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It was a rare moment of euphoria for fatigued NATO staffers. As two B-52 bombers lumbered over southwest Kosovo on June 8, war planners at NATO's operations center in Vicenza, Italy, gazed hopefully at a live video feed from an unmanned spy plane circling over suspected Serbian troop lines. As 37 bombs dropped by the jets began to explode, "they were whooping and hollering," says Col. Floyd Carpenter, operations group commander for the 5th Bomb Wing, who was on the phone to Vicenza at the time. Initial reports estimated 800 dead Serbian troops. A day later Yugoslavia agreed to withdraw all its forces from Kosovo.
The strikes appeared to have been the decisive blow NATO had been hoping for–until NATO analysts inspected the area from helicopters hovering 50 feet off the ground. There were plenty of bomb craters, sure enough. But investigators "saw nothing," according to a NATO official, "that would indicate that kind of devastation"–such as scattered personal effects. "Unless Hazel came in with her broom and cleaned things up," he insists, "nothing serious was destroyed in the area."
Clashing generals. NATO and Pentagon officials are reluctantly beginning to apply that conclusion to the entire campaign against Serbian forces on the ground. That strategy was championed by NATO's top commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, even though it tied up most of NATO's jets for several weeks of the war and was opposed at the time by Clark's top air-power expert. "The campaign against mobile targets was a near failure," declares one NATO official. While some dismiss such sour post-mortems as irrelevant bean counting, the issue is already a focal point of NATO and Pentagon "after-action" reviews meant to determine what worked in Kosovo and what didn't. The final results, due out in coming weeks, will shape how the Pentagon fights future wars and even which weapons earn scarce defense dollars. Many military analysts, meanwhile, now think that Russia's withdrawal of support for Yugoslavia along with attacks on the power grid, transportation system, and other "strategic" targets–which only intensified late in the 78-day war–are ultimately what defeated Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
It may never be clear whether NATO could have won the war more quickly. But emerging insights suggest that, at the very least, NATO planned poorly for Operation Allied Force and sputtered along for weeks in a kind of trial-and-error mode. Originally, NATO planned for a bombing campaign that would last just two to four days until Milosevic gave in. "We called this one absolutely wrong," says a NATO slide presentation prepared recently by Adm. James Ellis, Clark's second-in-command, and obtained by U.S. News. That faulty prediction caused a "lack of coherent campaign planning" and a failure to prepare for surprises, according to Ellis's summary.
Slow start. For one thing, NATO was not prepared for round-the-clock operations until early May, according to one Air Force officer. That was six weeks into the war. Nor did NATO have a plan for dealing with the Serbs' brutal treatment of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. "The end result," wrote Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a study for the Air Force, "was thousands of dead and over 1.5 million refugees."
From the outset of the war, NATO's military commanders were severely constrained by their political bosses on what they could bomb. The slow pace of progress that resulted left Clark grasping for solutions. At one of the daily videoconferences held by senior NATO commanders, in mid-April, Clark asked if Air Force AC-130 gunships then being used to strafe Serbian positions near the Albanian border could be used as a kind of airborne artillery battery. Fears of getting shot down had kept the special-operations warplanes out of Serbian airspace, but Clark reasoned that if the plane flew at a tilt, shells from its huge 105-mm howitzer could blast targets 20 miles inside Serbia. He even drew a sketch of his concept. "There was perplexed silence," says one NATO official. For good reason, it turned out. Air Force staffers researching the proposal concluded that firing at that angle would blow a wing off.
There may have been no harm in pursuing such unorthodox ideas. "We were trying to be doctrinally innovative," says a senior NATO official. But Clark's dictates about how to employ air power soon produced a schism between him and Lt. Gen. Michael Short, NATO's top air commander. A week after the first bombs dropped, Clark began insisting that NATO go all out after Yugoslav forces in Kosovo, who were expelling and murdering civilians with virtual impunity. Short maintained that such an approach was unlikely to succeed and argued that the priority should be obliterating Yugoslavia's air defense system. That would permit broad attacks on infrastructure and "leadership" targets–if NATO political leaders approved.
Clark prevailed, and soon nearly all of NATO's pilots–except for those flying stealthy F-117s and B-2s, which were sent against infrastructure targets elsewhere in Yugoslavia–were squinting through the ubiquitous clouds trying to make out tanks 15,000 feet below. Clark had his staff compile bar charts assessing the combat effectiveness of ground units in Kosovo–a dubious proposition with no friendly forces on the ground to gather intelligence.
The approach infuriated adherents of Air Force doctrine, which calls for the use of overwhelming force against a full spectrum of targets from the very outset of a campaign. One general complained that "rather than fight this war as a four-star theater commander, [Clark] is fighting it as an Army company commander in Vietnam." The few strikes that were directed against strategic targets seemed piecemeal and designed to do little more than send a message. "We have hit one type of target–air defense, petroleum, industry–on one day and then shifted to a whole different group the next," argued another NATO official in the midst of the war. "As a result, we have never finished the job in one category before moving on to the next."
But some credit Clark with breaking the Air Force mold for how a campaign should be fought. "He insisted on migrating in the direction of whatever promised success," says one NATO officer. "In this, he was dead right." Even some in the Air Force concede that their doctrine may be inflexible. "Perhaps our doctrine needs to reflect political constraints a little more deeply," says one general. The Air Force has scheduled a meeting of its top generals in December to address that question.
Missing tanks. Even so, postwar surveys of bomb damage on the ground in Kosovo seem to validate Short's claim that targeting tanks would be a losing proposition. A NATO team that visited 900 "aim points" targeted by NATO in Kosovo found carcasses of only 26 tanks and similar-looking self-propelled artillery pieces; after the war, NATO claimed it destroyed 110. The discrepancy seems sure to cause lasting controversy. Some NATO analysts think pilots hit many more decoys than at first thought–including some that were inflatable–and that the Serbs may have set damaged tanks out to be struck over and over. The Air Force has deduced from pilot reports, cockpit video, and intelligence sensors that measure the plumes from explosions on the ground that they really destroyed at least 75 tanks, according to a NATO official. That would mean the Serbs, for some reason, took blown-up tanks with them when they left Kosovo in June.
Clark and Short had other squabbles, on matters such as how many planes NATO needed to win the war. "Clark asked things like 'Why can't we get 2,000 jets into the air?' " says one NATO official. "Short, though, was saying, 'Please, no more airplanes.' " That's because the airspace over Kosovo couldn't accommodate all the jets NATO had available toward the end of the war.
On several important issues, however, top commanders agree. Most think it was a mistake for NATO to rule out the use of ground forces at the start of the war. And most analysts agree that the Air Force's campaign against bridges, buildings, refineries, and other fixed targets–once NATO approved them–was an enormous success, with mistakes such as the May 8 attack on the Chinese Embassy accounting for a tiny portion of all strikes.
That success seems to be producing another quiet consensus: that the attacks that hurt the citizens of Yugoslavia the most were the catalyst that induced Milosevic to give up. And that may produce an uncomfortable lesson for the politicians who call the shots during the next war: The most merciful way to conduct a war may be to end it swiftly and violently.