"Over the past two years, Air Force generals were briefing [people] on the Hill and around town that we don't need the Army or Marines, just air power and the National Guard to mobilize and clean up the debris left by the blue-suiters," Peters e-mailed from his home in Virginia. "It was really revolting, dishonest and almost treasonous."

Air Force generals, who often go to work for defense contractors when they retire, were motivated by "greed," Peters charged, and found willing ears all over Washington: "The air-power-can-do-it-all arguments were extremely seductive to the wonk generation that didn't serve. Both sides of the aisle, Gingrich and Clinton, fell for the high-tech-bloodless-war scenario. And here we are."

For its part, the Air Force, reeling from the Kosovo disaster, retorted this week that it never oversold what its fighters and bombers could do.

"With respect to stopping the ethnic cleansing, we never supposed or reported that we had a silver bullet that would bring that to a halt," Vice Adm. Scott Fry, operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Associated Press.

An Air Force colonel who earned a Ph.D. studying counterinsurgency warfare said sourly, "We should have learned that using air power as a message failed in Vietnam and it won't work in the Balkans."

The colonel pointed to the numbers: "The opening days of this 'campaign' amounted to only 50 sorties per day, and this sortie generation rate has not gone up significantly since that time. This is plinking cans with a BB gun."

Compare that with Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the colonel says. On Aug. 30, 1990, the first official day of Desert Shield, more than 260 sorties were flown, and the number increased exponentially into Desert Storm, he added. "What we're doing in the Balkans is doodley squat. In Desert Storm, we flew over 24,000 interdiction sorties, over 1,400 close air support missions, etc., for a grand total of just under 70,000 sorties. That's an air campaign," the colonel declared.

But pilot casualties would likely be high if that kind of air campaign were mounted in Kosovo, said most military officers, because of the Serbs' air defense capabilities. Most military experts agree that only a combination of ground troops, tanks, artillery and air power can best Milosvic, but they fear the American public and, by extension, its political leaders, have no stomach for casualties when the war's not close to home.

"A few dead Americans and we are out of there -- like Somalia and Beirut," says a Marine colonel at one of the leading war colleges, who requested anonymity for fear of ruining his career. "So we do these operations as 'risk avoidance missions.' We don't dare call them that, but avoiding risk is the reason we use super expensive stand-off weapons instead of 'level of effort' platforms like all weather attack aircraft."

Even the relatively small risk of losing such men and machines in close-order missions is too high for Washington today, he said.

"If the risk is even 99 percent safe -- every 100 flights will produce one downed pilot -- that's not good PR for the folks back home. So we keep shooting $750,000 cruise missiles at targets that cost a fraction of that amount."

But now NATO forces are running low on cruise missiles, according to reports. Even if the cupboard were full, questions were bound to arise, as the battle shifts to Kosovo, regarding how effective such missiles can be against Serbian forces and equipment hiding in the forests or dug into caves, beyond the reach of NATO lasers and other high-tech gizmos.

Likewise, two dozen state-of-the-art, tank-busting Apache attack helicopters, scheduled for deployment to Macedonia next week, are lethally vulnerable, like their Russian counterparts in Afghanistan a decade ago, to Serbian shoulder-fired missiles.

The Serbian ground forces are highly mobile, which has surfaced another technical glitch, according to the authoritative Jane's Defence Weekly.

"Despite lessons learned from the 1990-91 Gulf War, NATO forces participating in Yugoslavia ... have not fielded a real-time targeting capability, the ability to pass images of enemy installations and troop formations directly from spacecraft or airborne surveillance aircraft into the cockpit of fighter aircraft or other weapons systems," Jane's reported this week.

Meanwhile, morale throughout the armed services is plunging with every day's new embarrassment in the Balkans spectacle. Ironically, the bombing to date has been so limited that in Belgrade, ordinary Yugoslavs have taken to painting bull's-eyes on their T-shirts.

"Just when historians were begining to think that Vietnam was the nadir of American foreign and national security policy," an Air Force colonel said, "along comes Kosovo."
salon.com | April 10, 1999

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