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WASHINGTON -- The nation's top civilian and military officials told Congress Thursday that allied forces were too slow in choosing targets during the Kosovo war, that the United States seriously underestimated how many precision-guided munitions would be needed, that NATO should have kept alive the option of a ground invasion and that the war was fought with too much reliance on American forces.
In a report on the war before the Senate Armed Services Committee Thursday, Defense Secretary William Cohen and General Henry Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recited these and other lessons of the 78-day air campaign. But they also said that it was the technological and logistical superiority of the United States that ensured victory for the NATO alliance.
Cohen described the war over Serbia as "a very decisive victory." Without referring to lapses like NATO's bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Cohen said that this had been accomplished by carrying out "the most precise" air campaign in history and one with the fewest civilian deaths or injuries.
A day after the Senate's defeat of a landmark nuclear test ban treaty, Republicans again showed a willingness to attack the Clinton administration's foreign policy.
One Republican on the committee, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, argued that "the ethnic cleansing occurred after we started bombing."
"I'm not happy about that," Sessions said, "and I don't think we ought to consider this a great victory."
Cohen strongly disagreed, pointing out that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had launched a large-scale military operation in the fall of 1998 with the objective of removing the ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.
Overall, the European allies came in for serious criticism for falling so far behind the American military. Although Cohen repeated that the European allies have promised to modernize their armed forces like those of the United States, Pentagon officials in private discussions were divided over whether that would happen.
Several officials have predicted that the European militaries will not be given the money necessary to increase their forces and readiness much and instead will become its B team, acting as ground troops for the American air armada.
Shelton and Cohen refused to enter the debate over what convinced Milosevic to withdraw from Kosovo, saying that a variety of factors played a part: the intensified bombing around Belgrade, the resurgence of the Kosovo Liberation Army that acted like ground forces for NATO, the threat that NATO might mount a ground invasion, and Russia's role in isolating Milosevic.
In an interview last month, Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, who ran NATO's air campaign, said he believed it was the bombing campaign in Serbian territory outside of the Kosovo province that was the critical factor.
Instead of concentrating bombs on Serb forces in Kosovo, he said that he would have tried to stop ethnic cleansing by going "hard after Belgrade and the leadership targets and everything Milosevic held dear, and make it very clear to him that was exactly what we were doing." His comments appeared in an interview published by Air Force Magazine.
Shelton said Thursday that he and his European counterparts all argued to NATO political leaders for keeping alive the option of ground troops, at least as a threat to Milosevic. But the political leaders, including those in Washington, refused to accept their recommendation because several NATO countries said they would pull out of the coalition if there was any chance of a land invasion.
Another topic Cohen avoided Thursday was the debate within the military about the role of computer warfare.
Adm. James Ellis, commander of the American piece of the war, which was called Joint Task Force Noble Anvil, claimed in a still unpublished after-action report that the length of the war could have been cut in half if the United States had made better use of its information warfare unit, the first it had assembled and part of whose task was to present the war in the best light to the media and on the internet.
"Admiral Ellis is right," said Franklin Kramer, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, in an interview. "We have to do more and there is a lot more to be done."
Cohen did discuss the public side of information warfare, complaining that NATO lost what he called the propaganda war. Cohen cited the Serb policy of preventing Western coverage of Kosovo except to visit the sites where civilians were killed in NATO's accidental bombings of convoys or hospitals.
Even though the Pentagon and NATO restricted coverage of their side of the war, Cohen said that Milosevic "was far more skilled in the manipulation of the media than we were."
Cohen also addressed the charge that NATO's air campaign placed too great a premium on saving the lives of allied pilots; not a single pilot was killed in combat during 78 days of around-the-clock operations.
"There's a misapprehension that this is the goal of the United States, that this is a standard that has been set by the Pentagon, there can be no casualties incurred," Cohen said. "I want to make sure that everybody understands, we are not setting a standard, did not set one here, that there should be no combat fatalities."
A Pentagon official who has seen the classified after-action analysis said that estimates of Serbian civilian casualties were low given the tonnage of bombs dropped.
NATO's strict criteria for selecting and striking targets to reduce the possibility of hitting civilians also meant the burden fell on the United States -- with its satellite-guided smart bombs, other precision weapons, sensors and mission-planning computers -- to fly the vast majority of the roughly 13,000 combat sorties, with France a distant second.
That imbalance can only be altered if the Europeans produce or buy precision munitions, which would be a boon to American defense contractors.
For one senior Pentagon official, the most powerful lesson of this three-month review was the confirmation of the importance of these precision weapons, especially the Joint Direct Attack Munitions, bombs that strike a target guided by Global Positioning System satellites.
"That's the biggest deal," said the official. "We knew beforehand that JDAMS were great, it was nice to have it confirmed."
Also on the list of equipment that proved indispensable and in short supply were drone airplanes, tanker aircraft, and airborne warning and control aircraft, officials said.
An unexpected loser in this war was the U.N. High Commission for Refugees. From the start, the agency was overwhelmed in both Macedonia and Albania trying to care for the nearly one million refugees from Kosovo. NATO troops stepped in, built camps and generally overshadowed the refugee agency.
At the war's end, British Prime Minister Tony Blair privately took the agency to task for what he considered its problematic performance. Officials at UNHCR said that many of NATO's criticisms were based on unrealistic expectations for an agency with a $1.4 billion annual budget.
"We have no large standby capacity," said Dennis McNamara, who heads the operation in Kosovo. "If you want us to respond quickly to these emergencies then the governments have to pay for it, like they do for their militaries."