Thread with excerpts from Balkan Battlegrounds: A Military History of the Yugoslav Conflict, 1990-1995, written by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is in the public domain and can be found here: books.google.com/books/about/Ba
The combatants in the Yugoslav conflict were largely regular armies led by professionals, not bands of thugs. Even if some began as political militias or reservists, they professionalized over time and fought increasingly complex conventional operations.
Afraid of suffering a rapid Soviet invasion similar to Czechoslovakia, Tito established a militia (Territorial Defense) similar to those of Austria and Switzerland. However, this mostly served to provide an armed force to the republican governments.
The Slovenian independence movement was aided by the fact that it, alone among the Yugoslav republics, was largely ethnically homogeneous, along with being the most economically developed part of the country.
After the Yugoslav government attempted to confiscate weapons from Slovenian Territorial Defense, they began to establish a shadow army, controlled by a secret cells within the the TO and police.
Slovenia declared independence one day before it had announced it would, and immediately seized control of border checkpoints. This gave them control of customs revenue, enhanced their legitimacy as a state, and forced federal troops to attack defensive positions.
The destruction of a few federal helicopters and tanks in the early days of the fighting had minimal military impact, but was a huge boost to the morale of Slovenian forces.
Yugoslav military intelligence believed that the Slovenians would not fight, and accordingly "deployed for a show of force and not a true combat mission." Federal soldiers had many armored vehicles but rapidly ran out of fuel, food, and ammunition due to poor planning.
The Slovenian Defense Minister studied the Winter War between Finland and the USSR for inspiration on how to defeat tanks with light infantry. This was put to good use during the fighting.
Croatia also worked to create a military force, but since its Territorial Defense had been successfully disarmed it was based around the police. Paramilitary police units were expanded into a new National Guard, but they lacked heavy weapons or an effective command structure.
Most Croatian Serb forces were less effective in combat than their Croatian enemies in the early days of fighting, but this was made up for by the latter's poor command and control and inability to coordinate large operations.
When the Croatians began to go on the offensive against federal barracks, they were able to seize enough heavy weapons for a "quantum leap" in their capabilities. This would prove vital in their ability to hold off future attacks by federal forces.
The federal military planned an offensive into Croatia, but was undermined from above by their political leadership and from below by their conscripts, both of whom were largely Serb nationalists and had little desire to hold Yugoslavia together.
The offensive bogged down in the town of Vukovar, which inadvertently became the JNA's main effort as they threw more units into it. Limited by their lack of infantry, the battle saw the first use of ultranationalist Serb volunteers under JNA command.
The taking of Dubrovnik by federal forces featured "exceptionally thorough" looting. This can be attributed to the large numbers of hastily organized and poorly led volunteers, mostly from impoverished peasant backgrounds.
When Bosnian Muslims and Croats avoided military service in the JNA en masse, this not only harmed the JNA's offensive into Croatia but also made it more sympathetic to Serb nationalism, as it was increasingly forced to rely on nationalist militias.
Some details on the covert assistance program for Bosnian Serb paramilitaries by the Serbian security service.
The primary Croatian militia in Bosnia, the HVO, "was for all practical purposes a subordinate command of the Croatian Army" with a chain of command that ran "all the way back to Tudjman's desk in Zagreb."
The notorious Bosnian Serb Army, formed from Serb militias and the remnants of the JNA in Bosnia, was very effective on the battlefield. However, the quality of its combat leadership, doctrine, staff work, and firepower was undermined by a lack of numbers.
The Bosnian Serb Army brought the same technical competence to war crimes that it did to combat. The scale of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia would have been possible without military organization.
One of the largest offensives of the Bosnian War ended with a Bosnian Serb breakthrough of Croatian lines that many claim was the result of a secret political deal. There is no direct evidence for this but the CIA analysts find the success of the Croatian withdrawal suspicious.
The siege of Sarajevo featured the familiar clash of an infantry force lacking in heavy weapons against a mechanized force with a shortage of dismounts. Criminal gangs were some of the bravest of the city's defenders, even if they undermined law and order.
Croatian forces were very competent on the battlefield as early as 1992, able to conduct well planned offensives that not only integrated infiltration by recon units, indirect fire, envelopments, and amphibious landings but also effectively served strategic ends.
The Bosnian Army made major reforms in 1993, establishing training schools, enforcing discipline, purging criminals, and going on the offensive.
Criminal gangs helped defend Sarajevo, but they extorted civilians and stole UN equipment. When the Bosnian government tried to suppress them, they tortured policemen to death and took civilians hostage before being defeated.
The tenuous Bosnian-Croat alliance was based mostly on "enemy of my enemy" and broke apart in 1993. The HVO launched offensives into Muslim territory and attempted to ethnically cleanse the civilian population.
Now fighting a two front war, the Bosnian Army went on the offensive, now with the aid of brave but undisciplined Islamist fighters. They began to push back Bosnian Croat forces in fierce urban combat.
Despite its reforms, the Bosnian Army still lacked the heavy weapons of its Serb enemies. It developed a doctrine based on attrition, with infiltration by small SOF units followed up by mass infantry assaults.
In both the Croatian and Bosnian Serb republics, there was tension between the nationalist political leadership and the ex-Yugoslav Army officers running the military, who they saw as communist.
The Croatian leadership believed it was a political imperative to eliminate Serb Krajina within a week, before reinforcements could arrive from Serbia or international outrage could mount. They developed a "blitzkrieg" doctrine that would culminate in Operation Storm.
One of the reasons the Bosnian Serbs were able to take Srebranica was that the cut off Bosnian defenders had not been able to benefit from the improvements in the rest of the army. Their charismatic commander had been sent to a command course, and wasn't present during the attack
This is almost unbelievable. One of the reasons NATO air support was denied to the UN defenders of Srebrenica was that they filled out the wrong form, requesting "air strikes" instead of "close air support" and had to resubmit it.
The horrific breakout of Srebrenica by Bosnian soldiers and Muslim civilians. The hallucinations and behavior of some of the members of the column has led to suggestions that a chemical agent, BZ, had been used on them, although no traces of it were ever found.
The Muslim defenders are often criticized for trusting in the UN to protect the city. The CIA analysts admit that a heroic last stand may have been a more honorable option, but argue that they had no real chance of holding off the Serb attack.
Strategic analysis of Operation Storm. Although credit is often (rightfully) given to the improvements in the Croatian Army for the rapid destruction of Serb Krajina, the analysts also point to the contributions of their Bosnian allies and the unwillingness of Serbia to intervene
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