As it unfolded and expanded in scope and intensity, Operation Allied Force became the largest civilian emergency ever confronted by the airlines, although it produced little major traffic dislocation in the end. Before the cold war ended, there had been only two options from which to choose—either a peacetime operating mode, with the military taking only a small portion of the available airspace and time for training, or a wartime mode, with no civil operations whatever and unrestricted military flying. This time, as NATO’s top official on civil airspace put it, the coalition was “waging what we may plainly call war in a localized area of Europe, while throughout the rest of the continent it was business as usual.”[149] The situation required air traffic controllers to reroute as many as 8,000 airliners a day on some occasions. One concern was that inconveniencing civilians at peak summer travel time would erode public support and cause a backlash against the effort. Another was to avoid any replay of the downing of an Iranian airliner, which the cruiser USS Vincennes mistook for an Iranian F-14 over the Persian Gulf in 1988. That latter concern led to a double-checking of identification procedures for electronically identifying aircraft operating in and near the combat zone. Toward the end of the air war, NATO finally succeeded in easing the airspace congestion problem at least marginally, when it in effect opened a second front by initiating Marine F/A-18D operations out of Hungary and USAF fighter operations out of Turkey.
DEFICIENCIES WITH RESPECT TO SPACE
Fortunately, U.S. space superiority was not challenged during Operation Allied Force. Against the remote yet distinct possibility that Milosevic and his erstwhile supporters in Moscow might somehow have sought to do so, however, the enemy’s space order of battle, rudimentary though it may have been, was never seriously examined. Nor was the vulnerability of U.S. space systems sufficiently assessed and hedged against using the needed countermeasures. Other space-related problems were also highlighted by the Allied Force experience. With respect to ISR, intelligence collectors and combat aircrews both had repeated difficulty finding mobile targets. Adverse weather and enemy camouflage, concealment, and deception measures presented additional complications, with the result that the “kill chain” was too long by a discomfiting margin. Relatedly, space-based weather support suffered. For example, there was no continuous weather coverage of the theater of operations, so some scheduled strike missions may have been needlessly canceled because available weather information was not current. Battlespace characterization also suffered because of a lack of enough space-derived imagery of the right kinds.[150]
As for other deficiencies in the availability of on-orbit assets, some satellites that had been tasked primarily against the Middle East and Pacific basin were recommitted to the Balkans, leaving important areas of interest uncovered in other theaters.[151] Moreover, the United States was shown to continue to lack a real-time targeting capability and to suffer significant problems with respect to real-time distribution, all of which pointed to the still-unresolved challenge of getting the right information to the right people at the right time. To be sure, information cycle time was compressed significantly in comparison to earlier aerospace operations, as attested by one case in which a single TLAM was targeted and launched early during Allied Force against a MiG-29 that had suddenly been detected in the open at a Serbian air base. However, there was no mechanism available for providing shooters in near-real time with radar imagery and other intelligence gathered by the multitude of collection platforms and surveillance systems that were available and functioning. Joint STARS is slated to receive an upgrade that will permit it to transmit a map through a satellite uplink directly into a fighter cockpit, but that capability is not yet in place.[152] Also, U.S. space-based intelligence assets, including NRO’s classified ELINT and SIGINT satellites, DSCS, and other systems, were shown not to have improved greatly since Desert Storm. As one U.S. intelligence official noted, “three to four hours is the best we can do” from target identification to weapons delivery.[153] The good news in all this is that many needed fixes were discovered to lie in the realm of essentially cost-free improvements in techniques, tactics, and procedures rather than in more expensive hardware solutions.
Finally, the Allied Force experience indicated that considerable room remains for further progress in bringing operators to a fuller appreciation of what space systems now have to offer. The director of NRO, Keith Hall, commented after the air war ended that although allied operators turned in an effective performance, they made some important aspects of the operation harder for themselves than they needed to be. Stressing that professional military education and officer specialization training at all levels in the four U.S. services still do not offer enough needed first-hand exposure to space systems and their capabilities, he went on to say: “I impress upon [the service chiefs] the need to organize, train, and equip to use this stuff if they’re going to rely on it, and not just call up the NRO and say, ‘Can you do this for us?’ when we’re engaged in an operation…. We’re dealing with a situation where people are not trained, it hasn’t been practiced in peacetime, and you have to scramble…. If they’re going to rely on it, they’re going to have to do their part of it.”[154]
Air Force space professionals would undoubtedly concur that shortcomings in the use of available space assets identified during Allied Force highlighted a continuing need for more space involvement in peacetime exercises, on the sensible premise followed as gospel for years by fighter pilots that you should “train like you expect to fight.” That means a need for advanced space education and training of a highly specific and focused nature—not just greater “space awareness”—for operators at all levels, from the most senior command echelons all the way down to shooters working within tactical confines. It also means a need for better development and documentation of space operational support capabilities and options in theater contingency plans worldwide. Acknowledging this and more after the air war was over, the commander in chief of U.S. Space Command, Air Force General Richard Myers, remarked frankly that in terms of using space assets, the Kosovo operation was “probably the best we’ve done—surely superior to Desert Storm from everything we can learn. But there’s still a long way to go before space is really integrated with the rest of the campaign.”[155]
INTEROPERABILITY PROBLEMS
One of the most surprising aspects of the Allied Force experience was what it revealed about the extent of the discontinuity that had been allowed to develop between U.S air power and that of most other NATO allies who participated.[156] One concern had to do with inadequacies in the equipment operated by the allies. To begin with, there was a pronounced dearth of interoperability with respect to rapid and secure communications. Only at Aviano were there some old STU-2 secure telephones that allowed the U.S. participants to transfer classified information quickly to allied units. (The STU-3 secure phone system used by U.S. forces was not available to the allies.) Other classified communications required passing a hard copy of the information by hand, repeating one of the worst command and control deficiencies that had been exposed earlier in Desert Storm, when the ATO had to be flown every day to each of the Navy’s six participating aircraft carriers because the latter were not equipped to receive it electronically.
139
Joseph Fitchett, “For NATO, Keeping Peak Air Traffic on the Go Was a Critical Goal,”
140
“Space Support to Operation Allied Force: Preliminary Lessons Learned,” briefing to the author by Colonel Robert Bivins, director of operations, U.S. Air Force Space Warfare Center, Schriever AFB, Colorado, February 25, 2000.
141
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, “Dangerous Drawdown,”
142
“Space Support to Operation Allied Force: Preliminary Lessons Learned,” briefing by Colonel Robert Bivins, February 25, 2000.
143
Roy Bender, “Allies Still Lack Real-Time Retargeting,”
144
John Donnelly, “NRO Chief: Services Ill-Prepared to Work with Spy Satellites,”
146
For a fuller treatment of the allied contribution to the air war and the interoperability problems that became manifest as a result of it, see John E. Peters, Stuart Johnson, Nora Bensahel, Timothy Liston, and Traci Williams,