’s Life of Duty send us this 15-minute history lesson and update on our continuing operations (for 13 years, so far) in Kosovo hosted by Oliver North;
Category: Military issues
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Can anyone offer me one good reason why we’re still maintaining a presence in the Balkans?
Seems to me that the president promised the troops would be home in 18 months…14 years ago.
Hondo, It’s good training! the US forces there are now pretty much run by National Guard units- so it’s a great way for commanders to get some “hostile duty” pay without actually being in danger etc.
We were the 2nd to last US rotation in Bosnia – SFOR 14. My feeling is we should have stayed in Bosnia and stay in Kosovo but pull out of Germany- just the US being in the Balkans adds about the only income these places had or have. We could set up all our training we do in Germany in these places a lot cheaper….and still have some fun.
I love my tour in Bosnia– it was the most fun job I ever had in my entire life
@3-KFOR is going back to being an active duty mission with only small elements from the Guard and Reserve.
@3,
The Active Component Army resumes this mission next year. Yours truly is wheels up next spring. If it wasn’t a crappy time to be away from my family, I’d probably be looking forward to it.
CI Roller Dude: lots of things are “good training”. For example, maintaining a brigade task force in Northern Canada or Brazil would be good training, too. But either would be very expensive and would tie up huge numbers of troops (3x the number deployed with pre-deployment training/recovery). And neither is necessary to further the US national interests.
What national interest do we further by keeping roughly a brigade task force in the Balkans? Specifically, tell me (1) why we need forces there, (2) why they deserve CZTE (yeah, technically it’s different, but the effect is the same), and (3) why we are doing the mission instead of NATO?
Unless someone can give me a damn good reason, IMO we need to cut that one off now, bring our folks home, and let NATO clean up their own back yard. We can’t afford to keep doing missions like that forever once they no longer promote US national interests, just because they’re “fun”.
Hondo, unless something changes the direction in which we’re heading, it may be that we will need those troops over there in the Balkans.
But you could be right: we may need them more at home.
I have never understood what US national interests having US troops in the Balkans served, Ex-PH2 – not since freaking day 1. With the end of the Cold War, the US simply has no national interests there worth risking a war. To be cold-hearted about it: if the entire population of that region of Europe were to murder each other, so long as it did not touch off a general war in Europe or the Middle East it would not affect the US in any significant way. The same was and is true about Central Africa – where the manure hit the fan about the same time (Rwanda/Burundi) as Bosnia and Kosovo were spinning out of control. Hell, we’ve still got more folks in the Balkans than anywhere in the Carribean outside of perhaps Guantanamo Bay, or than we have securing our border with Mexico against uncontrolled migration/drug trade/infiltration by terrorists. Both of those regions/missions are far more important to US interests and are in our own freaking backyard. We chose to get involved in the Balkans and Haiti in the 1990s, but not in Burundi. We went to Haiti in 1994; it was in our own backyard, and stability there was in our national interests. Even so: we left not terribly long afterwards (1996). We went back after the earthquake in 2010; that time we left within 6 months. We chose not to go to Central Africa because we had nothing at stake there worth a fight. The same was true in the Balkans in the 1990s. But we went anyway. And we’re still in the Balkans, in strength, 14+ years later – and we are still doing nothing there that’s meaningful in terms of supporting US national interests. Bismark had it right in the late 1800s – all of Bosnia wasn’t worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier then. It’s not worth the commitment of a US brigade task force today. If we see a renewed push by a future Islamic Caliphate (or a resurgent Russia) to retake Vienna, I might change my mind. Ditto if one… Read more »
“If we see a renewed push by a future Islamic Caliphate (or a resurgent Russia) to retake Vienna” — that’s what my overactive imagination was thinking. Right now, anything is possible.
Isn’t that general area where the Crimean War took place? And how many lives were wasted on it? And what was accomplished?
Since we really don’t know what is going to happen over the next five to six months, I think that we need to be prepared for just about anything, no matter how ridiculous or useless it may seem right now.
Did you really expect the Cold War to end the way it did in 1989? Because I didn’t. I thought it would just sort of wither away to nothing after a while, not end with a wall dividing Berlin being pounded down with sledge hammers and crowbars. Not with mobs of people in Bucharest demanding on live television that Ceausescu be hanged.
I’m only saying, and mean to imply, that events can turn on a dime right now. Think about the worst case scenario for just a few minutes, and you may better understand why I said what I did.
Ex-PH2: that would take a united Islamic Caliphate with both capability and intent. Won’t happen any time soon; still too many internal division within the Islamic world. Ten or 20 years from now, if things continue, maybe. And if it happens earlier, we can counter that threat using existing infrastructure in Western/Central/Southern Europe in conjunction with our allies.
This mission ties up roughly a full old-style division (3 brigade combat teams plus support troops total). We don’t need and cannot afford to commit that amount of resources indefinitely to support a deployment where there is no real mission and no real need simply because something of low probability (and near zero-probability in the short term) “might happen” sometime in the distant future. We need those resources elsewhere, and have for a decade.
For what it’s worth: Sarajevo is about 750 miles generally west of the Crimean Peninsula.
Ah, but the entire area of eastern Europe, which used to be behind the Iron Curtain, is partly inhabited by people of Muslim faith. Tajikistan, for instance, is entirely Muslim in faith. Beautiful country, rugged, dry, right smack dab on China’s western border. The border crossing is, in fact, a small checkpoint, a pole across a gravel road and a couple of posts on each side of the checkpoing with about ten feet of fencing between them.
I understand your point. I’m just saying that the infrastructure is already there, even in remote areas, for a hostile force to put an assault together, and I don’t think it would be very difficult to do so without being observed, if we had no one there to see it….