THE FAILURE TO EMPLOY A COHERENT PLAN

As noted earlier, everything having to do with arrangements already in place when Allied Force began was driven by the assumption that the operation would entail, at most, a two‑ to three‑day series of air strikes directed at approximately 50 targets. Numerous earlier planning exercises had generated air attack options that varied in length from two to roughly ten days. None, however, came close to approaching anything as protracted as the 78 days that the air effort ultimately required. In February 1999, SACEUR directed that all existing attack plans be interwoven and that two to three days be assumed as the likely length of expected operations. Taking into account SACEUR’s guidance (“I’m only going to give you 48 hours”), the lack of stomach either in the United States or in Europe for a serious combat operation, and the past history of post–Desert Storm air power application in mere token doses by the Clinton administration, virtually no one in the planning loop questioned the short length of the expected operations.

Once NATO’s hope proved hollow, a frenetic rush ensued at SHAPE to come up with additional target nominations that could be more quickly and easily approved by NATO’s political authorities. At the end of the air war’s first week, Clark had only 100 approved targets.[441]With the bombing effort going nowhere, he accordingly went to the NAC and received blanket approval to go after certain broad classes of targets, including air defenses, command and control, fielded forces, and resupply sources, at his own discretion. Other broad target sets and individual targets of a more politically sensitive nature, however, still had to be submitted for review by the United States, Britain, and France.

Having thus been cleared to go after most military targets at will, Clark pressed his staff to identify 5,000 candidates. His target planners quickly convinced him that 5,000 legitimate aim points were not to be found in all of Serbia, whereupon Clark declared a new goal of coming up with 2,000 target candidates, a goal later derided by some planners as “T2K.”[442]That goal soon led to the targeting of objects that had no connection whatever to Yugoslavia’s military capability, what William Arkin later characterized as a “mechanical process of meticulous selection with little true military justification.”[443]Sometimes the target selection criterion entailed little more than the fact that an assigned DMPI was located safely away from civilian homes. That resulted in an approach to force employment that was “neither calibrated nor intelligible,” but instead spawned “a succession of unfocused and unconvincing air excursions–experiments in communication by detonation.”[444]It was only at that point that coalition planners began a serious and methodical target development process, in which prospective targets were categorized into four ascending tiers of collateral damage sensitivity.

Even then, there was little by way of a consistently applied strategy behind the target development process. As one U.S. officer reporting to an assignment at the CAOC midway into the operation noted afterward, he was told upon arrival: “I know you won’t believe this, but we don’t have a plan.” He learned that NATO aircrews could only attack those targets that came out of the target approval process and could never, at any time, attack an entire target set systematically in pursuit of paralysis. Target allocations, he said, were driven by rules of engagement of the moment, which, in turn, were set primarily on the basis of judgments regarding what the political traffic would bear domestically and within the alliance. Whenever an untoward event occurred that had a negative impact on public opinion, the ROE would seem to tighten almost reflexively. As a case in point, he noted, target planners were directed by the “highest levels” to cease using CBUs after Milosevic’s press staff had persuaded CNN to do a story on the CBU “terror weapon” that was being employed by NATO.[445]In the words of another officer, “nobody ever said, ‘no fooling, what we want to accomplish in this country is X.’” As a result, NATO started “throwing bombs around, hoping that objectives would materialize.” Said still another, “the targets we selected–because we had no objectives–were based on nothing other than that they had been approved. So we slung lead on targets [but] we couldn’t say, ‘the objectives are X, so we blew up Y.’”[446]

Indeed, although the methodology of effects‑based targeting had long since been elevated to a high art, most of the attack planning throughout Allied Force was not driven by desired effects but rather entailed simply parceling out sortie and munitions allocations by target category in boilerplate fashion, without much consideration given to how neutralizing a target might contribute to advancing the operation’s objectives. A typical example involved attacking refineries, factories, and bridges in ones and twos over time rather than as interconnected components of a larger entity whose simultaneous destruction might instantly undermine Yugoslavia’s capacity to function effectively. To be sure, some bridges were dropped not to curtail the flow of traffic over the bridges, but rather to halt the flow of commodities that flowed along the river under the bridges, or to cut fiber‑optic cables and other conduits that ran through the bridges. To that extent, effects‑based targeting could be said to have been successfully applied. For the most part, however, owing to the absence of any systematic effects‑based target analysis and strategy execution, NATO military chiefs had an unnecessarily hard time convincing NATO’s civilian leaders of the importance of many targets. General Jumper scored this failure when he stressed the importance of effects‑based targeting and faulted what often happened instead, namely, what he called “campaign‑by‑target‑list management,” whereby planners simply took a list of approved targets and managed them on a day‑to‑day basis.[447]

On the plus side, the methodology used in individual target planning, now a bona fide science in its own right, had evolved to a point where target analysts could predict, for any given weapon type and impact angle, how far the blast effects would extend, how far shards of glass could be expected to fly, and even at what distance they would retain enough force to penetrate skin. The use of this methodology in arriving at a precisely determined weapon yield, aim‑point placement, and weapon heading and impact angle to minimize unwanted collateral damage often proved decisive in persuading NATO’s civilian leaders to approve attacks on many of the most politically sensitive targets. The four‑tier collateral damage predictive model that had been developed toward that end was validated time and again in strike operations against sensitive targets in built‑up areas. Not only did it permit targeting successes against electrical power, POL, lines of communication, and other objects of interest in the very heart of downtown Belgrade, it also allowed for the planned preservation of systems, such as road links within Kosovo for later use by KFOR peacekeeping troops.

Nevertheless, the scramble to form a targeting cell and establish smoother planning procedures in the CAOC spotlighted gross inefficiencies in the air tasking arrangement. That led General Jumper to suggest afterward that the Air Force needed to start thinking of the air operations center “as a weapons system” and giving it the same seriousness of thought that is now given to weapon systems, recognizing that “our product in war is dead targets, and our product in peace is all that goes into generating the warrior proficiency that kills those targets in wartime”–including proficiency at planning and managing an air campaign.[448]

After the dust of Operation Allied Force had settled, the since‑retired commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, General Charles Krulak, commented from firsthand involvement that “we did not have a real strategy.”[449]Likewise, General Short remarked, in what was surely an understatement for him, that the bombing effort had produced its objectives “to some extent by happenstance rather than by design.”[450]There were later intimations that a hidden agenda of both the Clinton administration and General Clark had been not just a reversal of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but nothing less than the removal of Milosevic from power and the democratization of Yugoslavia. On that point, one NATO official later described Clark as having said, “you must understand that the objective is to take Yugoslavia away from Mr. Milosevic, so we can democratize it and modernize it. That’s our objective.”[451]But it was never communicated to subordinate staffs or made a declared goal of Allied Force.[452]

Given the unseemly rush for targets that ensued at SHAPE and elsewhere for more than a month after NATO’s initial assumptions proved groundless, it seemed more than a bit disingenuous for administration officials to have claimed afterward that although they had “hoped” that military action would end the Serb abuses in Kosovo quickly, “we knew that it was equally possible that it would not and that a sustained campaign might be necessary to stop the killing and reverse the expulsions” and that “we were prepared to do what it took to win.”[453]In what bore every hallmark of a post‑hoc attempt at historical revisionism, one official professed that “people in Washington” knew that there would be a need to attack infrastructure targets once it became clear that a three‑ to four‑day bombing effort would not compel Milosevic to settle, but because the allies, especially the French, were “not on board” initially, NATO could not start attacking Phase III targets until it had consensus about the bombing.[454]Two critics of administration policy countered convincingly that such claims by the administration that it had been prepared all along for the possible need for a prolonged air campaign were flatly belied by “the hasty improvisation that marked the bombing effort.”[455]True enough, General Clark was said on strong authority never to have suggested that just a few days of bombing would suffice to do the job, even though he did limit his planners to a short‑duration operations plan out of a conviction that the alliance’s political leaders would not sit still for anything longer.[456]But the presumptions of both NATO and the most senior officials of the Clinton administration were well reflected in U.S. interagency reports in January and February 1999, which argued confidently that “after enough of a defense to sustain his honor and assuage his backers, [Milosevic] will quickly sue for peace.”[457]