Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Col. Robert Dilger & Pierre M. Sprey • 153the classic Douhet strategy. Seventy-eight days and 36,000 sorties later, Milosevicsettled for terms that were the equivalent of those he had offered before the bombingand that the U.S. government had already rejected.During the war, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Short, who commanded the NATOair effort, restricted his pilots to altitudes above 15,000 feet to hopefully eliminateany possibility of losses. Unfortunately, this exacerbated an already difficult problem.It proved to be all but impossible to find camouflaged military targets in hiding atan altitude of three miles with or without sensors. So, despite 24 million pounds ofordnance dropped, the Serbs’ military losses were extremely minor. 82The NATO air forces made a major effort. They launched 36,000 sorties, fired 743HARM anti-radar missiles, and dropped 24 million pounds of munitions of which6,728 were precision-guided. Their claimed bomb damage seemed sizable. However,after the war, the Serbian government reported shockingly lower damage levels thanNATO had claimed. Only three of 80 radar missile batteries were actually destroyed.NATO had claimed 5,000 to 10,000 military casualties; Belgrade reported 387. Belgradealso reported 1,400 civilian casualties, an astonishingly low number for 36,000sorties of bombing effort, much of it against urban targets. 83During the course of the war, Yugoslavians fired 845 radar SAMs. As in otherwars, they were all but ineffective. They accounted for only three kills – an F-16 andtwo stealth F-117s. The SAM ineffectiveness rate was 99.7 percent.Given a 78-day bombing campaign, the results were minimal. This illustrates, yetagain, how tactical air effectiveness depends crucially on integration with a simultaneousground campaign, that is, combined arms. A friendly ground force is essential tomove the enemy army out of hiding into the open. Air attacks against an enemy armythat is never forced to maneuver are certain to show negligible military results. Thisis especially true when attacks are conducted from 10,000 or 15,000 feet, even with“precision” munitions. Who is available to penetrate the camouflage to find a target?Who is available to sort decoys from real targets? Who is available to distinguishwedding parties from terrorists?AfghanistanIn the Afghanistan war in 2001, American forces were primarily small units of SpecialOperations Forces (as small as four U.S. soldiers) that teamed up with fighters of theindigenous Afghan “Northern Alliance.” These forces were supported by Americanclose-air support in a multitude of minor engagements, most of them highly successfulwith few U.S. casualties.The following typical encounter illustrates the great effectiveness of a small fourmanSpecial Operations unit supported by A-10s. The thread is abbreviated andexcerpted from a published account by the Army News Service: 84