"If we'd had a division of Gurkhas in Albania when the war began, it wouldn't have taken us almost three months to get to Pristina."
NATO seems to have won in Kosovo, but no one could call it a very glorious victory — and to be fair, not even the tabloids have tried very hard to do so. Since the war began, headlines about "glory" and "heroes" have remained in their usual place on the sports pages.
But as John Keegan has written, the apparent victory of NATO air power does mark a critically important moment in military history. Some 15,000 Serbian soldiers have been killed and wounded without a single NATO casualty to date —a result which recalls 19th century colonial victories like Ulundi or Omduran, where, respectively, thousands of Zulus and Sudanese were cut down by higher technology for a mere handful of British casualties.
But while air power may in some circumstances win campaigns, to control the peace, ground forces have to occupy territory; and ground forces can be attacked if not by frontal assault then by terrorists and urban guerrillas. So we still need good fighting infantry.