The Air Force was similarly forced to juggle scarce assets to handle the overlapping demands imposed by Kosovo, Iraq, and Korea. It positively scrambled to find enough tankers to support NATO mission needs in Allied Force. Ironically, both Kosovo and Iraq, in and of themselves, represented lesser contingencies whose accommodation was not supposed to impede the U.S. military’s ability to handle two major theater wars. Yet the burdens of both began to raise serious doubts as to whether the two-MTW construct, at least at its current funding level, was realistic for U.S. needs. For example, when USEUCOM redeployed 10 F-15s and 3 EA-6Bs from Incirlik to support Clark’s requirements for Allied Force, it was forced to suspend its air patrols over northern Iraq immediately. Air patrols to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq were continued, but at a slower operational tempo. The net result was U.S. aircraft being flown two to three times more often than in normal peacetime operations.[181]
One example of the negative effects on combat readiness that surfaced during Allied Force was the frequent and widespread complaint by unit personnel in all services that their combat performance suffered because their lack of prior training opportunities with live weapons adversely affected their precision-weapons employment techniques and procedures in actual combat. Indeed, the majority of American bomb-droppers had never dropped a live LGB in training. That shortfall in combat proficiency was partly a reflection of limited range space, but it was also the result of under-resourcing of combat units in the training-munitions category. Numerous misses in Allied Force occurred because aircrews did not understand target-area effects such as thermal bloom, smoke, and dust, which cannot be duplicated in peacetime training without live weapon drops. By one informed account, civilians were injured in Pristina and Surdulica as a direct result of smoke and IR bloom effects. Targets were also missed when aircrews discovered several surprising effects in the LANTIRN system when using the combat laser in the presence of clouds. The training laser (which is eye-safe) fires at a much lower power and rate, with the result that the noted effects were not discovered until they were actually seen in combat—usually in the middle of a drop.[182] Bowing to the inevitable, General Shelton finally acknowledged the cumulative impact of these multiple untoward trends when he admitted to Congress at the beginning of May 1999 that there was “anecdotal and now measurable evidence… that our current readiness is fraying and that the long-term health of the total force is in jeopardy.”[183]
Chapter Seven
LAPSES IN STRATEGY AND IMPLEMENTATION
In the predictable rush to identify “lessons learned” that followed in the wake of the air war’s successful outcome, senior administration officials hastened to acclaim Operation Allied Force as “history’s most successful air campaign.”[1] Yet NATO leaders on both sides of the Atlantic had little to congratulate themselves about when it came to the manner in which the air war was planned and carried out. On the contrary, there was a dominant sense among both participants and observers that the desultory onset of Allied Force and its later slowness to register effects reflected some fundamental failures of allied leadership and strategy choice.
Indeed, the six years that preceded Allied Force saw a clear regression in the use of air power after the latter’s casebook performance in Desert Storm. With the singular exception of Operation Deliberate Force in 1995, a trend toward what came to be called “cruise missile diplomacy” had instead become the prevailing U.S. pattern, owing to the ability of cruise missiles to deliver a punitive message without risking the lives of any U.S. aircrews. The origins of this pattern went back to June 1993, when President Clinton first ordered the firing of several TLAMs in the dead of night against an empty governmental building in Baghdad in symbolic reprisal for confirmed evidence that Saddam Hussein had underwritten an assassination attempt against former President George Bush.
That trend was next reflected in the administration’s unwillingness or inability to use air power decisively in dealing with Bosnian Serb atrocities throughout the two years before Operation Deliberate Force, and in the costly, yet apparently ineffectual, TLAM strikes launched later by the administration against presumed assets of the terrorist Osama bin Laden in Sudan and Afghanistan.[2] It culminated in the three-day Operation Desert Fox, a mini-air operation that was executed against Iraq, to no significant consequence, at the very height of President Clinton’s impeachment trial in December 1998. Less than a year earlier, a more serious campaign plan called Operation Desert Thunder, set in motion shortly after Iraq had expelled the UN’s arms inspectors in January 1998, was aborted by President Clinton literally at the last minute, as allied strike aircraft were taxiing for takeoff, in response to the extraction by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan of an eleventh-hour, later unfulfilled, promise from Saddam Hussein to permit UN inspections.[3] In all of these cases, the declared emphasis was merely on “degrading” or “damaging,” rather than destroying, enemy assets, so that the operation could be terminated at any moment in a manner allowing success to be declared.
That may have been the administration’s going-in hope for Operation Allied Force as well. Not long after the effort began, however, senior U.S. military leaders began voicing off-the-record misgivings over the slow pace of the air operation, its restricted target base, and its rules of engagement that all but proscribed any serious application of air power. One Air Force general spoke of officers in Europe who had characterized the air war to date as “a disgrace,” adding that “senior military officers think that the tempo is so disgustingly slow it makes us look inept.”[4] Another, harking back to the initial concept of operations developed for Desert Storm, complained: “This is not Instant Thunder, it’s more like Constant Drizzle.”[5] Yet a third Air Force general, reflecting the consensus of most airmen, commented that “the hammer is working just fine. But when the blueprints have to undergo revision each day by 19 separate architects before it is determined where to drive the nail, one has to wonder what the final product is going to look like.”[6]
Indeed, the highly politicized and sometimes seemingly random targeting process was so cumbersome that Clark himself would discover from time to time that he was stymied by the system as action time neared.[7] The frequent hesitancy and indecision on the part of NATO’s political leaders, and the resultant fits and starts which that indecision inflicted on the daily target allocation machinery, ended up producing what some uniformed critics later faulted as “ad hoc targeting”: Air strikes were demanded on the same day that they had been approved, missions that had not yet been approved were assigned to the JFACC, and those same missions were later removed from the list at the last minute if they had not been approved by NATO’s civilian authorities. The resulting confusion led the commander in chief of Allied Forces in Southern Europe, Admiral James Ellis, to complain: “We don’t like this kind of process where something could be left on [the ATO] by omission.”[8] The burdensome rules and restrictions that dominated the target approval process, moreover, contributed to a defensive and reactive mind-set among target planners and mission coordinators at the working level, who were said by some to be locked into a resigned “we can’t do it” position rather than amenable to a more creative “let’s try it” attitude.[9]
171
Elizabeth Becker, “Needed on Several Fronts, U.S. Jet Force Is Strained,”
173
Kate O’Beirne, “Defenseless: The Military’s Hollow Ring,”
1
Paul Richter, “U.S. Study of War on Yugoslavia Aimed at Boosting Performance,”
2
In fairness to the Clinton administration, it must be said that bombing the Bosnian Serbs unilaterally was not a realistic option for the United States as long as three NATO allies (France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) had troops on the ground who would have been helpless against Serb reprisals had U.S. air strikes taken place. It was only after the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) pulled back into defensible positions so that the Serbs could not take its troops hostage that Operation Deliberate Force became politically feasible. Weakness on the ground can often negate strength in the air.
3
For an informed, if also sharply judgmental, account of this history, see Joshua Muravchik, “The Road to Kosovo,
4
Rowan Scarborough, “U.S. Pilots Call NATO Targeting a ‘Disgrace,’”
5
John D. Morrocco, David Fulghum, and Robert Wall, “Weather, Weapons Dearth Slow NATO Strikes,”
6
William M. Arkin, “Inside the Air Force, Officers Are Frustrated About the Air War,”
7
To illustrate, Clark recalled after the cease-fire that he would often have to call Solana at the last minute with an urgent request like: “You’ve got to help me with target 183. I need 183.” Michael Ignatieff, “The Virtual Commander: How NATO Invented a New Kind of War,”
9
Roundtable discussion with Hq USAFE/XP, USAFE/DO, and USAFE/IN staff, Ramstein AB, Germany, May 2, 2001.