Doubts Over Safety Keep Copters Out of Combat

U.S. officials declined Sunday to say when the Army’s Apache attack helicopters will be sent into combat in Kosovo, as NATO sources disclosed that their military commander has not sought permission to use the vaunted tank-busters because he fears a refusal from Washington.

Although the Apaches could be deadly against dug-in Serbian forces, Gen. Wesley K. Clark, the commander of Operation Allied Force, has refrained from submitting a formal request for battlefield deployment, according to NATO officials who requested anonymity.

Already nervous about the risk of American casualties, the Clinton administration has grown considerably more skittish since one of the 24 Apaches that have been sent to Albania crashed during a night training exercise May 5, a Western diplomat said. That crash killed both pilots. Another Apache went down April 26, but its two-man crew survived.

“They’re like the old Alfa Romeo sports cars,” one NATO official said of the $14-million gunships. “High performance, but also high maintenance--and high risk.”

Debate over the 22 remaining Apaches swirled Sunday as the United States and its allies continued to find themselves on the defensive over the uncertain outlook of the airstrikes, as well as over a series of bombing mishaps in which civilians have been killed.

Fifty-four days into the allied air campaign, NATO again pledged not to relent despite mounting reports that ethnic Albanians are being used as human shields in Kosovo, a province of Serbia, which is Yugoslavia’s main republic.

“We cannot allow ethnic cleansing to continue in Europe as we approach the 21st century,” NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana said in an interview on BBC television.

Thursday night’s bombing raid on the Kosovo village of Korisa, where NATO said the Serbs had installed a military camp and command post, has been blamed by state-controlled Yugoslav media for the deaths of 87 civilians and injuries to 78 others.

“It increasingly appears likely . . . that civilians were being used as human shields by [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic,” Britain’s undersecretary of defense, John Spellar, maintained.

In other developments:

* Two Yugoslav army soldiers held as prisoners of war by the U.S. military in Germany will be released, perhaps as soon as today, a senior Pentagon official told Reuters news agency Sunday.

* During the 24-hour period ending Sunday morning, NATO aircraft flew 539 sorties, fewer than in preceding days because of worsening weather. They struck six tanks, artillery pieces and other armored vehicles, three dug-in positions, troop concentrations, and military storage and command-and-control positions, alliance officials said.

* Two NATO missiles hit a power station belonging to a mining and smelting complex at Bor in eastern Serbia, injuring six workers, Yugoslavia’s official news agency, Tanjug, reported.

* Solana, in Brussels, said he expects more evidence of “ethnic cleansing” in Kosovo to emerge once the conflict is over. “You don’t see males in their 30s to 60s. It will be clarified upon entry into Kosovo, and probably we’ll see dramatic facts we don’t even believe,” he told the BBC.

* Col. Milivoje Novkovic, a Yugoslav army spokesman, accused NATO of deliberately preventing army and police units from pulling out of Kosovo by intensifying the bombing after Yugoslavia announced its intention to begin withdrawing its forces from the province. NATO and U.S. officials continued to insist that there is no evidence of a meaningful withdrawal.

* The Yugoslav army put checkpoints on the border between Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina in an attempt to stop recruits and reservists from leaving the country, a source close to the Montenegrin police told the Agence France-Presse news agency. The source said only 20% of recruits and reservists from Montenegro have accepted military call-up orders.

In Brussels, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea assured a news briefing that the Apache helicopters, equipped with Hellfire missiles, high-explosive rockets and 30-millimeter nose-mounted machine guns, will see action in Kosovo.

“I don’t believe the United States would have gone to the trouble, time and expense to deploy 24--22 now--24 Apaches in Albania with upwards of 5,000 supporting troops and a multiple-launch rocket system as well, which took hundreds of flights to deploy, and then done all of this intensive night and day training, if there was no intention to use the Apaches, and use them effectively,” Shea said.

The 24 Apaches began arriving at their staging areas in Albania on April 21, more than three weeks ago. Last week, a U.S. military commander in Albania said the 5,350-strong Apache battle force--named Task Force Hawk--had undergone “substantial” training and was ready for action.

Proponents of a more vigorous NATO campaign hope the Apaches can help wipe out enough of the Yugoslav army and police forces in Kosovo to halt the brutal “ethnic cleansing” of Kosovo Albanians. But privately, NATO sources say that the Apaches, though credited with knocking out 500 Iraqi tanks in Operation Desert Storm in 1991, have vulnerabilities of their own.

“These things are awesome weapons but also fragile beasts, and Kosovo is difficult terrain,” the Western diplomat said. “We’re talking about flying in narrow ravines often filled with fog.”

Yugoslavia’s rugged, broken landscape is significantly more challenging than the featureless terrain of the Persian Gulf region, NATO officials said, and Serbian troops are believed to be armed with shoulder-launched rockets that could prove devastating.

“Given the terrain, you’d have to go in very, very close,” a NATO official said. “The dilemma for the commander is knowing when to make the call that the possible benefits now outweigh the risks.”

Though Clark, NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe, informally requested the Apaches as the air war against Yugoslavia began March 24, it took weeks for him to receive the green light for their transfer to Albania.

A NATO military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Walter Jertz of the German air force, said that Task Force Hawk remains under U.S. command and that the required transfer of authority to NATO use has yet to occur.

“It’s up to Gen. Clark . . . and the political leaders to decide when and where these forces are going to be in action,” Jertz said. “But we await their decision.”

Last week, the four-star U.S. general told NATO ambassadors that Apache crews needed more training in exercises with live ammunition, the Western diplomat said.

“Clark hasn’t formally made a request yet. He knows it won’t fall on receptive ears [in Washington],” a NATO source explained. “It’s like marriage: You only ask when you know you’ll get a positive reply.”

In an interview on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation,” Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the 22 remaining helicopters in Albania “will be ready any time that we are ready to use them.” But he deflected questions about when the helicopters might see action.

Pentagon spokesman Kenneth H. Bacon reiterated the position that U.S. officials have taken about the helicopters since early in the conflict. “We’ve always said we’d use them at the appropriate time,” he told CNN.

A major proponent of deploying ground troops in Kosovo, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said the failure to use the Apaches has become a “metaphor” for the allies’ troubles in the Balkans.

The Apaches probably cannot be used at all unless the United States and NATO commit ground troops to the effort, McCain said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“The Apache helicopter is a ground-troop-support weapons system, and it is very hard to employ it if you’re not going to put ground troops in,” he said.

Having used aerial bombardment on most of the large, easily available targets in Yugoslavia in the nearly two-month conflict, military planners must now figure out how to attack smaller, more elusive prey, especially tanks.

“These things [Apaches] fly low and, compared to jets, slow, and that makes them vulnerable,” said David Ochmanek, a senior defense analyst in Washington with the Rand Corp.

“The Apache is the most effective tank-killer in the world, but its effectiveness requires it get down close to the enemy,” added Loren Thompson, an official with the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Virginia.

Thompson said Clinton administration officials “don’t want another Somalia,” where grisly footage of a downed U.S. helicopter crew member being dragged through the streets cost the administration public support for its intervention.

Meanwhile Sunday, administration officials tried to keep the spotlight of blame for the casualties in Kosovo firmly focused on Milosevic.

Even as NATO was acknowledging that its airstrikes have caused “perhaps hundreds of innocent casualties,” Defense Secretary William S. Cohen laced into Milosevic for his complaints about bombing deaths.

“For the Serbs to publicly lament the deaths . . . is almost tantamount to Adolf Eichmann complaining about allied forces bombing the crematoriums,” Cohen said on “Face the Nation.” “These are crocodile tears coming out of mass killers.”

In Montenegro, Serbia’s junior partner in the Yugoslav federation, tensions between the pro-Western government and the Yugoslav army mounted over an incident in which soldiers forced ethnic Albanian men off at least six buses headed to Albania.

The army action Saturday was the first in which men of fighting age have been separated from families seeking to flee from Kosovo to Albania through Montenegro. It raised concerns about the safety of Kosovo refugees in Montenegro and brought strong denunciations from the Montenegrin government.

“From those 100 people who were abducted by the military, I think at least 70 were released,” Montenegrin Deputy Prime Minister Dragisa Burzan said Sunday evening. “But at least 27 people are being held somewhere. . . . This is a blow for us.”

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Dahlburg reported from Brussels and Gosselin from Washington. Times staff writers Richard Boudreaux in Belgrade and David Holley in Podgorica, Yugoslavia, contributed to this report.