Operation Allied Force from the Perspective of the NATO Air Commander - Lieutenant General Michael Short, USAF (Ret)

• Author: Michael Short
• Position: Lieutenant General
• Pages: 19

The forces that I was privileged to command bombed Milosevic for seventy-eight days flying over thirty-eight thousand sorties without the loss of a single pilot, after which Milosevic accepted all of NATO's terms.

Those terms were: number one, the killing would stop in Kosovo; number two, the professional military forces of the Serb Army and the paramilitary police would leave Kosovo; number three, a NATO commander would come in on the ground with a predominantly NATO force to occupy the province (this was General Mike Jackson and the NATO forces that came in shortly after the bombing campaign was over); number four, the Kosovar Albanians would return to their homes; and, number five, we would facilitate the ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) process. We did all that despite some extraordinary restraints that were placed upon the warfighters in this effort.

I would like to talk quite frankly tonight about three of the issues coming out of Kosovo that are of most concern to me personally and for the future of the US armed forces. I am not a lawyer. I will hopefully share with you some things that will be of value to you who are military lawyers, or civilian lawyers who impact the Department of Defense, about how the next generation of my profession does its business. But I am not a lawyer. I am a professional soldier. I did that for thirty-five years. The three things that are of particular interest to me are targeting, collateral damage and coalition warfare.

Targeting Let's talk first about targeting. A lot has been said in a lot of different publications and by a lot of different people about how we did our targeting. Let me first assure you that the professionals in the American and NATO militaries understand the concept of effects-based targeting. We know what we were trying to do. We were trying to compel Milosevic to accept NATO's terms as rapidly as possible with as little destruction of Serbian property as possible and with as little loss of life on both sides as was humanly possible. That is what we were trying to do. Unfortunately, because NATO was an alliance of nineteen nations, you get the lowest common denominator. All those folks have to agree on something.

Targeting became something that was not in my control. I spent thirty-four years in my profession thinking that when I was in charge of an air effort, I would indeed be in charge of targeting. I thought that the president of the United States and the leaders of whatever alliance we were associated with would give me broad guidance-political objectives that they wanted to achieve. I thought that my boss, the combatant commander, would translate those into military objectives for me. I thought I would perhaps brief the president of the United States on target categories that I intended to strike, but that individual targets would be mine to decide and mine to destroy. And, thereby, I would achieve the effect of bringing Milosevic to the table as rapidly as possible. As all of you understand, that was not the case.

Targeting was not mine to decide. Targeting decisions were made in the White House, at Number Ten Downing Street, and in Paris, Rome and Berlin. The senior political leaders of the alliance approved individual fixed targets-a fixed target being something that doesn't move. Mobile targets were mine to decide upon. I could decide to attack tanks and armored personnel carriers any time I thought it was appropriate. Quite frankly I never thought it to be appropriate, because the center of gravity was not the third army in Kosovo. The center of gravity was Milosevic, the circle of leadership around him, and the ruling elite. But that was not the way NATO wanted to wage war.

We did our level best to target those things that we thought would have the effect of bringing Milosevic to the table. Instead, because those targets were not picked by professional soldiers and professional sailors and professional airmen, we bombed targets that were quite frankly inappropriate for bringing Milosevic to the table. I would say to you that in terms of targeting, this was victory by happenstance more than victory by design.

We had a video teleconference (VTC) every day for seventy-eight days-clearly the highlight of my day-between myself and my staff and the combatant commander, General Wesley Clark, and his staff. One of my...