In their book Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (1986), Harvard professors Richard Neustadt and Ernest May make an important observation. Washington decision makers, and even academics, students, journalists, and the average citizen, “used history in their decisions, at least for advocacy or for comfort, whether they knew any or not.” While most of their work concentrates on the question of whether or not decision makers, within the limits of their circumstances, could have done better, it also focuses on how decision makers often misread cases in history and draw inaccurate comparisons and parallels. Munich framed many decisions after World War II. Vietnam has been the military’s frame of reference for over two decades, and the past decade has seen the Gulf War used as the antithetical comparison to Vietnam. Whether these analogies are appropriate or not, they are used over and over, often to the detriment of thoughtful reflection. The military itself indulges too often in complacent hindsight, and it has done so again in looking back on the Kosovo air campaign, Operation Allied Force.
Much of the debate since Allied Force, especially in military circles and the Air Force in particular, has centered around the dissatisfaction of many commanders with the strategy of the campaign. These commanders are critical of the basic strategy choices made by NATO’s leaders, arguing that politicians needlessly hampered the application of a coherent and doctrinally pure air power strategy, thereby risking American credibility and also prolonging the war itself. What is most disturbing about this after-action chastisement is the absence of the appropriate collegiality coupled with civilian primacy that is necessary for both healthy civil-military relations as well as good national policy. Exacerbating this is the military’s misreading of both the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. Vietnam is remembered as a case of air power being undermined by civilian control of air operations, with images of President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara on their knees in the Oval Office selecting targets. The Gulf War is remembered as a textbook case of proper civilian noninvolvement, with President Bush, Secretary of Defense Cheney, and others merely standing back while the air planners conducted a lethal and successful strategy.
Both of these notions are incorrect, and they are especially harmful because they lead to the subsequent conclusion that politicians should only set objectives, not involve themselves with military plans or scrutinize the conduct of operations. A closer study of Vietnam, Iraq, and Kosovo reveals a far more complicated relationship between civilian policymakers and military leaders in setting air strategy than is generally understood either by military leaders or their civilian masters. The fundamentals of success in air warfare are candor, collegiality, and a common sense of purpose. And it is time to put to rest the unsupportable notion that civilians should only give broad guidance and then stay out of the way.
The criticism
Lieutenant general michael short, now retired, served as the Air Component Commander during Allied Force. He has publicly decried the strategy of an incremental, gradual escalation, appealing to the president and those above him in the military commands (the regional commanders in chief, or CINC’s), that they should heed the advice of airmen, who best understand how to carry out a campaign. Just weeks after the end of the war in an interview with the Washington Post, he declared that “as an airman, I’d have done this a whole lot differently than I was allowed to do. We could have done this differently. We should have done this differently.” He further expanded his argument in a speech at the Air Force Association Air Warfare Symposium in February 2000:
We need to prepare our politicians as best we can for what is going to happen. If we are going to initiate an air campaign, not an air effort, but an air campaign, airmen need to be given the chance to explain what is going to happen to our political leadership. Airmen, who have practiced their craft and their trade for 30 or 35 years, need to be given the opportunity to make that explanation. I read in General Horner’s [the air component commander in Desert Storm] superb book how he went to Camp David and briefed the President of the United States on how he intended to conduct an air campaign to prepare the battlefield in Kuwait and Iraq. I am not campaigning for a trip to Camp David, but there was a case to be made for an air campaign, and airmen should have made that case.
When this does not occur, as he claims it did not in Allied Force, we end up with random bombing of military targets, thereby undermining the goal of effects-based targeting. He has claimed that if he had been allowed to “go downtown” and bomb targets in Belgrade immediately, he could have shortened the war by four weeks. Moreover, he has concluded that civilian policymakers not only do not understand air power, but should not hamper operations once committed. He further elaborated in his speech to the Air Force Association: “Our politicians need to understand that we will do our best to make air power clean and painless as they want us to, but it is not going to work out that way. . . . When they choose to employ us, to take us to war, when they choose to use military force to solve a problem that politicians could not, then they need to grit their teeth and stay with us.” He decries the ad hoc campaign of Allied Force, which in his assessment was executed like a pick-up game:
Our targeting philosophy clearly has to be agreed upon before we start. . . . We need to have agreed how we intend to employ our forces. I am not so naïve as to believe that we will be able to execute an air campaign just because our nation wants to. But we need to have made that case, and if that case is not accepted, we need to have a fallback plan that works and gets it done. Again, we don’t want to do this by happenstance. We want to do it by design.
Perhaps his harshest criticism has been an oft repeated line to his superiors in the name of his pilots: “Sir, don’t risk lives to demonstrate resolve.”
General John Jumper, who commanded U.S. Air Forces in Europe during Allied Force and is now the commander of Air Combat Command, has voiced similar criticisms. In a recent speech at an Air Force conference, he called the 1990s the “era of the limited objective,” with military operations fraught with caution and half-measures. He compared the operation order of General Eisenhower for the Normandy invasion in World War II to the complicated and vague guidance governing Kosovo. Eisenhower ordered his subordinates, “You will enter the continent of Europe and, in conjunction with the other United Nations, undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.”
Admiral Leighton Smith, now retired and the former commander of NATO forces in the Balkans, declared soon after Allied Force that it was “possibly the worst way we employed our military forces in history.” During the air campaign, another unnamed general referred back to Operation Instant Thunder, the initial plan for the Gulf War, complaining, “This is not Instant Thunder, it’s more like Constant Drizzle.” There was a feeling among many in the military that the erratic pace of the campaign, especially with the target approval process, was undermining its effectiveness.
This criticism is useful, but it should not be read as a case of civilian micromanagement or ignorance about the efficacy of air power. Such criticism instead should illuminate the many challenges of fighting as a coalition, of the changes technology has wrought, and of the unique circumstances surrounding the use of force in Kosovo.
Technology changes things
Technology has changed warfare in many ways, but among the most significant is the ability for all levels of authority to scrutinize and to involve themselves in the battle itself. Those of us who flew in Allied Force were acutely aware of such scrutiny. Looking back, if a pilot in Vietnam was given a target to attack, he flew the mission and debriefed his flight not unlike a mission in Allied Force. The difference is that the debriefing during Vietnam would have been only the pilot’s recollection of events. Today we have the ability to reconstruct what happened, often with precise detail.
For instance, during one mission in Allied Force the crew flying an F-15E Strike Eagle was given the target of a bridge near Nis in Serbia. The weapon was an AGM-130, a propelled 2,000 pound bomb that is dropped more than 20 miles from the target and is guided via television data-link from the cockpit of the aircraft. The mission was a success; the bridge was destroyed. Tragically, there was a passenger train crossing the bridge when the bomb struck, and the post-flight video shows exactly that. As a result of that attack, as General Short testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in October 1999, “the guidance for attacking bridges in the future was: You will no longer attack bridges in daylight, you will no longer attack bridges on weekends or market days or holidays. In fact, you will only attack bridges between 10 o’clock at night and 4 o’clock in the morning.”
This technological fact of life simply has to be taken into account. In April 2000, in a speech to DFI International, General Jumper summarized the situation well: “Here we put this young man in this situation where he knows that this bomb is enroute to the target, and the videotape that is recording in the cockpit is running, that an hour after he leaves that tape is going to be graded by the Commander of the United States Air Forces in Europe, the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and probably the President of the United States.” We cannot brush aside this dilemma with the simple admonition to “let the warfighters fight.” Such carte blanche is impossible given today’s technology. Hasty reactions in response to information about bomb damage, like the one to which General Short referred, may or may not be appropriate, but unless this technological reality is addressed, reasoned decisions about targeting will be harder to make.
Vietnam
The view of Vietnam among many in the Air Force was summarized by Lieutenant General Short in an interview with the PBS program Frontline soon after the Kosovo campaign: “for years [in Vietnam] we bombed a little bit, and then we backed off, and . . . had pauses, and so on. Then finally we sent the B-52s north around January of 1973, and lo and behold, we brought them to the table.” This has led to a common belief among airmen that the U.S. might have won the war in Vietnam had they been allowed to run it. It also misrepresents what occurred in Vietnam.
The Vietnam War saw two major air campaigns against the North — Rolling Thunder (March 2, 1965 to October 31, 1968), and the two Linebacker campaigns, Linebacker I ( May 10, 1972 to October 23, 1972), and Linebacker II (December 18-29, 1972). Rolling Thunder failed, and the Linebackers succeeded in forcing concessions. The failure of Rolling Thunder and the success of the Linebackers was not related to a civil-military disagreement that was suddenly overcome under President Nixon. It had to do with the nature of the war and the specific goals sought.
Until March 1972, the North waged a guerrilla war against the South, a war that was not vulnerable to air attack and that required few external supplies, thus negating efforts at air interdiction. In 1972, the North decided to wage a sustained conventional war, which required continuous and vast logistical support that was vulnerable to air attack. This is the primary reason the bombing in 1972 worked and the bombing in the late 1960s did not.
There never was a fundamental disagreement between the military and civilian policymakers over air planning in Vietnam, even during the failed Rolling Thunder. Unfortunately, the Rolling Thunder strategy under President Lyndon Johnson is often mistakenly characterized as a failure undermined by divergent strategies advocated by the civilian and military leadership: the military continually advocating more bombing and the civilians pushing for a more restrained policy of gradualism. That assessment is incorrect, as is thoroughly documented by Robert A. Pape in his book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (1996). Both air commanders and civilian policymakers remained convinced throughout the three and a half years of Rolling Thunder that the bombing would ultimately compel the North Vietnamese to stop fighting.
Pape discusses Rolling Thunder in considerable detail. Three different and competing air strategies were tried in succession, each advocated by different constituencies in the administration and the military. The first strategy was one of coercing North Vietnam by threatening its population and economy, through limited bombing of its industrial economy and population with gradually increasing risk. This was advocated by Defense Secretary McNamara, his assistant John McNaughton, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Maxwell Taylor, Director of Central Intelligence John McCone, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, Deputy National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow, and Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy. The strategy was executed throughout the spring and summer of 1965, and bombing focused on a list of fixed targets. In The Pentagon Papers, General Taylor summed up this strategy as “a gradual, orchestrated acceleration of tempo measured in terms of frequency, size, number and/or geographic location. . . . An upward trend in any or all of these forms of intensity will convey signals which, in combination, should present to the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) leaders a vision of inevitable, ultimate destruction if they do not change their ways.”
The second strategy during Rolling Thunder was the interdiction of North Vietnamese forces, an effort to directly target the fielded forces and prevent their combat capabilities in the South. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Earle G. Wheeler was the primary advocate of this strategy. He replaced Taylor in August 1964. This strategy was also supported by Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson and theater commanders General William Momyer and Admiral U.S. Grant Sharp. This strategy was pursued from summer 1965 through the winter 1966-67. Strike aircraft were tasked with air interdiction in an effort to disrupt the North’s infiltration of men and supplies. Pilots were given complete freedom for armed reconnaissance and reattacks of previously struck targets throughout North Vietnam, except for small areas around Hanoi, Haiphong, and the Chinese border.
The third strategy tried was that of Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis E. LeMay with the assistance of his successor, General John P. McConnell. The air strikes focused on civilian vulnerabilities and aimed at raising the immediate costs of the war for North Vietnam, rather than trying to focus Hanoi on future risks. Most of the political constraints on bombing were removed. This strategy was executed from the spring to fall 1967. By the end of 1967, “the only remaining possibilities for increased military action against the North were mining and bombing of ports, bombing dikes and locks, and a land invasion of the North,” according to a 1968 CIA study titled “Effectiveness of the Air Campaign Against North Vietnam.”
It is a myth that the involvement of President Johnson and his advisors in selecting targets undermined Rolling Thunder. On the whole, it was not seen by the military as an ineffective approach. Nor is such detailed civilian control inappropriate. The lessons from the air campaigns of Vietnam are the ineffectual strategies chosen by both the military leaders and civilian policymakers, not a disagreement between the two.
Desert Storm
To many in the military, Operation Desert Storm was a textbook case of how to conduct a military operation. It had an easily defined objective — kicking Iraq out of Kuwait. There was broad political guidance given by civilian decision makers, and from that guidance the military commanders were allowed to design a campaign without further meddling. In contrast to Vietnam, where American politicians directed the incremental and restricted use of force without clearly stated political objectives, in Iraq the commanders were allowed to use decisive and overwhelming force with few restrictions and for clear purposes.
This view is probably overstated, and it misrepresents both the strategic realities of Vietnam and the implausible confluence of circumstances surrounding the Gulf War. In Vietnam, there was a constant fear of provoking a Soviet or Chinese intervention. No such threat existed in 1991. Although targets were not picked in the White House during Desert Storm, neither were air planners given carte blanche to plan and conduct the campaign.
In fact, two days before the beginning of the air campaign, Secretary of State James Baker and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Robert Kimmitt went over the target list with Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Colin Powell. In a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in December 1991, Kimmitt said about that meeting, “It was very clear to both Secretary Baker and me . . . that those political considerations that had been expressed, both at the Cabinet level and [in the NSC Deputies Committee], had been well taken into account, and we both left the meeting very comfortable from a political perspective.” Such a comment speaks to the close and mutually respectful working relationship between civilian decision makers and the military, not to a supposed absence of meddling by civilians.
There were also instances of civilian involvement in the details of the air campaign. The Al Firdos bunker incident is a useful illustration of the restraints that will always be placed on the waging of war. By the first week of February 1991, three weeks into the air campaign, a network of potential command post bunkers that had not hitherto been targeted began to gain the attention of several intelligence analysts. They began to collect SIGINT — signals intelligence — emanating from the vicinity of the Al Firdos bunker in southwest Baghdad. Analysts believed that it was being used by the Iraqi secret police. The bunker went on the target list, and two F-117s struck it the night of February 13. It is estimated that 204 civilians, all of whom had sought shelter in the bunker, perished in the attack.
Rick Atkinson, in his book, Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (1993), detailed the aftermath of the incident. General Powell and Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, intelligence director for the Joint Staff, went to the White House and defended the selection of the target to President Bush. Powell made it a policy thereafter to review all sorties proposed against the Iraqi capital. General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander in chief of Central Command, also required from then on that the air planners justify every mission in Baghdad beforehand, orally at first, and then in writing. In the remaining two weeks of the war, according to the Pentagon’s Gulf War Air Power Survey (1993), only five targets were struck in Baghdad, all carefully chosen, as compared to 25 targets struck during the two previous weeks.
Another illustration of the sometimes detailed civilian jurisdiction over air planning was the search for Scud missile launchers in Iraq. Only hours into the air campaign, Iraq launched several Scuds at Tel Aviv, Israel. American leaders from President Bush to Secretary Baker were working to persuade Israel to show restraint and not retaliate. Part of the argument they laid out for Israeli officials was that there was nothing Israel’s air force could do that the American air force was not already doing. President Bush himself pledged a relentless American effort to destroy the Scud sites. The order to suppress the Scuds was driven by Washington, not by the air planners in Riyadh. Air planners in Washington, even General Schwarzkopf himself, worried privately that the effort to destroy Scuds would hinder the main effort of the air campaign, according to Atkinson in Crusade.
This was a contentious issue during the opening days of the air campaign, even leading to a heated exchange between General Powell and General Schwarzkopf, Schwarzkopf complaining of Washington meddling. But the guidance did not change. In fact, a team of U.S. photo specialists was dispatched to Israel to help interpret satellite images and recommend targets for American pilots. The initial air campaign plan designated 24 F-15E Strike Eagles to suppress mobile Scud launchers. Eventually the number of aircraft would triple, involving both F-16 Fighting Falcons and A-10 Warthogs. Daily detailed accounts of Scud-hunting activities were sent to Secretary Cheney at the Pentagon. Atkinson revealed that a plan was readied to divert nearly all allied aircraft for three days of attacks against any site in western Iraq that could even remotely support Scud operations, although it was never carried out.
The relative goodwill during Desert Storm between military air planners and their civilian masters is the result of the unique circumstances of the Gulf War, not of a framework in which the civilians gave policy guidance and then butted out. First, there was a strong consensus among all countries involved, both at the military and political level, about the objectives of the war. There were almost no instances of cold feet among allies or political leaders in the United States. Second, there was little disagreement about how the air campaign should be carried out, unlike in Vietnam and Allied Force. Both the air planners and the civilians in the White House were generally in agreement about the conduct of the campaign, with the mild exception of Scud hunting. Third, the environment of Iraq made for a much easier air campaign than any might have foreseen or than we can anticipate in the future. The jungles of Vietnam or the forests of Kosovo provided a much more difficult targeting problem than the deserts of Iraq, both from the perspective of the military effect of striking a target as well as collateral damage considerations. Desert Storm was the easy case, and therefore it might not be the best example for future wars.
Allied Force
Any serious analysis of the 78-day bombing campaign for Kosovo must begin by considering the circumstances leading up to the decision to bomb Serbia. The agreement reached in October 1998 between Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke was seen as a vehicle to buy time to reach a political settlement before the resumption of fighting that was expected in April. On January 15, 1999, Serb paramilitary and armed forces massacred at least 45 people in Racak in southern Kosovo, blatantly violating the October agreement. This proved to be a turning point for the U.S. and NATO, although the NATO allies, with few exceptions, were not yet prepared to take military action. Finally, as military action appeared to be imminent after the talks failed at Rambouillet, there was widespread belief within the Clinton administration, among the NATO allies, and even in the military itself that decisive military action was not required. Most believed that a few days of bombing would coerce Milosevic to agree to a political deal. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright herself stated on the first night of the war on the Newshour with Jim Lehrer, “I don’t see this as a long-term operation.” They expected something similar to Operation Deliberate Force, the successful two-week limited bombing of Bosnia in September 1996 that eventually led to the Dayton peace accord.
Unquestionably, there were also doubts inside both the military and the administration about the probability of successfully coercing Milosevic after only a few days of strikes. Shortly before the air campaign, the service chiefs testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and voiced their skepticism over whether air strikes by themselves would compel Milosevic. But there was also a recognition by all involved that the imperatives of consensus politics, keeping all 19 allies on board, ruled out a classic, decisive air campaign initially, much less a ground campaign. As General Clark admitted after the campaign on PBS Frontline, “no set of targets, and no bombing series was more important than maintaining the consensus of NATO.” When seen in this light, it becomes apparent that the choice was not one between overwhelming force and lesser force, but between lesser force and no force at all.
So the middle ground was tried initially. Had it worked, there would have been little discussion about the air strategy that was chosen. Ben Lambeth, in his book The Transformation of American Air Power (2000), describes the air campaign. The first night, March 24, 1999, saw 120 strike sorties attack 40 Serbian targets. After a few days of the air campaign, it became apparent that Milosevic was not going to sue for peace, and General Clark received authorization from the North Atlantic Council to ramp up attacks against a broader spectrum of fixed targets in Serbia and fielded forces in Kosovo.
During the fourth week of the campaign, targeting efforts began to focus not just on the fielded Kosovo forces but also on Milosevic’s political machine — the media, the security forces, and the economic system — with approval given for such targets as national oil refineries, railway lines, road and rail bridges over the Danube, military communications sites, and factories capable of producing weapons and spare parts. By the end of the sixth week of the campaign, the bombing of infrastructure targets had cut Yugoslavia’s economic output capability by half and had left more than 100,000 civilians out of jobs. Finally, during the last two weeks of the campaign, Serbia’s electrical power-generating capacity was struck.
This escalation took place despite numerous obstacles: the reluctance of several alliance members; the process of sorting out procedures, authorities, and concepts of operations that had great effect on the target approval process; the lack of forces initially in the theater; the hesitation of the U.S. administration and the Joint Staff to escalate; and finally, the division among those in the U.S. military itself over the most appropriate targeting strategy. In fact, the disagreement within the military over strategy may have hampered the effectiveness of the air campaign more than any other factor. General Clark and Lieutenant General Short had a fundamental difference of opinion about the appropriate focus of the bombing. Clark believed the Serbian Third Army, the fielded forces in Kosovo, should be the focus of the effort, while Short believed this to be a waste of valuable munitions and sorties. Instead, Short advocated bombing strategic targets that were valuable to Milosevic. The theory goes that these targets are the Achilles’ heel of the enemy, that if destroyed the central leadership will be isolated and the enemy’s military will collapse under light military pressure without guidance from above. In Allied Force, these targets were Milosevic, his cronies, and the industries and buildings they personally valued, such as counterintelligence facilities, headquarters of security forces and loyal military units, and related communications facilities. The result was a somewhat ad hoc campaign in the initial stages, with Clark’s priorities generally prevailing, but one which eventually saw the expansion of all target sets throughout Kosovo and Serbia.
The air campaign also suffered several missteps that certainly hampered the achievement of an aggressive and uninterrupted strategy: the unfortunate bombing of a refugee column on April 14, the mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy on May 7, and that tragic strike on the bridge over the Nis River when a passenger train was crossing. Despite all these setbacks, the air campaign proceeded and escalated rapidly.
This is not to say that it was the most effective strategy, but that the relationship between the alliance members, within the military itself, and between military and civilian policymakers proved a workable one over time. They ultimately found common ground, they stayed the course, and they prevailed. That a gradual, incremental strategy is not the most efficient use of air power may not be as important as remembering that efficiency must sometimes be subordinated to political considerations. Those political considerations must be balanced against doctrine. That balancing act requires a close working relationship and frank dialogue between civilian policymakers and military professionals.
General Short himself has admitted that the dialogue that took place about the conduct of the air campaign was a frank one. After the conflict, in his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he stated, “Certainly there are things that I believe could have been done differently, and I was given every opportunity to speak with my senior leadership about that. At no time was I prevented from expressing my thoughts.” And as General Clark stated on Frontline after the campaign, “Once we crossed the threshold with the use of force, then my military colleagues and I had to speak up, and drive it toward the effective use of force.”
The lessons of Kosovo are not to decry the incremental strategy or to bridle at political restrictions, but instead to recognize that such limitations will always exist. Members of the military must not allow themselves to be fooled into believing it is “us” (the military) versus “them” (the politicians). If the military looks only with disdain on civilians whose professional lives have not, after all, focused on air campaign planning, the conduct of military operations will be hampered. The simplistic slogan “let the warfighters fight” is useless nostalgia for an era that never existed. Allied Force featured lots of scrutiny, lots of argument about which targets should be hit in what order, and the political ramifications of each strike. That is the way it should be.
The notion that it is inappropriate for civilian leaders to involve themselves in the details of military operations is pervasive in the military. It is also misguided. Rules of engagement and target selection will always be required to conform to political objectives. Those political objectives are articulated by civilians (who, to be sure, should know when to show restraint). In the end, only a candid and forthright civil-military relationship characterized by a shared sense of purpose will yield sound wartime policy.
