Warfighting 101

By Mark Thompson/Washington

On paper, Operation Allied Force may be the sharpest-looking war in American history. The numbers are remarkable: 99.6% of allied bombs--NATO dropped 20,000 of them--found their targets. NATO pilots flew some 35,000 sorties, and though two U.S. planes were shot down, it was the kind of war in which a fighter jock could be hit on an overnight raid and by sunrise be sipping coffee in Italy--and praising the Lord for helping him find the ejection handle. Stunningly, in a war that NATO believes killed some 5,000 Yugoslavs, not a single allied pilot died. Western military technology finally seemed to have transformed war into a push-button exercise. And it is on exactly this point that debate is beginning.

While Air Force officers were bragging that air power by itself had triumphed for the first time in history, Army officers were quick to note that air power had failed abjectly in attaining the war's key goal--protecting ethnic Albanians from Serbian violence. Says William Odom, a retired Army three-star: "This war didn't do anything to vindicate air power. It didn't stop the ethnic cleansing, and it didn't remove Milosevic." In fact, a ground movement--an offensive by the resurgent Kosovo Liberation Army in the past two weeks--played a key role in upping the pressure on Milosevic's army by forcing Serbian armor out into the open where it was vulnerable to allied attack. Says Army General Henry Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: "As [Milosevic] massed his forces to fight back, he set himself up for B-52 and B-1 bombing."

B-52? B-1? What about the sleek B-2? Ironically, while the B-2 performed well, the success of older aircraft may make it harder for the services to bring costly new planes on line. In the coming decades, the Pentagon plans to spend $300 billion on three new classes of warplanes, including $62.2 billion for a fleet of 339 F-22 fighters. But if U.S. air forces are so good, the thinking goes, why upgrade?

It wasn't just older, cheaper planes that won over Kosovo. The real star of the show was a new but very cheap bomb. While the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) is a pretty low-tech weapon, its satellite-guided tail fins let a plane at any altitude drop it right on target through clouds, smoke or darkness. At about $20,000 a pop, it's far cheaper than the $1 million cruise missile that has been the precision-guided weapon of choice for the past decade. "Once you get the air defenses suppressed, you can just fly over and puke out JDAMS," says Merrill McPeak, the retired general who ran the Air Force during the Gulf War. "You can't beat the economics."

The strength of the allied air performance will also reignite debate over the heft and utility of U.S. Army forces. The lame deployment of the Army's 24 Apache helicopters--slowed by the need to ship humanitarian supplies into the region--created a perception that the Army couldn't get those choppers to war promptly and that the Pentagon was chicken to use them once they got there. Moreover, despite decades of chatter about fast, light forces, the U.S. Army still can't move a major fighting force quickly into place. That's a problem that Shelton, among others, wants fixed quickly.

But even if the Army is never fast and light, the U.S. military will still possess an unmatchable tactical dominance over its opponents. That worries some Pentagon thinkers. In the next conflict, they fret, a really smart foe won't fight the U.S. in the skies or on the ground--places where victory is unlikely. Instead, it will be smart and strike far away from the war zone--in the heart of a major U.S. city, perhaps--with chemical or biological weapons. Even the slickest Stealth bomber couldn't stop that.