"They were really hands-on, seat-of-the-pants missions, and I don't think, from a ground perspective, that the pilots had anything other than their eyes and hands to guide them," recalled Brandon, who was a young U.S. Navy swift boat commander in the murky Mekong Delta 30 years ago. When he and his mates were ambushed by communist guerrillas, they'd call for air support. Often the first to arrive were prop-driven A4D Skyraiders who flew so low and slow "it sometimes seemed like a plane coming in to save our ass filled the sky."

"I loved those guys," said Brandon, who retired as a senior FBI counterintelligence official in 1995. "Unfortunately," he added, "sometimes the fog of war caused bad drops" -- bombs falling near or even on their own troops.

Today's high-tech, computer-driven aircraft have largely eliminated the "bad drops." But in the Balkan air campaign known as Operation Allied Force, such high-tech warplanes designed for all-weather, low-level attacks have been largely missing in action -- sometimes even returning to base with their ordnance still strapped under their wings, while heavier bombers have been relegated mostly to the north. After a four-day cloud clearing this week, rain and fog rolled in again Thursday night, forcing several fighter-bomber missions to turn back to base. Pentagon officials said the forecast called for bad weather over the weekend, which will again allow Serbian forces in beleaguered Kosovo to fire, bomb, shell and plunder at will.

Whatever happened to America's vaunted "all-weather" digitized aircraft, the fearsome birds touted in glossy newspaper and magazine ads? According to NATO spokesmen, bad weather has crippled an "all-weather" Air Force.

Apparently the generals are betting the public will forget a decade's worth of full-page ads in leading papers touting the all-weather capability of such warplanes as McDonnell-Douglas-Boeing's F/A-18 Hornet, "the first tactical aircraft designed to perform both air-to-air and air-to-ground missions ... around the clock and in any weather." Similar capabilities were advertised for the F-15 and F-16 fighter-bombers and the tank-killing A-10 "warthog."

Yet for the first two weeks of the Balkan campaign, none were assigned to attack the Serbs conducting "ethnic cleansing" missions in Kosovo -- the original raison d'être for the offensive.

So what's the truth? Are NATO's high-tech, all-weather aircraft less fearsome than advertised? Or is there some other reason for the air war's failure to stop the Serbs?

Increasingly, military men blame the stalemate in Kosovo on politicians, not equipment or bad weather.

"When you fly less than 50 bombing sorties per day for seven days, you're not serious about what you're doing," retired Air Force Gen. Buster Glosson, one of the key planners of the Persian Gulf War air campaign, said Friday. "At best it's sporadic bombing."

The troubling truth has emerged that the expedited "ethnic cleansing" of tens of thousands of Albanians in Kosovo wasn't worth the life of a single NATO pilot. So the high-tech aircraft were largely kept out of action in Kosovo, where they might be hit by Serbian anti-aircraft fire or shoulder-fired missiles.

"This is the first yuppie war, brought to you by those who have not served, but who know better than those in uniform," groused Ralph Peters, a former Army colonel who is the military expert of the moment. Peters' blistering prescription for military reform, "Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph?" (Stackpole Books) was coincidentally published on the eve of the Balkans bombing, propelling him onto the talk-show circuit.

"As for the aircraft that hide from the rain, we're playing it very, very safe, with little daytime flying," Peters said. "It certainly makes sense from a purely force-protection standpoint, but it's a bit hard on the Kosovar Albanians."

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