Last, and perhaps as decisive as any single other factor, VJ forces aggressively avoided making themselves easy targets for NATO air attacks. Indeed, digging in and hunkering down for defensive attrition warfare had lain at the heart of Yugoslav operational doctrine ever since the days of partisan operations against the Wehrmacht in World War II. Whenever General Clark would say, “You’ve got to get them in their assembly areas,” the reply typically was: “These guys aren’t assembling!”[55] RAF Harrier GR. Mk 7 pilots operating in kill boxes over Kosovo reported that “there was nothing moving around at all during the daytime,” adding that when Clark “got up and said knocking out five tanks was a good day for NATO, he [was] telling it straight. On some days we couldn’t find any tanks.”[56] Even with the aid of binoculars, the ground below often seemed devoid of life to NATO aircrews orbiting overhead at 15,000 ft. This was the predictable result of trying to engage an enemy who had no need to shoot, move, or expose his position, thanks to the absence of a credible NATO ground threat.
To be sure, there were some notable bright spots in NATO’s air effort against VJ forces in Kosovo. To cite one example, in those rare instances in which enemy armor and other targets exposed themselves to attack from the air, the upgraded AGM-65G2 Maverick air-to-ground missile generally performed very effectively. The effectiveness rate for older Mavericks was lower, but still reportedly higher than 90 percent.[57] Also, both U-2 imagery and pictures provided by the Navy’s F-14 equipped with TARPS (Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System) later proved useful to the CAOC in what the Cohen-Shelton after-action report to Congress called “several” instances involving the rapid retargeting of NATO aircraft to new targets.[58]
To cite another notable example, the two Marine F/A-18D squadrons that deployed to the former Warsaw Pact airfield at Taszar, Hungary, late in the air war played an active part in the effort against enemy forces in the KEZ.[59] For the first time on a large scale in combat, the F/A-18D aircrews, along with NATO pilots flying other combat aircraft types, made heavy use of night-vision goggles with compatible internal and external lighting modifications, thus enabling multi-aircraft formations and simultaneous night bomb deliveries.[60] Some F/A-18Ds also carried the internally mounted Advanced Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance System (ATARS). Still in operational evaluation as Allied Force began, the system provided digital, multispectral target images with its SAR and medium-altitude electro-optical (EO) imagery as a backup to pictures from other ISR sources, with a real-time connection to ground receiver stations. It figured prominently in both targeting and BDA activities.[61]
In a typical night F/A-18D flexible targeting mission (which might last as long as six hours, with four inflight refuelings), the C-130 ABCCC would pass to orbiting Marine fighters the grid coordinates of a VJ artillery position detected by the TPQ-36 and TPQ-37 counterbattery radars attached to the U.S. Army’s Task Force Hawk in Albania. An airborne FAC in an OA-10 would then illuminate the target location with flares and call in a two-plane section of F/A-18Ds to be available on short notice to attack it. In so doing, the OA-10 FAC, in effect, performed reconnaissance by fire. When shot at in return, the FAC would determine the source of fire to be hostile, and the F/A-18Ds would then be cleared to drop 500-lb Mk 82 bombs on it, which would generally stop the artillery fire for the rest of the night.[62] It was said that the greatest frustration for all NATO aircrews flying combat missions was to be orbiting over the KEZ night after night, for as long as six hours interspersed with multiple inflight refuelings, only to be called in at long last by an airborne FAC and cleared to attack a reported VJ tank that was no longer there.[63]
Owing in large part to such operations, at least those that produced recognizable combat results, NATO’s effort to engage dispersed and hidden enemy forces in the KEZ was not a complete waste of time and assets. For one thing, VJ commanders knew all too well that as the weather began steadily improving with the onset of summer, any effort on their part to conduct large-scale operations against either the KLA or civilian ethnic Albanians would put them at extremely high risk of being attacked. Moreover, General Short reported in late May that the newly focused attacks against the VJ’s 3rd Army in Kosovo were beginning to register discernible effects. He went on to predict that “if we do this for two more months, we will either kill this army in Kosovo or send it on the run.”[64]
Taken as a whole, however, NATO’s effort to attack enemy ground units in the KEZ was essentially a failure, the full extent of which became apparent only after the air war was over. To the very end, Short doubted that focusing exclusively, or even primarily, on elusive VJ forces in Kosovo would be enough to swing the desired outcome. He also placed little stock in claims emanating from NATO headquarters that the VJ was being progressively weakened by the air attacks. On that latter point, he observed that the only things that mattered were that army’s ability to move and its willingness to fight, and that both of those remained decidedly intact.[65]
In the first detailed official rundown of the air war’s accomplishments as Allied Force approached its midpoint, the limited effects of NATO’s bombing attempts against enemy forces in Kosovo were underscored by the frank admission that the VJ still retained 80 to 90 percent of its tanks.[66] Later, on May 19, NATO spokesman Major General Walter Jertz claimed more optimistically that one-third of all VJ tanks and artillery in Kosovo had been destroyed.[67] As the bombing effort drew to a close, NATO was similarly claiming that it had taken out more than one-quarter of the VJ’s tanks and APCs deployed in Kosovo. Britain’s chief of the defense staff, General Sir Charles Guthrie, further reported that more than 30 percent of the VJ’s artillery and mortar pieces had been destroyed by NATO attackers.[68]
In its final tally as Operation Allied Force ended, the U.S. Defense Department settled on 700 out of 1,500 tanks, APCs, and artillery pieces destroyed altogether in Kosovo.[69] More specifically, General Shelton announced in an early postwar briefing that NATO attacks had destroyed “around 120 tanks, about 220 armored personnel carriers, and up to 450 artillery and mortar pieces.” However, nothing like a matching number of hulks was found by allied inspectors after Allied Force ended. During their withdrawal, VJ troops took hundreds of tanks, artillery pieces, and APCs out of Kosovo. They also seemed spirited and defiant rather than beaten.[70] The VJ’s commander in chief, General Dragoljub Ojdanic, claimed after the war that only 524 Yugoslav soldiers had been killed, in marked contrast to NATO’s estimate of thousands.[71]
After the dust settled in early June, a preliminary NATO postmortem concluded that the air war had had almost no effect on VJ operations in Kosovo. In an after-action briefing to senior Pentagon officials, the commander of Joint Task Force Noble Anvil, Admiral James Ellis, confirmed that NATO air operations were effective against VJ armor only after the KLA launched its offensive, forcing defending VJ troops to uncover and mass their armor and mechanized forces.[72] NATO initially claimed after the air war ended that it had disabled 150 of the estimated 400 VJ tanks in Kosovo. General Clark later scaled back that number to 110, after having determined that many tanks assumed to have been destroyed had, in fact, been decoys that the VJ had skillfully fielded in large numbers.[73]
55
Brigadier General Randy Gelwix, USAF, “Oral Histories Accomplished in Conjunction with Operation Allied Force/Noble Anvil.”
57
Robert Wall, “Maverick Fix Tested in Kosovo,”
58
Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Henry H. Shelton,
59
The airfield itself offered an 8,200-ft runway and a tactical air navigation (TACAN) system enabling the aircraft to fly instrument approaches, but it lacked a ready communications link to the CAOC in Vicenza and also needed more fuel trucks, as well as runway arresting gear in the event of wet runways and aircraft emergencies. The latter were shipped in and quickly became a welcome presence because high-gross-weight landings in heavy rain proved to be routine.
60
As one downside aspect worth noting in this respect, numerous aircrews later indicated that night-vision goggles often provided them with
61
For further details, see Margaret Bone, “Kodak Moments in Kosovo,”
63
Conversation with Major General P. J. M. Godderij, deputy commander in chief, Royal Netherlands Air Force, Scheveningen, the Netherlands, June 7, 2000.
64
William Drozdiak, “Air War Commander Says Kosovo Victory Near,”
65
William M. Arkin, “Limited Warfare in Kosovo Not Working,”
66
Paul Richter, “Milosevic War Machine Has a Lot of Fight Left,”
67
Robert Hewson, “Allied Force, Part II: Overwhelming Air Power,”
68
Michael Evans, “Serb Army Talks of Peace as Armor Takes a Pounding,”
69
Rowan Scarborough, “Pentagon Intends to Issue Final Count of Serbian Losses,”
70
Over the course of the 11-day Serb withdrawal, NATO observers counted 220 tanks, 300 APCs, and 308 artillery pieces being loaded onto trucks and transporters, along with hundreds of other vehicles and assorted military equipment. Steven Lee Myers, “Damage to Serb Military Less Than Expected,”
71
“Yugoslav Army Lost 524 Soldiers, Top General Says,”
72
Briefing by Admiral James O. Ellis, USN, commander in chief, U.S. Naval Forces, Europe, and commander, Allied Forces Southern Europe and Joint Task Force Noble Anvil, no date given.
73
Joseph Fitchett, “NATO Misjudged Bombing Damage,”