As of May 31, the cost of the TF Hawk deployment had reached $254 million, much of that constituting the expense for the hundreds of C-17 sorties that had been needed to haul all the equipment from Germany to Albania, plus the additional costs of building base camps and port services and conducting mission rehearsals.[124] Yet despite SACEUR’s intentions to the contrary, the Apaches flew not a single combat mission during the entire remainder of Operation Allied Force. The reason given afterward by the JCS chairman, General Shelton, was that Serb air defenses in Kosovo, although noticeably degraded by early May, remained effective enough to warrant keeping the Apaches out of action until SEAD operations had “reduced the risk to the very minimum.”[125]
In a final coda to the Army’s plagued TF Hawk experience, Shelton conceded in later testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee that “the anticipated benefit of employing the Apaches against dispersed forces in a high-threat environment did not outweigh the risk to our pilots.”[126] Shelton added that by the time the deployment had reached the point where the Apaches were ready to engage in combat, VJ ground formations were no longer massed but had become dispersed and well hidden. Moreover, he went on to note, the weather had improved, enabling Air Force A-10s and other fixed-wing aircraft to hunt down dispersed and hidden enemy forces while incurring less risk from enemy infrared SAMs, AAA, and small-arms fire than the Apaches would have faced.[127]
Beyond the problems created for the deployment by the Army’s decision to bring along so much additional overhead, there was a breakdown in joint doctrine for the combat use of the helicopters that was disturbingly evocative of the earlier competition for ownership and control of coalition air assets that had continually poisoned the relationship between the joint force air component commander (JFACC) and the Army’s corps commanders during Desert Storm.[128] The issue stemmed in this case from the fact that the Army has traditionally regarded its attack helicopters not as part of a larger air power equation with a theater-wide focus, but rather as an organic maneuver element fielded to help support the ground maneuver needs of a division or corps. Apache crews typically rely on their own ground units to select and designate their targets. Yet in the case of Allied Force, with no Army ground combat presence in theater to speak of, they would either have had to self-designate their targets or else rely on Air Force forward air controllers flying at higher altitudes to designate for them. The idea of using Apaches as a strike asset in this manner independently of U.S. ground forces was simply not recognized by prevailing Army doctrine. On the contrary, as prescribed in Army Field Manual FM 1-112, Attack Helicopter Operations, an AH-64 battalion “never fights alone…. Attacks may be conducted out of physical contact with other friendly forces,” but they must be “synchronized with their scheme of maneuver.” FM 1-112 expressly characterizes deep-attack missions of the sort envisaged by Clark as “high-risk, high-payoff operations that must be exercised with the utmost care.”[129]
In light of this, the Army’s V Corps commander, Lieutenant General John Hendrix, was willing to have the Apaches included in the USEUCOM Air Tasking Order (ATO), but demurred on having them incorporated as well into the separate NATO ATO, notwithstanding General Short’s insistence that such inclusion would be essential in any situation in which the attack helicopters were ever committed to actual combat. Apart from that, however, Short never sought operational control of the Apaches or attempted to task them. He also offered to provide TF Hawk as much operational support (including EA-6B jamming support) as possible, and even went so far as to propose to subordinate himself and his CAOC to Hendrix, who as V Corps commander was also the ultimate commander of TF Hawk, as a supporting (as opposed to supported) combat element.[130]
In the end, an agreement was reached that included the Apaches with all other ATO missions yet left to Hendrix’s discretion much essential detail on mission timing and tactics. A window was provided in the ATO such that the Apaches would be time-deconflicted from friendly bombs falling from above and also assured of some fixed-wing air support. However, the agreement reached in the end was so vague that it allowed each service to claim that it maintained tactical control over the Apaches in the event they were ever committed to combat. For their part, Army officers insisted that fire support for the AH-64s would come only from MLRS and Army tactical missile systems (ATACMS) positioned on the Albanian side of the border. That doctrinal stance was enough all by itself to ensure that the Apaches would never see combat, considering that the massive MLRS and ATACMS fires envisaged for any AH-64 operations would have rained literally multiple thousands of CBU submunitions all over Kosovo in an indiscriminate attempt to suppress enemy AAA and IR SAMs, a tactic that was out of the question from the very start, given NATO’s determination to avoid any significant incidence of noncombatant casualties. In contrast, Air Force planners maintained that excluding the Apaches from CAOC control would increase their level of risk by depriving them of support from such key battlespace awareness assets as Joint STARS, Rivet Joint, Compass Call, and the EA-6B. As a USAF officer attached to Hendrix’s deep operations coordination cell (DOCC) reportedly put it, “they do not know, nor do they want to know, the detailed integration required to get the Prowler to jam the priority threats, provide acquisition jamming on the correct azimuth, etc…. The benefits of integrating with platforms like Compass Call, Rivet Joint and others are off their radar scope.”[131]
After Allied Force ended, the assistant chief of staff for operations at Supreme Headquarters Allied Power Europe (SHAPE), USAF Major General John Dallager, touched the heart of the overriding interests and equities at stake here when he stated, during a briefing at a NATO Reaction Force Air Staff conference on JFACC issues: “Clearly the JFACC’s authority must not infringe upon operational C2 [command and control] relationships within and between national or service commands and other functional commands. But to ensure deconfliction of simultaneous missions and to minimize the risk of fratricide, all air operations within the [joint operating arena] must be closely coordinated by the JFACC through the ATO… process. This last point may be difficult to swallow for land and maritime commanders, but if air history teaches us anything, it is that air, the truly joint activity, needs to be coordinated centrally if we are to make efficient use of scarce resources and if we are to avoid blue-on-blue.”[132]
Interestingly, the Army leadership in the Pentagon seemed far more disposed than General Hendrix, at least in principle, to assign operational control of the Apaches to the CAOC. The incoming Army vice chief of staff, Lieutenant General Jack Keane, frankly commented at an industry symposium that “it boggles my mind, but we still have senior leaders, people who wear stars… that don’t recognize that if you’re going to fly Apaches at a distance and range, it’s got to be on the [air tasking order].” General Keane added that the Apaches had to be under the operational control of the JFACC in the Army’s “self-interest” because that arrangement offered a more effective way of employing them in this particular instance: “The JFACC should determine what the Apache’s targets are as a result of the entire responsibility he has in conducting that air campaign.” He further noted that the JFACC had the comparative advantage of being able to retask combat assets based on real-time intelligence, something that the Army could take advantage of as well if it could get itself out of “the business of being myopic about ground operations.” In closing, he acknowledged that in the Army, “we’ve got this nagging fear that somehow, if we turn over our organization to somebody in another uniform, that that organization is somehow going to suffer as a result of that. And I just fundamentally disagree with that.”[133]
114
Ron Lorenzo, “Apache Deployment Has Cost Quarter Billion So Far,”
115
Molly Moore and Bradley Graham, “NATO Plans for Peace, Not Ground Invasion,”
116
Sheila Foote, “Shelton: Risk Was the Key in Decision Not to Use Apaches,”
117
True enough, the terrain and weather presented by Kosovo were more challenging than the open and featureless Iraqi desert, where the Apaches had performed so effectively against enemy armor in Desert Storm. Yet the biggest concern in the minds of many U.S. leaders was the specter of a replay of the 1993 “Bloody Sunday” horror in Mogadishu, Somalia, with dead Army Rangers and crewmembers from downed Black-hawk helicopters being dragged through the streets on live television worldwide.
118
David Atkinson and Hunter Keeter, “Apache Role in Kosovo Illustrates Cracks in Joint Doctrine,”
119
Quoted in Elaine M. Grossman, “As Apaches Near Combat, White House Seeks Diplomatic Solution,”
120
Telephone conversation with Lieutenant General Michael Short, USAF (Ret.), August 22, 2001.
121
Elaine M. Grossman, “Army Commander in Albania Resists Joint Control over Apache Missions,”
122
Major General John Dallager, USAF, “NATO JFACC Doctrine,” briefing at a conference on “The NATO Joint Force Air Component Commander Concept in Light of the Kosovo Air Campaign,” Headquarters NATO Reaction Force Air Staff, Kalkar, Germany, December 1–3, 1999. It might be noted in passing here that another Army–Air Force difference of view that had an even greater operational impact than the joint doctrinal disagreement discussed above (because all involved had to live through its consequences) was the disconnect between the two services at Tirana as to who was in charge of the airfield and force protection, a disconnect that, according to one senior USAF planner who was involved, created “some real problems.” Comments on an earlier draft by Brigadier General Robert Bishop, Hq USAF/XOO, April 17, 2001.