In Things to Come, Alexander Korda's classic 1936 version of the novel by H. G. Wells, a petty dictator in a war-ravaged corner of Europe is waging a campaign against the neighboring "hill people." The year is 1970. The "Boss," a Milosevic type played by Ralph Richardson, is thwarted by Wings Over The World (WTW), a group of scientists and engineers planning to rebuild civilization along rational and cosmopolitan lines. Their colossal, high-tech aircraft easily best the Boss's primitive planes and humanely neutralize his population with the harmless, sleep-inducing Gas of Peace. Standing over the corpse of the Boss-a casualty, evidently, of obsolescence-the allegorical John Cabal, played by Raymond Massey, declaims: "Poor old Boss. He and his flags and his follies. And now for the rule of the Airmen-and a new life for mankind!"

Substitute NATO for WTW, and the silver-haired Bill Clinton for the silver-haired John Cabal, and you have something like today's war of the West against Serbia. Unfortunately, the absence of a Gas of Peace in NATO's arsenal almost certainly ensures that in real life, unlike in the movies, a utopian New Order is unlikely to be realized by means of air power alone. Unlike H. G. Wells in the 1930s, we know that air power seldom if ever wins a war. Even Japan's decision to surrender in World War II following the atomic bombings might have been influenced by Soviet entry into the Pacific war. Bombing failed to defeat Nazi Germany, bombing alone did not roll back North Korean forces, and bombing did not prevent North Vietnam from continuing its ultimately successful war against South Vietnam. Bombing by itself would not have liberated Kuwait from the forces of Saddam Hussein, whose regime, moreover, has survived repeated rounds of massive U.S. bombardment, including that of last winter.

Nevertheless, the Clinton administration chose to bomb Serbia, with no back-up plan for the employment of ground forces in case the bombing failed. The result-the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo by Serb forces, while the bombs fall on Belgrade-is the greatest military humiliation for the United States since the fall of Indochina.

THE WRONG LESSON

Indeed, the disaster in Kosovo has demonstrated that Americans-and American conservatives, in particular-learned the wrong lesson from the Vietnam debacle. For a generation, many conservative civilians have credited the claims of some military officers that more intense U.S. bombing of North Vietnam could have quickly and easily ended the Vietnam War. In his 1976 memoir, A Soldier Reports, Gen. William C. Westmoreland wrote that "the war still might have been ended within a few years, except for the ill-considered policy of graduated response against North Vietnam. Bomb a little bit, stop it a while to give the enemy a chance to cry uncle, then bomb a little bit more but never enough to really hurt. That was no way to win." Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the latter part of the Vietnam War, claimed in 1987 that without restrictions on bombing "we could have polished those clowns off in six months."

In retrospect, it is clear that the Vietnam War could not have been won by air power alone. The Johnson administration's limited bombing campaign failed to deter Ho Chi Minh, a ruthless Stalinist tyrant as willing as Saddam to inflict enormous costs on his hapless subjects; the more intense campaign favored by the Pentagon probably would have failed as well. Nor is there any merit to the argument that a "sharp knock" instead of gradual bombing would have changed the outcome of the war. The historian Robert A. Pape, in Bombing to Win (1996), notes that a twelve-week bombing campaign from August to October 1967 "closely approximates the air chiefs' plans. There is no evidence that executing the sharp knock in 1965, instead of 1967, would have produced better results." Apart from ruling out some targets for legitimate strategic and diplomatic reasons, Johnson did not "tie the hands of the military." In 1966, for example, U.S. aircraft flew 81,000 attack sorties and 48,000 combat-support sorties against North Vietnam; in the panhandle of Laos there were 48,000 attack sorties and 10,000 combat-support sorties. Johnson and his advisors could not possibly have supervised these.

Air power could not be used to destroy North Vietnam's industrial base because there was none. The industrial base of North Vietnam was the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites and China. The Communist Great Powers funneled supplies to the Vietnamese Communists overland through China, through North Vietnamese ports, and also through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville.

Nor was bombing an effective approach to combating the Vietcong insurgents. "Not to denigrate what we accomplished against Hussein, but Hussein was no military strategist," former secretary of the Navy James Webb wrote after the Gulf War. "If Ho Chi Minh had put 60 percent of his army in one spot where there were not any trees, we would have blown them away in 40 days too." Only after North Vietnam switched to a conventional invasion strategy, following the decimation of the Vietcong guerrillas in the Tet Offensive of 1968, did Communist forces became more vulnerable to the kind of air power Nixon used in halting the Easter Offensive in 1972.

The genuine Lesson of Vietnam, then, is not that air power is a military panacea; rather, it is that the U.S. military was not, and arguably is not, prepared to fight long-term, low-intensity wars on the ground. This bias reflects the traditions of the Army, and its offspring the Air Force. For various reasons, including the low toleration for casualties on the part of the American public, the indiscipline of militiamen and conscripts, and the comparative advantage of the U.S. in industrial production, the military has preferred to "spend shells, not men." The emphasis on long-range firepower shared by Winfield Scott, an artillery officer, and Ulysses S. Grant, who manned a cannon during the Mexican War, lives on in the doctrine named after Colin Powell, like Scott and Grant a product of the Army. The Powell doctrine, which holds that the U.S. should use massive firepower if it goes to war at all, effectively rules out the use of the military in situations in which an all-out offensive would be inappropriate.

The only one of the services with a tradition of expertise in low-intensity conflict is the Marine Corps, which, unlike the Army, played the major role in long-term pacification efforts in the Philippines, Haiti, and Nicaragua. It is no coincidence that Marine generals like Victor "Brute" Krulak and Lewis W. Walt were among the most insightful critics of the firepower-intensive attrition strategy in Vietnam devised by that Army general, Westmoreland.

Given the American military's preference for air power and attrition tactics, and the reluctance of American presidents to risk the lives of ground troops, it was perhaps inevitable that bombing would become the instrument of choice in the coercive diplomacy of the United States. Before Clinton tried to bomb Milosevic into negotiations, Reagan bombed Libya to punish it for terrorism (the result was the Libyan bombing of Pan Am 103). Although light-infantry formations are most appropriate for the kinds of low-intensity conflicts in which the U.S. is likely to take part in the near future, including the war in Kosovo proper, the Army today has even fewer light-infantry formations, compared with armored and mechanized divisions, than it did during the Cold War. A rational great power tailors its tactics to its grand strategy. For decades the United States has been tailoring its strategy to its tactics. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.