By William M. Arkin

Sunday, April 25, 1999

The pundits have spoken: Air power is failing, NATO's strategy isn't working, ground troops must be brought in to roll back Serb forces in Kosovo. While there's an irritating consistency to this armchair analysis, what's surprising is that a number of top-ranking Air Force officers agree.

In my recent interviews with some two dozen active-duty and retired Air Force generals and senior officers, several themes emerge about the NATO operation in Yugoslavia: disappointment that air power is being so poorly employed, frustration over the false promise of a perfect war and zero casualties, and puzzlement that the Air Force leadership is so cowed and silent.

The Air Force is the main player in Operation Allied Force and provides most of the planes, but its role is decidedly passive. It is in reality an administrator of the air war, neither in charge of the target selection nor in control of the overall strategy. Those functions are retained by the North Atlantic Council-the decision-making body of NATO-and Gen. Wesley Clark, the U.S. Army officer who commands Operation Allied Force.

With far too much political micromanagement, but without a clear military strategy and the aid of ground forces, the air war, many Air Force officers fear, is destined to fail.

"We've been hoist on our own petard," said Col. Phil Meilinger, a historian and former dean of the service's School of Advanced Airpower Studies. "For years, we were begging, 'Send me in, coach.' Now we're in, and [Washington has] picked the political scenario that is the hardest to do. We've been put at a terrible disadvantage, we just can't get to [Yugoslav] fielded forces when we operate by ourselves."

"It might fail," Meilinger acknowledges of the air war, "but it's still at a lower cost than sending in 200,000 ground troops." Like most Air Force officers, he is frustrated at the double standard applied to his institution, in which air power will be held responsible for the failures of the overall strategy: "Is it a test of ground power when the Army gets kicked out of Somalia?"

Another senior officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, says the frustrations many officers feel with respect to Operation Allied Force concern the limits and constraints of political consensus, not air power. Air power is being blamed, he says, for failures that have nothing to do with what's happening in the air. "The original mission [that] air power was given in Yugoslavia was not to stop genocide in southern Europe with a Desert Storm-like air campaign. But it is being graded that way," he said. The original mission was simply to diminish Yugoslav military capabilities.

The overall message among the Air Force brass interviewed is not just the cover-your-back finger pointing so common inside the Beltway. Everyone understands the enormous political constraints that military forces operate under. That's war.

Nor is the gloomy Air Force position simply institutional protection should the war strategy fail. "If Washington is going to fight an air war," says a soft-spoken three-star general who was a pilot in five air campaigns, "one might expect greater reliance on air power specialists and air doctrine."

He has a point.

More than anything, these Air Force loyalists are interested in NATO's success. They stress the danger of "expanding" the target list as the war proceeds. But beyond the nervousness of the dreaded escalation strategy of the Vietnam War, their point is more centrally that the military leadership and the White House do not understand the very tool they are employing.

The time to take advantage of the shock effect of air power, they say, is early in a campaign. Since NATO never planned to continue bombing for weeks, Air Force officers say that a coherent strategy was never discussed.

"We are training them [the Yugoslavs] to live with air attacks," says retired Gen. Charles Horner, who directed the Desert Storm air war in 1991. Horner is concerned that the "no losses" tactic and concentration on hitting Yugoslav army mobile targets from the air will produce little more than headlines.

What a strange position to be in: The Air Force is the force of first resort, master of America's most recent wars and the undisputed Persian Gulf War victors. Yet the senior military leaders in this war-Gen. Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Clark, the NATO supreme commander-are Army officers. In the hierarchical military, the absence of air operators in the chain of command should not be underestimated.

Officers point to Gen. Michael Short, the air combat commander stationed in the NATO Command Post in Vicenza, Italy. Short has been virtually the invisible man in the war, and officers lament that he is merely an administrator carrying out the directions of Clark and the NATO council.

By comparison, Horner, in Desert Storm, was able to develop his own choreography and priorities to match Washington's policy and the strategies of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who was the supreme commander of allied forces in the Gulf War, like Clark today. "Air planners are not planning the air operation," said a general. "They are being issued targets each day for the next day's operations, too late to do rational planning."

Moreover, another officer adds nervously, "I don't know anyone in uniform who trusts the administration. No one thinks that President Clinton, or [Secretary of State Madeleine K.] Albright or [Defense Secretary William S.] Cohen will pull it out in the end." And worse, those interviewed have little regard for either Clark or Shelton.

Several senior officers say they are baffled as to why the pundits ignore the fact that it is air power that makes any further use of force possible. As a result, the Air Force seems perpetually on the defensive. "My only real frustration is that we have absolutely nothing to be defensive about," said one senior officer.

Perhaps surprisingly, Air Force officers are themselves some of the biggest pessimists on the question of whether air power by itself can win. One after another, they stress that they recognize that the best "platform" to use to go after Yugoslav forces from the air is the Army's Apache helicopter.

More fundamentally, there is the widespread view that even absent a ground component to the war, NATO has lacked a strategy. Senior officers from all quarters are disconcerted over the slow start of the air campaign, the restrictions and hesitations about hitting what they thought should be key target groups (such as the national electrical grid and the Yugoslav leadership), the personal control of the air campaign held by Clark, and the meddling from 19 NATO capitals.

"In the current situation, the hammer is working just fine," a general observed. "But when the blueprints have to undergo revision each day by 19 separate architects before it is determined where to drive the nail, one has to wonder what the final product is going to look like.

"Which part of the equation . . . needs to be fixed," he asked, "the architects or the hammer and nails?"

The problem with the smorgasbord approach-hitting a little bit of everything-and servicing a target list over many weeks, Meilinger says, is that it lessens the effect of bombing. There is little or no psychological impact, the targets are empty or have been moved, and whatever hope that there might have been to magnify the impact is lost, he says.

Those who have fought air wars also recognize the inherent danger of believing that NATO can successfully shift gears now or "escalate."

For air officers, the desire to deliver the overwhelming blow is not some bloodthirsty throwback to the era before smart weapons. Especially with precision bombs, the current doctrine is to seek "parallel" effect on the enemy. Critical locations are bombed, entire systems collapse, leaders are separated from their forces, the society is made to feel the impact of its rulers' war, the sum is greater than the individual parts.

"You bomb," says one Air Force general, "and have effect even where bombs haven't fallen."

A strategy of systemic attacks would have its detractors. But as Meilinger says, "If you are going to nail air power, at least do it on the right evidence." To him and others, bombing has the potential to bring a conflict to a rapid conclusion and can be less destructive than either ground wars or open-ended embargoes-such as the one the United States has against Iraq.

This is the good side of the administration's love affair with the cruise missile and air power. Air Force leaders may be asleep at the switch when it comes to publicly promoting their views, but the fact remains that as of last week, after 6,000 sorties, more than 2,000 strikes and 200 targets, only one NATO plane has gone down and the Yugoslav government is claiming no more than 1,000 civilian casualties. Yet when extraordinary assets are poorly employed, bombing merely becomes punishment and a foolhardy attempt at coercion. As one of the officers I've spoken to said about Yugoslav Slobodan Milosevic, "His head will last longer than our fist." Said another, "The flaw in the policy of punishment is that it cedes the initiative to your adversary. We could continue to bomb until there isn't one brick standing on top of another in Serbia and Milosevic would still not be punished, unless he chose to be."

And as the air campaign continues and the target list grows, they say, Kosovo Albanians and ordinary Serbs are the ones who suffer most.

The officers are right.