THE WILL TO FIGHT

...We intend to take care of you . . . to minimize the risk to your lives," Secretary of Defense William Cohen pledged to his uniformed subordinates on the eve of an aborted operation against Iraq last year...

...While the tendency to advertise our fears as if they were virtues no doubt comforts the sensibilities of national security advisers and senators, it undermines U.S...

...Do Americans instinctively recoil at the very mention of ground troops...

...Until the later stages of the war in Vietnam, those losses were borne with remarkable fortitude...

...Ever since the 1993 Somalia debacle, which for Bill Clinton was the first sustained public humiliation of his presidency, risk-averse war managers at the White House have tailored America's strategic goals to reflect the president's own preoccupation with casualties...

...Within the administration, that sensitivity has proved contagious...

...On the contrary, the destruction of the targets our opponents most value—their infantry battalions, tactical headquarters, and staging areas—can only be achieved with low-flying attack aircraft or ground forces and, hence, considerable peril...

...Last week, for example, a Washington PostABC News poll found that 57 percent of respondents supported the use of combat troops in Kosovo—not an overwhelming figure, but a clear majority nonetheless...

...Lawrence F. Kaplan is executive editor of the National Interest...

...During the era of universal conscription, which lasted a mere three decades, nearly half a million American families lost sons in foreign wars...

...The eagerness of administration officials to liken Milosevic to Hitler and Pol Pot notwithstanding, the Serb dictator recognizes that the cost of halting his contemptible depredations is not one that Americans—or, rather, American officials—will be willing to pay...

...Today, of course, the United States fields an all-volunteer military...

...consider, to begin with, operation Desert Storm, where the public was instructed to and did anticipate thousands of U.S...

...There is a paradox here...

...in this instance, at least, a famously poll-driven White House is less reacting to public fears than projecting its own...

...Hence, Slobodan Milosevic, like Saddam Hussein before him, opts to call America's bluff, sensing rightly that the administration's enlightened sensitivities comprise its Achilles' heel...

...Then, too, a Gallup poll taken last year finds that even the continued presence of U.S...

...Needless to say, such practices have evolved in response to imagined political imperatives rather than the nation's strategic interests...

...That's why [the mission] has been very carefully circumscribed...

...in the case of Desert Storm, public support for ground troops intensified over a six-month period, largely in response to presidential cajoling...

...And, indeed, the self-defeating preoccupation with casualties has led to strategic paralysis...

...The sooner the White House acknowledges this unwelcome truth and seeks to persuade rather than be persuaded, the sooner American military power might recover its utility as an instrument of national policy...

...Substituting tactical scoring for genuine measures of military effectiveness, the administration has shown a clear preference for directing sporadic fusillades of cruise missiles at inanimate objects in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Bosnia, and now Serbia...

...And that, too, is why the Clinton team has assured the American public (and Slobodan Milosevic) of its determination not to send combat troops to Kosovo...

...For the objectives it routinely sets for itself— from destroying Iraq's weapons program to halting ethnic cleansing in Kosovo—plainly cannot be accomplished with the risk-free means it favors...

...credibility on the international scene and encourages adversaries to conclude that they enjoy more room to maneuver than American rhetoric would suggest—as in fact they do...

...But is the prevailing wisdom accurate...

...Nor is public willingness to employ ground forces merely a function of some narrowly defined national interest...

...on the matter of Kosovo, however, a willingness to deploy American soldiers has developed independently of White House leadership: When the president finally saw fit to mount his podium, it was mainly to make the case against ground operations...

...Indeed, reluctance to place at risk the nation's military professionals emanates from the top down these days...

...At least to judge from the opinion polls, the answer is no...

...casualties...

...And yet, according to the new wisdom, the mere prospect of ground operations will quash the resolve of a citizenry for which, apparently, the contests of the post-cold War era offer no great purpose...

...soldiers in Bosnia commands majority support...

...Dire predictions notwithstanding, fully 84 percent of those polled on the eve of the war backed the use of ground troops to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait...

...In the serene conviction that victory on the battlefield may be achieved without sacrifice—and that the public will not, in any case, endure much loss—the administration has become caught in a bind of its own devising...

...Instead, its members have sought in vain to devise a methodology for unshackling themselves from war's messy logic...

...THE WILL TO FIGHT by Lawrence F. Kaplan THE FINELY CALIBRATED BOMBING of Serbia exemplifies a conventional wisdom that emerged soon after the 1991 Gulf War: The only wars American public opinion will sanction are those that may be fought bloodlessly and, hence, from the air...

...And when compelled to employ ground troops, the administration has had them hunker down in base camps, and declared "force protection" the ne plus ultra of the deployment...