Air-Only Campaign Offers a False Sense of Security, Some Say

If the peace agreement with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic holds, the United States and its allies will have accomplished what some military experts had predicted was impossible: a victory achieved with air power alone.

Air power is generally held to be a limited weapon unless combined with ground forces, and many senior U.S. military officials have acknowledged that NATO’s campaign defied conventional practice.

But some military officers and outside analysts fear that the peace plan announced Thursday could suggest the tantalizing prospect of military triumphs virtually without casualties. And they fear that this is a false promise--and perhaps a dangerous one.

Many worry that the campaign could reinforce an unfounded faith among politicians and the public that “smart” bombs and radar-evading planes can routinely yield “immaculate” victories. Instead, they say, the settlement should be counted as a limited victory for air power.

They point out that the world’s most powerful military alliance has needed more than 10 weeks to subdue a country the size of Kentucky. And success has required a massive fleet of more than 1,000 warplanes--a force that Pentagon doctrine says should be enough to overwhelm a “major regional power” such as North Korea, or the strong, prewar Iraq of 1990.

“We had to hit this gnat with a sledgehammer,” said Richard J. Dunn, a retired U.S. Army colonel. A senior Air Force officer said, “People could make a very serious mistake about all this. This [approach] isn’t always going to be the solution.”

And, North Atlantic Treaty Organization warplanes were never successful in attaining one of the goals alliance officials enunciated: halting the purge of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians.

Although Secretary of State Madeleine Albright declared that she didn’t expect the war to last long, the campaign turned out to be a prolonged affair. The Persian Gulf War, by comparison, took 47 days.

In addition, the Yugoslav war suggested that--contrary to the hopes of NATO politicians--air wars can be ugly and won’t work by surgically destroying military targets and avoiding civilian sites, analysts said.

Signs indicate that the Serbs were brought around only by the final stages of the campaign, when precision bombs were taking out power stations and dropping the water supply in Belgrade, the capital, to less than one-quarter of capacity, according to experts.

The conflict shows that air power is “best used bluntly,” said Daniel Goure, a former defense official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It has to be all-out.”

From the beginning of the campaign, many senior officers pointed out that this wasn’t the way air power was supposed to be used.

According to long-held precepts, it should be combined with ground troops and ships, to exert maximum pressure on the other side, they pointed out. And it should be applied massively at the outset, to stun and paralyze the enemy, not escalated gradually, as NATO ordered in the Yugoslav campaign.

Air power advocates argue that, had the Kosovo campaign begun with 1,000 planes, rather than fewer than 400, as it did, the end might have come more quickly.

And they can certainly point to one remarkable measure of success: the lack of NATO casualties. Only two U.S. pilots died--in a training accident--compared with an estimated 5,000 dead and 10,000 injured among the Yugoslav forces.

The American losses, which came in connection with a conflict that has seen more than 30,000 NATO sorties, may be fewer than U.S. pilots typically suffer in an equivalent number of training flights, some analysts believe.

Only a few years ago, “no one would have imagined such a thing,” said Andrew F. Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think tank in Washington.

Military experts predict that the Kosovo experience will give new fuel to the old debate about the value of air power versus ground forces.

But many said they feared that outsiders would misinterpret the lessons in dangerous ways.

This campaign, combined with the experience of the Persian Gulf War, will suggest to the public “that you can have a costless conflict--that ‘immaculate’ U.S. technology will win wars,” Goure said. “Maybe they’re right with some small ones. . . . On a rare occasion, you can.”

Yet it must be remembered that Milosevic is knuckling under only after “72 days and a hellacious bombardment--and he’s small,” Goure said.

NATO’s victory may also encourage political leaders to believe that high-tech air power can be used to prosecute wars--or small and distant wars, at least--even when domestic support for them is not strong, analysts predicted.

Some believe it could lead foreign leaders to draw some dangerous conclusions about U.S. capabilities and will, said Dunn, the former Army officer.

It offers more evidence that the U.S. will go to any lengths to avoid casualties, and may also raise questions in some capitals about how much punch America’s high-tech arsenal really has.

Countries such as North Korea will ask, “If Slobodan Milosevic could hold them off for 70 days, what about us?” Dunn said. In Asia and elsewhere, he said, “I think we’ve lost a tremendous amount of credibility.”

Military experts say the war holds a variety of other lessons for the Pentagon.

One question, in light of the huge need for warplanes for an air campaign, is whether the U.S. really has enough aircraft to fight two big regional wars in quick succession, as Pentagon doctrine requires.

Another lesson is that the Pentagon may need to stock up on weapons that are useful in fighting wars where the enemy has dangerous air defenses and nearby landing space is at a premium.

These include the latest smart bombs, surveillance planes and drones, and the B-2 Stealth bomber, which dropped payloads of 16 large bombs, called Joint Direct Attack Munitions, on round trips from Missouri carried on through the conflict.

The B-2 was “one of the success stories,” Krepinevich said.