To all intents and purposes, the difference between Phase II and Phase I was indistinguishable as far as the intensity of NATO’s air attacks was concerned. The commencement of Phase II was characterized as more of an evolution than a sharp change of direction. On that point, NATO’s spokesman at the time, RAF Air Commodore David Wilby, said that the operation was “just beginning to transition” from IADS targets to fielded VJ and MUP forces.[33] By the start of the second week, merely 1,700 sorties had been flown, only 425 of which consisted of strike sorties against a scant 100 approved targets.[34] Up to that point, air operations had averaged only 50 strike sorties a night, in sharp contrast to Desert Storm, in which the daily attack sortie rate was closer to 1000. The operational goal of Allied Force was still officially described as merely seeking to “degrade” Serbia’s military capability. In one of the first hints of growing concern that the air effort was not going well, a senior U.S. general spoke of at least “several weeks” of needed attacks to beat down VJ and MUP forces to the breaking point.[35] Similarly, by the start of the second week, an administration official declared that the goal of the bombing was to “break the will” of the Belgrade leadership, implying an open-ended air employment strategy.[36] Earlier, administration spokesmen had indicated that they believed that just a few days of bombing would do the trick.
NATO soon discovered that it was dealing with a cunning opponent who was quite accomplished at hiding. As a result, it conceded that it was being forced to “starve rather than shoot them out.”[37] Even with clear skies at the beginning of the third week, NATO pilots were having little success at interdicting those VJ and MUP troops and paramilitary thugs in Kosovo who were carrying out the executions, village burnings, and forced emigration of Kosovar Albanians, to say nothing of finding and attacking their tanks and artillery. Since attacking dispersed VJ troops directly was proving to be too difficult, attacks against fielded forces concentrated instead on second-order effects by going after bases, supplies, and petroleum, oil, and lubricants (POL).
On Day 6, Clark sought NATO approval to increase the pressure on Milosevic by attacking the defense and interior ministry headquarters in Belgrade. That request was disapproved by NATO’s political leaders, on the declared ground that such strikes were still “premature.”[38] The list of approved targets increased by about 20 percent at the end of the first week. Yet Clark still did not receive the full authority from NATO that he had sought. NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, in particular, expressed misgivings about a larger target set, saying that he was not persuaded that the time had come yet to intensify the operation so dramatically. As a result, Clark was forced to improvise changes to an original plan that had called for slow-motion escalation, punctuated by pauses, disturbingly comparable to the flawed strategy employed during Operation Rolling Thunder over North Vietnam a generation earlier.
Phase III, which entailed escalated attacks against military leadership, command and control centers, weapons depots, fuel supplies, and other targets in and around Belgrade, commenced de facto on Day 9 with strikes against infrastructure targets in Serbia. These included the Petrovaradin bridge on the Danube at Novi Sad; a bridge on the Magura-Belacevac railway; the main water supply to Novi Sad; and targets near Pec, Zatric, Decane, Dragodan, Vranjevac, Bajin Basta, and the Pristina airport.[39] No targets in or near Belgrade, however, were attacked. At this point, Allied Force was still generating no more than 50 ground-attack sorties a day.[40] There was mounting unease over the fact that attacks against empty barracks and other military facilities were having no effect on Serb behavior now that VJ and MUP forces were well dispersed. It soon became evident that Milosevic had hunkered down in a calculated state of siege. Evidently sensing that he had accomplished many of his goals on the ground and believing that he could now succeed in dividing NATO, he declared a unilateral cease-fire on April 6. The United States and NATO, however, rejected that transparent ploy and pressed ahead with their attacks.
U.S. naval aviation, unavailable for the initial phase of Operation Allied Force, joined the fray when the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt arrived on station in the Ionian Sea south of Italy two weeks afterward, on April 6. The air wing assigned to the Theodore Roosevelt flew complete and self-sustaining strike packages, including F-14Ds and F/A-18s for surface-attack operations, EA-6Bs for the suppression of enemy air defenses, F-14s in the role of airborne forward air controllers, and E-2Cs performing as ABCCC platforms. These packages typically flew missions only against dispersed and hidden enemy forces in Kosovo, although on one occasion, on April 15, they struck a hardened aircraft bunker at the Serbian air base at Podgorica in Montenegro in the first of several allied efforts to neutralize a suspected air threat against the U.S. Army’s Task Force Hawk deployed in Albania (see below).[41] The E-2C, normally operated as an airborne early warning (AEW) platform to screen the carrier battle group from enemy air threats, was used in Allied Force to provide an interface between the CAOC and naval air assets operating in the theater, including both strikers and intelligence collectors.[42]
It was hard during the first few weeks for outside observers to assess and validate the Pentagon’s and NATO’s claims of making progress because U.S. and NATO officials had so deliberately refrained from disclosing any significant details about the operation. Instead, administration and NATO sources limited themselves to vague generalizations about the air war’s effects, using such hedged terms as “degrading,” “disrupting,” and “debilitating” rather than the more unambiguous “destroying.” On this studiously close-mouthed policy, the Defense Department’s spokesman, Kenneth Bacon, declared that a precedent was being intentionally set, since both Secretary Cohen and General Shelton had seen a need to “change the culture of the Pentagon and make people more alert to the dangers that can flow from being too generous—or you could say profligate or lax—with operational details.”[43]
In one of the first tentative strikes against enemy infrastructure, the main telecommunications building in Pristina, the capital city of Kosovo, was taken out by two GBU-20 LGBs dropped by an F-15E on April 6. Yet the air effort as a whole remained but a faint shadow of Operation Desert Storm, with only 28 targets throughout all of Yugoslavia attacked out of 439 sorties in a 24-hour period during the operation’s third week.[44] As for the hoped-for “strategic” portion of the air war against the Serb heartland, Clark was still being refused permission by NATO’s political leaders to attack the state-controlled television network throughout Yugoslavia. On April 12, attacks were conducted against an oil refinery at Pancevo and other infrastructure targets, with the Pentagon announcing that all of Yugoslavia’s oil refineries had been destroyed but that some stored fuel remained available. Also on April 12, the 20th day of the air attacks, NATO missions into the newly designated Kosovo Engagement Zone (KEZ) commenced with attempted attacks against VJ and MUP tanks, artillery, wheeled vehicles, and other assets fielded in Kosovo, in response to Belgrade’s escalated ethnic cleansing of the embattled province.
34
The USAF flew 84 percent of those sorties, the NATO allies 10 percent, and the U.S. Navy 6 percent.
36
Craig R. Whitney, “NATO Had Signs Its Strategy Would Fail Kosovars,”
37
William Drozdiak and Bradley Graham, “NATO Frustration Grows as Mission Falls Short,”
38
Thomas W. Lippman and Dana Priest, “NATO Builds Firepower for 24-Hour Attacks,”
39
The NAC did not formally approve strikes on Phase III targets per se, although it did assent to target classes within Phase III.
41
Conversation with Vice Admiral Daniel J. Murphy, USN, commander, 6th Fleet, aboard USS
42
See Commander Wayne D. Sharer, USN, “The Navy’s War over Kosovo,”
43
Jason DeParle, “Allies’ Progress Remains Unclear as Few Details Are Made Public,”
44
In fairness to that effort, however, and given the many constraints that affected it—in contrast to the far fewer constraints that affected Desert Storm—weather, mainly an irritant during the Gulf War, was a significant factor during Operation Allied Force. Bad weather, combined with the higher population density of Serbia, the concern for collateral damage, and the increased surface-to-air threat, could easily have contributed to a lower relative intensity of strike operations. I thank Major Richard Leatherman, Hq Air Force Doctrine Center, for having called this possibility to my attention.