U.S. Air Force Headquarters History Office -- Thirty years ago, in August 1995, NATO launched an air campaign in the Balkan area of Bosnia and Herzegovina that was known as Operation Deliberate Force. The allied nations were attempting to break the Serbian-orchestrated siege of Sarajevo and precipitate peace talks to end the Bosnian War (1992–1995). The campaign, which included significant U.S. Air Force participation, lasted from August 30 through a bombing pause on September 14 that became permanent on the 20th. The Air Force connection continued with the peace talks, which the parties held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, resulting in a peace agreement, the Dayton Accords.
This Special Study by Kenneth H. Williams documents the complicated political, military, and social background that led the United States to send forces to the region in the 1990s as part of United Nations and NATO operations, with the U.S. Air Force playing a leading role in Operations Provide Promise, Deny Flight, Deliberate Force, and Allied Force/Noble Anvil.
This work focuses on the west-central Balkans, the land of the South Slavs, which for most of the twentieth century was known as Yugoslavia. The disintegration of that former communist country in the early 1990s resulted in eight years of warfare between former provinces, and provincial and ethnic groups within those areas. The instigator for much of the unrest was Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević, who prosecuted a very short conflict with Slovenia and longer ones with Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Kosovo. These fights displaced millions and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
Conflict was not new in the Balkans, as this study details in a historical overview section leading up to what happened in the 1990s. In fact, more than two million people in the region died unnatural deaths during the twentieth century due to conflict or war-related privation, around a million of those during World War II alone. The emergence of the Yugoslav Partisans during that conflict, also known as the National Liberation Army, brought to the fore their leader, Josip Broz, who became known as Marshal Tito. He would become the political leader of Yugoslavia from the end of the war in 1945 until his death in 1980.
From its founding in 1918, Yugoslavia had been a loose amalgam of provinces, ethnic groups, and religions. With Tito’s passing, these forces increasingly began pulling the country apart, spurred by tremendous economic problems and, by the end of the 1980s, the eagerness of some parties to follow the example of other Eastern European countries in breaking free from communism.
No unifying democratic leader emerged in Yugoslavia, however, only strongmen like Milošević of Serbia and Franjo Tudjman of Croatia. Serbia controlled the Yugoslav army, and Milošević used it in an attempt to keep all or most of Yugoslavia together, under Serbian control. Years of conflict followed, from Serb incursions in Slovenia and Croatia in mid-1991 through Milošević’s capitulation in June 1999 in the face of the UN coalition in Operation Allied Force. U.S. aircraft few 59 percent of the sorties during that conflict.
This study focuses on the complicated political military and political dynamics that played out in the Balkans during the 1990s and the roles that the United States and the U.S. Air Force played in bringing what has now been a quarter century of peace to the region, where seven independent nations exist on the land that was Yugoslavia. That peace is not without tension, however, and in fact the study was inspired by, and opens with, the current jousting between Serbia and Kosovo that has been escalating since 2021. More than 4,500 NATO peacekeeping troops remain in Kosovo as of this writing, including more than 500 U.S. service members. Aggravation there is now at a level that led the International Crisis Group in 2024 to list the Serbia-Kosovo dispute among ten areas on its watch list of “countries or regions at risk of deadly conflict or escalation.”
For those wanting to know more about tensions in the Balkans now as well as how the region came to be in such devastating disarray during the 1990s, this short book is an excellent primer.
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The Balkans, the Great Powers, and the Historical Roots of Conflict and Ongoing Tensions