Indeed, that NATO prevailed in the end with only two aircraft lost and no combat fatalities sustained surely reflected good fortune at least as much as the professionalism of its aircrews and their commanders. General Jumper explained afterward that “we set the bar fairly high when we fly more than 30,000 combat sorties and we don’t lose one pilot. It makes it look as if air power is indeed risk free and too easy a choice to make.” Amplifying on the same point, retired RAF Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason observed that seeking to minimize one’s losses is both admirable and proper up to a point, yet it can lead to self-deterrence when efforts to escape the costs of war are pursued to a moral fault. Although force protection “must be a major concern for any force commander,” Mason added, “my own view is that if Saint George’s first priority with tackling dragons had been force protection, I don’t think he would now be the patron saint of England.”[64]
The Kosovo experience further suggested some needed changes in both investment strategy and campaign planning. The combination of marginal weather and the unprecedented stress placed on avoiding collateral damage made for numerous days between March 24 and mid-May when entire ATOs had to be canceled and when only cruise missiles and the B-2, with its through-the-weather JDAM capability, could be used. That spoke powerfully for broadening the ability of other aircraft to deliver accurate munitions irrespective of weather, as well as for ensuring that adequate stocks of such munitions are on hand to see the next campaign to completion. The extended stretch of bad weather underscored the limitations of LGBs and confirmed the value of GPS-guided weapons like JDAM that can bomb accurately through the weather.
Not surprisingly, the munitions used in Allied Force generally performed as advertised. The operation’s results, however, confirmed the need for a larger U.S. inventory of precision-guided munitions (especially those capable of all-weather target attack), as well as greater accuracy and more standoff attack capability. At the same time, it indicated a continued operational utility for both unguided general-purpose bombs and cluster munitions for engaging soft military area targets deployed in the open. Other areas in which allied weapons performance showed a need for further improvement include interoperability across platforms, more multispectral sensors, higher-gain optical sensors for UAVs, more data-link interoperability, a wider range of bomb sizes, and weapons capable of conducting “auto-BDA.”[65] Still other force capability needs highlighted by the Allied Force experience include better means for locating moving targets, better discrimination of real targets from decoys, and a way of engaging those targets with smart submunitions rather than with more-costly PGMs and cruise missiles.[66] One airman later commented frankly that in being tasked by Clark to go after dispersed and hidden VJ forces, U.S. air power “was being asked to be a 21st century tactical air force… and the truth is, we’re not very good at it,” at least yet.[67]
As for the ultimate wisdom of the allied decision to proceed with the air war in the first place, the United States and NATO displayed an ability in this case to apply coercion successfully through air power from a poorly prepared battlefield at a remarkably low cost in noncombatant fatalities caused by direct collateral damage.[68] Yet there is a danger that making a habit of such displays by accepting Allied Force as a model for future interventions could easily lead to an erosion of the U.S. claim to global leadership.[69] On the contrary, Allied Force should have underscored the fact that one of the most acute challenges facing U.S. policymakers in the age of a single superpower entails deciding when, and in what manner, to intervene in humanitarian crises that do not yet impinge directly on U.S. security interests.
ON THE USES AND ABUSES OF AIR POWER
Viewed in hindsight, the most remarkable thing about Operation Allied Force was not that it defeated Milosevic in the end, but rather that air power prevailed despite a U.S. leadership that was unwilling to take major risks and an alliance that held together only with often paralyzing drag. Fortunately, the Clinton administration did a creditable job of keeping the allies together in the end, albeit at the cost of what Brent Scowcroft called “a bad strategy” that raised basic questions about the limits of alliance warfare and about whether the United States should, in the future, settle instead for coalitions of the willing, at least in less than the cataclysmic showdowns of the sort that NATO was initially created to handle.[70] One can only wonder what greater efficiencies might have been registered by a more assertive campaign approach had the U.S. government been willing to play a more proactive role in leading from the front and setting both the direction and pace for NATO’s more hesitant allies.[71]
Lesson One from both Vietnam and Desert Storm should have been that one must not commit air power in “penny packets,” as the British say, to play less-than-determined games with the risk calculus of the other side. Although it can be surgically precise when precision is called for, air power is, at bottom, a blunt instrument designed to break things and kill people in pursuit of clear and militarily achievable objectives. Not without reason have air warfare professionals repeatedly insisted since Vietnam that if all one wishes to do is to “send a message,” call Western Union. On this point, Eliot Cohen summed it up well five years before the Kosovo crisis erupted when he compared air power’s lately acquired seductiveness to modern teenage romance in its seeming propensity to offer political leaders a sense of “gratification without commitment.”[72]
To admit that gradualism of the sort applied in Allied Force may be the wave of the future for any U.S. involvement in coalition warfare in the years ahead is hardly to accept that it is any more justifiable from a military point of view for that reason alone. Quite to the contrary, the incrementalism of NATO’s air war for Kosovo, right up to its very end, involved a potential price that went far beyond the loss of valuable aircraft, munitions, and other expendables for questionable gain. It risked frittering away the hard-earned reputation for effectiveness that U.S. air power had finally earned for itself in Desert Storm after more than three years of unqualified misuse over North Vietnam a generation earlier. For all his disagreement with so many other arguments put forward, to no avail, on the proper uses of air power by his air component commander, General Short, even General Clark emphasized after the air war ended that despite understandable pressures for a gradualist approach both from Washington and among the NATO allies, “once the threshold is crossed to employ force, then force should be employed as quickly and decisively as possible. The more rapidly it can be done, the greater the likelihood of success.”[73]
64
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.
65
These were among numerous other conclusions suggested by Major General Ronald Keys, USAF, director of operations (J-3), U.S. European Command, cited in Colonel Steve Pitotti, USAF, “Global Environments, Threats, and Military Strategy (GETM) Update,” Air Armament Summit 2000 briefing, Eglin AFB, Florida, 2000.
67
Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. Military Debates Link Between Kosovo Air War, Stated Objectives,”
68
A heated argument arose after the war ended between defenders and critics of the Clinton administration’s strategy for Kosovo over whether the approach taken, despite its low cost in noncombatant lives lost to
69
I am grateful to Lieutenant General Bradley Hosmer, USAF (Ret.), for bringing this point to my attention.
70
John F. Harris, “Berger’s Caution Has Shaped Role of U.S. in War,”
71
In a measured indictment of the Clinton administration’s comportment in this regard, two Brookings Institution analysts wrote that “what was missing… was less allied will than a demonstrated American ability and willingness to lead a joint effort. NATO works best when Washington knows what it wants done and leads the effort to get the alliance there. In the runup to the Kosovo war, both elements were tragically lacking…. Although it is impossible to know whether the allies would have gone along with a more robust strategy, including early use of ground forces, the United States never made the case. U.S. policy presumed the allies’ rejection, just as it presumed congressional opposition to the use of ground forces.” Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O’Hanlon,
72
Eliot A. Cohen, “The Mystique of U.S. Air Power,”
73
Joseph Fitchett, “Clark Recalls ‘Lessons’ of Kosovo,”