Given the unseemly rush for targets that ensued at SHAPE and elsewhere for more than a month after NATO’s initial assumptions proved groundless, it seemed more than a bit disingenuous for administration officials to have claimed afterward that although they had “hoped” that military action would end the Serb abuses in Kosovo quickly, “we knew that it was equally possible that it would not and that a sustained campaign might be necessary to stop the killing and reverse the expulsions” and that “we were prepared to do what it took to win.”[60] In what bore every hallmark of a post-hoc attempt at historical revisionism, one official professed that “people in Washington” knew that there would be a need to attack infrastructure targets once it became clear that a three- to four-day bombing effort would not compel Milosevic to settle, but because the allies, especially the French, were “not on board” initially, NATO could not start attacking Phase III targets until it had consensus about the bombing.[61] Two critics of administration policy countered convincingly that such claims by the administration that it had been prepared all along for the possible need for a prolonged air campaign were flatly belied by “the hasty improvisation that marked the bombing effort.”[62] True enough, General Clark was said on strong authority never to have suggested that just a few days of bombing would suffice to do the job, even though he did limit his planners to a short-duration operations plan out of a conviction that the alliance’s political leaders would not sit still for anything longer.[63] But the presumptions of both NATO and the most senior officials of the Clinton administration were well reflected in U.S. interagency reports in January and February 1999, which argued confidently that “after enough of a defense to sustain his honor and assuage his backers, [Milosevic] will quickly sue for peace.”[64]
THE DOWNSIDE OF ALLIANCE WARFARE
Throughout Operation Allied Force, there were targets that one or more of the key NATO countries would not approve, those that such countries would not allow to be hit by attacks launched from their soil, and those that they would not hit themselves but would allow other allies to hit. The principal NATO member-states also had differing political agendas and even differing business and financial interests, which heavily affected their reluctance or unwillingness to countenance attacks against certain targets. As a result, General Short was never able to mass forces in the execution of an integrated campaign plan in pursuit of desired strategic effects that had been carefully thought through in advance. Instead, he was left to go after approved targets largely in piecemeal fashion, in what one Allied Force participant caustically dismissed as “target-based targeting” rather than conscious effects-based targeting.
As the air war entered its second fitful week, one senior U.S. official suggested that the bombing effort was turning out to be a real-world battle laboratory, in which the allies were “learning by doing how you conduct a NATO operation, both at a political and at a military level.”[65] Another later declared, less charitably: “This is coalition warfare at its worst.” After Allied Force ended, yet another complained that “the NATO troops had too many political masters. The system was so cumbersome that it limited the effectiveness of some of the best technology. Joint STARS, for example, couldn’t be used to direct aircraft to the targets it saw because it took too long to get approval for a strike.”[66]
A senior NATO official commented that “NATO got in way over its head, stumbled through, didn’t know how to get out, [and] was scared to death by what was happening.” This official added that the entire bombing effort had been a “searing experience” that had “left a bitter taste of tilting within governments, between governments, between NATO headquarters in Brussels and the military headquarters at Mons.”[67] Reflecting the consensus arrived at by many senior U.S. military officers, both active and retired, Admiral Leighton Smith concluded that “the lesson we’ve learned is that coalitions aren’t good ways to fight wars” and that, at a minimum, the political process in NATO needed to be streamlined so that the collective could use force in a way that made greatest military sense.[68]
In what became a particular sore spot, leaks of target information were discovered early on during Allied Force, contributing in part to the change in procedure described above to streamline the target selection process to allow commanders and planners greater freedom to bomb without consulting every NATO ally every time. In one instance of a suspected leak, two empty Interior Ministry buildings in Belgrade were struck by cruise missiles at the end of the third week. Only 24 hours previously, those buildings had been full of employees, suggesting that the enemy knew the attack was coming and when.[69]
Even before that event, the Pentagon had admitted the discovery of operational security problems, as well as its suspicions that the Serbs had gained access to at least parts of the ATO, thereby enabling them to reposition mobile SAMs in anticipation of planned attacks.[70] Allegations that France, in particular, had been kept out of the loop with respect to some target planning because of concern that the information would be passed on to Milosevic were tacitly confirmed in early April by a Clinton confidant, who remarked that “there are circles and circles within NATO.”[71] In a post–Allied Force interview, Clark admitted that at least one ally had leaked secret targeting information to Yugoslav officials. Without naming the alleged culprit, he said that the security breach was “as clear as the nose on your face.”[72]
After the air war ended, Secretary Cohen conceded in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee that “it was very difficult to take 19 different countries and get an effective campaign under way without some bumps in the road.” Cohen added that the alliance was “slow, in some cases too slow, to achieve a consensus.”[73] Citing what he called “self-inflicted wounds in asymmetric warfare,” Admiral Ellis added, in his own after-action briefing to Pentagon officials, that the enemy had most definitely drawn aid and comfort from the cumbersome White House and NAC target approval process, as well as from the poor operational security the coalition operations had generated, not only on the NATO side but on the U.S. side as well.[74]
COMMAND AND CONTROL SHORTCOMINGS
The problems created by the lack of a coherent strategy in Allied Force were further aggravated by a confusing chain of command, unsuitable organizational structures, and a lack of staff integration where it was needed most. Indeed, the air war was dominated by what General Short called “about as murky a command relationship as you could possibly get.”[75] Two parallel chains of command (see Figure 7.2) worked simultaneously for each allied participant: The first was a NATO chain of command, which began at the North Atlantic Council, the alliance’s political leadership, and went from there to General Clark as SACEUR, through the NATO military staff at SHAPE, to the regionally involved CINCSOUTH, Admiral Ellis, and his JTF staff in Naples, and finally to General Short as commander, Allied Air Forces, Southern Europe (COMAIRSOUTH) and his staff, along with his subordinate Allied Tactical Air Forces, including 5 ATAF, which also operated the CAOC at Vicenza, Italy.
60
James B. Steinberg, “A Perfect Polemic: Blind to Reality on Kosovo,”
61
This official further claimed that Clinton had never intended to take the ground option off the table but “downplayed” it at first on the grounds that any public mention of it could have prompted a bruising debate in Congress and premature pressures to invoke the War Powers Act. He added that by April, the administration felt compelled to change that perception when it had become clear that important audiences had concluded that the president had flatly ruled out any ground option. That attempt to shift perceptions, he said, included asking Solana to initiate a review of the forces that would be required and encouraging Clark to accelerate planning for a ground invasion, making no effort to keep this quiet. The official admitted that there was no way a ground invasion could have been imminent when Milosevic capitulated on June 3, but that any decision to proceed with an invasion most definitely would have had to be made by mid-June so that the logistical provisions needed to support a ground offensive could be completed before the onset of winter. Interview by RAND staff, Washington, D.C., July 11, 2000.
62
Christopher Layne and Benjamin Schwarz, “Kosovo II: For the Record,”
63
Conversation by RAND staff with Lieutenant General Ronald Keys, USAF, director of operations, U.S. European Command, Stuttgart, Germany, March 8, 2000. Clark himself was clear on this point in his subsequently published memoirs. Although he acknowledged that “there was a spirit of hope at the political levels [going into the bombing] that Milosevic might recognize that NATO was actually going to follow through with its threat and then quickly concede in order to cut his losses,” he, for his own part, suspected all along that it was “going to be a long campaign.” Clark,
64
Elaine Sciolino and Ethan Bronner, “How a President, Distracted by Scandal, Entered Balkan War,”
65
John M. Broder, “How to Lay Doubt Aside and Put the Best Face on a Bad Week in the Balkans,”
66
David A. Fulghum, “Lessons Learned May Be Flawed,”
67
Jane Perlez, “For Albright’s Mission, More Problems and Risk,”
68
Bradley Graham and Dana Priest, “‘No Way to Fight a War’: Hard Lessons of Air Power, Coalitions,”
69
Hugo Gurdon, “U.S. Admits Milosevic Spies Are Inside NATO,”
70
Roberto Suro and Thomas E. Ricks, “Pentagon: Kosovo Air War Data Leaked,”
72
“NATO Chief: Targeting Goals Leaked to Yugoslavia,”
73
Tom Raum, “Cohen: NATO Process Prolonged Air Strikes,”
74
Other examples of such self-inflicted wounds, in Ellis’s view, were excessively high standards for limiting collateral damage, NATO’s self-suspension of the use of cluster munitions, the aversion to casualties and ground combat, and the reactive as opposed to proactive public affairs posture, all of which slowed allied response time and reduced allied control over the air war’s operational tempo.
75
Quoted in Lieutenant Colonel L. T. Wight, USAF, “What a Tangled Web We Wove: An After-Action Assessment of Operation Allied Force’s Command and Control Structure and Processes,” unpublished paper, no date, p. 1. Colonel Wight was a member of the C-5 Strategy Cell at the CAOC.