Milosevic War Machine Has a Lot of Fight Left

Data released piecemeal by U.S. and European military authorities are finally painting a well-rounded portrait of NATO’s bombardment of Yugoslavia--and showing how limited its effects have been.

The figures indicate that while more than five weeks of pounding have badly damaged important parts of the nation’s military infrastructure, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic retains many of his field forces and air defenses, and much of his fuel and ammunition. His forces generally can communicate with each other, maneuver and arrange for resupply.

The Yugoslav army still has 80% to 90% of its tanks, 75% of its most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles and 60% of its MIG fighter planes, according to official estimates released during the past week. And although NATO warplanes have blown up the major rail links into Kosovo, five of the province’s eight major roads remain at least partially passable, according to British officials.

Yugoslav troops in Kosovo still have nearly half their resupply capability, the Pentagon estimated last week, and Milosevic’s military has been able to maintain--or perhaps even expand--the force of 40,000 it had there when the air campaign began March 24.

Despite NATO’s ability to strike big, immobile targets with precision weapons, its warplanes have failed to attack 80% of the Yugoslav army’s barracks. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces have also left untouched, or only lightly damaged, 80% of Yugoslavia’s ammunition depots, officials say.

These grim statistics, which add up to the first well-rounded portrait of the air campaign, reflect in part the effect of the persistently inclement weather that has forced NATO to cancel more than one-third of its 4,400 sorties. President Clinton suggested Wednesday that better weather ahead will allow NATO to intensify its campaign; in addition, nearly 400 more warplanes will soon join the bombardment.

“The weather is better in May than in April, better in June than in May, better in July than in June,” Clinton said. And, in a comment apparently aimed at critics, he added that only officials on the inside know “objectively” how much damage has been done.

In fact, the military’s own estimates show how much remains undone.

With many repeat strikes, NATO has knocked out Yugoslavia’s two oil refineries, thus eliminating all of its refining capability, and also bombed 16 petroleum depots. Military officials estimate that some Yugoslav military units are down to 10% of their usual petroleum supplies, threatening to immobilize them.

Yet overall, the military still has about two-thirds of its petroleum reserves, U.S. Gen. Wesley K. Clark, NATO’s supreme commander, acknowledged. Much of this is stored in small, hard-to-locate tanks in Kosovo--in southern Serbia, the dominant republic in Yugoslavia--and elsewhere.

Also still available are the reserves of the civilian population.

NATO has knocked down five of the nine bridges over the Danube River and damaged a sixth. This makes it more difficult for Yugoslavia to move troops and equipment from the northern part of the country to the south. Yet soon after the bridges are knocked down, the Serbs start work on temporary spans.

The reinforcement of the troops in Kosovo reveals the mobility that remains. The army has bolstered forces in the province with troops from the Yugoslav 2nd Army based in the other Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, as well as with reservists.

Officials have disclosed that NATO planes have blasted 31 fixed communications sites. Yet Clark acknowledged that damage to the military communications system was only “moderate to severe” because of the system’s many redundancies, as well as the Serbs’ ability to improvise.

Indeed, Clark acknowledged that the Yugoslav military’s command-and-control system has been well-shielded and versatile, with fiber-optics, cables and microwaves. It overlaps with the commercial system in ways that make it hard to take down.

Despite the damage to many of its best planes, the MIG fighters, the Yugoslav air force still has 380 of its 450 aircraft. Eight of the country’s 17 airfields have not been struck, and six more have sustained only moderate or light damage.

Although Clark declared that the Serbs’ integrated air defense system is now “ineffective” overall, it remains a powerful defensive weapon: It has kept NATO planes generally at altitudes above 15,000 feet, too high to most effectively hit Milosevic’s field forces.

And U.S. forces report that Serbian air defense troops are not ducking combat, as most Americans think, but are engaged in tactical games with the NATO fliers in a bid to lure them into missile and artillery traps.

“Day after day, we see an intricate cat-and-mouse game played between us,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Mark Kirk, a reservist assigned to an attack wing of radar-jamming planes at Aviano Air Base in Italy.

By official estimates, the Serbs still have three-quarters of their most sophisticated surface-to-air missiles, the mobile SA-6, and 60% of their less sophisticated SA-2s and SA-3s.

Many outside analysts acknowledge that they have been surprised by the relative lack of damage done so far by the air campaign.

At this rate, “it would take a very long time to destroy Yugoslavia’s military,” said Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore who conducted a lengthy study of the 1991 Persian Gulf War for the Air Force.

Cohen said that, even adjusted for the great destructive power of the precision-guided weapons in this fight, Operation Allied Force has only about one-fifth the intensity of the Gulf War’s air campaign.

Daniel Goure, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the deeper problem is that NATO could end up bombing Yugoslavia “into the past” and still not persuade Milosevic to capitulate and reopen Kosovo to its ethnic Albanian refugees.

Because of this, he said, the campaign may turn out to be “a marvel of technology--and a political-military disaster.”