Anyways i am certain that Iraq is going to be different fromt he Yuogoslav scenario! First of all Iraq is one big flat plane of desert! there are no rolling hills and wooded areas to speak off, and the obfuscation strategies used in Yugoslavia would not work in a desoltae sand hell like Iraq! Secondly i doubt we will allow our ordnance to be fooled by microwave ovens, old tractors, and logs lying on the ground again! And i am sure that if there is a future Iraq campaign it will be led by a US of A general not some NATO euro-trash commander who led caused US deaths (I am sure if it wree a 100% US thing, with no NATO intermediaries, that we woudl not have lost the Stealth Fighter or the other planes downed ...however NATO likes set patterns henc ei was easy for the slavs to know the flight patterns of the F-117s and it was just a matter of time before something bad happened).
Also consider that in the first GulfWar the Iraqis were totally helpless against Allied assault ....they had no way of even viably fighting back!
Anyways Yugoslavia is totally different from Iraq, and will always be! Even though technically Iraq is a stronger 'military power' in paper the Slavs are by far the stronger adversary! They are more intelligent than the Iraqis by far (after all they managed to fool NATO, which woudl not be a big deal had they also not managed to fool US and British specialists too in the process). However Iraqis are just dumb fellas with huge bullseyes over their heads. Simply target practice.
As for the Yugoslav thing i still wonder why Klington sent the US army there! Especially when you consider that we were helping Albanian Muslim terrorist-rebels against the Serbian Christian Yugoslavs!
Also the following excerpt from the article disturbs me: Teams of Iraqi intelligence officers rushed to Yugoslavia in the aftermath of the war to visit command centres and air-defence sites. Many toured Belgrade's Aviation Museum, inspecting destroyed drones, cruise missiles and the remnants of U.S. F-16 Falcon and F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighters.
Why do we still allow them to have pieces of the F-117A? I thought we would have sent teams to retrieve the wreckage of the F-117! They can keep the pieces of the F-16s and other stuff ...but i thought the F-117 components were still valued possessions! Or am i wrong?
As far as the F-117, it is first generation stealth technology, and the materials it's made of aren't all that exotic, IIRC.
There were no US or NATO deaths due to combat. During the early part of the campaign the northern areas, and particularly around Belgrade, were US only targets. No non-US bombers dropped ordnance onto targets in this area during this period. It was US planners solely who controlled these missions and who organised their ingress and egress routes. The only non-US pilot flying bombing missions during this period in this US only operation zone was RAF Squadron Leader Alastair Monkman. Monkman was on exchange with the USAF flying F-117s.
Yugoslavia rejoined the Dayton Accord and Vienna Document at the end of 1999. They revealed the losses that they suffered during Allied Force as a confidence building measure between the signatories. During the implementation meeting held during September 1999 the Yugoslavs exchanged the information in compliance with agreed limits. Although submitted in confidence the figures revealed leaked like a sieve.
The Yugoslavs declared that 136 Armoured Combat Vehicles had been lost along with 18 Battle Tanks. Insignificant really when you consider that some 850 ACVs were in the inventory holdings revealed in January 1999 before the conflict. The significant losses were to the Yugoslav Air Force. Yugoslavia was limited to 155 combat aircraft and revealed that it had lost 50 of those. Of those 11 out of 16 MiG-29s were lost leaving, post conflict, 4 Fulcrum A and one Fulcrum B in the 127th Fighter Squadron. Six of those were lost flying combat missions, four destroyed in NATO bombing attacks on the ground, and one lost due to pilot error while repositioning. Due to the M-18 (MiG-29 decoys) it had been thought that 14 were destroyed out of the 16. The largest losses were suffered by the MiG-21 fleet on the ground which was kept out of combat with NATO forces by the JRV i PVO. Yugoslavia also declared 11 helicopters destroyed bringing the total to 61. Other miscellaneous transport and training types brings this '61' figure up to between 70-80 aircraft destroyed. The embargoed Iraqi MiG-21 and MiG-23 were not included in the tally of aircraft destroyed.
The heavy losses suffered by the JRV i PVO were revealed in two interviews given in 2001:
Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic:
The lone exception, he said, was the Yugoslav air force, which “suffered considerable losses.
Col. Radovan Rakovic (250th Rocket Brigade)
The Yugoslav air force, he said, lost about 30 percent of its combat equipment and 40 percent of its combat systems.