The second alleged procedural error entailed an EA-6B support jammer that was said to have been operating not only too far away from the F-117 (80 to 100 miles) to have been of much protective value, but also out of proper alignment with the offending threat radars, resulting in inefficient jamming.
Last was the reported fact that F-117s operating out of Aviano had previously flown along more or less the same transit routes for four nights in a row because of a SACEUR ban on overflight of Bosnia to avoid jeopardizing the Dayton accords. That would have made their approach pattern into Yugoslav airspace predictable. Knowing from which direction the F-117s would be coming, Serb air defenders could have employed low-frequency radars for the best chance of getting a snap look at the aircraft. Former F-117 pilots and several industry experts acknowledged that the aircraft is detectable by such radars when viewed from the side or from directly below. U.S. officials also suggested that the Serbs may have been able to get brief nightly radar hits while the aircraft’s weapons bay doors were fleetingly open.
Heated arguments arose in Washington and elsewhere in the immediate aftermath of the shootdown over whether USEUCOM had erred in not aggressively having sought to destroy the wreckage of the downed F-117 in order to keep its valuable stealth technology out of unfriendly hands and eliminate its propaganda value, which the Serbs bent every effort to exploit.[44] Said a former commander of Tactical Air Command, General John M. Loh: “I’m surprised we didn’t bomb it, because the standing procedure has always been that when you lose something of real or perceived value—in this case real technology, stealth—you destroy it.”[45] The case for at least trying to deny the enemy the wreckage was bolstered by Paul Kaminski, the Pentagon’s former acquisition chief and the Air Force’s first F-117 program manager during the 1970s. Kaminski noted that although the F-117 had been operational for 15 years, “there are things in that airplane, while they may not be leading technologies today in the United States, are certainly ahead of what some potential adversaries have.” Kaminski added that the main concern was not that any exploitation of the F-117’s low-observable technology would enable an enemy to put the F-117 at greater risk, but rather that it could help him eventually develop his own stealth technology in due course.[46] Reports indicated that military officials had at first considered attempting to destroy the wreckage but opted in the end not to follow through with the attempt because they could not have located it quickly enough to attack it before it was surrounded by civilians and the media.[47] Those issues aside, whatever the precise explanation for the downing, it meant not merely the loss of a key U.S. combat aircraft but the dimming of the F-117’s former aura of invincibility, which for years had been of incalculable psychological value to the United States.
PROBLEMS WITH FLEXIBLE TARGETING
Yet another disappointment in the air war’s performance centered on what turned out to be NATO’s almost completely ineffective efforts to attack mobile VJ forces in the KEZ. By the end of the third week, despite determined attempts by allied aircrews over the preceding week, NATO analysts were unable to confirm the destruction of a single VJ tank or military vehicle, owing to the success of enemy ground units at dispersing and concealing their armor. That disappointment underscored the limits of conducting air operations against dispersed and hidden enemy troops in conditions in which weather, terrain, and tactics all favored the enemy and where no friendly ground combat presence was on hand to compel those forces to concentrate and expose themselves. Had Serb commanders any reason to fear a NATO ground invasion, they would have had little alternative but to position their tanks to cut off roads and other avenues of attack, thus making their forces more easily targetable by NATO air power. Instead, having dispersed and hidden their tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), Serb army and paramilitary units were free to go in with just 20 or more troops in a single vehicle to terrorize a village in connection with their ethnic cleansing campaign.
Indeed, the opportunity to get at fielded enemy ground units with air power alone had been essentially lost by NATO even before Operation Allied Force commenced. As General Jumper later recalled, during the Rambouillet talks in early March 1999, “we watched 40,000 Serbian troops mass north of Kosovo, we watched them infiltrate down into Kosovo, we watched heavy armor come down into there, all under the umbrella of the peace conference, and we weren’t able to react.”[48] Once those forces had completed their massing on March 15 and had begun a substantial incursion into Kosovo, any chance for allied air power to be significantly effective against them promptly disappeared. Once safely dispersed, VJ units simply turned off the engines of their tanks and other vehicles to save fuel, hid their vehicles in barns, churches, forests, and populated areas, hunkered down, and hoped to wait the air effort out. By the end of April, General Clark frankly conceded that after six weeks of bombing, there were more VJ, MUP, and Serb paramilitary forces in Kosovo than there had been when Allied Force began. That attested powerfully to the latter’s near-total ineffectiveness, at least up to that point, in halting the Serbian ethnic cleansing rampage throughout Kosovo.
Once the targeting of enemy troops in Kosovo became a SACEUR priority at the start of the third week, Yugoslavia was divided into four large search sectors. The two USAF E-8 Joint STARS aircraft that had been committed to supporting the air effort were tasked with searching for ground targets in the KEZ and with providing near-real time intelligence and targeting information to the CAOC in Vicenza and to the EC-130 ABCCC. Depending on the possibility of collateral damage, Joint STARS was sometimes cleared to communicate directly to airborne FACs and to direct NATO strikes against fleeting targets of opportunity, with the goal of getting target information and coordinates to orbiting strike aircraft within minutes.[49]
Before long, three broad approaches to what came to be called “flex” targeting emerged for prompt employment against mobile VJ and MUP forces operating in Kosovo and against pop-up IADS assets deployed in Serbia. In the first, called “alert flex” targeting, combat aircraft were apportioned from the very outset as designated “flex” sorties in the ATO and reserved for launch on short notice against any pop-up targets that might be detected and identified within the ATO cycle. Initially, such designated aircraft were kept on ground alert. Later in the operation, they were placed on airborne tanker alert, which reduced their response times by as much as two hours.
The second approach entailed redirecting aircraft already en route to preplanned fixed targets. Strikers would be diverted either to alternate high-value fixed targets in Serbia or to recently detected mobile targets in Serbia or Kosovo. Because of the large number of NATO fighters already preapportioned and available on call for use as alert flex assets, however, such en route diversions occurred only rarely. All three heavy bombers (the B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s) were also diverted to new targets on occasion, requiring real-time changes in their preplanned ingress routes.
The third category of flexible targeting involved dedicated sorties launched into holding orbits for on-call attacks against detected mobile VJ forces in Kosovo after the KEZ was declared on Day 20 of the air effort. This approach, which evolved progressively over time, entailed the use of F-16s, A-10s, or Tornados serving as airborne forward air controllers. Their FAC-qualified pilots would search for ground targets in predesignated kill boxes, attempt a visual identification of any suspected target candidates, and assess the potential for collateral damage after determining that the target candidates were valid. Depending on the prevailing rules of engagement, the FAC pilots would first request ABCCC or CAOC approval to attack the target and then, upon being cleared to release weapons, would drop their munitions on the approved target while directing their wing-men to drop on adjacent targets. In the event that multiple targets were detected and approved, additional strike aircraft would be called in if they were close at hand. Because NATO had no fielded ground forces in the combat zone, the FACs could not request ground assistance and were on their own in locating and identifying mobile targets.
44
To bolster their case, some noted that when an F-117 had crashed earlier at an air show near Baltimore in 1998, the Air Force had thoroughly sanitized the area and hauled off the wreckage to prevent its most sensitive features from being compromised.
45
Vago Muradian, “Stealth Compromised by Not Destroying F-117 Wreckage,”
47
On April 2, the Yugoslav government announced its intention to hand over pieces of the downed F-117 to Russian authorities. Robert Hewson, “Operation Allied Force: The First 30 Days,”
48
General John Jumper, USAF, “Oral Histories Accomplished in Conjunction with Operation Allied Force/Noble Anvil.”
49
Robert Wall, “Joint STARS Changes Operational Scheme,”