Battle Damage in Kosovo

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Bomb craters above the storage "tunnels" at Pristina. Despite repeated NATO claims, little damage was inflicted upon the aircraft inside

A Serb "plastic" mock-up tank. How many of these were included in NATO's initial battle damage assessment figures?

The Russian military now operates a handful of Mi-8 Hips and Mi-24 Hinds from Pristina Airport. Just hours after the cease-fire, a tense stalemate developed over Russian participation within the KFOR. The situation was defused by diplomacy

An F-16C, serial 90-0830, of the 78th Expeditionary Fighter Sqn based at Aviano AB, during Allied Force sports a MiG kill.

On September 16, 1999, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Wesley Clark, attempted to 'put to bed' once and for all, the question of how much of the Yugoslav army was destroyed by NATO bombing during the 79 day conflict earlier in the year between the alliance and the Belgrade regime.

In a typically bravura press conference at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, complete with cockpit video and Power-point slides, the General announced new NATO bomb damage assessment (BDA) figures for the campaign. These now included 93 tanks, 155 armored personnel carriers, 339 other military vehicles and 389 artillery pieces and mortars.

Clark said that exhaustive examinations had taken place in Kosovo by NATO Munitions Effectiveness Teams, comparing the aftermath of air strikes on the ground with wartime reconnaissance imagery and cockpit video film. He then told his audience that they were more than welcome to examine the raw data in a series of target folders to prove the veracity of NATO's new BDA figures.

In spite of the General's new-found 'openness', it is clear that many senior NATO officers are skeptical about these revised BOA figures. Senior British military officers closely involved in the Kosovo campaign have so far been unwilling to publicly sign up to Clark's BDA figures. Only recently, the RAF's second most senior officer in the area, Air Vice Marshal 'Jock' Stirrup, declared the UK Ministry of Defence did "not know how many Serb tanks were destroyed in Kosovo and we will never know".

When this author made a request to General Clark's office, in Mons, Belgium, to make an appointment to view the new BDA files, the spirit of openness evaporated. "We are only making available information about individual air strikes on a case-by-case basis," said Clark's press spokesmen. "it is not our intention to make the complete files available." To coin a phrase... this is a story that "will run and run".

Senior NATO officers and political leaders involved in devising and running the alliance campaign repeatedly stress that 'bean counting' is not the way to assess the effectiveness of the alliance and that the final successful outcome should be looked at. Many military officers and analysts are deeply worried by the unwillingness to address objectively the effectiveness of alliance strategy and weapon systems. Some put this down to the need by a number of senior alliance leaders to protect their own political reputations.

"In the next war it might actually be important to know which weapons worked and those which did not," commented one senior NATO officer. "We might have to go up against an opponent who decides to stand and fight!"

In the days immediately after the Serb withdrawal, I traveled to Kosovo to make an initial assessment of the Allied air campaign in the disputed Yugoslav province. The author was able to travel freely throughout Kosovo, visiting a significant number of the locations subjected to allied air attacks. I was also able to talk to a number of NATO officers closely involved in making intelligence assessments of Yugoslav forces before, during and after the conflict. Many of these officers had served with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) between October 1998 and March 1999, which allowed them to gain an intimate knowledge of Serb military units, deployments and commanders. These officers also visited Kosovo immediately after the war to serve as liaison officers to the withdrawing Serb forces.

Serbia proper is still under the control of the Milosevic regime, so I was unable to gain access to targets attacked there. This article is therefore restricted to assessing only Kosovo - but the efficiency of the NATO campaign against targets in the province, is perhaps, the most controversial aspect Of Operation ALLIED FORCE.

Accuracy

According to NATO figures, some 14,006 attack sorties were flown during the war, with around 2,000 individual attacks being made against targets in Kosovo itself. Only some 20 NATO weapons hit the wrong target and caused civilian casualties. A handful of these 'bombing blunders', as the press inevitably called them, took place in Kosovo but it is very clear from the ground that the overwhelming majority of NATO air strikes were very accurate. Serb claims that the Albanian refugees were fleeing indiscriminate NATO bombing are palpably false.

Anyone visiting postwar Kosovo will undoubtedly be struck by the apparent lack of war damage, particularly along the main road from Macedonia and in the Pristina area. Compared to other Balkan 'war cities' - Sarajevo, Mostar and Vukovar - the province's capital seems to have survived almost unscathed.

However, once out in the countryside, the true nature of the conflict becomes apparent. Almost every Albanian village was attacked, cleared of its population and thousands of homes burnt out. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that more than 25% of the domestic dwellings in Kosovo have been destroyed. Almost every other surviving Albanian dwelling had been damaged or looted to varying degrees.

In Albanian areas you can drive from burnt out village to burnt out village. Close inspection reveals that almost no buildings in residential areas were destroyed or damaged by NATO bombing. The gutted buildings in Albanian villages have none of the tell-tale blast damage associated with large high-explosive detonations. The only bomb damaged domestic dwellings to be seen in the countryside are close to bridges and military targets, where blast Shock waves have shattered windows and lifted roof tiles. These are very small in number.

Allied air strikes and cruise missile attacks on targets in the Pristina area were clearly ,surgical' in nature. Only some half a dozen locations were targeted in the city and they were all heavy damaged. These included the telephone exchange, the army barracks, the military police headquarters, oil storage facilities and an industrial site being used by the Yugoslav military. Collateral damage was minimal and largely limited to broken windows in neighboring streets. The infamous 'carpet bombing' of Pristina in early April was clearly hyped up by Serbian propaganda.

Television images of the city 'ablaze' were, in fact, restricted to views of a single row of shops which were part of the same building as the telephone exchange, which had a large microwave communications tower on its roof - an obvious military target. A neighboring office block had some of its walls blown out, but it is clear that all the damage was restricted to an area of a few hundred square yards. The weapons used in the attack all hit their target, causing them to be put out of action.

The same story is repeated at other locations around the capital and further afield in the province. Large fixed targets, such as bridges, communications sites and military barracks, were all hit and destroyed with great precision and little collateral damage. While most of the targeted bridges were destroyed, one just north of Pristina was only partially cut by two laser-guided bombs which just clipped it, missing the vital load-bearing pillars.

Local Albanians and Serbs, who remained in Pristina throughout the war, are remarkably candid, reporting few civilian and military casualties from the NATO bombing.

While Allied bombs and cruise missiles easily destroyed buildings in and around Pristina, elsewhere in Kosovo it is clear that some targets were harder to crack. The Yugoslav defense industry is experienced at building hardened installations and some of these were targeted in Kosovo. Pristina's airport was a dual use facility, with a civil terminal sharing a runway with military facilities nearby. These consisted of offices, barracks, a rail terminal, hangars, hardened ammunition and fuel storage facilities and two deep tunnel complexes capable of holding 19 aircraft.

The 'soft facilities' were all devastated by NATO bombs, and the rail link was also cut in two places. Later attacks did not damage roads located only a few yards away. The hardened fuel and ammunition storage facilities were also penetrated and destroyed.

Attacks on the tunnels, however, were less successful in spite of repeated claims by NATO and the Pentagon that that they had penetrated them and destroyed the aircraft hidden within. The hillside above the tunnels is peppered with craters from bombs and missiles aimed at the tunnel entrances. There are sharp angle turns just before the entrances, which make it difficult to aim bombs and missiles directly at the doors. Debris from bomb impacts can be seen littering the taxi-ways near the tunnels but their thick armored doors were not compromised. One did punch through the tunnel roof, but the aircraft inside were protected by internal shelters and blast doors. On June 11, hours after NATO halted its bombing and just before the Serb military began withdrawing, some 11 MiG-21 fighters emerged from the tunnels and took off for Yugoslavia.

The most controversial aspect of the Allied bombing campaign was the apparent inability of NATO to destroy large numbers of Yugoslav Army main battle tanks, light armored vehicles and artillery, inside Kosovo. Critics of the bombing campaign have been quick to jump on Yugoslav claims that they lost only 13 tanks. Furthermore, that a lot of heavy equipment, including 220 tanks, 300 armored personnel carriers, 308 artillery pieces and hundreds of trucks - were seen withdrawing back to Serbia at the end of the war. Add to this the apparent lack of serried ranks of destroyed tanks around Kosovo, and some observers wonder if NATO claims immediately after the war of destroying more than 120 tanks, 220 other armored vehicles and 450 artillery pieces and mortar, were fiction.

On the ground the situation is less clear cut. As of late July, NATO officers inside Kosovo were unable to confirm exactly how many pieces of military equipment were lost by the Yugoslav Army. The British Army had apparently found only five destroyed tanks by mid-July, but NATO patrols fanning out through Kosovo are still regularly finding single vehicles or artillery pieces in ruined villages and forests. Some abandoned heavy equipment, including artillery pieces, was seized by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and has since been handed over to NATO. Over time, it is expected that this effort could turn up around a 'couple of hundred' items of heavy military equipment.

One of the major problems in assessing the Yugoslav Army's losses is that there was little clear idea in NATO intelligence circles of how many Yugoslav troops, interior ministry police (MUP) and paramilitary irregulars were actually inside Kosovo at the start of campaign on March 24. Everyone has had a good guess, but there is little hard information on which to form a firm baseline. Yugoslav commanders proved very adept at hiding their forces from NATO intelligence. Troops, vehicles and headquarters were all dispersed into the countryside in the days preceding Operation ALLIED FORCE. NATO troops and journalists arriving at Pristina airport on June 12 were surprised to find tanks and artillery pieces hidden among the ruins of the military section of the base. Within minutes the Yugoslav troops received orders from their higher commanders, formed up into columns and drove off towards the capital, as if this was a standard drill.

Throughout the war, the Yugoslav military continued to hide in the Kosovo countryside. It went to extreme lengths to camouflage its equipment and even key roads and bridges. Scores of decoy tanks and vehicles, made of wood and plastic sheet, were scattered around the Kosovo countryside. Decoy bridges were also built, with the real thing nearby covered in foliage to divert attention. Other bridges were painted with infra-red suppressor paint in zigzag patterns to break up their shape if spotted by the forward looking infra-red (FLIR) sensor systems used by NATO aircraft.

Yugoslav units displayed excellent 'hide' and 'track' discipline, staying under cover during daylight and not leaving tell-tale signs, such as tank tracks in fields, which would reveal their presence to aerial reconnaissance.

Logistic re-supply and other road movements were often conducted at the same time that refugee columns were on the move, to try to confuse NATO reconnaissance systems and deter air attacks.

The intermingling of military and civilian traffic was designed to confuse ground surveillance radar systems, such as the USAF's E-8C Joint STARS, because they were unable to differentiate between supply trucks and tractors carrying refugees.

The Yugoslavs put great resources into confusing NATO intelligence and it is clear that this extended to covering up the effects of Allied bombing. In some places, Allied intelligence officers have found craters at bombing zones and vehicle tracks but no destroyed vehicles. Yugoslav troops, it seems, were ordered to remove all wreckage to be cannibalized for spares and to confuse NATO aerial photographic reconnaissance analysts. Local Albanians report that considerable effort was put into this recovery effort, in much the same way as the Yugoslavs tried to cover up their massacres. This attempt to confuse NATO intelligence continues to this day, hence the flaunting of the surviving MiGs.

Barely a month after the end of Operation ALLIED FORCE, the Yugoslav Air Force wheeled out its remaining MiG fighters onto the runway at Batajnica air base, apparently so that NATO reconnaissance satellites could view them. "They were taunting us" was the comment of one Alliance intelligence official closely involved in Balkan operations.

Yugoslav Army chiefs announced in late July that 462 personnel had been killed in action, along with 114 policemen. There are no figures for paramilitary casualties. These figures match those given to NATO officers in Kosovo by departing Yugoslav commanders in June. They also talked about 2,000 wounded and 50%1 losses in armored vehicles. One NATO officer has claimed more than 5,000 Yugoslav military dead, while opposition groups in Serbia talk of 'secret' funerals of thousands of conscripts and recalled reservists.

It is difficult to come to any definitive answer about this, but it is clear that Yugoslav Army and MUP units in Kosovo were clearly not decimated by NATO air attacks. The units that withdrew from Kosovo, all did so in good order, under the tight control of their officers and took all their serviceable equipment with them. Few units seemed to be under strength or missing large quantities of equipment.

The heaviest losses were suffered in the west of Kosovo, along the Albanian border where KLA fighters tried to open routes into the province. NATO bombing was also heaviest here, with the USAF claiming to have killed some 800 Yugoslav soldiers in a single B-52 strike in early June. British intelligence officials who have visited the site, say those figures are exaggerated and that the Yugoslav soldiers in question saw contrails of the approaching B-52s and were able to make a quick exit from the target zone.

Yugoslav officers say they lost the majority of their casualties in battles with the KLA. Fighting took place throughout the country and it is clear that no part of the province was ever totally cleared of KLA fighters. Serb bases have bunkers and other field fortifications to protect them from infantry assaults.

NATO officers who spoke to senior Yugoslav commanders inside Kosovo describe them as not 'broken' but 'tired'. They had fought a three-month long guerrilla campaign, achieving considerable success against the KLA. Supplies and support from home had been intermittent but they had kept their troops combat ready and were waiting for NATO to attack across the mountains from Macedonia. They expressed confidence that they would have given a good account of themselves.

Senior Yugoslav commanders in Kosovo said that Milosevic justified his decision to give in to NATO through a need protect the Serb civilian population and industrial infrastructure from Allied strategic bombing. Whether the Serb generals actually believed their President's rationale is not known, but it displays a degree of altruism hitherto not usually attributed to the Yugoslav leader.

Balkan veterans among the NATO forces in Kosovo are not so sure, and many put greater weight on the withdrawal of Russian diplomatic support from Belgrade as being the decisive factor. Some NATO intelligence officials, however, suspect that secret assurances were made to Milosevic, by senior Western politicians, promising not to 'actively' pursue him for his war crimes. Whatever the truth, it is clear that there is, as yet, no clear reason to explain the Yugoslav President's decision to end the war when he did.

The NATO BDA teams will no doubt produce volumes of analysis and recommendations, but from my initial assessment, some clear points emerge.

Technical means, such as satellite reconnaissance, AN/TQP-37 artillery locating radar in Albania and JSTARS, were not good enough to provide targeting intelligence that alone could be used to authorize targets for attack. NATO imposed tight rules of engagement, requiring at least two sets of human eyes to identify and then confirm a target, as 'military', before it could be attacked. While technical means could identify possible targets, unmanned aerial vehicles and airborne forward air control aircraft had to be sent to confirm the status of the target. From 15,000ft (4,500m) it was difficult to confirm the status of targets sufficiently to clear them for attack. Not surprisingly, NATO tank 'kill rates' were slow, with five a day being good and on many days no tanks at all were found.

NATO intelligence officers all say that the Alliance had a good handle on Yugoslav military deployments up to the point the KVM observers were withdrawn. After that, they lost track of much of the Serbian military machine until it emerged from the forests and ruins of Kosovo to withdraw back to Serbia. Reports of extensive Special Forces operations inside Kosovo were apparently exaggerated by the Pentagon and Whitehall in a bid to boost domestic morale. Allied special forces teams did not enter Kosovo until a few days before the main body of the peacekeeping force in June, because of high-level political restrictions on 'ground troops' being used. The lack of human intelligence from the ground was a major limiting factor in the air campaign.

It appears that the US Government provided the KLA with a number of satellite telephone systems in the hope that this would bridge the intelligence gap. Daily phone calls from KLA commander Hashim Thaci to General Clark, often only served to make matters worse. The accidental bombing in May of a KLA base inside Kosovo has been attributed to incorrect grid references being given to the Americans by Thaci.

The main implication for Western defense strategy is obvious. The idea that Western politicians can fight 'painless' wars by remote control are flawed.

Symbolic victories are possible, but to systematically destroy from the air an opponent's field army, deployed in difficult terrain and intermingled among a civilian population, will require risks to be taken to get human 'eyes-on-targets'.