The Honorable Louis Caldera
Secretary of the United States Army

"The U.S. Army: In Kosovo and Beyond"

Thank you so much for that kind introduction, Mr. Mack, who I know I could refer to by several different titles, President Mack, Secretary Mack, former Assistant Secretary of the Commerce Department, Colonel Mack, retired Air Force Colonel-- which is a great tribute to what the armed forces are all about--distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is great to be back here in my old assembly district, and to see so many old friends, and my former colleagues from O’Melveny and Meyers, colleagues from the administration, [such as] Phil Recht who served as the director of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, I just know it by its initials, NHTSA. Eve and I literally lived right next door in Museum Towers when we lived here in Los Angeles. She would walk across the street to her law firm, and I would take the short ride on Angels Flight to my district office at the Bradbury Building. We loved downtown Los Angeles, and we love to be home, and so it’s great to have this chance to be back here again.

I am delighted to have this opportunity, this very timely opportunity from when this was originally scheduled to talk about our nation’s involvement in Kosovo and what it means for the future roles that our military is being called to play in the world. You’ll recall, if I could take you back a little bit, that last September the United Nations Security Council called for an end to the violence in Kosovo and for political dialogue to solve a looming crisis that was appearing there. The Yugoslav military and the state police forces had, since early last year, begun a brutal campaign of repression against the Albanian majority people of Kosovo, in response to some of the terrorist actions that members of the independence-minded Kosovo Liberation Army, the KLA, had started. Those were actions that were fostered by Belgrade, since Belgrade had removed the autonomy that Kosovo had enjoyed under Tito in 1988, and had increasingly over the years continued to repress the majority of people there in the same way that Milosevic had started wars against Slovenia, against Croatia, and in Bosnia. The heavy-handed actions of the Serb forces were resulting in thousands of internally displaced persons including women, children, the elderly, individuals who were hiding in the hills exposed to the elements just as winter’s cold was beginning to set in.

In October, NATO authorized air strikes to stop the repression of the Kosovar majority by the Serb forces. Yugoslav president Milosevic agreed; he averted those air strikes by agreeing to reduce the number of military forces in Kosovo, but then he quickly broke that promise. By January, the inter-ethnic conflict had worsened, with Serbian police and military forces again committing the kinds of atrocities that they committed in Bosnia, atrocities that only ended when our nation, as part of a UN force, finally put a stop to it. We worked hard with other nations to start a peace process at Rambouillet, that called for the KLA and the Serb forces to put down their arms, but Milosevic turned his back on that opportunity. Instead, he increased the pace of ethnic cleansing and repression. NATO responded the only way that NATO could to stop the ethnic cleansing, to preserve NATO’s credibility after the threat of air strikes that had been made, and to keep the destabilizing effect of the Serbian use of force from spilling into other countries in that region.

For 78 days, NATO conducted the most intense and precise air campaign in history. Our nation stood up to the evil that was being perpetrated against the Kosovar people: mass killings, systematic rape, forced evictions, destruction of homes, and purposeful destruction of people’s identity papers, trying to destroy their very identity, and connection to their homes, inhumane detentions, and the inhumane use of noncombatants as human shields positioned in front of heavy weapons. We held a coalition of 19 countries with very different realities with respect to their relationship to Yugoslavia-- very different geographical, historical, economic, political, ethnic and religious realities. We held those nations together to a principled, sustained course of action. We prevented an even larger humanitarian crisis from occurring by making it now possible for one and a half million Kosovar refugees and internally displaced persons to be able to return in safety to their homes.

For the Army, the hard part of this mission is just beginning. The initial entry forces that began the de-mining of the roads and bridges and the verification of the withdrawal of the Serb forces, in accordance with the military-technical agreement were European. Those initial forces were European. But now we have deployed some four thousand of the seven thousand U.S. troops that are going to man the American sector of the multinational peace-keeping force. Today it’s some 1,600 Marines and 2,300 U.S. Army soldiers. Within a month it will be an all-Army force. Our country will contribute 15% of the initial 50,000-troop force that is going to provide this peace-keeping force, that is, KFOR. The demilitarization agreement that NATO signed with the KLA has to be enforced, not withstanding that there are some Kosovars who want retribution. Likewise, there are rogue Serb elements who are unhappy about our presence, unhappy about the return of the refugees, some 180,000 who have returned so far, and who also have to be disarmed and dealt with.

As we have in Bosnia, we are going to be scrupulously evenhanded in ensuring that all parties put down their arms and that the rights and the property of all the people of Kosovo, regardless of their background, are respected. We’ve negotiated an agreement with the Russians to bring their participation under the umbrella of KFOR, to achieve all the tasks that have to be accomplished in the coming months and years. There are still an estimated hundred thousand mines to be cleared, there are bomblettes to be disarmed, destroyed homes will have to be rebuilt, humanitarian assistance has to be delivered, and an economy rebuilt. The institutions of civil government have to be built, institutions that are pluralistic, democratic, including a police force that everyone can have confidence in, a judicial system, and a municiple government, first provisionally, and then as elected bodies.

It is a tough, complex, and dangerous job, but it is one that we are doing successfully in Bosnia today where we’ve gone from some twenty thousand peace-keeping troops to less than six thousand over the last three-and-a-half years, and one that we can successfully do in Kosovo. It is a mission that we train hard for. We train our troops up before we send them on a mission so that we can do well, but it is not without risk. It is also, however, the kind of mission that is frankly stretching our Army and our military services very very thin, and that raises the question of what kind and what size of a military we need. We never expected that we would be this busy when we began downsizing our military at the end of the Cold War. The Army has now come down nearly 40% in size and has gone from 18 to 10 divisions. A mission like Kosovo ties up three divisions. There’s the one that is performing the peace-keeping mission, the one that just rotated out, that’s now on train-up to hone back their war fighting skills now that they’ve gotten back to their base camp, and there is the unit that is getting ready to deploy to take over once the unit that is there leaves after their six-month tour. So you occupy three of those ten divisions for missions like a peace-keeping mission. These are units that also are expected to be ready to fight the two nearly-simultaneous major theater wars that our national security strategy, our national military strategy, calls on us to be able to fight and win. The fact that it stretches us thin, however, doesn’t mean that Kosovo isn’t an appropriate mission. It is an appropriate mission. It is an important mission that furthers our country’s interests by contributing to peace and the stability in southeast Europe.

For those who want to spend more money on defense but don’t want to use our military, I would argue that this is one of the kinds of missions that we must be trained and ready for. Yes, we have to be trained and ready for a major theater war, because our interests are vast, and the readiness, that readiness, is what deters aggression, and because it would be inexcusable to send America’s sons and daughters to a war where they were not as ready for it as they could be. But precisely because we are trained and ready, major theater wars don’t occur very frequently. Regional conflicts and smaller scale contingencies, like peace-keeping and disaster assistance, do happen more frequently, and also implicate U.S. interests. They are situations where our early leadership and our judicious intervention can contribute to peace and stability, can prevent conflicts from occurring, and can prevent conflicts from spreading at lower costs, and we are doing precisely that all over the world, from Kosovo to Korea, from the Sinai to Central America. That’s why our Army and our military are so busy. We have some 20,000-30,000 soldiers deployed around the world, every single day to 70 to 80 countries, not including the ones who are forward deployed in the Korean peninsula, and forward deployed in Europe.

For those who would spend more money on our military, but would adopt an isolationist posture, we have to ask: trained and ready for what, if not to support U.S. leadership in the world? For those who would spend less on our military, we have to say that engagement in the world is more than just economic engagement. It is also contributing to the peace and stability through our security relationships, and indeed it is our nation’s contributions to peace and stability through our military that makes the economic engagement possible, and that helps fuel our nation’s prosperity. To those who want our military to do all that we’re doing and more, with the same force and the same resources, we have to say our soldiers and our service members won’t be there for long if they find themselves deployed so often that they don’t have time for the families that they love and the children that they are trying to raise. So we have to adequately compensate our men and women in uniform and we’ve got to have a force that is the right size for all the things that we are asking it to do.

In sum, let me say that America should be proud of what our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have done and will be doing in Kosovo; that America’s military men and women are underwriting America’s leadership role in the world; that America must have a strong military that helps our nation stay engaged in the world: military that is contributing to enlarging and engaging the number of nations in the world who are turning to democracy, to market-based economies, to respect for individual liberty and the protection of human rights. That’s what our soldiers do for our nation each and every day.

Thank you and God bless you.