He was wrong about Kosovo. He wanted ground troops, remember?
March 25, 1999
‘’These bombs are not going to do the job,’’ said Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican who was a naval pilot in the Vietnam War. ‘’It’s almost pathetic. You’re just going to solidify the determination of the Serbs to resist a peace agreement.
‘’You’d have to drop the bridges and turn off the lights in Belgrade to have even a remote chance of changing Milosevic’s mind,’’ he said. ‘’What you’ll get is all the old Vietnam stuff, bombing pauses, escalation, negotiations, trouble.’’
Mr. McCain, who is expected to announce his candidacy for President next month, said the Administration was caught with unpalatable alternatives — bombing, which he said ‘’has never worked without ground forces,’’ and the use of ground forces, which he said had little support on Capitol Hill or in the nation as a whole.
‘’Many Republicans have criticized the Democrat president for a failure of resolve over the Kosovo crisis and in other earlier foreign policy crises like Bosnia and Iraq.Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, insists the United States should be preparing its troops for a ground war in case that option became necessary.McCain was one of a number of members of Congress travelling to Brussels and Aviano, Italy with Defense Secretary William Cohen in the next three days to meet top NATO leaders and visit U.S. forces involved in the operations.
http://www.alb-net.com/kcc/index24-1.htm
No, he was not wrong.
An entrenched enemy can sit underground as thousands of tons of ordnance are hurled at him all over the countryside and do quite well. World War One barrages would last for days.
In the end, you need infantry to flush the fox out of the hole.
In Kosovo, the role of that infantry fell upon the Kosovo Liberation Army as Clinton wanted to keep U.S. boots out of Kosovo.
Whether or not having that Muslim infantry (which had been classified as "terrorist") replace U.S. ground troops is a good thing is debatable.
The air campaign undoubtedly pinned down the Serbian Army making it operationally useless. However, without the KLA infantry moving in for the clean up, the Serbs could have stayed hunkered down indefinately.
Once the Serbs had to react to KLA infantry, they either had to sit in their holes and die at the hands of KLA infantry or move to meet the KLA infantry and die at the hands of U.S. air power.
The actual damage inflicted on the hidden and entrenched Serb forces by air power was not very significant.
Air power is fantastic against armies on the move and infrastructure that can't go anywhere but relatively ineffectual against dispersed, hidden and entrenched forces without out infantry to pin point targets and do the final clean up.
The old claim that "air power can win a war all by itself" has been around since the days of Billy Mitchell and the claim has yet to be vindicated except for the "war" of the conquest of the Japanese home islands after the nuclear attacks.
Before that, even raids such as the Tokyo Fire Raids that killed over 100,000 Japanese in a single night did little to bring about a Japanese surrender thereby necessitating the planned infantry invasion of Japan that was canceled only after the nuclear strikes.