Not only did the Serbs make successful use of tank decoys made out of tetra-pak milk carton material, they also positioned wood-burning stoves with their chimneys angled to make them look like artillery pieces. In some cases, water receptacles were found in the decoys, cleverly placed there to heat up under the sun to help replicate the infrared signature of a vehicle or hot artillery tube.[74] One source spoke of cockpit display videotapes showing targets with every appearance of being tanks collapsing instantly upon being hit. In addition, the Serbs made heavy and frequently effective use of smoke generators to protect targets against LGBs. After the air war ended, site-survey teams that went in on the ground in Kosovo and interviewed witnesses discovered that VJ forces had buried many of their missile launchers, covered fuel trucks with rugs, and disguised tanks as haystacks and armored vehicles as trees.
The subsequent, and putatively definitive, after-action report on Allied Force submitted to Congress by Secretary Cohen and General Shelton in the summer of 1999 claimed valid strikes on 93 enemy tanks, 153 APCs, 339 other military vehicles, and 389 artillery and mortar pieces.[75] Those downwardly revised estimates came on the heels of the findings by a munitions effectiveness assessment (MEA) team of 67 operators and intelligence experts, made up mostly of USAF officers, who went into Kosovo at Clark’s behest to comb the country, both by helicopter and on foot, in an on-site survey of all actual DMPIs attacked. The team’s specific mission was to perform an assessment of attacks undertaken against mobile targets in the Presevo Valley region of Kosovo by cross-referencing on-scene observations and conversations with witnesses on the ground against available cockpit display videotapes, imagery intelligence, signals intelligence, human intelligence, and interviews with airborne FACs who had been operating near the target area at the time of the attacks.[76]
The team’s initial conclusion from that assessment was that “only a handful” of enemy tanks, APCs, and artillery pieces could be determined to have been catastrophically damaged by air attacks.[77] Although the team succeeded in investigating some 60 percent of NATO’s claimed hits on mobile targets in the KEZ, it confirmed only 14 tanks, 18 APCs, and 20 artillery pieces as destroyed for sure. A later assessment conducted by USAFE’s office of studies and analysis, using the team’s findings as one important input, reported 93 tanks and 153 APCs as having been struck altogether, the same numbers noted above that were cited later by Secretary Cohen and General Shelton. Many of those claimed hits, however, were validated by only a single source of evidence, such as a cockpit display videotape or an infrared event detected by DSP satellites.[78] In the later aftermath of Allied Force, on-site surveys of bomb damage effects by KFOR observers and other inspectors further confirmed that NATO’s attacks against VJ forces had accomplished far less than had initially been assumed, notably including at Mount Pastrik.[79]
These seeming discrepancies led some air war critics to charge that NATO and the U.S. Defense Department were engaging in a blatant cover-up of allied air power’s poor performance against VJ forces in Kosovo to avoid being embarrassed by the paltry numbers the inspection team had produced. That criticism turned out, however, to have been overblown for two reasons. First, the cover-up charge was misdirected, in that it was based entirely on a leaked draft report by USAFE’s inspection team that went to Kosovo earlier in the summer of 1999. That draft report, dated August 3, 1999, and titled “Operation Allied Force: Munitions Effectiveness Assessment, Vol. II: Mobile Targets,” documented information collected in Kosovo and elsewhere by the MEA working group tasked with looking into mobile enemy targets. That effort was undertaken not to account for successful strikes, but rather to determine what equipment remained at the attacked sites. The freshest of the attacked sites visited was four weeks old, and some were only visited for the first time three months after the attacks.
All told, the USAFE team came across 14 tank carcasses and the hulks of 12 self-propelled artillery vehicles, which could have looked like tanks from the air and been reported as such in post-strike pilot mission reports. That added up to 26 confirmable “tanks” suffering sufficiently catastrophic damage from NATO air attacks to be written off and abandoned by departing VJ forces. Cross-referencing pilot reports with corroborating evidence from other sources, the USAFE studies and analysis staff later documented presumed successful strikes on 93 tanks, 153 APCs, and 389 artillery pieces. It further documented another 60 instances of attacks on tanks that were believed to have been successful but that could not be validated because of the stringent criteria it had been given by SACEUR. As explained in SACEUR’s subsequent strike assessment briefing at NATO headquarters, 26 tanks could be categorized as “confirmed catastrophic kills,” based on physical information actually gathered on the ground in Kosovo. The remainder of the 93 reported tank kills were categorized as “assessed strikes,” which meant, in effect, that there were indications suggesting that a weapon may have hit a valid target.[80]
Air warfare professionals, notably including the USAF chief of staff, General Michael Ryan, have readily acknowledged since the end of Allied Force that the problems encountered by the operation’s flexible targeting effort outlined above reflected real challenges for the effective application of air power posed by such impediments as trees, mountains, poor weather, and an enemy ground force permitted the luxury of dispersing and hiding rather than concentrating to maneuver to accomplish its mission.[81] The Cohen-Shelton report to Congress frankly admitted that the problems encountered with flexible targeting of VJ forces in Kosovo pointed up continued shortfalls in the nation’s ability to meet “the difficult challenge of rapidly targeting enemy forces and systems that can move and hide frequently.”[82] On that discomfiting point, U.S. and NATO defense officials had nothing whatever to hide and covered nothing up.
Second, and perhaps more important, although it was clearly essential for NATO to maintain constant pressure on VJ and MUP forces deployed in Kosovo and to bend every reasonable effort to suppress their freedom to operate at will against the ethnic Albanians, the majority of the combat sorties that SACEUR insisted be devoted to finding and attacking enemy forces in the KEZ arguably entailed a waste of munitions and other valuable assets. That perspective was pithily expressed by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, USAF General Joseph Ralston, who later went on to replace Clark as SACEUR: “The tank, which was an irrelevant item in the context of ethnic cleansing, became the symbol for Serb ground forces. How many tanks did you kill today? All of a sudden, this became the measure of merit that had nothing to do with reality.”[83] When General Jumper, on being pressed later by reporters for an honest account of how many tanks NATO had actually destroyed, replied simply “enough,” he was telling the truth. The marginality of the tank issue to what really mattered in Allied Force was perhaps most convincingly explained by Brigadier General Daniel Leaf, commander of the 31st Air Expeditionary Wing at Aviano, when he declared in the immediate wake of the cease-fire that “counting tanks is irrelevant. The fact is they withdrew, and while they took tanks with them, they returned to a country whose military infrastructure has been ruined. They’re not going to be doing anything with those forces for a long time.”[84]
74
Paul Richter, “U.S. Study of War on Yugoslavia Aimed at Boosting Performance,”
76
As the team’s concept of operations clearly stipulated, the mission objective was to “determine Allied Force munition effectiveness by selective examination of fixed and mobile target sets within Kosovo [and to] evaluate and record physical and functional target damage and precise weapons impact locations and characteristics, with emphasis on precision and near-precision air-dropped munitions.” The concept of operations further stipulated that validation of NATO’s air campaign, target set, BDA, and rationale for specific target selection were “beyond the scope of this survey.” Documentation provided to the author by Hq USAFE/SA, May 2, 2001.
77
Tim Butcher and Patrick Bishop, “NATO Admits Air Campaign Failed,”
79
Richard J. Newman, “The Bombs That Failed in Kosovo,”
80
Stephen P. Aubin, “
81
Indeed, in its interim report on the Kosovo air effort, the USAF expressly conceded that “shortfalls remain… in the USAF’s ability to locate and attack moving armor and other ground forces in poor weather. The Air Force needs to continue to develop and improve its ability to do this.”
83
Dana Priest, “Tension Grew with Divide in Strategy,”