As the air war entered its fifth week, Clark admitted that Milosevic was still pouring reinforcements into Kosovo continuously and that “if you actually added up what’s there on a given day, you might find that he’s strengthened his forces in there.”[53] Much as during some periods of Desert Storm, adverse weather at the five-week point had forced a cancellation or failure of more than half of all scheduled bombing sorties on 20 of the first 35 days of air attacks. Seemingly resigned to a waiting game as the air war appeared stalled after more than a month of continual bombing, a senior NATO diplomat confessed that it now felt as though Operation Allied Force “had been put on autopilot. Now we are basically waiting for something to crack in Belgrade.”[54] In light of the stalled offensive, some saw the air war now threatening to stretch into summer 1999, if not longer.
NATO FINALLY ESCALATES
In what proved in hindsight to be a watershed development for Operation Allied Force, the NATO summit that convened in Washington on April 23–25 to commemorate the alliance’s 50th anniversary was pivotal in solidifying NATO’s collective determination not to lose. As President Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel Berger, later attested, NATO’s leaders unanimously agreed at the summit that “we will not lose. We will not lose. Whatever it takes, we will not lose.”[55] Part of the mounting pressure on U.S. and NATO leaders to show greater resolution emanated from a public mood on both sides of the Atlantic that was growing increasingly sensitive to, and emboldened by, the horrific privations inflicted on helpless Kosovar Albanians by their Serb oppressors, shown daily on worldwide television—a public reaction, one might add, that calls into serious question the oft-heard assertion that Milosevic “won” the media campaign. The ugly spectacle of the ethnic cleansing push finally drove the allied leaders to turn the corner at the Washington summit, after which, as General Jumper later observed, “we really had the level of consensus we should have had to start this thing off…. After the Washington summit, there was no way that NATO was going to let itself fail.”[56]
That consensus, along with the refugee crisis, occasioned an increased NATO willingness to attack major infrastructure targets. Eventually, thanks to this heightened inclination to ramp up the pressure, NATO’s Master Target File grew from only 169 targets on the eve of the air effort to more than 976 by its end in early June.[57] Once the call for a substantially expanded target list had prevailed, the new goal became punishing Belgrade’s political and military elites, weakening Milosevic’s domestic power base, and demonstrating by force of example that he and his fellow perpetrators of the abuses in Kosovo would find no sanctuary.
Even before the Washington summit, NATO’s targeting efforts had already begun to focus gradually not just on dispersed and hidden enemy forces in Kosovo, but also on what NATO officials had come to characterize as the four pillars of Milosevic’s power—the political machine, the media, the security forces, and the economic system. New targets added to the approved list included national oil refineries, petroleum depots, road and rail bridges over the Danube, railway lines, military communications sites, and factories capable of producing weapons and spare parts.[58] The first attacks against state radio and television stations in Belgrade took place on April 21, with three cruise missiles temporarily shutting down three channels run by Milosevic’s wife, Mira Markovic, destroying the 12th through the 17th floors of the building, and killing several journalists and technicians, after NATO had issued a warning to employees to vacate the buildings. (Transmissions resumed 11 hours later, occasioning a reattack.) With that escalation, NATO finally brought the air war to Yugoslavia’s political and media elite after weeks of hesitation, indicating that it was now emboldened enough to go directly after the business interests of Milosevic’s family and friends. In the same attack, U.S. cruise missiles took out the offices of the political parties of Milosevic and his wife. Also on April 21, the Zezel bridge, the last remaining bridge over the Danube at Novi Sad, was dropped.
On April 28, a large, coordinated attack was launched against the Serb military airfield at Podgorica, with 30 munitions employed against such targets as hardened shelters, POL facilities, radar sites, and aircraft and helicopters parked in revetments. During that attack, a 4,700-lb GBU-28 “bunker-buster” was dropped for the first time in Allied Force by an F-15E on an underground aircraft and equipment storage hangar at the Pristina airfield. (By that point in the air war, F-15Es had begun flying seven-and-a-half-hour missions into Serbia directly from RAF Lakenheath in England.)[59] Having been repeatedly attacked before with less destructive munitions, that buried hangar and the remaining aircraft, munitions, and supplies kept in it were thought to have been taken out once and for all by this weapon, an assessment which later proved false.[60] Shortly thereafter, an attack was conducted against the national command center in Belgrade, a multistory facility buried more than 100 feet underground and known to have been one of Milosevic’s occasional re-treats.[61] Equipped with communications, medical facilities, living spaces, and enough food to last more than a month, it was designed to accommodate the entire Yugoslav general staff, top defense officials, and other civilian authorities.[62]
Despite these ramped-up attacks, however, the French leadership remained critical of many proposed strike options. In particular, President Jacques Chirac opposed any attacks against Belgrade’s electrical power grid with high-explosive bombs that would physically render it inoperative for any length of time. In an effort to get around Chirac’s resistance, U.S. planners worked behind the scenes with French officers in search of more palatable alternatives. As reported in a later U.S. press account, they finally came up with the idea of using the CBU-104(V)2/B cluster munition, formerly referred to by some U.S. Air Force officers as the CBU-94, which could shut down Belgrade’s power source for at least a few hours by depositing carbon-graphite threads on the electrical grid, an option to which Chirac finally consented.[63]
Thanks to that modest breakthrough, in possibly the most consequential attack of the air war up to that point, USAF F-117s reportedly dropped CBU-104s on five transformer yards of Yugoslavia’s electrical power grid—at Obrenovac, Nis, Bajina Basta, Drmno, and Novi Sad—during the early morning hours of May 3, temporarily cutting off electricity to 70 percent of the country. These munitions were similar to weapons delivered by TLAMs against the Baghdad electrical power network during the opening hours of Operation Desert Storm. The effects were achieved by means of scattered reels of treated wire which unwound in the air after being released as BLU-114/B submunitions, draping enemy high-voltage power lines like tinsel and causing them to short out.[64] The announced intent of that escalated attack was to shut down the installations that provided electrical power to the VJ’s 3rd Army in Kosovo to disrupt military communications and confuse Serb air defenses.[65] Very likely an unspoken intent was also to tighten the air operation’s squeeze on the Serbian political leadership and rank and file.[66]
53
Craig R. Whitney, “NATO Chief Admits Bombs Fail to Stem Serb Operations,”
54
Neil King, Jr., “War Against Yugoslavia Lapses into Routine, but Clock Is Ticking,”
55
Doyle McManus, “Clinton’s Massive Ground Invasion That Almost Was,”
56
General John Jumper, USAF, “Oral Histories Accomplished in Conjunction with Operation Allied Force/Noble Anvil.”
57
Dana Priest, “Target Selection Was Long Process,”
58
Eric Schmitt and Steven Lee Myers, “NATO Said to Focus Raids on Serb Elite’s Property,”
59
In the end, however, only some 10 percent of the 48th Fighter Wing’s F-15E combat missions were flown out of Lakenheath. The remainder were flown out of the wing’s forward operating location at Aviano. Conversation with USAF F-15E aircrews, 492nd Fighter Squadron, RAF Lakenheath, England, April 28, 2001.
60
Robert Hewson, “Allied Force, Part II: Overwhelming Air Power,”
61
Paul Richter, “Bunker-Busters Aim at Heart of Leadership,”
62
Ibid. The Pentagon’s formal report to Congress later indicated that “some” hardened underground command bunkers had been destroyed.
63
Dana Priest, “France Acted as Group Skeptic,”
64
An inertial navigation system (INS)–guided version of the weapon, a variant of the wind-corrected munitions dispenser, is now said to be entering the U.S. munitions inventory. Fulghum, “Russians Analyze U.S. Blackout Bomb.”
65
David A. Fulghum, “Electronic Bombs Darken Belgrade,”
66
The results were more symbolic than strategically significant. After the May 3 attack, some 500 workers managed to clear the filaments sufficiently to restart the equipment within 15 hours. After a similar attack on May 8, the threads were cleared within 4 hours. William Arkin, “Smart Bombs, Dumb Targeting?”