Army War College: Clark/Kosovo Air Campaign

Army War College, Parameters, Spring 2000, pp. 13-29. ^ | May 2000 | TIMOTHY L. THOMAS

[Robert A Cook PE]

Following is quoted the middle of the entire report.

Note: Detailed planning for the Kosovo campaign was ordered by Clinton in Mid-1998, the campaign itself started in March 1999, immediately after Clinton's impeachment, and slightly before Hillary began her NY Senate campaign.

Reference numbers in the text are to footnotes in the orginal Army War College report.

The Views of General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander, NATO

It is important to note that this analysis is simply an attempt to express the concern generated by sets of figures that do not correspond to one another. It is not an attempt to cast doubt on General Wesley Clark, who has received far less credit than he deserves for keeping the alliance together during the conflict. General Clark does not count tanks; he relies on figures provided by others. It is fair to examine the figures he is being provided, however, and to consider how he chose to use them.

On 12 July, one month after the end of the bombing, the Navy Times discussed General Clark's testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Relying on information provided by his staff, Clark stated that reports about NATO warplanes striking decoys and failing to destroy tanks and personnel carriers was a concerted disinformation campaign. Rather, he chose to underscore the virtual invulnerability of NATO aircraft and the fact that Kosovo set a new standard for warfare. He did not mention that there was no air force flying against NATO, nor that the 15,000-foot limitation was set to ensure there would be no damage to NATO's "virtually invulnerable" fleet. Battle damage assessment, according to Clark, included the destruction of 110 Serb tanks, 210 armored personnel carriers, and 449 guns and mortars. He also noted that NATO was aware the Serbs were using decoys and were able to recognize them. Department of Defense estimates of battle damage were slightly higher than Clark's estimates (120 tanks, 220 armored personnel carriers, and 450 artillery pieces).[14]

Clark later offered a reason why the battle damage may not have been as high as initially expected--there was a spy within NATO giving targets away to Belgrade. The Pacific Stars and Stripes quotes Clark on 13 August as saying the leak "was as clear as the nose on your face."[15] That is certainly one form of asymmetric offset to information superiority, and again it involves the human dimension. Even with complete information superiority, one can't destroy the target if the enemy knows an attack is coming and simply moves it or replaces it with a dummy target. NATO officials were reportedly tipped off that a spy might be among them by the fact that certain targets appeared to be vacated after appearing on target lists but before NATO planes attacked.

In September, a Pentagon review of the war was delayed by one month in order to fill in gaps in the number of armored vehicles and artillery batteries actually destroyed. One report noted that General Clark told a Pentagon officer that analysts verified only some 70 percent of the reported hits. Clark then ordered the US European Command to prepare a new estimate as well.[16] In a later report, Clark lowered his battle damage assessment, noting that in all likelihood only 93 tanks and 153 armored personnel carriers were destroyed.[17] The difference--17 tanks and 57 armored personnel carriers--is close to two reinforced infantry battalions. That obviously would be an extremely significant difference to a ground commander preparing for an attack. Accurate damage assessments are crucial to a ground commander's maneuver requirements.

Even with total information superiority, it was not possible to verify battle damage with any accuracy some two months after the conflict ended, despite having NATO forces on the ground and overhead coverage of departing Serb vehicles. Since DOD and NATO still have not produced a compatible set of figures to this day, there clearly is a faulty methodology or other problem here as well. All of these hits were cockpit recorded and many were shown on TV. There should be near compatibility between NATO and Pentagon findings in the age of information superiority.

The British Press and Other Reporters on Battle Damage Assessment

Independent accounts from reporters covering the battle for Kosovo offered an entirely different set of battle damage statistics from those offered by either General Clark or the Pentagon. Their perspective is interesting for it is offered from firsthand, on-the-ground analysis, just like the latter NATO and Pentagon estimates.

The first newspaper reports on battle damage appeared at the end of June. Indications were that only 13 Serb tanks and fewer than 100 armored personnel carriers had been destroyed. Reporters noted the ruins of many different types of decoys hit by NATO forces (e.g., rusted tanks with broken parts, wood or canvas mock-ups). Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, a veteran war correspondent from the first Russian war in Chechnya, saw little damage. Newsweek reporter Mark Dennis found only one destroyed tank after driving around Kosovo for ten days. Did the Serbs manage to extricate all of their destroyed vehicles during their publicly filmed withdrawal, did they hide them, or did they really experience much less damage than NATO sources declared?

In late July, Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that NATO had dropped 3,000 precision-guided weapons that resulted in 500 hits on decoys, but destroyed only 50 Yugoslav tanks. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre also reported that all 30 (other sources use the figure 20) incidents of collateral damage would be studied (the trains, convoys, schools, hospitals, and Bulgarian strikes).[18] What types of bombs actually hit the decoys is known only by Pentagon insiders, so they are the only ones capable of calculating the amount of money wasted on these targets. This is an important issue, however, because early in the war NATO and US stocks of precision weaponry ran very low, a fact that undoubtedly was noted and highlighted by other nations with hostile intent toward the alliance. They received a yardstick measurement of how long an air campaign can proceed using certain types of high-tech armaments against specific targets before stocks run low.

U.S. News and World Report, in its 20 September 1999 edition, stated that a NATO team visited 900 "aim points" targeted by NATO in Kosovo and found only 26 tank and similar-looking self-propelled-artillery carcasses. This would again throw NATO's revised number of 93 tanks out the window. However, how many tank carcasses were in Serbia, where the NATO team did not visit, is not known, making this figure less provocative and contradictory than it originally appears. The article also reported increased friction between General Clark and his NATO air operations chief, Lieutenant General Michael Short, over target selection and strategy (mobile targets such as tanks versus infrastructure, respectively). The article concluded that it was not air power but Russia's withdrawal of support for Serbia that probably brought an end to the air war in Kosovo. The article noted that in future conflicts, the most merciful way to end them may be to conduct them swiftly and violently instead of by the trial-and-error, phased approach used in Kosovo.[19]

Finally, several British officers, both retired and serving, also noted that damage was much less than originally stated. One newspaper report, citing British Ministry of Defense sources, stated that the damage done to tanks was perhaps even less than the lowest quoted figure of 13 tank kills.[20] But the most damning comment could prove to be from an International Herald Tribune article on 1 October. Written by Frederick Bonnart, the editorial director of the independent but highly authoritative NATO's Nations, the article discusses how NATO "propaganda" was used against the West. He notes:

In democracies, it is the duty of the public services to present the truth even in wartime, and particularly when they are in sole control of the information. If it is deliberately designed to engender fear and hate, then the correct term is propaganda.[21]

In particular, Bonnart believes the armored vehicle totals did not properly represent the vehicles actually destroyed, and that NATO deliberately used the West's reputation for truth and fairness to carry out a highly charged information policy against the Serbs. This made NATO's information policy rife with propaganda, Bonnart contends, and he points out that recommendations are being prepared to create a future NATO crisis information organization to keep this from happening again.[22] When did we ever think that a NATO-oriented publication's editor would be publicly accusing SACEUR's organization of propaganda and disinformation?

Assessing the Results of Information Superiority

One danger of the air campaign over Yugoslavia is overestimating NATO and US capabilities. All of the systems did not function all of the time with perfection. For example, some of the high-tech systems were unable to operate under poor weather conditions, as underscored in the daily Pentagon briefings during the campaign. Certainly it was an exaggeration to say:

A vast number of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems allowed for the rapid collection and collating into a single system the vital battlefield intelligence that we sent to our shooters. Taken together, all these innovations allowed our pilots to hit any target, any time, day or night, in any weather, accurate to within a few feet.[23]

Secretary of Defense William Cohen, in a November speech in California, listed several extremely important qualifiers regarding capabilities. He noted that even the most advanced technologies have limits and that a precision-guided weapon can only hit the coordinates it is given. Moreover, "our vast intelligence system can create such a haystack of data that finding the one needle that will pinpoint a target in the right time frame is difficult, indeed."[24]

Hitting the right target on time requires sorting out the right coordinates from a pile of information (interpreted correctly) at the right time, a degree of data management that is difficult to achieve. Yet that, most believe, is just what information superiority was designed to do. It is clear from the Secretary's comments that much work remains. His "technologies have limits" qualifier requires our attention. This is perhaps a recognition that our systems still cannot, as evidenced by Kosovo, determine if a target is a fake, and this in an environment where we were not confronted by opposing information technology systems to disrupt friendly systems. As a result, NATO and the United States lost untold resources each time we expended ordinance on impostor targets.

Does a count of destroyed tanks matter? When counts are off by such a margin, they do. A comparison of these figures causes the average American to shake his head in confusion and frustration. Worse yet, these figures affect American lives. The interpretation of data by analysts at the lowest level also directly affects the credibility of our leaders and commanders who must stand before service members and the American public to relate the data. The problem is analogous to that encountered with counting SCUD missiles during Desert Storm. Coalition assets often hit gas or trailer trucks instead of missile launch vehicles for the same reasons. We haven't corrected this problem, and maybe it is simply beyond our ability to do so with current technologies. But we must face up to our shortcomings if we want to do better. Concern over battle damage assessment is not analogous to the Vietnam era's "body count" fixation, as some try to imply. Rather, the battle damage assessment debate is over just how much of our battlespace awareness was manipulated, and that does matter.

Another problem with disputes over battle damage assessment in Kosovo is that focusing on that aspect loses sight of the actual war that Milosevic fought (and not the template war that NATO assumed he would fight). Milosevic's real war was the ethnic cleansing offensive against the Albanian civilian population of Kosovo. Milosevic had two objectives. The first one was immediate, to rob the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) of its medium of support. The second objective was the campaign against NATO's center of gravity, its political stability. Milosevic confronted the United States and its allies with the grave risk of expanding instability throughout the "target" countries of Albania and Macedonia, and extending into the entire Balkan region. His instrument in this campaign was primarily paramilitary and police formations which left little information signature. This made targeting armored vehicles and artillery systems largely irrelevant to countering Milosevic's offensive. Additionally, targeting the Yugoslav infrastructure offered only protracted operations with significant economic damage to all of southern Europe, whereas the refugee problem was immediate and catastrophic. Milosevic proved he was a master at playing chess while his NATO counterparts played poker.[25] This made General Clark and General Short's arguments over targeting at best tangential to the war Milosevic was imposing on his opponent.

[Gunrunner2]

Indeed.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Bump for today's readers.

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

Good post! Thanks, RAC. Stubborn facts = ammo for the good guys.