Historical Methods

I picked this topic because it was about the genesis of several wars which I knew very little about, despite my attention to Stokes. I knew very little about the Ten Days war, the War in the Balkans, and the various other wars that followed like Bosnia and Kosovo. In addition, the topic of asymmetric warfare is something I’d wish I didn’t hear about everyday, but it is a reality for we few and proud who choose to serve or are currently serving. As I continued to research on this subject I drew parallels between several issues and other more blatant issues (I assumed to be, at least) were not as they seemed initially. Some parallels would be the issue of media in war. It doesn’t matter where you are from or how many degrees you have, people will always listen to the media and what it tells us. The media shapes our reality so if we are watching Fox News, we tend to think things are going super duper in the war on terror and conversely if we are watching CNN. Well, Jelko Kacin who was the information minister threw the media a bone by telling them about the latest victories of the TO, like burned out vehicles which when viewed appear to show that the TO is kicking butt and taking names, when really the vehicle was abandoned and some kids set fire to it. Personally, I had the mindset that this war was a guerrilla war and ostensibly it is, but it in many ways it was nothing more than an organized armed protest (a few steps above the G8 or World Bank summit protests). What it I got out of my readings were that the Slovenes took advantage of their situation, both sides escalated tensions, there was a catharsis of sorts in the form of sporadic gun fire and the occasional tank/APC being immobilized, that immobilized armor being recorded, the JNA having no real plan and then everyone just going home because Slovenia couldn’t be suppressed. So many authors built the conflict up, but it wasn’t really a classic David versus Goliath situation like the Six-Day War between Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Iraq versus Israel, and many other wars in history. So right there, some sources like Gow and Carmichael and several others pointed out the fact that this war was largely a propaganda campaign against the weaker and ignorant JNA, which should change people’s opinions on the Ten Day war itself. This while other authors either ignore or haven’t found information validating that this war was largely a war for show. So my personal conclusions/bias doesn’t necessarily reflect the material I read, nor can I back the simplification up by facts because so much of it is over simplified, but that is where I’m coming from.

Originally my plan was to articulate the ideas I had in my paper and shed some light on new facts that were recently uncovered from other historians on the issue of the Ten Days War between the JNA and TDF. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. My argument is that the success of the Slovene resistance was the result of the Yugoslav state’s weakness, which is directly attributable to a series of decentralization efforts that benefited the TDFs and their autonomy throughout Yugoslavia. Moreover, that success was inevitable given the circumstances around 25 June 1991. The JNA chose to act against the Slovene guerrillas who had the desire to be independent from Yugoslavia, the Slovenes’ TO was trained in smaller unit tactics, were more agile and mobile, had first hand knowledge of their own country, and worse, had actual Slovenes and sympathizers within the JNA feeding them intelligence. On the other hand, the JNA had a plan, but the plan was specious and shortsighted. Their incursion was predicated on the assumption that the Slovenes would capitulate under the Yugoslav Army’s might. It was not the will of the JNA soldier to fight or die for their country, rather it was the officers at the higher echelons that desired the soldier to fight for their own control over the Yugoslav state, that was dying.