On the plus side, the air war’s successful outcome despite its many frustrations suggested that U.S. air power may now have become capable enough, at least in some circumstances, to underwrite a strategy of incremental escalation irrespective of the latter’s inherent inefficiencies. What made the gradualism of Allied Force more bearable than that of the earlier war in Vietnam is that NATO’s advantages in stealth, precision standoff attack, and electronic warfare meant that it could fight a one-sided war against Milosevic with near-impunity and achieve the desired result, even if not in the most ideal way.[47] That was not an option when U.S. air power was a less developed tool than it is today.
On this point, Admiral Ellis, a career fighter pilot himself, was no less disturbed by the air war’s lethargic pace than was his air component commander, General Short, or any other airmen on down the line. However, mindful of the long-standing political and bureaucratic rule of thumb that “if a problem has no solution, it is no longer a problem but a fact,” he recognized that ideal-world solutions were unworkable in the Allied Force setting and that flexibility was required in applying air doctrine in a difficult situation. As it turned out, NATO conducted its bombing effort in a way that was not maximally efficient, yet that worked in the end to foil Serb strategy, which was to wait out the alliance and strive mightily to fragment it. Because the escalation was gradual over time, the coalition succeeded in holding together. Because NATO used highly conservative tactics, it lost no aircrews and civilian casualties and collateral damage were kept to a minimum. In effect, a compromise was struck in which the air war was intense enough to maintain constant pressure on Milosevic yet measured enough to keep NATO from falling apart. Either the loss of friendly lives beyond token numbers or an especially gruesome spectacle of collateral damage could have been more than enough to incline at least some key allies to call it quits. Noting further that NATO fought in this case to establish conditions rather than to “win” in the classic sense, Ellis added that a campaign strategy that would have allowed Desert Storm–like intensity and scale of target attacks to be employed was simply never in the cards.
By the same token, RAF Air Commodore Andrew Vallance pointed out that because a key attraction of air power to civilian decisionmakers is its adaptability for accommodating different situations in different ways as needed, “the purist ‘one size fits all’ approach to air doctrine needs to be moderated. Existing air doctrine is fine for high-intensity conflicts, but more subtle operational doctrines are needed in the complex world of peace support.”[48] Echoing this point, Karl Mueller observed that “sometimes strategists will be called upon to execute gradually escalatory air campaigns whether they approve of the concept or not, and thus they should develop some expertise in the art form even if they abhor it.”[49] With the air weapon now largely perfected for such canonical situations as halting massed armored assaults, it needs to be further refined for handling messier, less predictable, and more challenging combat situations featuring elusive or hidden enemy ground forces, restrictive rules of engagement, disagreeable weather, the enemy use of human shields, lawyers in the targeting loop as a matter of standard practice, and diverse allies with their own political agendas, all of which were characteristic features of the Kosovo crisis. Moreover, although NATO’s political leaders arguably set the bar too high with unrealistic expectations about collateral damage avoidance, it seems clear that the Western democracies have long since passed the point where they can contemplate using air power, or any force, for that matter, in as unrestrained a way as was characteristic of World War II bombing. Admiral Ellis noted that NATO barely averted legal consequences prompted by the collateral damage incidents that occurred in Allied Force. This implies that along with new precision-attack capability goes new responsibility, and air warfare professionals must now understand that they will be held accountable.[50]
On this point, one can fairly suggest that both SACEUR and his JFACC were equally prone throughout Allied Force to remain wedded to excessively parochial views of their preferred target priorities, based on implicit faith in the inherent correctness of their respective services’ doctrinal teachings. They might more effectively have approached Milosevic instead as a unique rather than generic opponent, conducted a serious analysis of his distinctive vulnerabilities, and then tailored a campaign plan aimed at attacking those vulnerabilities directly, irrespective of canonical air or land warfare solutions for all seasons. A year after the air war, in a measured reflection on the recurrent tension that afflicted the interaction of Clark and Short, Admiral Ellis suggested that the failure of all the services to advance beyond their propensity to teach only pristine, service-oriented doctrines at their respective war colleges reflected a serious “cultures” problem and that the services badly need to plan for and accommodate the unexpected and the unconventional, both of which were daily facts of life during Operation Allied Force.[51]
Finally, the probability that coalition operations in the future will be the rule rather than the exception suggests a need, to the fullest extent practicable, to work out basic ground rules before a campaign begins, so that operators, once empowered, can implement the agreed-upon plan with a minimum of political friction. As it was, Allied Force attested not only to the strategy legitimation that comes from the force of numbers provided by working through a coalition, but also to the limitations of committee planning and least-common-denominator targeting. General Short commented that the need for 19 approvals of target nominations was “counterproductive” and that an appropriate conclusion was that “before you drop the first bomb or fire the first shot, we need to lock the political leaders up in a room and have them decide what the rules of engagement will be so they can provide the military with the proper guidance and latitude needed to prosecute the war.”[52] As it was, Short later said in his PBS interview, the rules continuously ebbed and flowed in reaction to events over the air war’s 78 days: “You can go to downtown Belgrade, oh my God, you’ve hit the Chinese embassy, now there’s a five-mile circle going around downtown Belgrade into which you cannot go.” As a result, he complained, strikers often ended up “bombing fire hydrants and stoplights because there just weren’t targets of great value left that weren’t in a sanctuary.”[53]
THE COST OF THE MISSING GROUND THREAT
One of the most important realizations to emerge from Allied Force at the operational and strategic levels was that a ground component to joint campaign strategies may be essential, at least in some cases, for enabling air power to deliver to its fullest potential. The commander of Air Combat Command, General Richard Hawley, was one of many senior airmen who freely admitted that the a priori decision by the Clinton administration and NATO’s political leaders not to employ ground forces had undercut the effectiveness of allied air operations: “When you don’t have that synergy, things take longer and they’re harder, and that’s what you’re seeing in this conflict.”[54]
47
See Colonel Phillip S. Meilinger, USAF, “Gradual Escalation: NATO’s Kosovo Air Campaign, Though Decried as a Strategy, May Be the Future of War,”
48
Air Commodore A. G. B. Vallance, RAF, “After Kosovo: Implications of Operation Allied Force for Air Power Development,” unpublished paper, p. 4.
50
This includes being held increasingly accountable for their own combat losses. The Allied Force SEAD experience showed that in crises where less-than-vital U.S. interests are at stake, near-zero attrition of friendly aircraft and their aircrews will be a high, and possibly determining, priority governing operational tactics.
51
Conversation with Admiral James Ellis, USN, Headquarters Allied Forces Southern Europe, Naples, Italy, May 30, 2000.
52
William Drozdiak, “Allies Need Upgrade, General Says.” As sensible as this suggestion may have sounded after the fact, however, one must ask how workable it would have been in actual practice. Wars characteristically feature dynamics that push participants beyond anything imaginable at the outset. Setting clear going-in rules is easy and feasible enough for something short and relatively straightforward, like Operation Deliberate Force and Operation El Dorado Canyon, the joint USAF-Navy raid on Libya in 1986. Expecting them in larger and more open-ended operations, however, means counting on a predictability of events that does not exist in real life. The fact is that there
53
Interview with Lieutenant General Michael Short, USAF, PBS
54
Bradley Graham, “General Says U.S. Readiness Is Ailing,”