The Bombs That Failed in Kosovo
Attacks on Serbian troops in the field were ineffective. So what won the war?
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."
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