The extraordinary media attention that was given to events like these attested to what can happen when incurring zero noncombatant casualties becomes not just the goal of strategy but also the expectation. Thanks to unrealistic efforts to treat the normal friction of war as avoidable human error, every occurrence of unintended collateral damage became overinflated as front-page news and treated as a blemish on air power’s presumed ability to be consistently precise. Indeed, the added constraints imposed on NATO aircrews as a result of such occasional tragic occurrences indicated the degree to which modern air power has become a victim of its own success. During the Gulf War, cockpit video images of LGBs homing with seemingly unerring accuracy down the air shafts of enemy bunkers were spellbinding to most observers. Yet because of that same seemingly unerring accuracy, such performance has since come to be expected by both political leaders and the public alike. Once zero collateral damage becomes accepted as a measure of strategy success, not only air power but all forms of force employment get set up to be judged by all but unreachably high standards. Inevitably, any collateral damage then caused during the course of a campaign becomes grist for domestic critics and the enemy’s propaganda mill. Anthony Cordesman rightly noted how characterizations of modern precision bombing as “surgical” overlook the fact that patients still die on the operating table from time to time.[92] Nevertheless, a nontrivial number of proposed sorties in Operation Allied Force were either canceled outright or aborted at the last minute before any weapons were released because their targets (wryly characterized by some USAFE staffers as “morally hardened”) could not be positively identified or because of the perceived risk of causing collateral damage. At best, that made for a necessarily constrained and therefore inescapably inefficient air operation compared to the standard set earlier in Desert Storm.
A bevy of criticism arose from some quarters after the bombing ended alleging that many of the 500 or more Yugoslav and Kosovar Albanian civilians who lost their lives to collateral damage incidents had died needlessly as a direct result of NATO attack aircraft having been kept above 15,000 ft in the interest of minimizing the likelihood of losing friendly lives. Critics further charged that operating at that altitude had somehow been risk-free, cowardly, and even immoral on the part of NATO’s aircrews.[93] In league with other detractors of the way the air war was conducted, strategist Edward Luttwak, for example, characterized 15,000 ft as a “not-optimal” but “ultra-safe” altitude from which allied pilots might carry out “perfectly safe bombing.”[94]
In point of fact, 15,000–20,000 ft was precisely the “optimal” altitude block from which to conduct LGB attacks—not only to keep the attacking aircraft clear of short-range air defenses in the immediate target area but, more important, to give the LGB time to acquire the target and assume a stabilized glide. Contrary to the suggestions of critics, operating at medium altitude provides no protection whatever against radar-guided SAMs. It merely puts attacking aircraft outside the lethal envelope of “trash fire” threats (small arms, AAA, and infrared SAMs). These threats are impossible to detect in a timely way and offer little or no warning of imminent danger; as a result, they cannot be countered very effectively. Indeed, operating at medium altitude actually increases the risk of being engaged by unnegated enemy radar-guided SAMs because the aircraft can no longer take advantage of terrain-masking opportunities. The more important point, however, is that when medium-altitude attack tactics are employed, the timeline for target acquisition and weapons guidance is substantially longer, thus improving the chance of achieving a hit.
Even assuming the absence of undetectable “trash fire” threats, it is by no means a foregone conclusion that had allied aircrews routinely descended to lower altitudes in an effort to identify their targets more positively, the incidence of unintended collateral damage occurrences would have been that much lower. To begin with, VJ and MUP troops were highly accomplished at camouflage and hiding, and they made frequent use of the civilian populace as human shields. Moreover, in Kosovo, where most of the inadvertent civilian fatalities occurred, the mandated altitude floor was not invariably 15,000 ft as the critics implied. On the contrary, once operations against dispersed and hidden VJ forces in Kosovo began in earnest in mid-April, FACs were cleared down to 5,000 ft as necessary to make positive target identifications, and strike aircraft could descend to as low as 8,000 ft for a nonprecision dive-bomb delivery.
Even at those lower altitudes, however, positive identifications tended to be difficult, although in one case, as noted above, USAF OA-10 pilots using nine-power space-stabilized binoculars managed to observe civilians intermingled with a VJ truck convoy after one vehicle had already been hit, as a result of which the ongoing attack was instantly terminated.[95] As a rule, however, routinely going lower and accepting the increased risk of losing an aircraft in the hope of doing better target discrimination would not, in all likelihood, have produced the desired result. True enough, flying even as low as 100 ft above ground level might have enabled NATO pilots to distinguish civilian from military traffic in a few fleeting moments, if that traffic happened to lie almost directly underneath the aircraft’s flight path. Yet operating that close to the ground at normal fighter airspeeds (500 nautical miles per hour or more) in defended airspace would have offered zero perspective and zero precision-attack capability. It also would have increased the chance of NATO aircraft losses to enemy “trash fire” and just possibly brought about the overall failure rather than success of Allied Force as a result. Moreover, hidden targets would still have remained hidden.
The point of the foregoing is that for the kinds of circumstances that repeatedly occasioned the accidental loss of civilian life in Allied Force, the United States, to say nothing of its NATO allies, has yet to develop fail-safe target discrimination capabilities and tactics for use either above or below 15,000 ft. As a result, it has had little choice but to rely on draconian rules of engagement (ROE), which are designed to hedge on the side of caution yet are anything but foolproof. In one case during Allied Force in which the ROE worked as intended, a USAF pilot was directed not to attack a confirmed SA-6 launcher because it was parked immediately adjacent to a civilian structure in a village. There were other reported instances in which precision munitions in the process of guiding were deliberately steered away from targets at the last minute to avoid harming civilians who had not been seen in the target area until after weapon release.[96] In the most egregious instance in which the ROE regime appears to have failed, however, namely, the tragedy involving the convoy along the Djakovica road in Kosovo, the FAC who was coordinating the attack had been given a positive identification by the ABCCC that was completely consistent with the prevailing ROE. Upon observing that the vehicles were uniformly colored and evenly spaced, the FAC declared the convoy to be a valid target. He had also been given ABCCC approval to clear the fighters under his control to drop at will after one F-16 orbiting overhead had drawn fire from one of the convoy’s vehicles.[97]
The solution to such challenges lies not in more relaxed operating restrictions but rather in the development of better tactics, techniques, procedures, and equipment—perhaps beginning with a more aggressive and effective use of offboard platforms like UAVs to perform combat identification and to provide cueing for engaged shooters.[98] Unfortunately, the sensor-to-shooter links that have been refined to a high art over the years for the air-to-air arena, such as the E-3 AWACS and the joint tactical information distribution system (JTIDS) carried by some F-15s, remain far less developed for ground-attack operations when it comes to situation characterization and target identification.[99] In the absence of such capabilities, flying lower in Allied Force not only would not have solved the target identification problem, it would also have rendered weapons deliveries less accurate and, as a result, probably compounded the collateral damage problem rather than ameliorating it. As matters stood, although regrettable tragedies did occur because of occasional misdirected weapons, the munitions and tactics used by NATO in Operation Allied Force made the air effort a record-setter when it came to achieving its declared goals with a minimum of collateral damage for an operation of that magnitude. Indeed, given the high volume of ordnance that was expended over the course of the 78-day air war, it is most remarkable—even astonishing—that the incidence of unintended civilian fatalities was not higher.
92
Anthony H. Cordesman, “The Lessons and Non-Lessons of the Air and Missile War in Kosovo,” unpublished draft, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., July 20, 1999.
93
Typical of such baseless charges was the reference by one pundit to the “low altitudes at which tactical attacks work,” yet where “pilots risk getting killed” (William Pfaff, “After NATO’s Lies About Kosovo, It’s Time to Come Clean,”
95
“NATO Jets May Have Erred in Convoy Attack, General Says,”
96
John A. Tirpak, “The State of Precision Engagement,”
97
It further bears stressing in this regard that most cases of unintended damage resulting in civilian deaths occurred inside targeted buildings, which were prespecified in the ATO and against which NATO aircrews were not free to exercise real-time discretion. Other such cases were occasioned by munitions failures such as faulty cluster-bomb fuses or laser target designators that were disrupted by smoke or clouds while a weapon was guiding. Neither had anything to do with weapon-release altitude. The only clear case of noncombatant fatalities that can be even indirectly ascribed to altitude was the April 14 Djakovica convoy incident, during which the attack was immediately called off once the target identification error was discovered.
98
Email from Lieutenant Colonel James Tubbs, AF/XPXQ, to Colonel James Callard, AF/XPXS, February 11, 2000. Lieutenant Colonel Tubbs was the operations officer of the 510th Fighter Squadron flying F-16CGs out of Aviano Air Base during Operation Allied Force.
99
Although, as in Desert Storm, AWACS generally provided a superb threat picture to allied pilots operating in hostile airspace, at least one specific instance of friction was reported by a USAF F-15C pilot who downed a Yugoslav MiG-29 during a day defensive counterair mission on March 26. The pilot complained that the supporting AWACS controller “did not have any inkling [that] someone was flying on the other side of the border, although he was real good at calling out every friendly