How We Fight

By Mark Thompson/Washington

Once committed to actual combat, anything less than overwhelming and rapid military success for the intervening power will be diplomatically disastrous.

That's how young army captain Wesley Clark urged that war be waged in his 1975 thesis on "Military Contingency Operations: The Lessons of Political-Military Coordination." Back then, he was a student at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kans. Today, the four-star general is NATO's Supreme Allied Commander, based in Belgium. He's running a much different war than the one he advocated a generation ago. It is a war of contrasts, one that pits the firepower of history's most powerful military alliance against a scorched-earth campaign. It is a war of double-checking all targets yet still blowing civilians into clots of gore and shreds of clothing as they flee their homeland, seeking to escape both Serbian wrath and NATO impotence.

Every hour of every day, warplanes take off from bases across Europe--and some in the U.S.--bound for Balkan targets. The sweep of weapons is impressive. Not since World War II has the U.S. military hurled three types of heavy bombers--B-1s, B-2s and B-52s--at an enemy. The fleet of 430 allied warplanes that began this war will soon grow to more than 1,000 planes. The escalation will force the Pentagon to call up as many as 33,000 reservists.

But if that seems like the kind of overwhelming force Clark had in mind in 1975, still fresh from being wounded in Vietnam and winning a Silver Star for valor, it's not. This campaign is all about controlled force--controlled by politicians in everything from target selection to level of intensity--and that control is making Clark's job more complicated than he could have ever imagined in 1975.

U.S. policymakers apparently overestimated the coercive effects which the air attacks could generate [in Vietnam]...Graduated escalation allowed time for the enemy to react to the U.S. pressures and sustain its morale, will and physical support of the war." --FROM CLARK'S THESIS

As the G-force presses you back into your seat at takeoff from the air base at Aviano, Italy, or from an aircraft carrier in the Ionian Sea, you are really never flying solo. You and your wingmen move into a complicated choreography charted for each of the 400 daily sorties. Depending on how far you've had to fly--B-2s fly more than 15 hours from the U.S.--it's likely your plane will slow down to gulp fuel from an aerial tanker before your final run into hostile airspace. One of every three flights is an aerial tanker sortie--more of them than attack flights.

You'll head in behind a SEAD (suppression of enemy air defense) package. These Navy EA-6B radar-jamming planes and Air Force radar-killing F-16CJs scour the skies for electronic clues betraying a SAM radar. As you plunge deeper over enemy territory between 15,000 and 25,000 ft., there's an aerial ballet taking place far above: a layer of F-15Cs ensuring that no Serbian pilot gets close enough to take a shot.

Above the fighters is the intel package: E-3 AWACS and E-2C radar planes, E-8 Joint STARS ground-surveillance planes and RC-135 Rivet Joint planes. They comb the sky and ground for the enemy, feed targets to pilots and keep allied warplanes safely apart. When you near your target, you peel off from your buddies, dodging antiaircraft artillery and corkscrewing missiles.

The 493rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Cervia, in northern Italy, has shot down four of the five Serbian MiG-29s killed so far. A lieutenant colonel, call sign "Rico," 40, scored one of those kills from his F-15C. "I was in the right place at the right time, and had a little luck," he says. "He ran into my missile." He had to wait for an AWACS to confirm that it was a foe before taking it on. "That all took about 20, 30 sec., but it seemed like it lasted an hour," he recalls. "Your hands, your eyes, your mouth--everything goes into training mode," he said. "Combat still scares the hell out of me."

NATO remains flummoxed by the limp Serbian air defense. The Pentagon suggests it signifies allied success in taking down the Serbian air-defenses, by attacks, jamming and corrupting data, which the allies have fed into Yugoslav computers through microwave transmissions. Pentagon analyst Franklin Spinney says Serbia's plan echoes its World War II tactics. The Germans sent 700,000 troops into Serbia but were unable to root Serbian partisans out despite four years of fierce fighting. "The Serbs are using their air-defense system as a quasi guerrilla force to capture the attention and distract the focus of NATO air power," Spinney says. "They are not trying to attrit NATO's air force as much as to neutralize its effects."

It's working. NATO pilots rarely fly below 10,000 ft. for fear of being shot down. Proof of the havoc that can wreak could be seen last Wednesday, when a U.S. F-16 apparently fired on what the pilot thought was a military convoy from 15,000 ft.--nearly three miles up. Unfortunately, his laser-guided bomb obliterated a tractor and wagon carrying Albanian Kosovars. Belgrade said 75 people died.

Had the air defenses been crippled, the pilot could have flown closer to that target, seen it was civilian and aborted the strike and the resulting global horror it provoked. A fellow F-16 pilot, from the 555th Fighter Squadron at Aviano, call sign "Buster," was frustrated by the snafu. "The last thing we want to do," the major says, "is help Milosevic do his job." But mixing Serbian troops with Albanian civilians has been part of Milosevic's strategy. Buster says he has seen "truck, truck, tractor, military, military, bus" convoys. "They're using Albanians as shields," he says, "and that makes me sick."

Tactically, the U.S. military is at a disadvantage when an enemy won't fight on its terms. Iraq, with its tanks and warplanes, was probably the last foe to make that mistake. The death of 18 U.S. Army troops in Somalia in 1993 showed the perils of fighting a primitive foe. Even though some 500 Somalis died in the battle, the fight was seen as a defeat for the U.S., which withdrew shortly thereafter. Milosevic was the first test case following the Gulf War in which an enemy could choose, more or less, to try to engage the U.S. and its allies militarily. Knowing he could never win, he has decided simply to stretch out the campaign so much that NATO tires of it.

The longer the bombing continued [in Vietnam], the more diplomatic pressure could be generated against the U.S. to halt it. --FROM CLARK'S THESIS

Altitude is not the only thing hindering allied efforts: many U.S. surveillance systems require line-of-sight to work, and the craggy, Balkan terrain hides much of what's going on. "At any given time," an Air Force officer says, "a large chunk of the Serbs is hidden behind mountains." But the hardscrabble Balkans also help: the few roads down below give pilots a sanctuary over the undeveloped forest. Armed Serbs travel along such roads, or only a short distance from them. So U.S. pilots avoid them whenever possible, and cross them at right angles when they must.

The Serbs have been hiding tanks and other weapons in villages, knowing that NATO's aversion to civilian casualties will keep them safe. "We know where they are, but it's difficult when they're parked in villages or in convoys with civilians," says Buster, the F-16 pilot. He held his fire, he recalls, when he spied a white vehicle next to a burning house. "Is a white van a military vehicle?" he asks. "No, but I'm sure it's not the guy lighting his own house on fire." And the Serbs have split their armored units so that tanks operate alone or in pairs, denying NATO nice, fat targets.

This war marks the first time that 90% of all weapons dropped have been so-called smart bombs, guided to their targets either by pilots or satellites. During the Gulf War, only 8% of the bombs dropped were precision-guided. Such weapons really triumphed in September 1995. In a two-week campaign that was 70% smart bombs, the U.S. military helped drive the Bosnian Serbs to the negotiating table.

U.S. pilots, who are flying more than 80% of the missions, are usually dropping laser-guided bombs. They trace a pilot-aimed laser beam, adjusting their tail fins to stay on course. But when the laser beam is broken by clouds or fog, or weather hinders the pilot's vision, the $50,000 bomb goes astray. Weather has been a key Milosevic ally, with good weather only on seven of the first 21 days of the war.

For the first time, U.S. warplanes can drop bombs regardless of the weather, guided to their targets by a constellation of Global Positioning Satellites rather than pilot eyeballs. JDAMs (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) have debuted from B-2 bomb bays. "You use expensive munitions like cruise missiles to defeat air defenses," says retired General Merrill McPeak, the former Air Force Chief of Staff, "and then you fly over with cheap jdams that cost, per pound, about the same as hamburger." (That's very prime ground beef, at about $10 per lb., but a bargain for a near-precision weapon that can be dropped in any kind of weather.)

The air war, though, is draining U.S. precision-guided munitions. The Air Force is down to about 90 of its $1.5 million air-launched cruise missiles and is months away from replenishing that stockpile. The B-2 force had less than 1,000 jdams before the war began, forcing the Air Force to order up more a week into the conflict. The war highlights the Pentagon's peculiar priorities: it is spending some $350 billion on three new high-tech warplane programs but doesn't have the ammo it needs for its current crop of bombers.

Key military questions revolve around Milosevic's ability to survive without what NATO is now destroying. The Pentagon's plans to drain Yugoslavia of oil, for example, only make sense if Serbian forces need fuel to prevail and don't have much stockpiled. "We have destroyed all their big reserves and refineries, but they have a whole network of smaller storage reserves," a French official says. "We thought they'd only have petrol for a month, but now it turns out they have a capacity far greater than that." And the pulverizing attacks against Serbia's command-and-control network may not be as successful as Pentagon targeteers think. After the Gulf War, the Air Force found out that Iraq's command network "had not collapsed," despite 500 strikes, and that "the system turned out to be more redundant and more able to reconstitute itself" than the Pentagon thought.

Contingency forces which are heavily armored and highly mobile through strategic airlift will be a necessity in contingencies entailing mid-intensity combat. --FROM CLARK'S THESIS

Of all Clark's ideas, this is the most seductive. A small, powerful force that can be quickly moved anywhere around the globe seems a perfect match for problem spots like Kosovo. The Army has been trying to pull it off for two decades, reaching back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which made Washington planners nervous about conflicts in that part of the world. But the idea died amid Army politics and lean budgets.

Some in the Army argue that building a smaller armored force is foolish until key advances have been made, especially in the areas of fuel and ammo, which armored forces devour. Electromagnetic guns, lasers, and new fuel types could allow the Army to achieve its goal of fielding such a force that could fight for two weeks without resupply. But until then, the speed of deployment is mostly dependent on how quickly the Army can set up logistics links. Napoleon's old dictum that an army travels on its stomach remains true today.

The Army's current fast-deploying force is the 82nd Airborne's ready brigade, which is set to move within 37 hours. But the Army couldn't deploy such a unit to Kosovo for action. In recent years, the Army scrapped the aging but light Sheridan tank it once used, and canceled the air-droppable Advanced Gun System that was to have replaced it. That means the 82nd has to seize and hold a major airfield within four hours of parachuting in, to allow C-17s carrying M-1 tanks to land. The Army's latest study on the subject isn't much use either. It's titled, "Enabling Rapid and Decisive Strategic Maneuver for the Army After 2010."

So what would the 30-year-old Wes Clark think of the war his 54-year-old twin is conducting? Hard to say. In public, the general says he's been pleased with events so far, confident that NATO is "degrading" Milosevic's war-fighting ability. But the campaign has violated many of his basic rules--dogma certified not just in his thesis but in most post-Vietnam strategic thinking. And as the campaign plays out, demanding more and more of NATO's men and munitions, the general may reflect on some other words from that 1975 thesis: "Reliance on air and naval forces is unlikely to prove wholly satisfactory."

--With reporting by Greg Burke/Aviano, James L. Graff/Tirana and Thomas Sancton/Brussels

With reporting by Greg Burke/Aviano, James L. Graff/Tirana and Thomas Sancton/Brussels