NATO’S AIR WAR IN PERSPECTIVE

Operation Allied Force was the most intense and sustained military operation to have been conducted in Europe since the end of World War II. It represented the first extended use of military force by NATO, as well as the first major combat operation conducted for humanitarian objectives against a state committing atrocities within its own borders. It was the longest U.S. combat operation to have taken place since the war in Vietnam, which ended in 1975. At a price tag of more than $3 billion all told, it was also a notably expensive one.[490]Yet in part precisely because of that investment, it turned out to have been an unprecedented exercise in the discriminate use of force on a large scale. Although there were some unfortunate and highly publicized cases in which innocent civilians were tragically killed, Secretary of Defense William Cohen was on point when he characterized Allied Force afterward as “the most precise application of air power in history.”[491]In all, out of some 28,000 high‑explosive munitions expended altogether over the air war’s 78‑day course, no more than 500 noncombatants in Serbia and Kosovo died as a direct result of errant air attacks, a new low in American wartime experience when compared to both Vietnam and Desert Storm.[492]

After Allied Force ended, air power’s detractors lost no time in seeking to deprecate NATO’s achievement. In a representative case in point, retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General William Odom charged that “this war didn’t do anything to vindicate air power. It didn’t stop the ethnic cleansing, and it didn’t remove Milosevic”–as though those were ever the expected goals of NATO’s air power employment to begin with.[493]Yet because of the air war’s ultimate success in forcing Milosevic to yield to NATO’s demands, the predominant tendency among most outside observers was to characterize it as a watershed achievement for air power. One account called Operation Allied Force “one of history’s most impressive air campaigns.”[494]Another suggested that if the cease‑fire held, the United States and its allies would have accomplished “what some military experts had predicted was impossible: a victory achieved with air power alone.”[495]A Wall Street Journal article declared that Milosevic’s capitulation had marked “one of the biggest victories ever for air power,” finally vindicating the long‑proclaimed belief of airmen that “air power alone can win some kind of victory.”[496]And the New York Times called the operation’s outcome “a success and more–a refutation of the common wisdom that air power alone could never make a despot back down.”[497]These and similar views were aired by many of the same American newspapers that, for the preceding 11 weeks, had doubted whether NATO’s strategy would ever succeed without an accompanying ground invasion.

Similarly, defense analyst Andrew Krepinevich, a frequent critic of claims made by air power proponents, conceded that “almost alone, American air power broke the back of the Yugoslav military and forced Slobodan Milosevic to yield to NATO’s demands. What air power accomplished in Operation Allied Force would have been inconceivable to most military experts 15 years ago.” Krepinevich further acknowledged that unlike earlier times when air power was considered by other services to be merely a support element for land and maritime operations, that was no longer the case today, since air power had clearly demonstrated its ability in Allied Force to “move beyond the supporting role to become an equal (and sometimes dominant) partner with the land and maritime forces.”[498]

It was not just outside observers, moreover, who gave such ready voice to that upbeat assessment. Shortly after the cease‑fire, President Clinton himself declared that the outcome of Allied Force “proved that a sustained air campaign, under the right conditions, can stop an army on the ground.”[499]Other administration leaders were equally quick to congratulate air power for what it had done to salvage a situation that looked, almost until the last moment, as though it was headed nowhere but to a NATO ground involvement of some sort. In their joint statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee after the air war ended, Secretary Cohen and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the JCS, described it as “an overwhelming success.”[500]

With all due respect for the unmatched professionalism of those allied aircrews who, against difficult odds, actually carried out the air effort and made it succeed in the end, it is hard to accept such glowing characterizations as the proper conclusions to be drawn from Allied Force. In fact, many of them are at marked odds with the views of those senior professionals who, one would think, would be most familiar with air power and its limitations. Shortly before the bombing effort began, the four U.S. service chiefs uniformly doubted, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, whether air strikes by themselves would succeed in compelling Milosevic to yield.[501]Indeed, the Air Force chief of staff, General Michael Ryan, admitted less than a week later: “I don’t know if we can do it without ground troops.”[502]After Allied Force was over, the former commander of NATO forces during Operation Deliberate Force, Admiral Leighton Smith, remarked that the Kosovo experience should go down as “possibly the worst way we employed our military forces in history.” Smith added that telling the enemy beforehand what you are not going to do is “the absolutely dumbest thing you can do.”[503]Former Air Force chief of staff General Ronald Fogleman likewise observed that “just because it comes out reasonably well, at least in the eyes of the administration, doesn’t mean it was conducted properly. The application of air power was flawed.” Finally, the air component commander, USAF Lieutenant General Michael Short, declared that “as an airman, I’d have done this a whole lot differently than I was allowed to do. We could have done this differently. We should have done this differently.”[504]

Indeed, few Allied Force participants were more surprised by the sudden capitulation of Milosevic than the majority of the alliance’s most senior airmen.[505]By the end of May, most USAF generals had concluded that NATO would be unable to find and destroy any more dispersed VJ troops and equipment without incurring more unintended civilian casualties.[506]General Short had reluctantly concluded that NATO’s strategy, at its existing level of intensity, was unlikely to break Milosevic’s will and that there was a clear need to ramp up the bombing effort if the alliance was to prevail.[507]True enough, on the eve of the cease‑fire, General Ryan predicted that once the air effort began seeking strategic rather than merely battlefield effects, Milosevic would wake up to the realization that NATO was taking his country apart on the installment plan and that his ultimate defeat was “inevitable.” The Air Force chief hastened to add, however, that Allied Force had not begun in “the way that America normally would apply air power,” implying his belief that there was a more sensible way of going about it.[508]As a testament to widespread doubts that the air war was anywhere close to achieving its objectives, planning was under way for a continuation of offensive air operations against Yugoslavia through December or longer if necessary–although it remains doubtful whether popular support on either side of the Atlantic would have sustained operations for that long.

In sum, Operation Allied Force was a mixed experience for the United States and NATO. Although it represented a successful application of air power in the end, it also was a less‑than‑exemplary exercise in strategy and an object lesson in the limitations of alliance warfare. Accordingly, any balanced appraisal of the operation must account not only for its signal accomplishments, but also for its shortcomings in both planning and execution, which came close to making it a disaster for the alliance.