bla. bla. bla
but Milloshi+vic & servs gave up !
- — -
> The Kosovo Cover-Up
> NATO said it won a great victory, but the war did very little damage to
Serb
> forces. By not conceding this, the Pentagon may mislead future presidents
> about the limits of U.S. power. A NEWSWEEK exclusive.
> By John Barry And Evan Thomas
> Newsweek, May 15, 2000
> It was acclaimed as the most successful air campaign ever. "A turning
point
> in the history of warfare," wrote the noted military historian John
Keegan,
> proof positive that "a war can be won by airpower alone." At a press
> conference last June, after Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to
> pull his Army from Kosovo at the end of a 78-day aerial bombardment that
had
> not cost the life of a single NATO soldier or airman, Defense Secretary
> William Cohen declared, "We severely crippled the [Serb] military forces
in
> Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and one third
of
> the armored vehicles." Displaying colorful charts, Chairman of the Joint
> Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton claimed that NATO’s air forces had killed
"around
> 120 tanks," "about 220 armored personnel carriers" and "up to 450
artillery
> and mortar pieces."
> An antiseptic war, fought by pilots flying safely three miles high. It
seems
> almost too good to be true-and it was. In fact-as some critics suspected
at
> the time-the air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely
> ineffective. NATO bombs plowed up some fields, blew up hundreds of cars,
> trucks and decoys, and barely dented Serb artillery and armor. According
to
> a suppressed Air Force report obtained by NEWSWEEK, the number of targets
> verifiably destroyed was a tiny fraction of those claimed: 14 tanks, not
> 120; 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artillery pieces, not 450.
> Out of the 744 "confirmed" strikes by NATO pilots during the war, the Air
> Force investigators, who spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by
> foot, found evidence of just 58.
> The damage report has been buried by top military officers and Pentagon
> officials, who in interviews with NEWSWEEK over the last three weeks were
> still glossing over or denying its significance. Why the evasions and
> dissembling, with the disturbing echoes of the inflated "body counts" of
the
> Vietnam War? All during the Balkan war, Gen. Wesley Clark, the top NATO
> commander, was under pressure from Washington to produce positive bombing
> results from politicians who were desperate not to commit ground troops to
> combat. The Air Force protested that tanks are hard to hit from 15,000
feet,
> but Clark insisted. Now that the war is long over, neither the generals
nor
> their civilian masters are eager to delve into what really happened. Asked
> how many Serb tanks and other vehicles were destroyed in Kosovo, General
> Clark will only answer, "Enough."
> In one sense, history is simply repeating itself. Pilots have been
> exaggerating their "kills" at least since the Battle of Britain in 1940.
But
> this latest distortion could badly mislead future policymakers. Air power
> was effective in the Kosovo war not against military targets but against
> civilian ones. Military planners do not like to talk frankly about
> terror-bombing civilians ("strategic targeting" is the preferred
euphemism),
> but what got Milosevic’s attention was turning out the lights in downtown
> Belgrade. Making the Serb populace suffer by striking power stations-not
> "plinking" tanks in the Kosovo countryside-threatened his hold on power.
The
> Serb dictator was not so much defeated as pushed back into his lair-for a
> time. The surgical strike remains a mirage. Even with the best technology,
> pilots can destroy mobile targets on the ground only by flying low and
slow,
> exposed to ground fire. But NATO didn’t want to see pilots killed or
> captured.
> Instead, the Pentagon essentially declared victory and hushed up any
doubts
> about what the air war exactly had achieved. The story of the cover-up is
> revealing of the way military bureaucracies can twist the truth-not so
much
> by outright lying, but by "reanalyzing" the problem and winking at
> inconvenient facts. Caught in the middle was General Clark, who last week
> relinquished his post in a controversial early retirement. Mistrusted by
his
> masters in Washington, Clark will retire from the Army next month with
none
> of the fanfare that greeted other conquering heroes like Dwight Eisenhower
> after World War II or Norman Schwarzkopf after Desert Storm. To his
credit,
> Clark was dubious about Air Force claims and tried-at least at first-to
gain
> an accurate picture of the bombing in Kosovo. At the end of the war the
> Serbs’ ground commander, Gen. Nobojsa Pavkovic, claimed to have lost only
13
> tanks. "Serb disinformation," scoffed Clark. But quietly, Clark’s own
staff
> told him the Serb general might be right. "We need to get to the bottom of
> this," Clark said. So at the end of June, Clark dispatched a team into
> Kosovo to do an on-the-ground survey. The 30 experts, some from NATO but
> most from the U.S. Air Force, were known as the Munitions Effectiveness
> Assessment Team, or MEAT. Later, a few of the officers would refer to
> themselves as "dead meat."
> The bombing, they discovered, was highly accurate against fixed targets,
> like bunkers and bridges. "But we were spoofed a lot," said one team
member.
> The Serbs protected one bridge from the high-flying NATO bombers by
> constructing, 300 yards upstream, a fake bridge made of polyethylene
> sheeting stretched over the river. NATO "destroyed" the phony bridge many
> times. Artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old
truck
> wheels. A two-thirds scale SA-9 antiaircraft missile launcher was
fabricated
> from the metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons. "It would
> have looked perfect from three miles up," said a MEAT analyst.
> The team found dozens of burnt-out cars, buses and trucks-but very few
> tanks. When General Clark heard this unwelcome news, he ordered the team
out
> of their helicopters: "Goddammit, drive to each one of those places. Walk
> the terrain." The team grubbed about in bomb craters, where more than once
> they were showered with garbage the local villagers were throwing into
these
> impromptu rubbish pits. At the beginning of August, MEAT returned to Air
> Force headquarters at Ramstein air base in Germany with 2,600 photographs.
> They briefed Gen. Walter Begert, the Air Force deputy commander in Europe.
> "What do you mean we didn’t hit tanks?" Begert demanded. Clark had the
same
> reaction. "This can’t be," he said. "I don’t believe it." Clark insisted
> that the Serbs had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn’t
> looked hard enough. Not so, he was told. A 50-ton tank can’t be dragged
away
> without leaving raw gouges in the earth, which the team had not seen.
> The Air Force was ordered to prepare a new report. In a month, Brig. Gen.
> John Corley was able to turn around a survey that pleased Clark. It showed
> that NATO had successfully struck 93 tanks, close to the 120 claimed by
> General Shelton at the end of the war, and 153 armored personnel carriers,
> not far off the 220 touted by Shelton. Corley’s team did not do any new
> field research. Rather, they looked for any support for the pilots’
claims.
> "The methodology is rock solid," said Corley, who strongly denied any
> attempt to obfuscate. "Smoke and mirrors" is more like it, according to a
> senior officer at NATO headquarters who examined the data. For more than
> half of the hits declared by Corley to be "validated kills," there was
only
> one piece of evidence-usually, a blurred cockpit video or a flash detected
> by a spy satellite. But satellites usually can’t discern whether a bomb
hits
> anything when it explodes.
> The Corley report was greeted with quiet disbelief outside the Air Force.
> NATO sources say that Clark’s deputy, British Gen. Sir Rupert Smith, and
his
> chief of staff, German Gen. Dieter Stockmann, both privately cautioned
Clark
> not to accept Corley’s numbers. The U.S. intelligence community was also
> doubtful. The CIA puts far more credence in a November get-together of
U.S.
> and British intelligence experts, which determined that the Yugoslav Army
> after the war was only marginally smaller than it had been before. "Nobody
> is very keen to talk about this topic," a CIA official told NEWSWEEK.
> Lately, the Defense Department has tried to fudge. In January Defense
> Secretary Cohen and General Shelton put their names to a formal
After-Action
> Report to Congress on the Kosovo war. The 194-page report was so devoid of
> hard data that Pentagon officials jokingly called it "fiber-free." The
> report did include Corley’s chart showing that NATO killed 93 tanks. But
the
> text included a caveat: "the assessment provides no data on what
proportion
> of total mobile targets were hit or the level of damage inflicted."
> Translation, according to a senior Pentagon official: "Here’s the Air
Force
> chart. We don’t think it means anything." In its most recent report
> extolling the triumph of the air war, even the Air Force stopped using
data
> from the Corley report.
> Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, General Clark refused to get into an
on-the-record
> discussion of the numbers. A spokesman for General Shelton asserted that
the
> media, not the military, are obsessed with "bean-counting." But there are
a
> lot of beans at stake. After the November election, the Pentagon will go
> through one of its quadrennial reviews, assigning spending priorities. The
> Air Force will claim the lion’s share. A slide shown by one of the
lecturers
> at a recent symposium on air power organized by the Air Force Association,
a
> potent Washington lobby, proclaimed: "It’s no myth… the American Way of
> War."
> The risk is that policymakers and politicians will become even more
…
