The Kosovo Cover-Up(Origin of the Wesley Clark Character Issue)

NATO said it won a great victory, but the war did very little damage to Serb forces. By not conceding this, the Pentagon may mislead future presidents about the limits of U.S. power. A NEWSWEEK exclusive.

It was acclaimed as the most successful air campaign ever. "A turning point in the history of warfare," wrote the noted military historian John Keegan, proof positive that "a war can be won by airpower alone." At a press conference last June, after Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to pull his Army from Kosovo at the end of a 78-day aerial bombardment that had not cost the life of a single NATO soldier or airman, Defense Secretary William Cohen declared, "We severely crippled the [Serb] military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and one third of the armored vehicles." Displaying colorful charts, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton claimed that NATO's air forces had killed "around 120 tanks," "about 220 armored personnel carriers" and "up to 450 artillery and mortar pieces." An antiseptic war, fought by pilots flying safely three miles high. It seems almost too good to be true—and it was. In fact—as some critics suspected at the time—the air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely ineffective. NATO bombs plowed up some fields, blew up hundreds of cars, trucks and decoys, and barely dented Serb artillery and armor. According to a suppressed Air Force report obtained by NEWSWEEK, the number of targets verifiably destroyed was a tiny fraction of those claimed: 14 tanks, not 120; 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artillery pieces, not 450. Out of the 744 "confirmed" strikes by NATO pilots during the war, the Air Force investigators, who spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot, found evidence of just 58.

The damage report has been buried by top military officers and Pentagon officials, who in interviews with NEWSWEEK over the last three weeks were still glossing over or denying its significance. Why the evasions and dissembling, with the disturbing echoes of the inflated "body counts" of the Vietnam War? All during the Balkan war, Gen. Wesley Clark, the top NATO commander, was under pressure from Washington to produce positive bombing results from politicians who were desperate not to commit ground troops to combat. The Air Force protested that tanks are hard to hit from 15,000 feet, but Clark insisted. Now that the war is long over, neither the generals nor their civilian masters are eager to delve into what really happened. Asked how many Serb tanks and other vehicles were destroyed in Kosovo, General Clark will only answer, "Enough."

In one sense, history is simply repeating itself. Pilots have been exaggerating their "kills" at least since the Battle of Britain in 1940. But this latest distortion could badly mislead future policymakers. Air power was effective in the Kosovo war not against military targets but against civilian ones. Military planners do not like to talk frankly about terror-bombing civilians ("strategic targeting" is the preferred euphemism), but what got Milosevic's attention was turning out the lights in downtown Belgrade. Making the Serb populace suffer by striking power stations—not "plinking"

tanks in the Kosovo countryside—threatened his hold on power. The Serb dictator was not so much defeated as pushed back into his lair—for a time. The surgical strike remains a mirage. Even with the best technology, pilots can destroy mobile targets on the ground only by flying low and slow, exposed to ground fire. But NATO didn't want to see pilots killed or captured.

Instead, the Pentagon essentially declared victory and hushed up any doubts about what the air war exactly had achieved. The story of the cover-up is revealing of the way military bureaucracies can twist the truth—not so much by outright lying, but by "reanalyzing" the problem and winking at inconvenient facts. Caught in the middle was General Clark, who last week relinquished his post in a controversial early retirement. Mistrusted by his masters in Washington, Clark will retire from the Army next month with none of the fanfare that greeted other conquering heroes like Dwight Eisenhower after World War II or Norman Schwarzkopf after Desert Storm. To his credit, Clark was dubious about Air Force claims and tried—at least at first—to gain an accurate picture of the bombing in Kosovo. At the end of the war the Serbs' ground commander, Gen. Nobojsa Pavkovic, claimed to have lost only 13 tanks. "Serb disinformation," scoffed Clark. But quietly, Clark's own staff told him the Serb general might be right. "We need to get to the bottom of this," Clark said. So at the end of June, Clark dispatched a team into Kosovo to do an on-the-ground survey. The 30 experts, some from NATO but most from the U.S. Air Force, were known as the Munitions Effectiveness Assessment Team, or MEAT. Later, a few of the officers would refer to themselves as "dead meat."

The bombing, they discovered, was highly accurate against fixed targets, like bunkers and bridges. "But we were spoofed a lot," said one team member. The Serbs protected one bridge from the high-flying NATO bombers by constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting stretched over the river. NATO "destroyed" the phony bridge many times. Artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old truck wheels. A two-thirds scale SA-9 antiaircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons. "It would have looked perfect from three miles up," said a MEAT analyst.

The team found dozens of burnt-out cars, buses and trucks—but very few tanks. When General Clark heard this unwelcome news, he ordered the team out of their helicopters: "Goddammit, drive to each one of those places. Walk the terrain." The team grubbed about in bomb craters, where more than once they were showered with garbage the local villagers were throwing into these impromptu rubbish pits. At the beginning of August, MEAT returned to Air Force headquarters at Ramstein air base in Germany with 2,600 photographs. They briefed Gen. Walter Begert, the Air Force deputy commander in Europe. "What do you mean we didn't hit tanks?" Begert demanded. Clark had the same reaction. "This can't be," he said. "I don't believe it." Clark insisted that the Serbs had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn't looked hard enough. Not so, he was told. A 50-ton tank can't be dragged away without leaving raw gouges in the earth, which the team had not seen.

The Air Force was ordered to prepare a new report. In a month, Brig. Gen. John Corley was able to turn around a survey that pleased Clark. It showed that NATO had successfully struck 93 tanks, close to the 120 claimed by General Shelton at the end of the war, and 153 armored personnel carriers, not far off the 220 touted by Shelton. Corley's team did not do any new field research. Rather, they looked for any support for the pilots' claims. "The methodology is rock solid," said Corley, who strongly denied any attempt to obfuscate. "Smoke and mirrors" is more like it, according to a senior officer at NATO headquarters who examined the data. For more than half of the hits declared by Corley to be "validated kills," there was only one piece of evidence—usually, a blurred cockpit video or a flash detected by a spy satellite. But satellites usually can't discern whether a bomb hits anything when it explodes.

The Corley report was greeted with quiet disbelief outside the Air Force. NATO sources say that Clark's deputy, British Gen. Sir Rupert Smith, and his chief of staff, German Gen. Dieter Stockmann, both privately cautioned Clark not to accept Corley's numbers. The U.S. intelligence community was also doubtful. The CIA puts far more credence in a November get-together of U.S. and British intelligence experts, which determined that the Yugoslav Army after the war was only marginally smaller than it had been before. "Nobody is very keen to talk about this topic," a CIA official told NEWSWEEK.

Lately, the Defense Department has tried to fudge. In January Defense Secretary Cohen and General Shelton put their names to a formal After-Action Report to Congress on the Kosovo war. The 194-page report was so devoid of hard data that Pentagon officials jokingly called it "fiber-free." The report did include Corley's chart showing that NATO killed 93 tanks. But the text included a caveat: "the assessment provides no data on what proportion of total mobile targets were hit or the level of damage inflicted." Translation, according to a senior Pentagon official: "Here's the Air Force chart. We don't think it means anything." In its most recent report extolling the triumph of the air war, even the Air Force stopped using data from the Corley report.

Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, General Clark refused to get into an on-the-record discussion of the numbers. A spokesman for General Shelton asserted that the media, not the military, are obsessed with "bean-counting." But there are a lot of beans at stake. After the November election, the Pentagon will go through one of its quadrennial reviews, assigning spending priorities. The Air Force will claim the lion's share. A slide shown by one of the lecturers at a recent symposium on air power organized by the Air Force Association, a potent Washington lobby, proclaimed: "It's no myth... the American Way of War."

The risk is that policymakers and politicians will become even more wedded to myths like "surgical strikes." The lesson of Kosovo is that civilian bombing works, though it raises moral qualms and may not suffice to oust tyrants like Milosevic. Against military targets, high-altitude bombing is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to those hard realities will be fooling himself.

The mission in which they fancy themselves expert

That is to say, the provision of air superiority. First, as the Pacific war showed, the Nav and the Marines do not need the Air Farce to provide air superiority. Second, beginning with the end of WWII, the need to provide effective interdiction and close air support has eclipsed the air superiority requirement. The Air Farce has, quite simply, refused to accept this fact of life. Their miserable and in fact criminal performance in Kosovo bears this out. They have a severe case of cultural arrogance and they get away with it because they are past masters of stroking all of the right pimps in Congress.

If Cohen, Shelton and Clark were all telling the same lie,what are the integrity issues Shelton has with Clark?

Cohen and Shelton wanted the truth about ineffectiveness, so we could get the hell out of there. Clark gave them optimistic figures in order to continue the war. Had Clark told the truth, either we would have left, or we would have had ground troops. Clark lied so Clinton was never forced to make a hard decision.

Their miserable and in fact criminal performance in Kosovo bears this out.

The Air Force suffered in Kosovo from poor leadership and tactics (provided by the Army via Clark). I cannot say that had we been given their mission with our BombCats instead of the CAPs we flew, that we would have done much better from 15K ft. Also, the enemy had superb deceptive tactics against our mission. Clark was a fool. We followed orders regardless.

I never said they were terrible. I merely said they should be disbanded. They have a longstanding institutional culture and it is irreparable. It goes back a long long time, in fact, long before the advent of military aviation. A recent case in point: An Army general is ordered to take down an incumbent regime in Afghanistan. Who goes in first, 400 miles from the beach? Who provides tactical and logistical air support, 400 miles from the beach, for 6-8 weeks while the Air Farce tacair is parked back in Kuwait, looking for landing rights and fuel dumps. You know the answer. [The Air Force bomber community did outstanding work from the gitgo. They are exempt from this reproach] This is the way it is - this is the way things are. Except for the bomber people, the Air Farce is institutionally lame, incompetent, ineffective, and criminally wasteful. Show me one specific example to the contrary, since Billy Mitchell was court martialed.

Not to mention that the air force has wanted to be completely rid of the A-10 since it came out. A-10 drivers were looked down on by the rest of the air force. They quickly made the A-10 primarily a reservist plane. Congress several times (if I recall correctly) forced the Air Force to buy more of them.

Yet it has consistently and verifiably been one of the most effective in support of our guys on the ground. During Iraq I they had something like 2100 confirmed kills... kills where the ground troops could walk up and stick their arms in the holes of the armor.

The US ignores the ground support roles, and the navy at our own peril. We need to remember, the Soviets were more immediately scared operationally of Reagans Navy than star wars despite what the techie types in the pentagon would like us to remember.

Except for the bomber people, the Air Farce is institutionally lame, incompetent, ineffective, and criminally wasteful.

Sorry, I cant consider that a serious statement, so I will spare you many examples of excellent Air Force fighter-community work. In order to dispute your statement, it would be necessary to use a comparative example, where there really is none. While the Navy could (and arguably should) take over the role of the Air Force, the Air Force mission requires over-the-top spending on almost every level. Although I subscribe to the Col. Boyd philosophy, while the Air Force did not, they have accomplished much with a complexity vs. numbers argument. If anything, the Air Force is the most political of the services, and that fact shows in the promotion of yes-men over warriors too often than not.

While I love the A-10, I think it is only fair to present the other side of the argument that causes the Air Force to want to be rid of it.

As a ground-pounding CAS aircraft, there is none better. That effectiveness comes at a very high price, because when you see the A-10 swooping down in the mud with impunity, it is because me or someone else in a fighter was sitting above it at 20K feet watching it's back. A Mig-29 could turn an A-10 into aluminum foil in about 30 seconds if left alone with it. So, instead of one aircraft performing the CAS mission, you have 2 or 3 in a high/low combination. That is expensive. Effective yes, but expensive.

So, the Air Force says: "We can do almost as good a job with a stand-off CAS aircraft role for the F-16, and we dont need escort for it either". One F-16 can carry 6 Maverick tank-busters or CBUs in addition to a couple of AIM-120s and a couple 'winders.

So, they have an argument against the A-10. Not a great one, but a cheap one, which Air Force brass loves to hear about, if it gets them a few more -16s in the inventory. The A-10 lives on as it should, but the Air Force made a case against it that some could consider plausible.

"But give him one thing - he was a military man unfortunate to be serving under the Klintoons. A more anti-military administration is hard to find in American history."

I would ordinarily agree with your conclusions here in regards to respect for military service. But this particular general was documented as being viewed unfavorably by pentagon brass at the pentagon such that he was denied his fourth star. That is until after he proved his loyalty to the clintons by cooperating with the posse comotatis violation at Waco. Supplying military equipment, training and facilities, troops, advisors and even planners from Fort Hood.

After demonstrating his obsequious loyalty to the clintons he was given his fourth star and elevated to the position of 'supreme commander of NATO'. He was fired from the position because of his inability to follow a chain of command. Now the clintons are rewarding him with a presidential campaign. What makes us think he will submit to limits of presidential powers when he would not properly submit to his position as the 'supreme commander of NATO?

I think that Waco Clark the butcher of bosnia is loyal to the clintons and himself. Yeah, he served under an anti-military administration... and was rewarded richly for a job well done. Nuff Said.

The actual population figures may be the basis for many arguments, but the ROOT ISSUE is the Albanians have no legitimate basis for being in Kosovo, and they have inflicted more terror on the Serbs than the Serbs have been ALLEGED to have done to them.

Add to the fact that the Albanians have a systematically been destroying the ancient churches in Kosovo, built by the Serbs ... the Albanians seeking to destroy the very history of Kosovo - tells me that the ethnic Albanians should not be supported in the slightest!!

As mentioned elsewhere ... the Albanians tended to create "massacres" that could be blamed on the Serbs. They have prepretrated lies by the thousands .... and of course, now that Clinton helped the KLA ... we have made Eastern Europe save for the drug trade!!

You can make some determination of the "good guys" and "bad guys" by looking at their friends and enemies. Since the Serbs were our faithful allies in WWII, I would be skeptical to start with ... then as I see that the Albanians were good little Nazis ... I would be hesitant to support them. And looking at the situation 50 years after WWII - I see that there are some issues that can cloud the situation - but there is NOTHING that the ethnic Albanians have done to justify our support, and our war against Serbia. See this article that discusses the "ethnic cleansing of Kosovo people by Serbs" ...http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a383b13b27205.htm

And to add insult to injury ... when we aid the predominantly Muslim ethnic Albanians in Kosovo - does our country get any consideration of "aid to Muslims" ... heck no... they still hate us and still want to kill us.

It was stupid of us to aid the ethnic Albanians.

Try reading: http://www.srpska-mreza.com/bookstore/kosovo/kosovo.htm - the later chapters describe the forced depopulation of Serbs and settlement of Albanians in Kosovo after WWII (and after significant ethnic cleansing where Serbs were killed by Nazi supporters.)

Mike

At a minimum, the Allied air campaign forced Serbian forces to hide, and didn't allow them to concentrate to attack the KLA - when they did, on Mt. Pastrik, they got a dose of vitamin B-52. As to the KLA calling in air strikes, considering we were bombing the KLA as well as the Serbs (Kosare, May 22), it's not too well delineated how closely we were working with the KLA in the field.

The problem with evaluating the efficacy of our airstrikes on Serb tactical units remains the lack of access to military records from the Serbian side - Serbia has not to this day put together a meaningful accounting of her civilian casualties, much less her military losses. I note that researching the web will not help one determine the number of remaining Mig-29's in Serbia's inventory (I last tried 6 months ago), so the Serbs are still quite closed mouth about their losses during Allied Force - until they join the PfP and open their archives, the question of Serbia's military losses during Allied Force is going to remain a guessing game on one side and an exercise in concealment on the other.

The whole APC/Tank/Artillery argument overlooks the attacks on Serbia's logistical infrastructure, however, and attacks on transportation, POL, and communications targets are a more effective use of airpower than going after the end users in the field - we'll know the full story eventually, but until we do this topic is going to be the source of more smoke than heat.

I have yet to hear one substantive rebuttal from you, about anything! Your ad hominem attacks on me are tiresome. If that is all you have to offer,I would observe that the remarks you have directed at me reflect your own concerns about yourself. So, unless you have specific rebuttals to my general remarks about the bluesuit Tacair community, spare all of us the boredom and Jimrob the bandwidth. BTW, I am beginning to suspect that you may have been a backseater, in which case may I be the first to thank you for your service to your country. And BTW, CHEERS.

Ad hominem attacks? Are you an sane? Why would anyone provide thoughtful responses to over-the-top drivel? I'll ignore the backseater comment, as I ignore the rest of your statements when they appear more anger-driven than factual. I would be happy to discuss the Air Force with anyone when I feel they can do so without hyperbole. Sorry to disapoint you, but I drove and taught others to drive Tomcats for a living. If I was ever in back, it was because whoever was in front was not ready to be there without guidance. RIOs are great people, but I was not one of them.

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