GRADUALISM AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

The greatest frustration of Operation Allied Force was its slow start and equally slow escalation. A close second entailed the uniquely stringent rules of engagement that limited the effectiveness of many combat sorties. Indeed, the dominance of political inhibitions was a signal feature of the air war from start to finish. Because it was an operation performed essentially for humanitarian purposes, neither the United States nor any of the European members of NATO saw their security interests threatened by ongoing events in Yugoslavia. Because the perceived stakes were not high, at least at the outset, any early commitment by NATO to a ground offensive was all but out of the question. Moreover, both the anticipated length of the bombing effort and the menu of targets attacked were bound to be matters of often heated contention.

On top of that, the avoidance of noncombatant fatalities among Yugoslavia’s civilian population was rightly of paramount concern to NATO’s leaders, further aggravating the complications caused by poor target‑area weather throughout much of the air war. As USEUCOM’s director of operations, USAF Major General Ronald Keys, later noted, while there was no single target whose elimination might have won the war, there was a profusion of targets that could potentially have lost the war had they been struck, either intentionally or inadvertently. In the presence of factors like these that could have split the alliance at any time, NATO’s unity was a sine qua non for the success of Allied Force. Not surprisingly, the Serbs were aware of that fact and were frequently able to exploit it.[526]

Acceptance of these realities, however, hardly eased the discomfiture among air warfare professionals over the fact that NATO’s self‑imposed restraints were forcing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs. One analyst, reporting the results of interviews conducted in late April with some two dozen senior active and retired Air Force generals, reported a collective sense of “disappointment that air power is being so poorly employed [and] frustration over the false promise of a perfect war and zero casualties.” His interviews revealed a deep‑seated concern that “with far too much political micromanagement but without a clear strategy and the aid of ground forces, the air war… is destined to fail.” Worst of all, the generals complained, the United States and NATO did not take advantage of the shock effect of air power. Said retired General Charles Horner: “We are training [the Serbs] to live with air attacks.” Said another Air Force general: “Air planners are not planning the air operation. They are being issued targets each day for the next day’s operations, too late to do rational planning.”[527]

There was no less disaffection among air warfare professionals at the working level. As one U.S. pilot flying combat sorties complained in an email message that made its way to public light: “This has been a farce from the start. We have violated every principle of campaign air power I can think of.” The pilot hastened to add that “over‑zealous air power advocates have, since Desert Storm, sold us as something we are not. Air power can do a lot of things, [but] it cannot change the mind of a dictator who has his people’s tacit support.” Nevertheless, he concluded, “it is not the USAF’s fault that the air campaign is not going as well as Desert Storm. Hitting 5–8 targets a night, with sequential [as opposed to] parallel operations, is not the way to prosecute a campaign.”[528]

The UK Ministry of Defense’s director of operations in Allied Force denied that there was ever a hard‑and‑fast rule that NATO must not lose an aircraft under any circumstances.[529]Yet NATO’s leaders had powerful incentives to avoid any circumstances that might result in friendly aircrews being killed in action or taken prisoner of war, since the continued cohesion of the alliance was the latter’s center of gravity and since any such losses would have been precisely the sorts of untoward events most likely to undermine it. Indeed, if there was any unwritten “prime directive” that guided NATO’s strategy throughout the course of Allied Force, it was the preservation of its own solidity, especially during the air war’s critical early weeks. In light of that concern, General Short admitted toward the end of May that zero losses was a primary goal in fact if not in name.[530]Not only would a split in the alliance have undermined the air war’s effort against Belgrade, it would have raised fundamental questions about the future viability of NATO as a military alliance. It naturally followed that an incremental bombing effort and least‑common‑denominator targeting had to be accepted until it became clearer throughout the alliance that NATO was committed for the long haul.[531]

Although the manner in which Allied Force was conducted fell short of the ideal use of air power, it suggests that gradualism may be here to stay if U.S. leaders ever again intend to fight wars for marginal or amorphous interests with as disparate a set of allies as NATO. As the vice chairman of the JCS at the time, USAF General Joseph Ralston, noted after the air effort ended, air warfare professionals will continue to insist, and rightly so, that a massive application of air power will be more effective than gradualism. Yet, Ralston added, “when the political and tactical constraints imposed on air use are extensive and pervasive–and that trend seems more rather than less likely–then gradualism may be perceived as the only option.”[532]General Jumper likewise intimated that the United States may have little choice but to accept the burdens of an incremental approach as an unavoidable cost of working with shaky allies and domestic support in the future: “It is the politics of the moment that will dictate what we can do…. If the limits of that consensus mean gradualism, then we’re going to have to find a way to deal with a phased air campaign. Efficiency may be second.”[533]

Insofar as gradualism promises to be the wave of the future, it suggests that airmen will need to discipline their natural urge to bridle whenever politicians hamper the application of a doctrinally pure campaign strategy and to recognize and accept instead that political considerations, after all, determine–or should determine–the way in which campaigns and wars are fought. This does not mean that military leaders should surrender to political pressures without first making their best case for using force in the most effective and cost‑minimizing way. It does, however, stand as an important reminder that war is ultimately about politics and that civilian control of the military is an inherent part of the democratic tradition. It follows that although airmen and other warfighters are duty‑bound to try to persuade their civilian superiors of the merits of their recommendations, they also have a duty to live with the hands they are dealt and to bend every effort to make the most of them in an imperfect world.[534]It also follows that civilian leaders at the highest levels have an equal obligation to try to stack the deck in such a manner that the military has the best possible hand to play and the fullest possible freedom to play it to the best of its ability. This means expending the energy and political capital needed to develop and enforce a strategy that maximizes the probability of military success. In Allied Force, that was not done by the vast majority of the top civilian leaders on either side of the Atlantic.[535]

On the plus side, the air war’s successful outcome despite its many frustrations suggested that U.S. air power may now have become capable enough, at least in some circumstances, to underwrite a strategy of incremental escalation irrespective of the latter’s inherent inefficiencies. What made the gradualism of Allied Force more bearable than that of the earlier war in Vietnam is that NATO’s advantages in stealth, precision standoff attack, and electronic warfare meant that it could fight a one‑sided war against Milosevic with near‑impunity and achieve the desired result, even if not in the most ideal way.[536]That was not an option when U.S. air power was a less developed tool than it is today.

On this point, Admiral Ellis, a career fighter pilot himself, was no less disturbed by the air war’s lethargic pace than was his air component commander, General Short, or any other airmen on down the line. However, mindful of the long‑standing political and bureaucratic rule of thumb that “if a problem has no solution, it is no longer a problem but a fact,” he recognized that ideal‑world solutions were unworkable in the Allied Force setting and that flexibility was required in applying air doctrine in a difficult situation. As it turned out, NATO conducted its bombing effort in a way that was not maximally efficient, yet that worked in the end to foil Serb strategy, which was to wait out the alliance and strive mightily to fragment it. Because the escalation was gradual over time, the coalition succeeded in holding together. Because NATO used highly conservative tactics, it lost no aircrews and civilian casualties and collateral damage were kept to a minimum. In effect, a compromise was struck in which the air war was intense enough to maintain constant pressure on Milosevic yet measured enough to keep NATO from falling apart. Either the loss of friendly lives beyond token numbers or an especially gruesome spectacle of collateral damage could have been more than enough to incline at least some key allies to call it quits. Noting further that NATO fought in this case to establish conditions rather than to “win” in the classic sense, Ellis added that a campaign strategy that would have allowed Desert Storm–like intensity and scale of target attacks to be employed was simply never in the cards.

By the same token, RAF Air Commodore Andrew Vallance pointed out that because a key attraction of air power to civilian decisionmakers is its adaptability for accommodating different situations in different ways as needed, “the purist ‘one size fits all’ approach to air doctrine needs to be moderated. Existing air doctrine is fine for high‑intensity conflicts, but more subtle operational doctrines are needed in the complex world of peace support.”[537]Echoing this point, Karl Mueller observed that “sometimes strategists will be called upon to execute gradually escalatory air campaigns whether they approve of the concept or not, and thus they should develop some expertise in the art form even if they abhor it.”[538]With the air weapon now largely perfected for such canonical situations as halting massed armored assaults, it needs to be further refined for handling messier, less predictable, and more challenging combat situations featuring elusive or hidden enemy ground forces, restrictive rules of engagement, disagreeable weather, the enemy use of human shields, lawyers in the targeting loop as a matter of standard practice, and diverse allies with their own political agendas, all of which were characteristic features of the Kosovo crisis. Moreover, although NATO’s political leaders arguably set the bar too high with unrealistic expectations about collateral damage avoidance, it seems clear that the Western democracies have long since passed the point where they can contemplate using air power, or any force, for that matter, in as unrestrained a way as was characteristic of World War II bombing. Admiral Ellis noted that NATO barely averted legal consequences prompted by the collateral damage incidents that occurred in Allied Force. This implies that along with new precision‑attack capability goes new responsibility, and air warfare professionals must now understand that they will be held accountable.[539]

On this point, one can fairly suggest that both SACEUR and his JFACC were equally prone throughout Allied Force to remain wedded to excessively parochial views of their preferred target priorities, based on implicit faith in the inherent correctness of their respective services’ doctrinal teachings. They might more effectively have approached Milosevic instead as a unique rather than generic opponent, conducted a serious analysis of his distinctive vulnerabilities, and then tailored a campaign plan aimed at attacking those vulnerabilities directly, irrespective of canonical air or land warfare solutions for all seasons. A year after the air war, in a measured reflection on the recurrent tension that afflicted the interaction of Clark and Short, Admiral Ellis suggested that the failure of all the services to advance beyond their propensity to teach only pristine, service‑oriented doctrines at their respective war colleges reflected a serious “cultures” problem and that the services badly need to plan for and accommodate the unexpected and the unconventional, both of which were daily facts of life during Operation Allied Force.[540]

Finally, the probability that coalition operations in the future will be the rule rather than the exception suggests a need, to the fullest extent practicable, to work out basic ground rules before a campaign begins, so that operators, once empowered, can implement the agreed‑upon plan with a minimum of political friction. As it was, Allied Force attested not only to the strategy legitimation that comes from the force of numbers provided by working through a coalition, but also to the limitations of committee planning and least‑common‑denominator targeting. General Short commented that the need for 19 approvals of target nominations was “counterproductive” and that an appropriate conclusion was that “before you drop the first bomb or fire the first shot, we need to lock the political leaders up in a room and have them decide what the rules of engagement will be so they can provide the military with the proper guidance and latitude needed to prosecute the war.”[541]As it was, Short later said in his PBS interview, the rules continuously ebbed and flowed in reaction to events over the air war’s 78 days: “You can go to downtown Belgrade, oh my God, you’ve hit the Chinese embassy, now there’s a five‑mile circle going around downtown Belgrade into which you cannot go.” As a result, he complained, strikers often ended up “bombing fire hydrants and stoplights because there just weren’t targets of great value left that weren’t in a sanctuary.”[542]