In yet further testimony to the ill-fated nature of the Army’s TF Hawk experience, an internal Army memorandum written after Allied Force ended acknowledged that the aircrews sent with the Apaches had been both undertrained and underequipped for their intended mission. In a report to the incoming chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, then–Brigadier General Richard Cody, the Army’s director of operations, resources, and mobilization, warned that because of those shortcomings, “we are placing them and their unit at risk when we have to ramp up for a real world crisis.” Cody, who earlier had planned and executed the Army’s highly successful Apache operations during the Gulf War, noted that more than 65 of the assigned aviators in TF Hawk had less than 500 hours of flight experience in the Apache and that none were qualified to fly missions requiring night-vision goggles. He further noted that the radios in the deployed Apaches had insufficient range for conducting deep operations and that the crews were, in the absence of night-vision goggles, dependent solely on their forward-looking infrared (FLIR) sensors. Given the rugged terrain, unpredictable weather, and poorly marked power lines that crisscrossed Kosovo, relying on FLIR alone, he suggested, “was not a good option.” Moreover, he added, in order for the Apaches to have flown the required distances and crossed the high mountains of Kosovo, Hellfire missiles would have had to be removed from one of their two wing mounts to free up a station for auxiliary fuel tanks. As for the MANPADS threat, Cody remarked that “the current suite of ASE [aircraft survivability equipment] was not reliable enough and sometimes ineffective.”[134]
The TF Hawk experience underscored how little the U.S. Army, by its own leadership’s candid admission, had done since Desert Storm to increase its capacity to get to an emergent theater of operations rapidly and with sufficient forces to offer a credible combat presence. Shortly after the Gulf War, the Army’s leadership for a time entertained the thought of reorganizing the service so that it might become more agile by abandoning its structure of 10 combat divisions and opting instead for 25 “mobile combat groups” of around 5,000 troops each. Ultimately, however, the Army backed away from that proposed reform, doing itself out of any ability to deploy a strong armored force rapidly and retaining the unpalatable alternatives of airlifting several thousand lightly armed infantrymen to a theater of conflict within days or shipping a contingent of 70-ton M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks over the course of several months.[135]
On his second day in office as the Army’s new chief of staff, General Shinseki acknowledged that the Army had been poorly prepared to move its Apaches and support overhead to Albania. Part of the problem, he noted fairly, was that the only available deployment site that made any operational sense had poor rail connections, a shallow port, and a limited airfield capacity that could not accommodate the Air Force’s C-5 heavy airlifter. However, he admitted that the Army was nevertheless overdue to develop and act on a plan to make its heavy forces more mobile and its lighter forces more lethal.[136] In what may have presaged a major shift in Army force development policy for the years ahead, he declared: “Our heavy forces are too heavy and our light forces lack staying power. Heavy forces must be more strategically deployable and more agile with a smaller logistical footprint, and light forces must be more lethal, survivable, and tactically mobile. Achieving this paradigm will require innovative thinking about structure, modernization efforts, and spending.”[137]
One positive role played by TF Hawk after the KLA’s counteroffensive began registering effects in late May was the service provided by the former’s counterbattery radars in helping NATO fixed-wing pilots pinpoint and deliver munitions against enemy artillery positions. Its TPQ-36 and TPQ–37 firefinder radars were positioned atop the hills adjacent to Tirana to spot Serb artillery fire and backtrack the airborne shells to their point of origin. Army EH-60 helicopters and RC-12 Guardrail electronic intelligence aircraft were further able to establish the location of VJ command posts whenever the latter transmitted. Although TF Hawk’s Apaches and other combat assets never saw action, its ISR assets exerted a significant influence on the air effort at one of its most crucial moments. The KLA’s counteroffensive had forced the VJ to mass its forces and maneuver, to communicate by radio, and to fire artillery and mortars to protect itself. In response, the sensors of TF Hawk, operating in conjunction with the Army’s Hunter UAVs, spotted VJ targets and passed that information on to those in the command loop who could bring air-delivered ordnance to bear in a timely manner. “The result,” said a retired Army three-star general, “was that NATO air power was finally able to target precisely and hit the Serb army in the field. The Kosovars acted as the anvil and TF Hawk as the eyes and ears of the blacksmith so that the hammer of air power could be effective.”[138] Echoing this conclusion, USAFE’s commander, General Jumper, confirmed that the counterbattery radars of TF Hawk had played “a very big part” in allied targeting during the final stages of Allied Force.[139]
Another bright spot in the otherwise troubled TF Hawk experience was the USAF air mobility system’s superb performance in opening up the Rinas air base in Albania and flowing forces and relief supplies into it. The combined efforts of USAFE’s Air Mobility Operations Command Center (AMOCC), the Allied Force Air Mobility Division, USAFE’s 86th Contingency Response Group at Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and multiple supporting Air Mobility Command entities resulted in a stand-out success amid the generally dismal story of TF Hawk’s immobility and the Army’s persistent go-it-alone approach to command relations and putting the Apaches into the ATO. Simply put, the C-17 made the TF Hawk movement possible. (See Figure 6.3 for the sharp spike in C-17-delivered short tonnage connected with TF Hawk from the second week of April through the first week of May.) No other aircraft could have done the job—yet another testimonial to the direct-delivery concept that shaped the aircraft’s design and got it through one of the most hard-fought acquisition battles in the USAF’s history. Thanks to the C-17 acquisition, TF Hawk (despite its near-fatal growing pains) got in, and many thousand Albanian refugees survived—two signal accomplishments of what the commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, General Montgomery Meigs, later called one of the most successful airlift operations in history.[140]
SHORTCOMINGS IN INTELLIGENCE CYCLE TIME
Commanders and other air operators throughout the course of Allied Force found themselves repeatedly frustrated by the amount of time it often took to cycle critical information about enemy pop-up targets of opportunity from sensors to shooters who were positioned to engage them effectively. Although the requisite architecture was in place throughout most of the air war once a flexible targeting cell had been established by the end of the first month, it lacked a sufficiently high-volume data link with enough channels to quickly get the information where it needed to go.
124
George C. Wilson, “Memo Says Apaches, Pilots Were Not Ready,”
125
Thomas E. Ricks, “Why the U.S. Army Is Ill-Equipped to Move Troops Quickly into Kosovo,”
126
Eric Schmitt, “New Army Chief Seeks More Agility and Power,”
127
“Shinseki Hints at Restructuring, Aggressive Changes for the Army,”
128
Lieutenant General Theodore G. Stroup, Jr., USA (Ret.), “Task Force Hawk: Beyond Expectations,”
129
Response to a question at an Air Force Association Eaker Institute colloquy, “Operation Allied Force: Strategy, Execution, Implications,” held at the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, Washington, D.C., August 16, 1999.
130
Comments on an earlier draft by Brigadier General Robert Bishop, Hq USAF/XOO, April 12, 2001, and Colonel Robert Owen, Hq AMC, May 10, 2001. See also General Charles T. Robertson, Jr., USAF, commander in chief, U.S. Transportation Command, and commander, Air Mobility Command, “Air War Over Serbia: A Mobility Perspective,” briefing charts, 2000, Hq USAFE/SA library.