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Premise 2: Once the bombs started falling, Milosevic would blink within days
The most fanciful variant of this argument was the idea that Milosevic needed a small dose of bombing to provide political cover for his inevitable capitulation to NATO. Others simply pointed, again, to Dayton to show that Serb resistance would crumble in the face of the alliances ability to wage a devastating air war.
Rude Awakening 2: The Serbs not only defied the alliance for a grueling 78 days but also dramatically escalated their attacks on Kosovar Albanians once the bombing began
Milosevic had signed on to Dayton because the Serb forces were taking a beating at the hands of a ground offensive by the Croatian army, and prolonging the war also meant losing territory. Because NATO ruled out a ground war from the outset of the Kosovo campaign, Milosevic calculated that he could tough out the bombing in the hope of eventually splitting the alliance and securing a more favorable deal. By launching a campaign of savagery against Kosovar civilians, Milosevic also caught the alliance off guard by creating a massive refugee crisis for which NATO had not prepared.
Premise 3: NATOs objectives could be achieved solely from the air
Fearful of the domestic political impact of NATO casualties, the alliance restricted itself for most of the campaign to flying above 15,000 feet, and ruled out the use of ground troops. Once Milosevics ethnic-cleansing Operation Horseshoe went into effect, NATO launched its air strikes with the objective of protecting the Kosovar Albanians and impairing the Serbs' ability to carry out that policy.
Rude Awakening 3: NATOs air campaign was unable to prevent or impair Serb ethnic cleansing
Despite a bombing campaign designed to stop them, Serb forces were able to drive a large proportion of Kosovos ethnic Albanian population from their homes. It was only in the last two weeks of the two-and-a-half-month campaign that NATO aircraft, with the assistance of Kosovo Liberation Army guerrillas on the ground, managed to systematically target Serb artillery and armor on the ground in Kosovo. While some in Washington hailed Milosevics acceptance of the G8-authored peace deal as a triumph for the bombing-only strategy, others argue that it was only the perception that NATO was reopening the ground troops option that persuaded Milosevic to make a deal while he could still guarantee his own power. Now NATO is in the position of having to reverse a Serb campaign it was unable to prevent.