Page 121 - Leadership Lessons of the White House Fellows

THE LESSONS

to be persistent not only in your aims but also in your assessments. If you
say you need something, you have to persist until it’s either provided to you
or you’re ordered to quit asking.”
After his Fellowship was over, Clark continued to move up through the
Army’s ranks, eventually becoming a four-star general and NATO’s Supreme
Allied Commander for Europe. His greatest challenge during that tenure
would be the war in Kosovo, which was waged in 1999 in response to
Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic’s grisly ethnic cleansing crusade
in Kosovo. Clark commanded combined U.S. and NATO forces during
Operation Allied Force, which was NATO’s first major combat experience.
“When I was in the Kosovo campaign, there were a lot of people who
suggested that it would be over in a day or two, that all you had to do was
bomb them. But unfortunately that didn’t happen,” Clark said. “It became
a matter of persistence. We decided to use coercive diplomacy. We seized
control of the escalation ladder, and we established escalation dominance.
No matter what Milosevic tried to do, he was always going to be outesca-
lated by the NATO forces. We brought in more aircraft and attacked more
targets. We eventually threatened to institute a ground campaign. Ulti-
mately, despite the problems of the campaign, despite the difficulties of
coalition warfare with all these frictions and differences between America
and allied contentions of war and how to fight this one, we were able to
hold together. Nothing we did—no single target, no single strike—was
more important than maintaining a persistent NATO strategy. Through
seventy-eight days of persistent strategy implementation, we broke his will.
It was strictly a lesson in the power of persistence. You don’t give up.”
NATO forces saved an estimated one and a half million Albanians
from Milosevic’s bloody rampage, and General Wesley Clark retired from
the U.S. Army after thirty-four years of exemplary service. He ran for
president in 2003, winning the Oklahoma primary before setting aside his
campaign to help other Democrats win public office. He is also a writer,
businessman, and commentator on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.
Achieving a positive outcome in a high-stakes situation such as the
Kosovo campaign required great persistence, and the same has been true
of the war on terror. In late 2006, the Bush administration put together a
team to formulate a new strategy to counter the increased violence and
terrorist buildup in Iraq, and that team included former White House
Fellow Ahmed Saeed (WHF 04–05). During Saeed’s Fellowship, he was

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