True enough, a demonstrable record of effective performance by the attacks against VJ tanks may well have been regarded at the time as being of crucial importance toward vindicating SACEUR’s stress on attacks against dispersed and hidden enemy forces in Kosovo. Yet viewed in hindsight, the number of tanks taken out in the air war was, and remains, an issue of only scant pertinence to the operation’s ultimate outcome. Not only that, getting into the tank-counting business in the first place made for a largely self-inflicted wound by the Department of Defense, SACEUR, and NATO. In the end, all the to-ing and fro-ing over how many enemy tanks were taken out by NATO was mainly of academic interest, since air operations in the KEZ were, by all indications, not a determining factor affecting Milosevic’s ultimate decision to capitulate.[85] The KLA had been eliminated entirely as a tactical consideration by superior VJ strength. Moreover, notwithstanding more than two months of continual NATO bombing, the VJ lost few personnel to hostile fire, retained its command and control and resupply apparatus throughout the air effort, and continued to conduct ethnic cleansing forays until the last day of the air war, even though it did put itself at risk whenever its units exposed themselves to attack from the air. At bottom, NATO’s failure to perform better than it did against enemy ground units in the KEZ was as much a result of the strategy chosen by its leaders as it was of any inherent deficiencies in the air weapon. By ruling out before the fact even a ground threat, let alone any serious prospect of an early ground invasion, the Clinton administration and NATO ensured that air power would be stressed to the fullest when it came to attempts to engage fielded enemy forces.
STRAY WEAPONS AND THE LOSS OF INNOCENTS
Pressures to avoid civilian casualties and unintended damage to nonmilitary structures were greater in Allied Force than in any previous campaign involving U.S. forces. Nevertheless, despite rules of engagement characterized by USAF Major General Charles Wald as being “as strict as I’ve seen in my 27 years in the military,” there were more than 30 reported instances throughout the air war of unintended damage caused by errant NATO munitions or mistakes in targeting, including a dozen highly publicized incidents in which civilians were accidentally killed.[86] The first serious loss of civilian lives occurred on April 12, when an electro-optically guided AGM-130 released by an F-15E struck a targeted rail bridge over the Jusna Morava river in Kosovo on the Belgrade-Skopje line 300 km southeast of Belgrade just as a passenger train full of noncombatants, in a tragic moment of fateful timing, happened to be crossing it.[87] Belgrade later reported that more than 55 civilians had been killed in that incident. Two days later, in the worst case of collateral damage to have occurred at any time throughout the operation, attacks against presumed enemy military vehicles at two sites in southwestern Kosovo near the town of Djakovica were said to have killed numerous ethnic Albanian refugees when USAF F-16 pilots mistook civilian vehicles for a convoy.[88]
These and similar possible target identification errors resulted, in at least a few instances, from constraints imposed by the requirement that NATO aircrews remain above 15,000 ft to avoid the most lethal enemy infrared SAM and AAA threat envelopes, which made visual discrimination between military and civilian traffic difficult at best. Discriminate attacks against moving military vehicles amid a virtual sea of civilian refugees typically bordered on being an impossible mission when pilots orbiting at medium altitudes could not determine for sure whether a convoy consisted of military trucks, military vehicles carrying refugees, or civilian vehicles. General Wald, the deputy director of strategic planning on the Joint Staff and the commander at Aviano during Operation Deliberate Force in 1995, conceded that “the job is about as hard as it’s going to get for targeting.”[89]
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. On April 6, near the end of the second week, the first LGB went astray in that manner, hitting an apartment building in the small town of Aleksinac 100 miles southeast of Belgrade and reportedly killing at least seven civilians and injuring dozens more. The intended target had been an artillery brigade headquarters, but the bomb’s steering toward its desired mean point of impact was disrupted by clouds that deflected the laser beam after weapon release.
In the case of the Djakovica incident noted above, there were initial reports that Yugoslav aircraft had intentionally attacked the civilian tractors and wagons near Prizren. Those reports ultimately proved groundless, although Pentagon officials did confirm that the Yugoslav air force was still operating low-flying Galeb ground-attack jets and attack helicopters.[90] In all events, the alleged occurrence of an inadvertent bombing attack on noncombatant civilians took place at midday, despite the greatest operational discipline on the part of the involved USAF pilots. The F-16 strike force leader, who was operating as an airborne forward air controller (FAC-A), determined the initial convoy to be made up of uniformly sized, colored, and spaced military vehicles whose occupants seemed engaged in systematic house-burning. Extensive radio discussion then ensued between the FAC-A and the ABCCC stressing the need to avoid inadvertently harming any Kosovar refugees. The ABCCC, backstopped by an orbiting UAV, confirmed the convoy to be a valid military target and marshaled as many fighters against it as were available in the immediate target area.
During the course of the precision attacks with 500-lb GBU-12 LGBs that then ensued, it was reported as “possible” that some of the vehicles may have been civilian tractors, at which point the FAC-A immediately called all fighters off “high and dry” (clear of the target area with their armament switches deselected), and the ABCCC, in turn, requested reverification of the targets as hostile. At that point, nearby OA-10s were called in so that their pilots might reconnoiter the situation and provide such reverification with onboard nine-power space-stabilized binoculars. One OA-10 pilot reported observing definite military vehicles but also multicolored and possibly civilian vehicles, whereupon the FAC-A terminated all further attacks. Afterward, Serb news reports claimed that 80 civilians had been killed, although the persistent ambiguities were such that NATO only conceded that it “may have attacked” civilian vehicles. Some reports suggested that the civilians involved had been machine-gunned rather than bombed, and eyewitnesses on the ground reported the use of human shields in the convoys and nearby Serb mortar fire at the same time the convoy was being attacked by the F-16s. The commander of the 31st Air Expeditionary Wing whose F-16s were involved in the tragedy, Brigadier General Leaf, later told reporters that the incident involved “a very complicated scenario, and we will never be able to establish all the details.” He further stated that he could not explain the bodies of the civilians that had been shown on Serbian television and conceded only, in light of the ambiguous evidence, that there “may have been” unintended civilian fatalities.[91]
85
This is not to suggest that one should draw any particular comfort from the apparent fact that NATO’s failure to take out more than a token number of VJ tanks was largely irrelevant to the overall outcome of Allied Force. For one thing, had NATO been able to render the VJ’s Kosovo corps ineffective during the air war’s initial month, Milosevic may well have capitulated earlier, to the relief of both NATO and the Kosovar Albanians. Second, and more important, the mission of finding, identifying, and destroying dispersed and concealed enemy tanks is not going to go away, and the U.S. Air Force will likely be asked again in some future contingency to attack fielded enemy forces under comparably challenging circumstances. Civilians in senior leadership positions who recall the more optimistic early claims on behalf of the air war’s accomplishments in this respect will naturally expect air power to perform effectively. Fortunately, despite charges from some that the Air Force sought to play down its difficulties in this regard in the early aftermath of Allied Force, its leadership has frankly owned up to those difficulties and has initiated measures aimed at improving its capability. I am grateful to my RAND colleague Bruce Pirnie for directing my attention to this point.
86
Joel Havemann, “Convoy Deaths May Undermine Moral Authority,”
87
Indeed, the train entered the AGM-130’s field of regard so close to the moment of weapon impact that the F-15E weapon systems officer (WSO) who was controlling the guiding weapon noted that he had not even seen it until the videotape of his cockpit display was played back during the subsequent mission debriefing. As a measure of the extent to which F-15E aircrews, like all others, were disciplined to honor the strictest collateral-damage avoidance rules, there were numerous instances in which the WSO dragged the selected impact point of a guiding AGM-130 off the designated aim point to an open area at the last moment because the target looked through the weapon’s EO seeker head like a house or some other potential opportunity for collateral damage. In a similar illustration of such discipline, one videotape of an AGM-130 attack on an enemy fuel storage tank as the weapon neared impact showed the targeted tank to be empty while others around it were full. Nevertheless, despite the WSO’s natural temptation, the guiding weapon was not slewed at the last moment toward a more lucrative target because the empty fuel tank happened to be the one to which the approved DMPI had been assigned. Conversation with USAF F-15E aircrews, 492nd Fighter Squadron, RAF Lakenheath, England, April 27, 2001.
89
Robert Wall, “NATO Shifts Tactics to Attack Ground Forces,”
90
Michael Dobbs and Karl Vick, “Air Strikes Kill Scores of Refugees,”
91
Videotaped press statement by Brigadier General Daniel Leaf, USAF, Brussels, Belgium, NATO Office of Information and Press, April 19, 1999.