THE AIR WAR’S FAILINGS

Despite these accomplishments, enough discomfiting surprises emanated from the Allied Force experience to suggest that instead of basking in the glow of air power’s largely single‑handed successful performance, air warfare professionals should give careful thought to the hard work that still needs to be done to realize air power’s fullest potential in joint warfare. As in the case of the various positive outcomes noted above, many of these surprises entailed shortfalls at the tactical and operational levels. As previous chapters have documented in detail, the targeting process was inefficient to a fault, command and control arrangements were excessively complicated, and enemy IADS challenges indicated much unfinished work for SEAD planners. In addition, elusive enemy ground forces belied the oft‑cited claim of airmen that air power has arrived at the threshold of being able to find, fix, track, target, and engage any object on the surface of the earth.[521]

The biggest failures of Allied Force likewise occurred in the realm of strategy and execution. First, despite its successful outcome and through no fault of allied airmen, the bombing effort was clearly a suboptimal application of air power. The incremental plan chosen by NATO’s leaders risked squandering much of the capital that had been built up in air power’s account ever since its ringing success in Desert Storm nearly a decade before. General Clark’s early comment that NATO would “grind away” at Milosevic rather than hammer him hard and with determination attested powerfully to the watered‑down nature of the strikes.[522]By meting out those strikes with such hesitancy, NATO’s leaders remained blind to the fact that air power’s very strengths can become weaknesses if the air weapon is used in a way that undermines its credibility.[523]Almost without question, the first month of underachievement in the air war convinced Milosevic that he could ride out the NATO assault.

Indeed, the way Operation Allied Force commenced violated two of the most enduring axioms of military practice: the importance of achieving surprise and the criticality of keeping the enemy unclear as to one’s intentions. The acceptance by NATO’s leaders of a strategy that preemptively ruled out a ground threat and envisaged only gradually escalating air strikes to inflict pain was a guaranteed recipe for downstream trouble, even though it was the only strategy that, at the time, seemed politically workable. For U.S. defense leaders to have suggested afterward that NATO’s attacks against fielded enemy ground troops “forced [those troops] to remain largely hidden from view… and made them ineffective as a tactical maneuver force” and that its SEAD operations forced Milosevic to “husband his antiaircraft missile defenses to sustain his challenge [to NATO air operations]” was to make a virtue of necessity on two counts.[524]First, it was the absence of a credible NATO ground threat that enabled Milosevic’s troops to disperse and hide, making it that much more difficult for NATO’s aircrews to find and attack them. The ineffectiveness of those troops as a tactical maneuver force was quite beside the point, considering that tactical maneuver was not required for the ethnic cleansing those troops managed to sustain quite handily throughout most of the air war’s duration. Second, it would have been more honest to say that the Serb tactic of carefully conserving antiaircraft missile defenses throughout Allied Force made those defenses a continuing threat to NATO’s freedom to operate in Yugoslav airspace, undermining the effectiveness of many sorties as a result.

In fairness to the U.S. and NATO officials most responsible for air operations planning, many of the differences between Allied Force and the more satisfying Desert Storm experience were beyond the control of the allies, and they should be duly noted in any critique of the way the former was conducted. To begin with, as discussed earlier, bad weather was the rule, not the exception. Second, variegated and forested terrain limited the effectiveness of many sensors. Third, Serb SAM operators were more proficient and tactically astute than those of Iraq. Fourth, alliance complications were greater by far in Allied Force than were the largely inconsequential intracoalition differences during the Gulf War. Finally, because the goal of Allied Force was more to compel than to destroy, it was naturally more difficult for senior decisionmakers to measure and assess the air war’s daily progress, since there was no feedback mechanism to indicate how well the bombing was advancing toward coercing Milosevic to comply with NATO’s demands. It was largely for that reason that most Allied Force planners were surprised when he finally decided to capitulate.

That said, the most important question with respect to Allied Force has to do less with platform or systems performance than with the more basic strategy choices that NATO’s leaders made and what those choices may suggest about earlier lessons forgotten–not only from Desert Storm and Deliberate Force but also from Vietnam. Had Milosevic been content to hunker down and wait out NATO’s bombing effort, he could easily have challenged the long‑term cohesion and staying power of the alliance. Fortunately for the success of Allied Force, by opting instead to accelerate his ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, he not only united the West in revulsion but also left NATO with no alternative but to dig in for the long haul, both to secure an outcome that would enable the repatriation of nearly a million displaced Kosovars and to ensure its continued credibility as a military alliance.

Because of the almost universal assumption among NATO’s leaders that the operation would last no more than two to four days, the first 30 days of the air war were badly underresourced. Among the results of this erroneous assumption were erratic procedures for target nomination and review, too few combat aircraft on hand for conducting both night and day operations, and pressures from SACEUR for simultaneous attacks not only on fixed infrastructure targets but also on fielded VJ forces. Relatedly, there was an inadequate airspace management plan and no flexible targeting cell in the CAOC for servicing SACEUR’s sudden demands to attack VJ forces in the KEZ. All of these problems, it bears stressing, were a reflection not on NATO’s air power or its mechanisms for using air power per se, but rather on the strategy choices that were made (or, perhaps more correctly, forgone) by NATO’s political leaders.

To be sure, allied capabilities for detecting and engaging fleeting enemy ground‑force targets improved perceptibly as the weather grew more agreeable with approaching summer and as the KLA became more active. Nevertheless, persistent problems with the flexible targeting effort spotlighted further work that needs to be done. The CAOC went into the operation without an on‑hand cadre of experienced target planners accustomed to working together harmoniously. Accordingly, General Short was forced to resort to a “pickup team” during the first month of operations against VJ forces in Kosovo. The fusion cell also frequently lacked ready access to all‑source reconnaissance information. At first, data from special operations forces and the Army’s TPQ‑36 and TPQ‑37 firefinder radars in Albania were not provided to the CAOC. Indeed, there was an absence of allied ground‑force representation in the CAOC until the air war’s very end. Other needs that became apparent included regularized and centralized mensuration of target coordinates as new target candidates were detected and became available for prompt servicing.

Beyond that, the very nature of Operation Allied Force and the manner in which it was conducted from the highest levels both in Washington and in Brussels placed unique stresses on the JFACC’s ability to command and control allied air operations. For example, General Short and his staff had to contend on an unrelenting basis with rapid shifts in political priorities and SACEUR guidance, as well as with the myriad pressures occasioned by a random and nonsystematic flow of assets to the theater, ranging from combat aircraft to staff augmentees in the CAOC. All of these problems emanated from a lack of consensus among the top decisionmakers on both sides of the Atlantic as to what the air effort’s military goals were at any given moment and what it would take to “prevail.” The de facto “no friendly loss” rule, stringent collateral damage constraints, and the absence of a NATO ground threat to force VJ troops to concentrate and thus make them easier targets further limited the rational employment of available in‑theater assets and placed a premium on accurate information and the use of measures that took a disconcertingly long time to plan, carry out, and evaluate.[525]One realization driven home by these and other shortcomings was the need for planners in the targeting cell to train together routinely in peacetime before a contingency requires them to react at peak efficiency from the very start.