and economic systems, while earlier Hungarian, Czech, and Polish rebellions against their Soviet masters had given their enthusiasm some bite.
Since this visit came just after the Gulf War, the former Warsaw Pact militaries were in something like shock over the quick and total defeat of Iraq’s military, trained, organized, and equipped as they were by the Soviets. Since the rout had serious implications for other Soviet-style militaries, Zinni was bombarded by questions about American tactics and capabilities, as well as considerable curiosity about how Americans had viewed them as potential adversaries. His answer: “We saw you as formidable enemies; we respected you; and we hoped we wouldn’t have to fight you.” His answer — which happened to be the truth — pleased them.
But their chief concern was not about facing the past but about facing the future. At that time NATO’s expansion was beginning to surface; and all of them badly wanted to bring their military services up to speed to join it. They were eager to show Zinni the military reforms they had already implemented, they briefed him on those that were planned… and of course they were quick to tell him that they needed all the help the U.S. could give.
The most striking change for Zinni was the reorientation of defenses. For obvious reasons, Warsaw Pact nations had not been permitted forces facing to the east. Now that had changed; and they had organized allaroundsecurity, with forces positioned on all of their borders. This must have been demoralizing to the Russians.
Yugoslavia, even then, was already a special and dangerous case. After the death of Tito and the fall of the Soviets, the country had fragmented, and old ethnic hatreds had reemerged. In 1990, the descent into ethnic violence had started in Bosnia, with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims all fighting each other. Of course, the ordinary people who just wanted to live their lives suffered.
That year, EUCOM put together the first of many aid missions to Bosnia, a humanitarian airlift operation called “Provide Promise.” Though Provide Promise was actually implemented by the Air Force, the EUCOM J-3, as the Unified Command headquarters, monitored and controlled the operation and supplied intelligence. This new priority caused Zinni to take in the Balkan reports and briefings provided by the command’s intelligence experts and analysts — an extremely knowledgeable and insightful collection of young majors and captains.
They were not optimistic about the future of what had been called Yugoslavia. “This place was an artificial nation,” they reported. “Tito was strong enough to hold it together by force of personality, but there was never such a thing as Yugoslavia. Its pieces were never meant to be joined together; and it’s ready to burst. It’s going to come apart like an old suitcase.”
Though these insights won’t be news to anyone now, better than ten years later, at the time they were prescient. The EUCOM analysts saw the future of the Balkans much earlier than anybody else. Other than Zinni, they got few listeners. And he was in a quandary about how to respond.
“How important are the Balkans?” he asked himself. “Are they vital to American or European security? Can we just let the region go and blow itself up?”
Zinni’s answer: “If we want to stop it, we’re going to have to get involved in this. Provide Promise does not go far enough. It’s a small Band-Aid on a sucking chest wound, and it’s only going to get worse. We need to get involved early, when the situation is resolvable. We need to consider an international peacekeeping mission that only the U.S. can put together. It’s pay me now or pay me more later.”
Meanwhile, everybody in Europe and the West in general was in the euphoric stage of the peace dividend. Nobody was interested in taking on the problem. Though others in EUCOM, like General McCarthy, saw the value of early involvement, they couldn’t generate interest in the kind of operation that would have to be mounted.
Eventually, of course, the problems spread throughout the region and forced the UN and NATO to face them.
Flash forward to 1992, near the end of Zinni’s EUCOM tour. Zinni was asked to sit in for his boss on a first- time staff brief for the new CINC, General Shalikashvilli. During the briefings, General McCarthy asked each person on the staff to give the new CINC their prediction of the single most challenging issue that would dominate his time and attention during his tour.
“That’s going to be the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia,” Zinni told Shalikashvilli, without hesitation, basing this statement not on intuition or inspiration but on hard analysis and the day-to-day involvement he and his colleagues had already been going through in handling the growing problems in the Balkans. These could easily be seen by anyone who was paying attention.
His words, however, did not sit well with everyone at the briefing. The EUCOM director of intelligence, for example, an Air Force major general, jumped all over him. “You’re crazy, Zinni,” he declared. “Everyone knows that dealing with the former Soviet Union will be the major issue facing us.”
What would that general say now?
The other regions in the EUCOM area of responsibility also generated their share of crises.
In Africa, three Non-combatant Evacuation Operations (NEO) were launched during Zinni’s time at EUCOM. All of them were run out of the EUCOM Operations Directorate.
The first of these was Zinni’s earliest EUCOM crisis.
Operation Sharp Edge in Liberia (mentioned earlier) was conducted by the Sixth Fleet’s Amphibious Ready Group, after fighting between various brutal local factions threatened foreigners. It started out as an evacuation mission, but when the ambassador realized he had Marines on hand to protect him he decided he might as well hang in there. And the quick in-and-out evacuation turned into a several-months-long operation to provide security for the embassy. This required a large military presence, because of the chaos and slaughter in the streets of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia. And this in turn stirred up a serious debate over whether the mission was worth tying up key Navy-Marine assets of EUCOM’s fleet. The embassy was not in fact doing anybody in Liberia much good. Though the battle went upstairs to the State Department and the Department of Defense, months went by before it was finally ended as Liberia calmed after the assassination of the President of the country, Samuel K. Doe.
The other two African NEOs were executed by Dick Potter’s Special Operations Command, who conducted flawless operations in Sierra Leone (Operation Silver Anvil) and Zaire.
THE GULF WAR
The Persian Gulf War added tremendous and unexpected demands on top of all the changes and crises EUCOM was facing.
In the Cold War, EUCOM had always been the center of focus — the priority Unified Command. The theater had traditionally been the receiver of forces from elsewhere for NATO employment. Even during a major war (like Vietnam), the command never gave up forces. It was totally geared to take forces in, not to give forces out. That was about to change. EUCOM was now being called on to be a supporting Unified Command and to flow forces out to another theater of operations.
General Galvin immediately saw the significance of this new role for EUCOM: It was ideally suited to become a forward base supporting operations elsewhere from the well-established bases in Europe. The strong relationships among NATO nations, forged over half a century, could be used to build the strategic bridge necessary to reach both the Gulf, and, later, other world trouble spots.
The job ahead was enormous. Creating the strategic bridge meant working out air and sea lines of communications, overflight rights, diplomatic clearances, sea transit permissions. Since most of the troops and supplies for CENTCOM from the States had to flow through EUCOM’s area of responsibility, EUCOM was responsible for it all. EUCOM had to worry about getting them down there, protecting them, and coordinating with the countries involved.
It was an entirely new experience for the command, which had to redesign not only their philosophy of getting such things done but the mechanics of doing it. They had to work through all the complexities of the German rail system, barges, road transport, and convoys to the ports. They had to work through the most efficient use of all the ports — using Rotterdam and the ports on the North Sea and the Baltic as well as the more obvious Mediterranean ports.
Galvin’s direction to the staffs and commands was simple: “When you get a request for support from CENTCOM, the answer is yes. Then you can ask what the question is.”
