THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
Friday, September 22, 2000

Kosovo Report Supports Calls for Separate Army Peacekeeping
Force

Military: The aggressive tactics used by combat troops are at odds with
police missions, it finds.
The conclusion follows an inquiry into civilian abuse.

By PAUL RICHTER, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON--They are taught to be prepared for an attack at any moment, to
return fire
when threatened, to win with overwhelming force.

This conditioning produces elite U.S. combat troops. But some experts have
disputed whether it is
the best preparation for the peacekeeping missions that combat troops often
take on in the world
today. And an official Army report now gives added support to their view.

The report, the result of an Army investigation, found that a few soldiers
from the elite 82nd
Airborne Division harassed, threatened and assaulted civilians during a
five-month mission in Kosovo
that ended last spring.

One important factor in their actions, the report says, was the difficulty
they had as combat-trained
troops trying to adjust to the unfamiliar demands of peacekeeping. As troops
of the 3rd Battalion of
the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment tried to make this adjustment, they
suffered "disciplinary and
leadership breakdowns" and "experienced difficulties tempering their combat
mentality," the report
says.

The 1,100-page analysis, released earlier this week, grew from an
investigation into the sexual
assault and murder of an 11-year-old ethnic Albanian girl in January. Staff
Sgt. Frank J. Ronghi was
court-martialed for the crimes and in July pleaded guilty to forced sodomy,
three indecent acts and
murder.

Separately, the Army took administrative disciplinary steps against six
enlisted men for their
misconduct in treatment of Kosovars. Three officers were given letters of
reprimand.

Army leaders for years have resisted suggestions that they set up a
separate cadre of troops
trained exclusively for peacekeeping duty. With the country unwilling to
increase the size of its
active-duty military, such a move would only drain troops who are needed to
keep the country ready
for conflicts, including big regional wars--such as the Persian Gulf
War--that could still occur.

"The best peacekeeper is a well-trained fighter," Army Gen. Henry H.
Shelton, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during an appearance in Beverly Hills last month.

But earlier this summer, a congressionally chartered study panel, the
Commission on National
Security in the 21st Century, urged the government to ease the burden on the
active duty military by
developing a "government-wide capability" for handling peacekeeping and
humanitarian crises. Texas
Gov. George W. Bush, the GOP nominee for president, also believes that
peacekeeping is "not the
mission of the future" for the active-duty forces, said John Hillen III, a
defense analyst who is a
consultant to the Bush campaign.

"Why should you take the world's best war-fighting machine and use it to
decide whose duck
belongs to whom, in a place like Kosovo?" said Hillen, not speaking for the
Bush campaign. He is a
former member of the 82nd Airborne Division.

Richard J. Dunn, a retired Army colonel, contended that combat and
peacekeeping troops develop
opposite instincts and to mingle the two missions is to hurt both.

For combat, troops need to be conditioned to "take the initiative--be
brutal--and use a lot of
firepower," he said. Peacekeepers, in contrast, need to learn to "be
cautious, think about protecting
themselves and not overreact."

The Army investigative report describes how members of the 82nd Airborne
trained for combat
and fully expected to fight when they entered the southeast corner of Kosovo
last September, three
months after the end of the Kosovo war. Before their deployment, their
training had focused on
close-quarters battle, counter-sniper fire and other small-unit infantry
tactics.

What they found instead was frustration as they sought to prevent the
ethnic Albanian majority
from surreptitiously attacking an ethnic Serb minority that in the war's
aftermath made up less than
one-third of the local population.

Their battalion commander had given them orders to locate and "neutralize"
Albanian splinter
guerrilla groups--orders that were "emphatically" out of line with the
wishes of the Army's higher-ups,
according to the report. But the troops told investigators that they found
it difficult to carry out those
orders and other routine peacekeeping duties.

"The soldiers expressed frustration in what they perceived to be their law
enforcement role," the
report says. The battalion's command sergeant major said flatly: "We are not
trained to act as police
and perform police duties."

The author of the investigative report, Col. John W. Morgan III, cited
what he said were the unit's
"overly aggressive tendencies." These were evident in the unit's slogan,
"Shoot 'Em in the Face," he
wrote, and in the soldiers' "standard operating procedure" of pointing their
M-4 carbines in the faces
of local nationals at night to illuminate their faces with the attached
spotlights.

The report quotes an American military police battalion commander
complaining about the unit's
"heavy-handed treatment" of the Kosovars and suggesting that such an
approach might not be
uncommon for combat troops.

"You always hear the old adage that this is an infantry force [and] they
just believe in force," he told
investigators.

The Army report takes the view that the unit was "not adequately trained"
for peacekeeping before
it embarked on the mission.

An Army spokesman, Maj. Tom Collins, said that the unit's deployment
orders came in last
summer at a point where it was impossible to give the soldiers the full
course of training for
peacekeeping situations. That training is traditionally spread over eight
months before deployment, he
said.

But he insisted that lack of instruction was not the key ingredient in the
unit's misconduct. These
troops were "bad apples" who "knowingly violated the rules," he said.

Collins said the fact that tens of thousands of U.S. troops continue to be
rotated through Bosnia
and Kosovo with a good record demonstrates that soldiers can shift between
combat and
peacekeeping duties.

* * *
Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this story.
Copyright 2000 Los Angeles Times