Once NATO’s hope proved hollow, a frenetic rush ensued at SHAPE to come up with additional target nominations that could be more quickly and easily approved by NATO’s political authorities. At the end of the air war’s first week, Clark had only 100 approved targets.[48] With the bombing effort going nowhere, he accordingly went to the NAC and received blanket approval to go after certain broad classes of targets, including air defenses, command and control, fielded forces, and resupply sources, at his own discretion. Other broad target sets and individual targets of a more politically sensitive nature, however, still had to be submitted for review by the United States, Britain, and France.
Having thus been cleared to go after most military targets at will, Clark pressed his staff to identify 5,000 candidates. His target planners quickly convinced him that 5,000 legitimate aim points were not to be found in all of Serbia, whereupon Clark declared a new goal of coming up with 2,000 target candidates, a goal later derided by some planners as “T2K.”[49] That goal soon led to the targeting of objects that had no connection whatever to Yugoslavia’s military capability, what William Arkin later characterized as a “mechanical process of meticulous selection with little true military justification.”[50] Sometimes the target selection criterion entailed little more than the fact that an assigned DMPI was located safely away from civilian homes. That resulted in an approach to force employment that was “neither calibrated nor intelligible,” but instead spawned “a succession of unfocused and unconvincing air excursions—experiments in communication by detonation.”[51] It was only at that point that coalition planners began a serious and methodical target development process, in which prospective targets were categorized into four ascending tiers of collateral damage sensitivity.
Even then, there was little by way of a consistently applied strategy behind the target development process. As one U.S. officer reporting to an assignment at the CAOC midway into the operation noted afterward, he was told upon arrivaclass="underline" “I know you won’t believe this, but we don’t have a plan.” He learned that NATO aircrews could only attack those targets that came out of the target approval process and could never, at any time, attack an entire target set systematically in pursuit of paralysis. Target allocations, he said, were driven by rules of engagement of the moment, which, in turn, were set primarily on the basis of judgments regarding what the political traffic would bear domestically and within the alliance. Whenever an untoward event occurred that had a negative impact on public opinion, the ROE would seem to tighten almost reflexively. As a case in point, he noted, target planners were directed by the “highest levels” to cease using CBUs after Milosevic’s press staff had persuaded CNN to do a story on the CBU “terror weapon” that was being employed by NATO.[52] In the words of another officer, “nobody ever said, ‘no fooling, what we want to accomplish in this country is X.’” As a result, NATO started “throwing bombs around, hoping that objectives would materialize.” Said still another, “the targets we selected—because we had no objectives—were based on nothing other than that they had been approved. So we slung lead on targets [but] we couldn’t say, ‘the objectives are X, so we blew up Y.’”[53]
Indeed, although the methodology of effects-based targeting had long since been elevated to a high art, most of the attack planning throughout Allied Force was not driven by desired effects but rather entailed simply parceling out sortie and munitions allocations by target category in boilerplate fashion, without much consideration given to how neutralizing a target might contribute to advancing the operation’s objectives. A typical example involved attacking refineries, factories, and bridges in ones and twos over time rather than as interconnected components of a larger entity whose simultaneous destruction might instantly undermine Yugoslavia’s capacity to function effectively. To be sure, some bridges were dropped not to curtail the flow of traffic over the bridges, but rather to halt the flow of commodities that flowed along the river under the bridges, or to cut fiber-optic cables and other conduits that ran through the bridges. To that extent, effects-based targeting could be said to have been successfully applied. For the most part, however, owing to the absence of any systematic effects-based target analysis and strategy execution, NATO military chiefs had an unnecessarily hard time convincing NATO’s civilian leaders of the importance of many targets. General Jumper scored this failure when he stressed the importance of effects-based targeting and faulted what often happened instead, namely, what he called “campaign-by-target-list management,” whereby planners simply took a list of approved targets and managed them on a day-to-day basis.[54]
On the plus side, the methodology used in individual target planning, now a bona fide science in its own right, had evolved to a point where target analysts could predict, for any given weapon type and impact angle, how far the blast effects would extend, how far shards of glass could be expected to fly, and even at what distance they would retain enough force to penetrate skin. The use of this methodology in arriving at a precisely determined weapon yield, aim-point placement, and weapon heading and impact angle to minimize unwanted collateral damage often proved decisive in persuading NATO’s civilian leaders to approve attacks on many of the most politically sensitive targets. The four-tier collateral damage predictive model that had been developed toward that end was validated time and again in strike operations against sensitive targets in built-up areas. Not only did it permit targeting successes against electrical power, POL, lines of communication, and other objects of interest in the very heart of downtown Belgrade, it also allowed for the planned preservation of systems, such as road links within Kosovo for later use by KFOR peacekeeping troops.
Nevertheless, the scramble to form a targeting cell and establish smoother planning procedures in the CAOC spotlighted gross inefficiencies in the air tasking arrangement. That led General Jumper to suggest afterward that the Air Force needed to start thinking of the air operations center “as a weapons system” and giving it the same seriousness of thought that is now given to weapon systems, recognizing that “our product in war is dead targets, and our product in peace is all that goes into generating the warrior proficiency that kills those targets in wartime”—including proficiency at planning and managing an air campaign.[55]
After the dust of Operation Allied Force had settled, the since-retired commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, General Charles Krulak, commented from firsthand involvement that “we did not have a real strategy.”[56] Likewise, General Short remarked, in what was surely an understatement for him, that the bombing effort had produced its objectives “to some extent by happenstance rather than by design.”[57] There were later intimations that a hidden agenda of both the Clinton administration and General Clark had been not just a reversal of the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, but nothing less than the removal of Milosevic from power and the democratization of Yugoslavia. On that point, one NATO official later described Clark as having said, “you must understand that the objective is to take Yugoslavia away from Mr. Milosevic, so we can democratize it and modernize it. That’s our objective.”[58] But it was never communicated to subordinate staffs or made a declared goal of Allied Force.[59]
49
Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. Military Debates Link Between Kosovo Air War, Stated Objectives,”
50
William M. Arkin, “Smart Bombs, Dumb Targeting?”
53
Grossman, “U.S. Military Debates Link Between Kosovo Air War, Stated Objectives,” p. 8.
54
Comments 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. When asked about effects-based targeting applications in Allied Force, the former commander of the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, which provides senior warfighters with the principal analytical support for such targeting, remarked, “the campaign was more like random acts of violence than true effects-based targeting. The legal restrictions and political constraints in the target approval process were inexplicably given as excuses not to do effects-based targeting. Achieving the desired effects while minimizing the undesired effects, particularly under the restrictions and constraints that were placed on SACEUR, is precisely why effects-based targeting should have been applied. Anything else is just high-tech vandalism.” Conversation with Captain C. J. Heatley, USN (Ret.), Arlington, Virginia, June 21, 2000.
56
Grossman, “U.S. Military Debates Link Between Kosovo Air War, Stated Objectives,” p. 6.
58
Quoted in Grossman, “U.S. Military Debates Link Between Kosovo Air War, Stated Objectives,” p. 7.
59
General Krulak later remarked that even had it been an unstated goal, it was a “nonstarter,” because it would never have gained the backing of NATO.