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Pentagon Dissecting Kosovo Combat Data
DAVID A. FULGHUM/WASHINGTON
Seemingly effortless aerial assault on Yugoslavia conceals fundamental flaws and tactical miscalculations
In an effort to head off an endless series of congressional hearings on successes and failures in the Kosovo air campaign, the Pentagon's top civilian leaders say they will sift the data and produce an official report within about two months.
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| JIM HASELTINE/HIGH-G |
| Future wars will need more intelligence gathering. Two 55th Wing electronic intercept RC-135V/W Rivet Joints sandwich a RC-135U Combat Sent that analyses radars. |
The analysis of lessons learned in the conflict won't be completed and briefed to Defense Secretary William Cohen until late summer or early fall, said Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre. It is to be finished just in time to make adjustments to the President's 2001 budget, which is due out in spring 2000. Hamre and Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will oversee a Kosovo After-Action Review Board.
Military and aerospace industry officials are already starting to spotlight problem areas, however. They warn that if changes aren't instituted within six months to one year, they will again be shelved as political considerations start to outweigh wartime needs. Critics contend that many of the lessons coming from the conflict with Yugoslavia were already recognized, prioritized and then pushed aside in the aftermath of the 1990-91 Persian Gulf war.
In fact, some tactical lessons apparently have proven almost impossible to pass from generation to generation of combatants. Basic precautions such as not flying the same route every night and ensuring that the necessary air defense suppression and jamming is in place and coordinated--failures that led to the first shooting down of a stealthy F-117 at the beginning of air operation over Yugoslavia--had been identified and supposedly corrected both during the Vietnam conflict and Desert Storm.
There are three objectives for the study, Hamre said. To ensure the military does a better job when it next has to go to war; to decide how the next budget needs to be constructed or altered to make these changes affordable; and to create a foundation for the next quadrennial defense review--likely to be conducted in 2001 in the wake of the next presidential election.
To help make the reports more manageable, separate groups have been designated to review three broad areas, said Vice Adm. Vernon Clark, director of the joint staff. These groups will reflect the primary areas of interest. The deployment-employment group will examine getting the force to the field, sustaining it and using it in combat. An intelligence support for operation group will review intelligence preparation of the battlefield, surveillance and reconnaissance. Finally, an alliance and coalition warfare group will wrestle with some obvious problems associated with the technological gap between the U.S. and its NATO allies.
The most immediate task will be to gather the comments from commanders-in-chief and field commanders about tactics, techniques, interoperability and procedures so they can be quickly assimilated, Clark said. Also, each service has been ordered to conduct an executive review. Concerns with high priorities are the U.S. Army's slow deployment of its AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, the heavy use of the Air Force's aerial tanker fleet, the Yugoslav army's deception campaign to hide its mobile forces from allied air attack and a heavily stressed signals intelligence gathering and cuing system.
After being asked to confirm reports that the allies had dropped 3,000 guided weapons that resulted in hits on 500 decoys but only 50 Yugoslav tanks, Hamre said the data wasn't yet available. "We've got to figure out what worked and what didn't, and we had lots of things both ways." He made the promise to reveal "everything that I find out as long as it's not classified, and if it is, I'll try to find a meaningful way to discuss it." Hamre also said all 30 incidents of collateral damage will be studied to see what went wrong.
Another goad for haste in the study, beyond the budget deadlines, is to head off demands from Congress for immediate hearings about the more embarrassing aspects of the conflict.
"Part of the reason why the secretary wants a quick look is because he knows questions like that are being raised by members of Congress," he said.
Congress has already conducted a hearing on the Apache's participation in the conflict. Lawmakers promised it was only the first in a series to be held in coming months. The Apache hearing focused on an internal Army assessment that the troops were ill-prepared for operation from Albania against targets in Yugoslavia.
Hamre also said what the report would not be.
"The review is not to postulate [that] we need more of this or that kind of airplane, but operationally what happened and what would we have to do in the future, and what are alternative ways of getting at that," Hamre said. "Speed and agility are important to us on this one. We don't want to wait a long time for the solutions we can glean from this experience. There are people [in Kosovo] on the ground now that are gaining additional pieces of information." The Central Intelligence Agency also has pledged its full cooperation. "As to what data is there and can be released, that I don't know yet," he said.
Hamre said he looked with anticipation to examining exactly how well national intelligence was distributed to field commanders, a major complaint during the Persian Gulf war.
"We have spent an enormous amount of work trying to get the national intelligence capabilities transparent to each other and information available down into the field," he said. "We don't know where there were problems [and] bottlenecks. That's one of the kind of questions I know I'll want to find out answers to."
© July 26, 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
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Last Modified: 20.02.03 12:54
© Copyright: Dragan Kostadinov