LAPSES IN STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION. In the predictable rush to identify “lessons learned” that followed in the wake of the air war’s successful outcome

In the predictable rush to identify “lessons learned” that followed in the wake of the air war’s successful outcome, senior administration officials hastened to acclaim Operation Allied Force as “history’s most successful air campaign.”[394]Yet NATO leaders on both sides of the Atlantic had little to congratulate themselves about when it came to the manner in which the air war was planned and carried out. On the contrary, there was a dominant sense among both participants and observers that the desultory onset of Allied Force and its later slowness to register effects reflected some fundamental failures of allied leadership and strategy choice.

Indeed, the six years that preceded Allied Force saw a clear regression in the use of air power after the latter’s casebook performance in Desert Storm. With the singular exception of Operation Deliberate Force in 1995, a trend toward what came to be called “cruise missile diplomacy” had instead become the prevailing U.S. pattern, owing to the ability of cruise missiles to deliver a punitive message without risking the lives of any U.S. aircrews. The origins of this pattern went back to June 1993, when President Clinton first ordered the firing of several TLAMs in the dead of night against an empty governmental building in Baghdad in symbolic reprisal for confirmed evidence that Saddam Hussein had underwritten an assassination attempt against former President George Bush.

That trend was next reflected in the administration’s unwillingness or inability to use air power decisively in dealing with Bosnian Serb atrocities throughout the two years before Operation Deliberate Force, and in the costly, yet apparently ineffectual, TLAM strikes launched later by the administration against presumed assets of the terrorist Osama bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan.[395]It culminated in the three‑day Operation Desert Fox, a mini‑air operation that was executed against Iraq, to no significant consequence, at the very height of President Clinton’s impeachment trial in December 1998. Less than a year earlier, a more serious campaign plan called Operation Desert Thunder, set in motion shortly after Iraq had expelled the UN’s arms inspectors in January 1998, was aborted by President Clinton literally at the last minute, as allied strike aircraft were taxiing for takeoff, in response to the extraction by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan of an eleventh‑hour, later unfulfilled, promise from Saddam Hussein to permit UN inspections.[396]In all of these cases, the declared emphasis was merely on “degrading” or “damaging,” rather than destroying, enemy assets, so that the operation could be terminated at any moment in a manner allowing success to be declared.

That may have been the administration’s going‑in hope for Operation Allied Force as well. Not long after the effort began, however, senior U.S. military leaders began voicing off‑the‑record misgivings over the slow pace of the air operation, its restricted target base, and its rules of engagement that all but proscribed any serious application of air power. One Air Force general spoke of officers in Europe who had characterized the air war to date as “a disgrace,” adding that “senior military officers think that the tempo is so disgustingly slow it makes us look inept.”[397]Another, harking back to the initial concept of operations developed for Desert Storm, complained: “This is not Instant Thunder, it’s more like Constant Drizzle.”[398]Yet a third Air Force general, reflecting the consensus of most airmen, commented that “the hammer is working just fine. But when the blueprints have to undergo revision each day by 19 separate architects before it is determined where to drive the nail, one has to wonder what the final product is going to look like.”[399]

Indeed, the highly politicized and sometimes seemingly random targeting process was so cumbersome that Clark himself would discover from time to time that he was stymied by the system as action time neared.[400]The frequent hesitancy and indecision on the part of NATO’s political leaders, and the resultant fits and starts which that indecision inflicted on the daily target allocation machinery, ended up producing what some uniformed critics later faulted as “ad hoc targeting”: Air strikes were demanded on the same day that they had been approved, missions that had not yet been approved were assigned to the JFACC, and those same missions were later removed from the list at the last minute if they had not been approved by NATO’s civilian authorities. The resulting confusion led the commander in chief of Allied Forces in Southern Europe, Admiral James Ellis, to complain: “We don’t like this kind of process where something could be left on [the ATO] by omission.”[401]The burdensome rules and restrictions that dominated the target approval process, moreover, contributed to a defensive and reactive mind‑set among target planners and mission coordinators at the working level, who were said by some to be locked into a resigned “we can’t do it” position rather than amenable to a more creative “let’s try it” attitude.[402]

To be sure, it was not as though NATO’s uniformed professionals had been railroaded into an operation against Milosevic without having given it prior consideration. On the contrary, serious and detailed options planning for an air operation of some sort against Yugoslavia had begun at USAFE headquarters as far back as June 1998–planning that was never ultimately made use of for political reasons. Nevertheless, it became clear, shortly after the bombing effort began, that the relatively seamless performance by the coalition in Desert Storm was not to be replicated in Allied Force. Instead, what unfolded was a highly dissatisfying application of air power that showed not only the predictable fits and starts of trying to prosecute a war through an alliance of 19 members bound by a unanimity rule, but also some failures even within the operation’s U.S. component to make the most of what air power had to offer within the prevailing constraints of alliance warfare.