Pressures to avoid civilian casualties and unintended damage to nonmilitary structures were greater in Allied Force than in any previous combat operation involving U.S. forces. Nevertheless, there were recurrent instances throughout the air war of unintended damage caused either by errant NATO munitions or by mistakes in targeting, including a dozen highly publicized incidents in which civilians were accidentally killed. One such bombing error resulted in part from constraints imposed by the requirement that NATO aircrews remain above 15,000 ft to avoid the most lethal enemy threats, making visual discrimination between military and civilian traffic more than routinely difficult. Another contributing factor was the occasional tendency of allied aircrews to maneuver their aircraft in such a way as to put clouds within the targeting pod’s field of view between the aircraft and the target, thus blocking the laser beam illuminating the target and depriving the weapon of guidance. Moreover, Serb forces often used civilians as human shields in an effort to deter NATO from attacking military vehicles. The extraordinary media attention given to these events bore ample witness to what can happen when zero noncombatant casualties becomes not only a goal of strategy but also the international expectation. Thanks to unrealistic efforts to treat the normal friction of war as avoidable human error, every occurrence of unintended collateral damage became overinflated as front-page news and treated as a blemish on air power’s presumed ability to be consistently precise.
LAPSES IN STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION
NATO’s leaders also had little to congratulate themselves about when it came to the way in which the air war was planned and carried out. There was a dominant sense among participants and observers alike that the desultory onset of Allied Force and its later slowness to register effects reflected some fundamental failures of allied leadership and strategy choice. In contrast to the relatively seamless performance by the coalition in Desert Storm, what unfolded during NATO’s air war for Kosovo was a highly dissatisfying application of air power, which showed not only the predictable fits and starts of trying to prosecute an air operation through an alliance of 19 members bound by a unanimity rule, but also some failures even within the operation’s U.S. component to make the most of what air power had to offer within the limits of the effort’s political constraints.
To begin with, the conduct of the air war as an allied effort came at the cost of a flawed strategy that was further hobbled by the manifold inefficiencies that were part and parcel of conducting combat operations by consensus. In addition to the natural friction created by NATO’s approach to target approval, the initial reluctance of its political leaders to countenance a more aggressive air campaign in terms of target numbers and force size failed completely to capitalize on air power’s potential for taking down entire systems of enemy capability simultaneously. Further compounding the inefficiency of this multistage and circuitous process, two parallel but separate mechanisms for mission planning and air tasking were used. Any U.S.-specific systems involving special sensitivities, such as the B-2, F-117, and cruise missiles, were allocated by U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) rather than by NATO, and the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) maintained separate targeting teams for USEUCOM and NATO strike planning.
Because NATO had initially hoped that the operation would last only a few days, it failed to establish a smoothly running mechanism for target development and review until late April. Once NATO’s going-in assumption proved hollow, a frenetic rush ensued to come up with additional target nominations that could be more quickly and easily approved by NATO’s political authorities. Even then, there was little by way of a consistently applied strategy behind the target development process. Most of the attack planning done throughout the air war was not driven by desired effects, but rather entailed simply parceling out sortie and munitions allocations by target category as individual targets were approved, without much consideration given to how a target’s neutralization might contribute toward advancing the overall objectives of the air war.
It was not only the alliance-induced friction that helped make for an inefficient bombing effort. As Allied Force unfolded, it became increasingly clear that even the U.S. military component was divided in a high-level struggle over the most appropriate targeting strategy—reminiscent of the feuding that had occurred nine years earlier between the Army’s corps commanders and the joint force air component commander (JFACC), then–Lieutenant General Charles Horner, over the ownership and control of air operations in Desert Storm. Once the initial hope that Milosevic would fold within a few days after the bombing started proved groundless, NATO was forced into a scramble to develop an alternative strategy. The immediate result was an internecine battle between the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, and his air component commander, USAF Lieutenant General Michael Short, over where the air attacks should be primarily directed. Short maintained that the most effective use of allied air power would be to pay little heed to dispersed Serbian forces in Kosovo and to concentrate instead on infrastructure targets in and around Belgrade, including key electrical power plants and government ministries. However, Clark insisted, as was his command prerogative, upon concentrating on elusive enemy ground troops in Kosovo, and this targeting emphasis prevailed throughout most of the air war.
Despite the success of Allied Force in the end, one misjudgment of near-blunder proportions came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure. The worst call by NATO’s leaders was their assumption that what had worked for Bosnia would work for Kosovo and their resultant failure to appreciate the special importance of Kosovo to the Serbs and its criticality to Milosevic’s survival in power. Fortunately for the allies, their faulty assessment was not a show-stopper—although it could have been if Milosevic had refrained from launching his ethnic cleansing campaign and instead merely hunkered down to wait out the bombing in a win-or-lose contest of wills with NATO. Had he done so, he could have threatened the long-term viability of the alliance. Fortunately for the success of Allied Force, by opting instead to accelerate his ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, he helped unite Western opinion behind NATO and left NATO with no choice but to dig in for the long haul, not only to secure an outcome that would allow for the repatriation of nearly a million displaced Kosovars, but also to ensure its continued credibility as an alliance.
NATO’S AIR WAR IN PERSPECTIVE
Operation Allied Force was the most intense and sustained military operation to have been conducted in Europe since the end of World War II. It represented the first extended use of military force by NATO, as well as the first major combat operation conducted for humanitarian objectives against a state committing atrocities within its own borders. It was the longest U.S. combat operation to have taken place since the war in Vietnam. At a price tag of more than $3 billion, it was also a notably expensive one. Yet in part because of that investment, it turned out to have been an unprecedented exercise in the discriminate use of force on a large scale. In all, out of some 28,000 high-explosive munitions expended over the operation’s 78-day course, no more than 500 noncombatants died as a direct result of errant attacks.
After the bombing ended, the predominant tendency among most outside observers was to characterize that effort as a watershed achievement for air power. Yet with all due respect for the unmatched professionalism of the aircrews who actually carried out the air war, it is hard to accept that characterization as the proper conclusion to be drawn from Allied Force. To be sure, there is much to be said of a positive nature about NATO’s air war for Kosovo. To begin with, it did indeed represent the first time in which air power coerced an enemy leader to yield with no friendly land combat action whatsoever. This does not mean that air power can now “win wars alone” or that the air-only strategy ultimately adopted by NATO’s leaders was the wisest choice available to them. Yet the fact that air power prevailed on its own despite the multiple drawbacks of a reluctant administration, a divided Congress, an indifferent public, a potentially fractious alliance, a determined opponent, and—not least—the absence of a credible NATO strategy surely testified that the air instrument has come a long way in recent years in its relative combat leverage compared to that of other force elements in joint warfare.