As the commander of U.S. naval forces participating in Allied Force, Vice Admiral Daniel Murphy, recalled after the air war ended, “there was a fundamental difference of opinion at the outset between General Clark, who was applying a ground commander’s perspective… and General Short as to the value of going after fielded forces.” Short believed that it made little sense to waste valuable munitions, sorties, and time going after the VJ’s 3rd Army in Kosovo “if we don’t have an army in the field [or] unless we have defined the opposing army in the field as a center of gravity.”[29] He later commented that he thought going after that elusive army entailed a “high level-of-effort, high-risk, low-payoff option” because there was no friendly ground presence poised nearby “to make them predictable.”[30] Nevertheless, Clark’s view as to where the target priority emphasis should lie prevailed throughout most of the air war. Not only did Clark insist on attacking dispersed and hidden VJ ground forces as the first priority—indisputably his prerogative as the theater CINC—he reportedly micromanaged the day-to-day execution of Allied Force, at times even choosing the particular type of weapon to be used against a given target.[31]
In fairness to the record, Clark was in the decidedly unenviable position of having multiple masters tugging at him from different directions, including the civilian ambassadors to NATO who made up the NAC; NATO’s Secretary General Solana, who was responsible for political control over NATO military operations; and the diverse cast of players in Washington, notably the president, Secretary Cohen, General Shelton, and the service chiefs with their independent interests. In the presence of these often conflicting influences, Clark’s overarching responsibility as SACEUR was to ensure that coalition warfare worked and that the allies remained in step until they produced a successful outcome. To his credit, keeping the other 18 allies on board to the very end was an immense and remarkable accomplishment. As Columbia University political scientist Richard Betts later pointed out in this respect, Clark’s command “was compromised by more conflicting pressures—political, diplomatic, military, and legal—than any other in history. Given these constraints, keeping the enterprise from flying apart was no mean feat.”[32]
That said, Clark had the option all along of leaving the day-to-day operational responsibilities of planning and implementing the air effort to his JTF commander, Admiral Ellis, as the principal subordinate warfighting CINC. That is what U.S. Army General George Joulwan had done as SACEUR in 1995 with Admiral Leighton Smith during Operation Deliberate Force, so he could devote his full time, attention, and energy to his paramount duties as a diplomat in uniform. Instead, Clark elected not only to shoulder his diplomatic burdens as NATO’s supreme commander, but also to conduct the air war himself from Brussels, in the process bypassing not only Admiral Ellis but also his air component commander, General Short, in making air apportionment decisions. Whereas General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, on the eve of Desert Storm, had become wholly persuaded by his trusted JFACC, then–Lieutenant General Horner, of the merits of the chosen air campaign strategy, Clark would not be moved by Short from his less trusting insistence that the VJ’s 3rd Army in Kosovo, rather than vital equities closer to Milosevic in and around Belgrade, constituted the principal enemy target set.[33]
THE DESULTORY ONSET OF THE AIR WAR
Notwithstanding their narrow intent and the admitted constraints that impeded them, the initial strikes of Allied Force, by their measured nature, stood in marked contrast to the massed and highly orchestrated hammer-blows that were delivered with such paralyzing effect by coalition air power against Iraq from the earliest moments of Operation Desert Storm. On the home front, criticism of NATO’s seeming timidity was both instant and searing. The morning after the operation’s opening night, Senator John McCain, a former Navy attack pilot and Vietnam POW, complained that “these bombs are not going to do the job…. It’s almost pathetic. You’re going to solidify the determination of the Serbs to resist a peace agreement. You’d have to drop the bridges and turn off the lights in Belgrade to have even a remote chance of changing Milosevic’s mind. What you’ll get is all the old Vietnam stuff, bombing pauses, escalation, negotiations, trouble.”[34] In a similar vein, NATO’s tentativeness and preemptive forswearing of a ground option led the respected London Economist to declare that the West had “stumbled into one of its riskiest ventures” since World War II and to predict that if the bombing eventually succeeded, it would “owe as much to luck as to precision.”[35]
In response to such charges, NATO’s spokesman at the time, RAF Air Commodore David Wilby, gamely said of the enemy as Allied Force entered its second week: “He’s hurting. We know that he’s running short of fuel. We’re starting to hit him very hard on the ground. You will start to see the resolve starting to crack very quickly.”[36] However, USAF officers were complaining bitterly about the restrictive rules of engagement from the first days of combat operations. Similarly, RAF pilots flying combat missions out of Italy scored the insipid air effort as “nancying around” and bordering on cowardice.[37] General Short later commented that the frustration felt by airmen was “under control” because the alliance was not losing aircraft and airmen. He added, however, that had losses begun to occur on a repetitive basis, the alliance would have had to rethink the guidance its leaders were handing down on strategy and rules of engagement.[38]
Indeed, so counter to military common sense was the strategy selected by NATO that Short became convinced early on that strike planning was all “just planning for diplomatic threat,” that his air planners were “just going through the motions to some degree,” and that “we’re probably never going to drop a bomb.” Short added that he and his planners had determined that there were somewhere between 250 and 300 “valid, solid military targets” in the area for the sort of campaign effort that airmen ideally would like to conduct, but that he was told: “You’re only going to be allowed to bomb two, maybe three nights. That’s all Washington can stand, that’s all some members of the alliance can stand, that’s why you’ve only got 90 targets, this will all be over in three nights.” At that, Short frankly conceded that he assumed a prior deal had been struck with Milosevic, whereby Milosevic had told NATO, in effect, that he could not accept NATO’s terms and keep his job unless NATO bombed him and inflicted some degree of at least symbolic damage.[39] That meant, or so Short thought, a token NATO bombing effort against the approved set of 90 targets, 51 of which were IADS targets selected for force protection—both south and north of the 44th parallel—and some in Montenegro, after which Milosevic would dutifully show the white flag.
30
Interview with Lieutenant General Michael Short, USAF, PBS
31
In one reported exchange during a daily video teleconference, Clark insisted that NATO air power remain committed against enemy fielded forces in Kosovo, and Short countered that such missions were a waste of assets and should be supplanted by missions against downtown Belgrade. Noting that U.S. aircraft were about to attack the Serbian special police headquarters in Belgrade, Short said: “This is the jewel in the crown.” To which Clark replied: “To me, the jewel in the crown is when those B-52s rumble across Kosovo.” Short: “You and I have known for weeks that we have different jewelers.” Clark: “My jeweler outranks yours.” Dana Priest, “Tension Grew with Divide in Strategy,”
32
Richard K. Betts, “Compromised Command: Inside NATO’s First War,”
33
During a 10th-anniversary retrospective featuring Schwarzkopf’s principal deputies in Desert Storm, Horner was emphatic on the crucial importance of the ability of those key deputies to work together harmoniously in producing the war’s successful outcome: “The one thing you need to understand if you’re going to understand Desert Storm is that the relationship among the four people at this table—[Admiral Stanley] Arthur, [General Walter] Boomer, [Lieutenant General John] Yeosock, and me—was highly unusual. Such a relationship probably has never existed before, and it probably won’t exist in the future. The trust and respect we had for one another was unbelievable. This was a function of personality as much as a desire to get the job done. Unless you understand our relationships, then you really won’t understand what went on in Desert Storm, all the good and bad—and there was plenty of each.” “Ten Years After,”
34
R. W. Apple, Jr., “With Decision to Attack, a New Set of U.S. Goals,”
36
James Gerstenzang and Elizabeth Shogren, “Serb TV Airs Footage of 3 Captured U.S. Soldiers,”