NATO FINALLY ESCALATES

In what proved in hindsight to be a watershed development for Operation Allied Force, the NATO summit that convened in Washington on April 23–25 to commemorate the alliance’s 50th anniversary was pivotal in solidifying NATO’s collective determination not to lose. As President Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel Berger, later attested, NATO’s leaders unanimously agreed at the summit that “we will not lose. We will not lose. Whatever it takes, we will not lose.”[74]Part of the mounting pressure on U.S. and NATO leaders to show greater resolution emanated from a public mood on both sides of the Atlantic that was growing increasingly sensitive to, and emboldened by, the horrific privations inflicted on helpless Kosovar Albanians by their Serb oppressors, shown daily on worldwide television–a public reaction, one might add, that calls into serious question the oft‑heard assertion that Milosevic “won” the media campaign. The ugly spectacle of the ethnic cleansing push finally drove the allied leaders to turn the corner at the Washington summit, after which, as General Jumper later observed, “we really had the level of consensus we should have had to start this thing off…. After the Washington summit, there was no way that NATO was going to let itself fail.”[75]

That consensus, along with the refugee crisis, occasioned an increased NATO willingness to attack major infrastructure targets. Eventually, thanks to this heightened inclination to ramp up the pressure, NATO’s Master Target File grew from only 169 targets on the eve of the air effort to more than 976 by its end in early June.[76]Once the call for a substantially expanded target list had prevailed, the new goal became punishing Belgrade’s political and military elites, weakening Milosevic’s domestic power base, and demonstrating by force of example that he and his fellow perpetrators of the abuses in Kosovo would find no sanctuary.

Even before the Washington summit, NATO’s targeting efforts had already begun to focus gradually not just on dispersed and hidden enemy forces in Kosovo, but also on what NATO officials had come to characterize as the four pillars of Milosevic’s power–the political machine, the media, the security forces, and the economic system. New targets added to the approved list included national oil refineries, petroleum depots, road and rail bridges over the Danube, railway lines, military communications sites, and factories capable of producing weapons and spare parts.[77]The first attacks against state radio and television stations in Belgrade took place on April 21, with three cruise missiles temporarily shutting down three channels run by Milosevic’s wife, Mira Markovic, destroying the 12th through the 17th floors of the building, and killing several journalists and technicians, after NATO had issued a warning to employees to vacate the buildings. (Transmissions resumed 11 hours later, occasioning a reattack.) With that escalation, NATO finally brought the air war to Yugoslavia’s political and media elite after weeks of hesitation, indicating that it was now emboldened enough to go directly after the business interests of Milosevic’s family and friends. In the same attack, U.S. cruise missiles took out the offices of the political parties of Milosevic and his wife. Also on April 21, the Zezel bridge, the last remaining bridge over the Danube at Novi Sad, was dropped.

On April 28, a large, coordinated attack was launched against the Serb military airfield at Podgorica, with 30 munitions employed against such targets as hardened shelters, POL facilities, radar sites, and aircraft and helicopters parked in revetments. During that attack, a 4,700‑lb GBU‑28 “bunker‑buster” was dropped for the first time in Allied Force by an F‑15E on an underground aircraft and equipment storage hangar at the Pristina airfield. (By that point in the air war, F‑15Es had begun flying seven‑and‑a‑half‑hour missions into Serbia directly from RAF Lakenheath in England.)[78]Having been repeatedly attacked before with less destructive munitions, that buried hangar and the remaining aircraft, munitions, and supplies kept in it were thought to have been taken out once and for all by this weapon, an assessment which later proved false.[79]Shortly thereafter, an attack was conducted against the national command center in Belgrade, a multistory facility buried more than 100 feet underground and known to have been one of Milosevic’s occasional re‑treats.[80]Equipped with communications, medical facilities, living spaces, and enough food to last more than a month, it was designed to accommodate the entire Yugoslav general staff, top defense officials, and other civilian authorities.[81]

Despite these ramped‑up attacks, however, the French leadership remained critical of many proposed strike options. In particular, President Jacques Chirac opposed any attacks against Belgrade’s electrical power grid with high‑explosive bombs that would physically render it inoperative for any length of time. In an effort to get around Chirac’s resistance, U.S. planners worked behind the scenes with French officers in search of more palatable alternatives. As reported in a later U.S. press account, they finally came up with the idea of using the CBU‑104(V)2/B cluster munition, formerly referred to by some U.S. Air Force officers as the CBU‑94, which could shut down Belgrade’s power source for at least a few hours by depositing carbon‑graphite threads on the electrical grid, an option to which Chirac finally consented.[82]

Thanks to that modest breakthrough, in possibly the most consequential attack of the air war up to that point, USAF F‑117s reportedly dropped CBU‑104s on five transformer yards of Yugoslavia’s electrical power grid–at Obrenovac, Nis, Bajina Basta, Drmno, and Novi Sad–during the early morning hours of May 3, temporarily cutting off electricity to 70 percent of the country. These munitions were similar to weapons delivered by TLAMs against the Baghdad electrical power network during the opening hours of Operation Desert Storm. The effects were achieved by means of scattered reels of treated wire which unwound in the air after being released as BLU‑114/B submunitions, draping enemy high‑voltage power lines like tinsel and causing them to short out.[83]The announced intent of that escalated attack was to shut down the installations that provided electrical power to the VJ’s 3rd Army in Kosovo to disrupt military communications and confuse Serb air defenses.[84]Very likely an unspoken intent was also to tighten the air operation’s squeeze on the Serbian political leadership and rank and file.[85]

Whatever the case, the attack moved NATO over a new threshold and brought the war, for the first time, directly to the Serbian people. By the end of the seventh week, there began to be reports of Yugoslav officials openly admitting that the country was on the verge of widespread hardship because of the air war’s mounting damage to the nation’s economy, which had already been weakened by almost four years of international sanctions imposed for Serbia’s earlier role in the war in Bosnia.[86]The destruction of one factory in Krujevac that produced automobiles, trucks, and munitions resulted in 15,000 people being put out of work, plus 40,000 more who were employed by the factory’s various subcontractors. Attacks against other factories had similar effects on the Yugoslav economy. By the time Allied Force had reached its halfway point, the bombing of infrastructure targets had halved Yugoslavia’s economic output and deprived more than 100,000 civilians of jobs. Local economists reported that the effect was more damaging than that of the successive Nazi and allied bombing of Yugoslavia during World War II, when the country was far more rural in its economic makeup. A respected economist at Belgrade University who coordinated a group of economists from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Mladjan Dinkic, called the results of the bombing an “economic catastrophe,” adding that while the Serb population would not die of hunger, “our industrial base will be destroyed and the size of the economy cut in half.”[87]

Only during the last two weeks of Allied Force, however, did NATO finally strike with real determination against Serbia’s electrical power generating capability, a target set that had been attacked in Baghdad from the very first days of Desert Storm. The earlier “soft” attacks at the beginning of May with graphite filament bombs against the transformer yards of Yugoslavia’s main power grid had caused a temporary disruption of the power supply by shorting out transformers and disabling them rather than destroying them. But this time, in perhaps the single most attention‑getting strike of the entire air war up to that point, the Yugoslav electrical grid was severely damaged over the course of three consecutive nights starting on May 24. Those attacks, directed against electrical power facilities and related targets in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Nis, the three largest cities in Serbia, shut off the power to 80 percent of Serbia, leaving millions without electricity or water service. They affected the heart of Yugoslavia’s IADS, as well as the computers that ran its banking system and other important national consumers of electricity.[88]

As evidence that these infrastructure attacks were making their effects felt, the early street dancing and carefully orchestrated demonstrations of studied outrage against NATO in response to its earlier pinprick attacks became displaced by a manifest weariness on the part of most residents. Clark continued to stress that the top priority was to destroy the VJ’s 3rd Army or run it out of Kosovo. He also acknowledged, however, the goal of disrupting the everyday life of Serb citizens.[89]By late May, NATO military commanders had received authorization to attack Yugoslavia’s civilian telephone and computer networks in an effort to sever communications between Belgrade and Kosovo.[90]In all of this, a long‑discredited premise of classic air power theory, namely, that the bombing of civilian infrastructure would eventually prompt a popular reaction, seemed to be showing some signs of validity. Until that key turning point, Clark later observed, Operation Allied Force had been “the only air campaign in history in which lovers strolled down riverbanks in the gathering twilight and ate at outdoor cafes and watched the fireworks.”[91]