Hits And Misses

By Mark Thompson/Washington

For weeks, NATO's war against Serbia seemed a polite affair, marked by strict rules of engagement, pinpoint attacks on army units and lots of examples of NATO planes returning to base with all their bombs because they couldn't be sure of dropping their payloads on the right place. Last week that changed. Across 70% of Yugoslavia, elevators creaked to a halt, faucets dribbled, stoves cooled and TVs blackened. Traffic lights and tram lines were out, and pump failures forced Serbs to the Danube River for water to flush their toilets. And as the bombing expanded, so did the civilian casualties. On Friday night an allied warplane--most likely a U.S. B-2--dropped a load of bombs on the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing four and infuriating the Chinese. That bombing bungle followed a week of occasional misses and offered a reminder that in the heat of a massive bombing raid, even a 99.93% hit rate against military targets can still wreak tremendous civilian damage.

The strategy behind this extension of the NATO air war against Slobodan Milosevic has a devilish design: to break the spirit of the Serbian people by depriving them of modern conveniences. When military planners refer to "bombing them back to the Stone Age," this is what they have in mind: everything from bridges to television stations has become a target. Many Serbs are now living by candlelight, eating food that doesn't require refrigeration and sleeping--if they can sleep at all--with the uneasy knowledge that 0.07% of NATO's bombs do go astray. Not surprisingly, as the allied target list grew, Serbian cockiness--like the paper targets once boisterously pinned to Serbs' shirts--seemed to crumble amid the rubble.

Why wait until Day 40 to turn off the lights, especially when crippling the power grid also helps shut down the air defenses that threaten allied pilots? NATO officials say such sites--while on their target list from the war's first night--didn't win political approval until the recent NATO summit in Washington. Taking on such politically sensitive sites is fraught with peril for the allies: Belgrade ensures that the ruination caused by every misaimed bomb is televised worldwide, while the wholesale horrors wrought by Belgrade's paramilitaries in Kosovo are hidden from view. And while allied mistakes may be rare, if the war is literally brought into your living room, NATO's overall accuracy is small consolation. Inside Yugoslavia, at least, it is becoming harder for many to see the distinction between targeting civilian life-styles and targeting civilians.

As talk of a possible peace agreement ricochets around Europe, the U.S. has dispatched nearly 200 more planes to the theater--bringing the total to about 1,100--to keep the pressure on Milosevic and his people. Even after the hit on the Chinese embassy, Pentagon officials insisted they had no intention of slowing the pace of the raids. "NATO is determined to continue this campaign--and to intensify this campaign," said Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon.

But the Pentagon did say privately that NATO would be taking a closer look at what went wrong in the case of the Chinese embassy. The warplane, Pentagon sources said, didn't miss what it was aiming at. The problem, evidently, was that it was aiming at the wrong thing, because mistaken coordinates had been fed to the plane's targeting computer. It was a peculiar mistake to make. The Chinese embassy is a distinctive building that stands pretty much alone, with open space on three sides. Rows of high-rise apartments and lines of shops are at least 150 yds. away. How NATO came to believe this was the weapons-procurement center, which actually sits across the street--and was supposed to have been the warplane's target--had Pentagon officials fuming and frustrated.

That didn't ameliorate feelings in Beijing, where the streets were packed with furious protesters. In New York City the Chinese demanded, and got, a midnight meeting of the U.N. Security Council, an unusually urgent tactic that smelled of cold war fustian but served to let them express their outrage within hours of the attack. Speaking after the attack, President Clinton called the embassy bombing a "tragic mistake."

But if military officials are considering tweaking their tactics to limit collateral damage, they have no plans to dump the overall strategy of using the expanded bombing to try to generate anti-Milosevic sentiment in Yugoslavia. Says NATO spokesman Jamie Shea: "I would hope that he would start getting some echoes up from the grass roots over the next couple of weeks that the population is decreasingly behind him on this and they would very much like this to be solved."

While Americans are spoiled when it comes to war's duration--one great European conflict wasn't called the Hundred Years' War for nothing--NATO and the Pentagon say they are pursuing a methodical strategy that ultimately will prevail. The U.S. is, however, pulling some of its power punches in the air war by using "soft bombs" against the electrical network. F-117 fighters lob missiles filled with gobs of gossamer graphite strands that spark massive short circuits as they flutter across power lines. In some places Yugoslavia was able to restore power seven hours after the attack. But NATO simply responded with another round of short-circuiting. Why did the Pentagon use such bombs? NATO politicians are still hoping for a quick peace and don't want to completely disable Milosevic's struggling nation. Soft bombs can make the Serbs' lives miserable in the short run--a couple of months, say--without making them hopeless in the long run.

These soft strikes also disrupt the Yugoslav military's computers as well as crippling its command-and-control efforts. "Inconveniences like this will continue as we intensify the air campaign," Pentagon spokesman Bacon says. "There is one easy way to stop them, and that is to meet NATO's demands for a settlement." But the loss of power was more than an inconvenience for the 4,000 Yugoslavs who, Belgrade says, need dialysis or other life-saving electricity. They found themselves depending on hospital generators starved for fuel. Allied officers say continued strikes on the Yugoslav power system are likely, along with additional attacks on road and rail networks. But attacks on waterworks and sewage-treatment plants would harm civilians too much, so they have been kept off NATO's target list. The allies are also bringing sophisticated munitions into play. Last week, in an attack that mistakenly hit a market in Nis, NATO used cluster bombs that disperse "bomblets" over a wide area. While cluster munitions are ideal for targets like airfields, they can--and do--inflict heavy casualties if they go astray in dense urban areas.

And NATO is stepping up its attacks on so-called leadership targets, hurling huge 5,000-lb. bunker busters from B-2 bombers against buried command posts last week. One such strike against "the brains behind the brutality," as NATO commander Wesley Clark calls it, targeted Milosevic's national command center at Mount Avala just outside Belgrade.

Just how much effect these bank shots--trying to generate enough anger among Yugoslavs to push Milosevic to change his strategy--will have remains uncertain. Some military experts, like retired Air Force Colonel John Warden, a key architect of the gulf air war, think the attack strategy is just right. "Without electric power, production of civil and military goods, distribution of food and other essentials, civil and military communication, and life in general become difficult to impossible," Warden says. "Unless the stakes in the war are very high, most states will make concessions when their power-generation system is put under sufficient pressure or actually destroyed."

This isn't a new debate, however; military planners have been struggling with it since World War II. Is it really possible to bomb a nation to the bargaining table? A 1994 study in the Air Force's Airpower Journal suggests it may not be. The study cites vain American efforts to bomb the North Koreans into an agreement during the Korean War. Those raids concentrated on Pyongyang's electrical grid to little effect. Wrote Lieut. Colonel Thomas Griffith: "While it is possible to measure how many planes attacked the target, the tonnage of bombs dropped and even the results of the raid in terms of destruction to the physical structures, it is far more difficult to determine the actual impact of the raid on the opposing nation."

Yet by the end of last week there were signs that Milosevic might be preparing his citizens for a deal with NATO. State-controlled TV led its evening broadcasts with stories about diplomatic efforts to end the war rather than about the conflict itself. More important, the Yugoslav press claimed that Serbian forces had wiped the Kosovo Liberation Army from Kosovo. While this was manifestly untrue--Western reporters visited K.L.A. soldiers inside Kosovo all week--the fact that Milosevic was touting the "victory" suggested he might be looking to declare himself a winner and end the bombing. If not, as the weather continues to clear over Serbia this week, he can expect a further expansion of the NATO raids--and devastation for a whole new set of targets.