As noted earlier, a major problem that inhibited the effectiveness of Joint STARS in support of these missions was Kosovo’s mountainous terrain, which required the aircraft to fly unusually close to enemy territory so its sensor operators could look into valleys and minimize the enemy’s opportunities to take advantage of terrain masking. Even then, the high ridgelines often made it impossible for Joint STARS crews, from their standoff orbits, to peer into some valleys where VJ forces were thought to have been concentrated. Joint STARS also had only a limited ability to detect and monitor ground targets in dense woods and built-up areas. Because of these constraints, NATO had little by way of wide-area airborne surveillance and cueing of the sort that had made coalition operations against enemy ground forces so effective in Desert Storm. That deficiency placed a doubly high premium on hitting enemy ground-force targets as they moved into open areas and were visually detected by airborne FACs. It also, in effect, ceded the tactical initiative to VJ forces, since the latter could decide when and where to reposition themselves. The net result was a need for large numbers of combat aircraft continuously orbiting over the KEZ but producing little tactical return, compounded—indeed, largely caused—by the absence of a NATO ground threat to force enemy troops into more predictable patterns of behavior.[50]
The performance of Joint STARS against dispersed and hidden enemy forces was less than satisfactory not only because of the constraints described above, but also because of an unfortunate failure by air operations managers to make the most of the aircraft’s inherent capabilities for supporting counterland operations. That failure partly reflected a continuing slowness on the part of the U.S. Air Force to develop and institutionalize a detailed appreciation for how land forces operate and, in turn, to acquire the conceptual wherewithal that is essential for making air power more effective in defeating those forces. Surprisingly little progress was registered by the Air Force over the nine years since Desert Storm in developing a concept of operations for using Joint STARS in a surveillance and control team that also includes AWACS, Rivet Joint, airborne FACs, and UAVs, all working as a synergistic collective against elusive enemy ground forces.
As one telling testament to this failure, the inclusion of Joint STARS in the air war’s equipment roster had been requested by the Army, not by the Air Force.[51] Because of the predominant USAF focus on attacking fixed infrastructure targets, few in the Air Force fully appreciated the E-8’s capability for providing wide-area, all-weather standoff coverage of the KEZ and its resultant ability to provide USEUCOM’s and NATO’s operational-level commanders with real-time situation awareness regarding the status and activity of VJ forces. It took days for Joint STARS even to be included in the ATO. Once there, the aircraft was typically thought of as a surveillance platform operating in the service of the intelligence community, rather than as a strike support asset working to provide direct and immediate assistance to NATO aircrews conducting flexible targeting missions. With the right teaming, connectivity, and practice, the use of Joint STARS to cue UAVs might have reduced, if not eliminated, the “searching-through-a-soda straw” problem, lessened UAV exposure to hostile fire, and helped maintain tactical surprise for NATO aircrews engaged in the search for VJ targets of opportunity. No measures of that sort, however, were attempted until quite late in Allied Force.
Yet another complicating influence on the air effort’s attempts against dispersed and hidden enemy forces stemmed from the command and control arrangements that had been hastily cobbled together at the operational and tactical levels once it became clear that NATO was committed to an air war for the long haul. Although the CAOC eventually worked out a means of using real-time imagery to detect fielded VJ forces in the KEZ and to “flex” allied air assets to attack those newly developed targets in an orderly fashion, those doing the “flex” decisionmaking during the first half of Allied Force did so with no apportionment or targeting guidance whatever. As one expert observer noted, “if the detected target was militarily significant, it was struck, regardless of [General Short’s] priorities or intentions. There was no link to an assessment mechanism, so that once a target was struck, there was no way to link it to what unit it had been associated with, so no effective degradation was recorded.”[52] As a result, combat aircraft were sometimes diverted from scheduled ATO targets of clear operational significance to attack “flex” targets of highly dubious tactical, let alone operational or strategic, worth. Moreover, owing to the absence of any feedback mechanism, aircraft were often committed against targets that had already been successfully struck, forcing the CAOC either to re-role aircraft on short notice or else to expose aircrews needlessly to enemy IADS threats a second time. For most of the air war, roughly half of General Short’s available surface-attack sorties were committed against targets in the KEZ. Of those, a significant percentage were “flexed” in this haphazard manner.[53]
Weather was still another complicating factor in the effort against dispersed VJ forces. From the 15,000-ft altitude floor above which NATO aircrews typically operated, the cloud cover over Kosovo was greater than 50 percent for more than 78 percent of the air war’s duration. That allowed unimpeded strike operations on only 24 of the air war’s 78 days. The impact of these conditions on the flexible targeting effort was considerable. In all, 3,766 planned sorties, including 1,029 designated close air support sorties, had to be canceled because of weather.
Even on clear days, another factor preventing the kill box system from being as effective as it might otherwise have been was the tight rules-of-engagement regime that had been imposed after the Djakovica incident (see below), in which more than 60 ethnic Albanian refugees were reportedly killed in an attack by USAF F-16s against what was thought to have been a VJ troop convoy. These restrictions had a far greater inhibiting influence on the effectiveness of NATO’s flexible targeting efforts than the oft-cited 15,000-ft altitude floor which NATO’s aircrews had been directed to observe. Unless an object of interest was clearly determined to be a valid military target, such as a VJ tank operating in the open, pilots had to get clearance for any attack from the CAOC, with General Short himself often making the decision after checking second sources like real-time UAV video feed. Because of the delays created by these and similar hurdles, orbiting NATO aircraft often ran low on fuel before being cleared to drop their weapons and accordingly were forced to leave the area in search of a tanker.[54]
51
Personal communication to the author from Price Bingham, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Melbourne, Florida, December 20, 1999.
52
Lieutenant Colonel L. T. Wight, USAF, “What a Tangled Web We Wove: An After-Action Assessment of Operation Allied Force’s Command and Control Structure and Processes,” unpublished paper, no date, p. 12. Colonel Wight was a member of the C-5 Strategy Cell at the CAOC.
54
Tim Ripley, “Harriers over the Kosovo ‘Kill Boxes,’”