Attacks carried out by NATO aircrews the second night were described as “significantly heavier” than those the first night. Targets included the VJ barracks at Urosevac and Prizren in Kosovo; the military airfields at Nis in southern Serbia and Golubovci near Podgorica, Montenegro; and other Serb military facilities near Trstenik and Danilovgrad.[20] That night, fewer than 10 SAMs were fired, none of which succeeded in scoring a hit. The third afternoon, a USAF F-15C downed two more MiG-29s, which evidently had lost contact with their ground controller and inadvertently strayed into Bosnian airspace. Although their intended NATO targets were never positively determined, it was the subsequent conclusion of the allied air commander, Lieutenant General Short, that the Serb pilots had simply lost any semblance of air situation awareness and, as a result, set themselves up as easy prey for the F-15.[21]
Third-night attacks included targets in Mali Mokri Lug, Ayala, Vozdovac, and, for the first time, nearer to the immediate outskirts of Belgrade. That night, 40 percent of the targets attacked were in Kosovo, as opposed to only 20 percent the first two nights.[22] These attacks, however, just like the ones that took place the preceding two nights, caused no serious inconvenience for the Serbs. On the contrary, the gradually mounting intensity of the air war merely allowed the Serbs to adjust to a new level of pain, while pressing ahead with what they had planned all along: to redouble their effort to run as many ethnic Albanian civilians as possible out of Kosovo and thus be able to take an unobstructed shot at the KLA once and for all.
This escalated ethnic cleansing should not have come as a complete surprise to NATO. Weeks earlier, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), George Tenet, had predicted that VJ and MUP forces might respond to a NATO bombing campaign with precisely such a strategy. Similarly, U.S. military leaders had argued behind closed doors that air power alone would not suffice to force Milosevic to back away from such a move.[23] The CIA had reportedly learned as early as fall 1998 that Belgrade was planning a move with tanks and artillery, called Operation Horseshoe, to drive ethnic Albanians over the southern and western borders of Kosovo as soon as the snow melted in the spring. The KLA would thus be stripped of a surrounding civilian population and exposed to direct attack.[24] The Serb incentive for such a move was not difficult to fathom, considering that the heavily radicalized KLA, which represented the aspirations of most Kosovar Albanians, was (and remains) committed to the establishment of an independent Kosovo—and a Greater Albania over the longer term.[25]
In any event, Milosevic’s unleashing of large-scale atrocities in Kosovo and his truculent defiance of NATO denied the alliance the quick settlement it had counted on and left both NATO and the Clinton administration with no alternative but to continue pressing the air attacks until NATO unambiguously prevailed. Because NATO’s leaders on both sides of the Atlantic had banked on a quick win, no preparations had been undertaken to anticipate what the consequences might be should Milosevic raise the stakes by accelerating his ethnic cleansing plans. Lest there be any doubt on that score, General Naumann admitted a month into the bombing that from the air war’s very start, “there was the hope in the political camp that this could be over very quickly” and that as a result, no one at any level had prepared for Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing push.[26] As a result, what had begun as a coercive NATO ploy aimed at producing Milosevic’s quick compliance quickly devolved into an open-ended test of wills between the world’s most powerful military alliance and the wily and resilient Yugoslav dictator.
THE AIR WAR BOGS DOWN
Once it became clear by the fourth day that the air offensive was not having its hoped-for effect on Milosevic, Clark received authorization from the NAC to proceed to Phase II, which entailed ramped-up attacks against a broader spectrum of fixed targets in Serbia and against dispersed and hidden VJ forces in Kosovo. Attacks during the preceding three nights had focused mainly on IADS targets. Phase II strikes shifted the emphasis from SEAD to interdiction, with predominant stress on cutting off VJ and MUP lines of communication and attacking their choke points, storage and marshaling areas, and any tank concentrations that could be found. Immediately before Phase II began, NATO ambassadors had argued for more than eight hours, well past midnight, over whether to expand the target list. General Naumann insisted at that session that it was time to start “attacking both ends of the snake by hitting the head and cutting off the tail.”[27] His use of that bellicose-sounding metaphor reportedly infuriated the Greek and Italian representatives, who had been calling for an Easter bombing pause in the hope that it might lead to negotiations.[28]
NATO went into this second phase earlier than anticipated because of escalating Serb atrocities on the ground. Up to that point, the air attacks had had no sought-after effect on Serb behavior whatsoever. On the contrary, Serbia’s offensive against the Kosovar Albanians intensified, with Serb troops burning villages, arresting dissidents, and executing supposed KLA supporters. The Serbs continued unopposed in their countercampaign of ethnic cleansing, ultimately forcing most of the 1.8 million ethnic Albanians in Kosovo from their homes.[29]
By the start of the second week, Clinton administration officials acknowledged that Operation Allied Force had failed to meet its declared goal of halting Serbian violence against the ethnic Albanians.[30] Echoing that judgment, Clark added that NATO was confronting “an intelligent and capable adversary who is attempting to offset all our strategies.”[31] It was becoming increasingly clear that at least one element of Milosevic’s strategy entailed playing for time. Yet although the humanitarian crime of ethnic cleansing gave the Serbs an immediate tactical advantage, it also came at the long-term cost of virtually forcing NATO to stay the course. The bombing effort thus evolved into a race between those Serb forces trying to drive the ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo and NATO forces trying to hinder that effort—or, failing that, to punish Milosevic badly enough to make him quit.
Five B-1Bs were added to the U.S. Air Force’s bomber contingent at the start of the second week. In preparing them for combat, what normally would have taken months of effort to program the aircraft’s mission computers was compressed into fewer than 100 hours during a single week as Air Force officers and contractors updated the computers with the latest intelligence on enemy radar and SAM threats. One aircraft with the latest updated software installed, the Block D upgrade of the Defensive System Upgrade Program, passed a critical flight test at the 53rd Wing at Eglin AFB, Florida, and two B-1s were committed to action over Yugoslavia two days later. These aircraft, which, alongside the B-52s, operated out of RAF Fairford in England, employed the Raytheon ALE-50 towed decoy to good effect for the first time in combat.[32] They were still test-configured aircraft flown by test crews. The B-1s, all test-configured with Block D upgrades, typically flew two-ship missions against military area targets, such as barracks and marshaling yards.
While the Serb pillaging of Kosovo was unfolding on the ground, NATO air attacks continued to be hampered by bad weather, enemy dispersal tactics, and air defenses that were proving to be far more robust than expected. In the absence of a credible NATO ground threat, which the United States and NATO had ruled out from the start, VJ forces were able to survive the air attacks simply by spreading out and concealing their tanks and other vehicles. More than half of the nightly strike sorties returned without any weapons expended owing to adverse weather in the target area. Only four days out of the first nine featured weather offering visibility conditions suitable for employing laser-guided bombs (LGBs). By the end of Day 9, only 15 percent of the 2,700 sorties flown had actually been bombing missions. In all, it took NATO 12 days to complete the same number of strike sorties that had been conducted during the first 12 hours of Desert Storm.
21
Telephone conversation with Lieutenant General Michael Short, USAF (Ret.), August 16, 2001.
23
John F. Harris, “Clinton Saw No Alternative to Airstrikes,”
25
For an informed treatment of the KLA and its origins, goals, and prospects by
26
Carla Anne Robbins, Thomas E. Ricks, and Neil King, Jr., “Milosevic’s Resolve Spawned Unity, Wider Bombing List in NATO Alliance,”
27
William Drozdiak, “NATO Leaders Struggle to Find a Winning Strategy,”
28
The latter rumblings prompted concern in U.S. and NATO military circles that once any such pause might be agreed to, it would be that much more difficult to resume the bombing after the pause had expired. In the end, no pause in the bombing occurred at any time during Allied Force, other than those occasioned by bad weather.
29
After careful examination, the provision of airlift relief missions for the Kosovar refugees was ruled out by U.S. and NATO planners because they were deemed excessively dangerous in the face of threats from enemy ground fire and because of concern that any delivered supplies would end up in the wrong hands.
30
Bradley Graham and William Drozdiak, “Allied Action Fails to Stop Serb Brutality,”
31
Craig R. Whitney, “On 7th Day, Serb Resilience Gives NATO Leaders Pause,”
32
Of 10 known Serb SAMs that reportedly guided on B-1s during the course of the air war, all were believed to have been successfully diverted to the decoys. See David Hughes, “A Pilot’s Best Friend,”