. in the 1960s . . . politicians now wanted the surgical air strikes that airpower zealots had promised for decades . . .
Fighter Wing by Tom Clancy
It is unwise to be dogmatic about the course of the Kosovo war. Has the NATO bombing campaign really failed?
It has not stopped the ethnic cleansing of the unfortunate Kosovans. Bombing did not start the cleansing, but it caused the Serbs to make it faster and more brutal.
Bombing has not yet brought Milosevic back to the conference room, with agreement to accept a NATO verification force, which will also be a protection force for Kosovo.
Pentagon spokesmen said yesterday that bombing was succeeding. Up to 20 per cent of Serb tanks in Kosovo, 30 per cent of Yugoslavia's surface-to-air missile capacity and 35 ground attack aircraft are destroyed. (Presumably this means the MiGs, although these are classed as fighters, as distinct from the Yugoslav manufactured Galebs and Oraos, which are shown as fighter-ground attack planes).
These are serious losses, but Serb forces seem undeterred. Undoubtedly, no Serb planes are rising to challenge NATO's ones; the contest would be hopelessly uneven.
So what has gone wrong?
First it is clear that there were too few NATO aircraft. There were about 430 NATO planes of all types in the theatre of operations, of which 250 (60 per cent) were American. There are now about 500 US planes and about 1,000 overall in NATO by the end of the month.
It is unlike the US to under-provide, and this would seem to argue for those who say that an early victory with a small force was expected.
There were target constraints initially: collateral damage was to be avoided at almost all costs. These constraints lessened, as they always tend to do, as the war continued and the treatment of the refugees got more brutal. Now, as we can see, while there is no direct bombing of "area targets", there is much collateral damage.
Weather was another serious difficulty. For years (cf Brassey's excellent Air Power series in the late 1980s) studies of NATO's air tasks started with details of the "environment" in northern Europe. Aircraft tactics and munitions designed for that should not have had so many problems in the relatively clearer skies of the Balkans.
But British planes, in particular, were badly hampered. The RAF has suffered badly in the Defence White Papers of the past 30 years.
Heavy losses in the Gulf War caused the abandonment of low-flying hedge-hopping techniques in favour of laser-guided bombs (LGBs). Laser light tends to stay in a tight, narrow beam and can mark a target from a distance. Marking can be done from another aircraft or by Special Forces on the ground using hand-held equipment.
But the lasers must be able to "see" the targets. If the laser energy is broken by cloud or smoke the "lock" on the target cannot hold. Bad weather has reduced successful sorties. By the 21st day of the campaign there were only seven days of "favourable" weather and 10 days on which 50 per cent of strikes had to be "cancelled".
Apparently, RAF Harriers were only cleared to bomb through cloud from April 11th, to avoid casualties. It is unclear whether this made much difference.
The Americans have their own problems. There are indications of a shortage of Joint Attack Munitions which use inertial and Global Positioning System guidance. We have heard little about the shortage of cruise missiles (which still seem very accurate), but from figures given two weeks ago a shortage clearly exists.