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Interview Maj. Gen. Charles Link, USAF (Ret.)
July 20, 1999
ADM's Jon Lottman
interviews the President of the Air Force Memorial Foundation for "The Limits of Air Power"
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Writer and producer Interview Transcripts
Maj. Gen. Charles Link
Congressional Testimony
Gen. Henry Shelton
| LOTTMAN: What were NATO's principal military objectives at the
time the decision to use force in Kosovo was taken?
LINK: I think part of the problem with the early phases of the
NATO campaign was a lack of a clear military objective achievable
by air power. I think we unfortunately wound up with a President
who said something like, "we're going to stop ethnic cleansing
in Kosovo by bombing in Serbia." He didn't say it quite
that clearly but that's really how it developed. I think had
there been more thought, more time spent on articulating military
objectives that were achievable, we could have avoided those early
days of not too much productivity.
LOTTMAN: How successful was the air campaign in securing those things?
LINK: I think the real objectives were to fight Milosevic into
folding early. And I think those were the expectations. And
I think those expectations permeated the entire 19-nation military
alliance. And therefore there was not a driving need to establish
measurable military objectives. Now I think fairly quickly people
came to grips with that. And the military objectives were, they
more or less evolved, partly as a result of the people who were
prosecuting the campaign's dissatisfaction with the outcome, and
pressing for more.
In terms of satisfying the expectations, the early expectations
at the political level, I think military force failed. Because
it did not bring Milosevic to an early capitulation. On the other
hand, the very lack of clear military objectives created an opportunity
for a less-focused military campaign. So those two things I think
feed one upon another.
LOTTMAN: A lack of focus, that's interesting. In what ways do
you think that was manifest in the operation?
LINK: I think there was a tension very early, uh, probably vertically,
from the political level through the CINC, General Clark, on down
through the airmen prosecuting the campaign. What the airmen
knew they could do, was they could attack Serb infrastructure,
Serb capacity to make war next week, or the following week. They
knew what would be very difficult to do would be to actually engage
the Serbian military in Kosovo having then already intermingled
with the civilian population. Of course the political objective
would have been very pleased if you could have just picked off
Serbs in Kosovo with air power, but that's not yet within our
capability.
LOTTMAN: I want to get your views not only on the decision to
limit this campaign to air power, but also the publicity surrounding
that decision. From the beginning it was a matter of record,
and therefore in a sense, broadcast to the enemy.
LINK: I think that was an extraordinarily foolish thing to do.
It was the equivalent of saying two things: the first, "Milosevic,
we're going to attack you militarily but first, we'd like you
to review our plan;" and the second thing was, "Milosevic,
we're going to attack you militarily, but we want to assure you
that our commitment is rather tentative." The combination of those
things, I think, put him in a frame of mind, although he knew
he was playing a much superior player, those bungled first moves
put him in a frame of mind that he might be able to hold out for
at least a draw, and maybe a win.
LOTTMAN: The ability to hold out, because of our limited commitment,
limitations on the use of force, what is that based on? Is there
a doctrine to confront air power being used against you?
LINK: I think there may be one in the minds of our adversaries,
and much of it's probably created by our own propaganda. You
may remember that in the opening days of this conflict, I would
suggest that somewhere in the neighborhood of 95% of all of the
expert military commentary predicted a failure. If you have all
of the American expert testimony, public testimony, that this
is probably not going to work, it probably induces an enemy that
thinks there's a chance of a successful holdout, to hold out longer.
We probably need to train our future adversaries to respond in
rational ways. That was an irrational response on Milosevic's
part. With any kind of good luck, future adversaries will look
at this campaign and understand that there are varying degrees
of effectiveness of the application of modern aerospace capabilities.
But in the end, unless you have superiority in that regime, you're
gonna lose.
LOTTMAN: So the book on how to escape an attck from the air is
still being written?
LINK: It's being written.
LOTTMAN: Precision, stealth, new communications, you've said
those capabilities haven't been fully measured. In what ways
was Kosovo a test, and to the extent that it was, how did they
do? What do we know about those capabilities that we didn't know
before?
LINK: There are a couple of ways of gaining knowledge. One of
the is the experiential, accumulating historical knowledge which
is the way that those 95% of the "air power will fail"
commenters had couched their, you know, air power has never won
a war, etc. And the other is science. Most airmen, by the end
of the Gulf war understood that we had crossed a rubicon in the
application of air power because we began to be able to hit what
we were aiming at with astonishing consistency. And the only
thing that was standing between the vision of being able to do
that and the reality of being able to do that was resources.
It was no longer outside the domain of the physical characteristics
of aerospace capabilities. It was just having enough. So they
worked pretty hard at accumulating enough. What's enough? Apparently
there was enough in Kosovo.
I think in one dimension, history has given us a valuable lesson
on the effectiveness of the combination of precision, lethality,
stealth, and three-dimensional maneuver. On the other hand, there
are a large number of people who think hard about air power but
fail to comprehend it in its whole. These are people who convert
the idea of air power in an artillery context, merely additional
operational fire, failing to understand that the speed and range
components of aerospace power produce an infinite number of options
across an enemy's whole battlespace, as long as you own the medium.
When you understand that, then you realize that there are techniques
for employment that exceed the techniques bounded in the artillery
construct.
It would have been very useful in my view to, after the first
few demonstration sort of strikes, that would have satisfied those
in the NATO alliance who believed that he would fold as soon as
he would see we were serious, we shouldn't have spent more than
a couple of hours doing that. And at least by the second night,
we should have been attacking all the fixed targets that it took
us actually 21 days to dribble through.
Now, we do a couple of
things. We see his ability to respond physically. In other words,
there's no way he can actually muster the resources to repair
all that damage in that many places, and restore enough capability
for him to respond morally. He begins to confront the idea that
this is maybe more than he thought it would be, and it's more
than he could possibly tolerate. Some people have described this
as "shock and awe." But it's a key component of air
power that we need to take advantage of. Otherwise, it's just
smarter artillery.
LOTTMAN: So the failure to take full advantage of these capabilities
and technologies makes this a...
LINK: A less than truly useful test. But there are some lessons
to be learned, I think. I think the relative, the relative number
of unintended collateral damage results versus the relative number
of intentional destruction results is probably on a ratio unanticipated
by people outside the science of air power.
I'm discounting the intelligence problem of the Chinese Embassy.
I'm talking about mis-identified targets, stray precision weapons,
those kinds of things. I think for the defense community, I think
they thought there would be a larger amount of collateral damage
in this kind of campaign. I think most airmen by this time have
figured out that collateral damage is something you can't control.
LOTTMAN: So insofar as precision was put to the test, it's been
validated as a real world thing?
LINK: Yeah.
LOTTMAN: Grand strategy not necessary to do this, perception
of no risk, is there danger of taking war too lightly?
LINK: Absolutely. I'd frame it probably in a little different
way. I think the American military may have been remiss over
the last, probably when we let go of the Cold War and embraced
another idea of conflict, we haven't been doing the homework we
should be doing in understanding what the new war is. What's
the new war? What is war today if not the war that we imagined
for 40 years? And involving our political leaders and our prospective
political leaders, because we don't elect people on the basis
of their military competence.
So there's a special burden on the
U.S. military, on the military of any democracy, to take the responsibility
for the military education of their leadership. And I think we
are vulnerable to losing support of other nations because we're
the biggest kid on the block and don't understand what-all that
entails. To me, war is not as much about dying as it is about
killing.
Humanitarian action which involves some risk to us but whose
central design isn't the elimination of somebody else, is to me
not really war. That is a humanitarian operation. But our relief
of someone's suffering calls for the taking of lives on the other
side, then that's war. And we ought to treat it just as seriously
as when we put a battalion of 18-year-olds on the ground. Because
war is about taking lives, particularly for us. I mean, as much
as we value life, it should be, we should understand that. And
if we understand that, and begin to hold that up as the test of
whether we're serious about something, we would avoid this terrible
conundrum that I think we've fallen into, in which we permit other
prospective allies as well as prospective adversaries, to believe
that we hold somehow, the belief that American lives are of more
value than other human lives. What an anti-democratic notion
that is. We really need to take that apart, examine it, and fashion
new precepts on which to base these decisions to commit military
forces.
LOTTMAN: The other lessons?
LINK: The other lesson on a grand scale that I hope we take from
Kosovo, is that it will be useful for us to be prepared to use
air power in the future in the way it was attempted to be used
in Kosovo. But we ought to be able to do it better. I think
in order to do it better, we'll have to understand that there
is a special competence involved in the application of these modern
capabilities, and it's not a competence that one learns in the
Army, or the Navy, or even the Marine Corps. And so the next
time something like this happens I hope we're able to put an airman
in charge of an air campaign in dialogue with the political authorities,
whoever they might be. Because it is that individual, that commander,
at the junction between the military and the civilian political
authorities who has the opportunity to explain to these people
what is possible, and what's not possible. What's high risk and
what's low risk. What's good and bad about the way they articulate
objectives, for example.
Had the President said, "there's
not a lot we can do about what's going on in Kosovo, but we're
gonna make damn sure that this guy can never do this again, and
we're gonna do it in about a week," I'm absolutely certain
that we had the capability to go about doing that. But because
we didn't have that kind of objective, we sort of diddled around
for too long. And without a doubt, more Kosovars died as a result.
LOTTMAN: To the extent that experienced military people were
critical of NATO's plans from the outset, why did that fall on
deaf ears?
LINK: While there were a lot of people who said, "this is
wrong," you didn't find the consensus about what is a suitable
alternative. You had airmen for example, I was critical, but
not for the same reasons that say, a retired army general was critical.
The retired Army general was saying, "well this won't work
unless you put our young people in the mud." And I was saying,
"this won't work unless we do it with vigor, you know, robustly."
If you are on the other end of that, listening to that criticism,
all you know is that there are some people out there carping about
this, but nobody's come up with a better way.
I will say that on the 23rd of March, to have entertained
going about this by introducing ground forces would have been
pure folly. By the time they would have gotten there, 72 days
of ethnic cleansing would have taken place, rather than 72 days
of degrading the Serb military.
The problem was to announce that we weren't going to use ground
forces. To me, that was the fundamental problem.
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