 |
Interview Richard J. Newman
July 9, 1999
ADM's Jon Lottman interviews
Richard J. Newman, Military Correspondent for US News and World Report, for "The Limits of
Air Power" | |
Related ADM Videos
CDI Resources
Ask the Expert: Interview Transcripts
Col. Carl Bernard
Congressional Testimony
Gen. Henry Shelton
Writer and producer |
LOTTMAN: What were the military objectives of NATO in Kosovo?
NEWMAN: An interesting question, because the military objectives
were always different from the political objectives. We have
followed this on a daily basis. We were constantly reminded of
this. The military objectives were to degrade the capability
of the Serb military, whereas the political objectives were to
do things like stop ethnic cleansing, get the Serb forces out
of Kosovo. There was always a disconnect between the political
objective and the stated military objective.
From the outset,
senior people in the Pentagon felt, and said privately, and as
I understand it, said in their advice to senior leaders in the
White House, "We don't think we can stop ethnic cleansing
with air power alone. We don't think we can necessarily, or we're
not sure we can necessarily, get the Serb forces out of Kosovo
with air power alone." So there was always this friction
between what the political people wanted done and what the military
people felt they could accomplish.
LOTTMAN: Again, on the performance of air power and what it did
or didn't achieve: recently I hear that there's evidence of only
a handful of destroyed Serb tanks and artillery pieces. How is
that information coming to the surface?
NEWMAN: This is a conundrum right now. Right after
the bombing stopped, NATO and the Pentagon both looked at their,
things like cockpit video, which they've been tallying all along,
cockpit video, images from spy planes and satellites, things like
this, and said that they felt they had destroyed something like,
with tanks for instance, about 120 tanks, 110 or 120 tanks. And
when NATO forces finally went into Kosovo, they have found so
far, only about, as I understand it, 6 or 7 tank hulks. So they're
scratching their heads saying, "Well, where are these 110
tanks we supposedly destroyed?" And from that point, are beginning
to ratchet back what they think they've accomplished.
Now, the Serbs could have taken some destroyed tanks with them. For
instance, if they were only slightly damaged, not destroyed,
but slightly damaged, and they thought they could be repaired,
they may have taken some out. People in Kosovo, just locals there,
have said that they did take some out. But it seems unlikely
that they took out almost 100 tanks. So now people think that
NATO airplanes didn't destroy nearly as many tanks, and it's the
same for artillery pieces, and armored personnel carriers, and
other types of heavy equipment like that, as they once thought.
And the difference, they think, can be accounted for by decoys,
that they thought they were hitting tanks but in fact the Serbs
were much more effective using decoys than they thought. Or things
like, now they think that, the Serbs I think, have said that they
would put damaged tanks out in the fields, put them out there,
tanks that have already been hit once, put them out so they
got hit again. There was a lot of double counting, who knows,
triple counting.
It seems unlikely that anybody's ever gonna develop a definitive,
you know, tally of exactly how many they destroyed. In fact this
could be debated for time to come. This was debated for a long
time after the Gulf War. But it seems that they were not quite
as effective as claimed.
LOTTMAN: In your opinion, that discrepancy can be accounted for,
at least partially, by Serb tactics used to deceive the air campaign?
NEWMAN: That appears to be the case now. NATO is just beginning,
NATO and the Air Force together, are just beginning their assessments
of what happened, you know, what did they hit. And in order to
do this, they literally have to comb Kosovo foot by foot really,
and do some detailed analysis. They know things like the coordinates
of the targets they hit. So they will go to those coordinates
and see what's there. You know, is there a tank there? Is there
just a pile of boards that indicates it was probably a decoy?
Is there nothing? Is there a crater where maybe there used to
be a tank but they took it away? It's gonna take some time to
sort through all this.
LOTTMAN: You mentioned the use of very old or damaged tanks.
That's one decoy method. Are there other methods that you're
aware of? What other ways can they make us think we're hitting
a military target when in fact we're hitting something else, or
nothing at all?
NEWMAN: I think that's essentially it. Either build something
that looks like a tank, you know, a silhouette of a tank, and
if you drive around Kosovo now, you see these things. I mean
they are oddities, curiosity pieces just sitting out in a field.
You'll be driving down the road and see what looks like a toy
tank from up close. But from the air, it just has the outline
of a tank, and it's got a, you know, a board or something sticking
out where the turret is, so it looks, and it's about the size
of a tank.
And in some cases you'll see these, it's really quite
interesting, you'll see them, you'll see that they've just built
some planks up like sort of leading up to the tank, to make it
look like a bridge, and often there will be a bridge nearby, because
NATO has maps, but you can see the bridges were covered with brush.
I mean, where there's brush, push it off to the side. So they
covered up the real bridge, and tried to build a fake bridge and
get NATO to bomb that.
Now as you drive around Kosovo you'll also notice that a lot of
these things are sitting around not destroyed. So clearly the
pilots were able to discriminate somewhat.
LOTTMAN: In 79 days of bombing - we've discussed the limited numbers
of military targets destroyed - what in fact was destroyed?
NEWMAN: Well, NATO did quite a good job at destroying fixed targets.
I mean it is unparalleled in its ability to do this. You know,
things like the military sites-barracks, military storage sites,
military repair sites, the infrastructure sites, water, power
base, things like this, headquarters buildings. Um, and of course,
the complaint from about day one of this campaign by a lot of
air power advocates, is that they just weren't allowed to hit
those targets at the intensity level that would have really been
decisive at the beginning. I think it's important to note that,
you know, the Air Force and air power advocates acknowledge that
hitting mobile targets, moving targets like tanks, trucks, things
that can hide in forests, is very hard. It's a very hard business.
And they're, what they're really good at is hitting fixed stuff,
finding it, hitting it, being able to hit it without putting pilots
in harm's way. They still say, "had we been able to do more
of that from the outset, this war could have been over much more
quickly."
LOTTMAN: Do you agree with that? In 79 days, how many more fixed
targets could there be?
NEWMAN: I think there could be a lot. Supposedly there was a
list - the air planners developed a list with something like 2000
targets on it, and ran it up the chain of command through NATO
and up through the political side of NATO, and were given back
a list with 200 or so targets on it, saying these are the ones
you're allowed to strike. There were relatively few strikes against
sites in Belgrade for example, government buildings, residences
of Milosevic. If I recall correctly they hit only one leadership
target. And you know, they wanted to go after this stuff, all
of it, at the beginning, as they did in Desert Storm.
Now it gets a little bit complicated, but if you begin to accept
the view that maybe they really didn't do that much damage to
forces in the field, well then what made Milosevic give in? And
you might conclude, I don't know that we'll ever know, but you
might conclude that it was the other type of damage-it was the
infrastructure damage. And you might therefore go further and
say if you had, if you had taken on those targets more quickly
at the beginning, maybe the war would have ended more quickly.
LOTTMAN: Let's look at the other side of this: what were the
Serb military objectives, and how effective were they in achieving
their objectives?
NEWMAN: Well, it's an interesting question, because if you, if
you compare, for instance, what Kosovo looks like post-war, and
what Bosnia looks like post-war, they're really quite different.
Bosnia was a 3-1/2 year war, with people, you know, fighting
each other, front lines that moved very little in some places
over time. And the place was destroyed from fighting. You go
through Kosovo right now, it doesn't look like that at all. It
just looks like it's been vandalized. Vandalism on a huge scale.
So to an extent, this was not a military campaign. This was
a kind of terror campaign that, you know, goes by the now-familiar
phrase "ethnic cleansing." Militarily, the Serbs did
have an objective, which was basically to rid Kosovo of the Kosovo
Liberation Army, these ethnic Albanian rebels who want, who were
fighting for Kosovo independence. And to the extent there was
military activity, and there was some, in Southwest Kosovo for
instance toward the end of the war, there was some fighting - that's
what it was about.
LOTTMAN: Did Serbia achieve its war objectives? What's your
assessment?
NEWMAN: It did not achieve its war objectives, because those
objectives, such as they were, were to eliminate the Kosovo Liberation
Army. They didn't do that. One reason they didn't do that was
that they didn't have a free hand to conduct a full-out military
campaign, because once they started to mass, as you have to do
for a military campaign in order to concentrate your force, they
became sitting ducks for NATO airplanes. So having NATO airplanes
bombing them was a real impediment to mounting an effective military
campaign.
And the KLA, at the same time, certainly had its difficulties,
and to this day I don't think is considered a robust fighting
force. But it was gaining strength, on account of all the people
kicked out of Kosovo who now had something to fight for they may
not have had to fight for before, they were gaining sympathy and
numbers. And some people thought, if you turn this fairly professional
Serb army loose on the KLA for a few days, it would be over.
And that turned out not to be the case.
LOTTMAN: To backtrack just a little bit: we talked about the
military equipment which we did or didn't destroy. I have the
same question with regard to the Serb troops themselves. We have
an estimate of 5,000 - 10,000 casualties on the Serb side. Now
there are some reports that that number could be as low as 600,
maybe 800. What's you assessment of the damage to the Serb forces
themselves, and what accounts for that discrepancy.
NEWMAN: NATO was always reluctant to estimate, to do a
body count essentially. I think one reason is that it's hard
to do. I mean, it's very hard to tell. I mean obviously, if
they're having trouble telling how many tanks they got, it's gonna
be a lot harder to actually tell how many soldiers you're killing.
And, you know, they were, you know, doing attacks in onesies
and twosies. You know, hitting a truck here and a tank there,
and I think most people believe that up until the final days of
the war, NATO was not having, it was not wiping out units per
se.
Then there were these couple of B-52 strikes in the Southwest.
And it's interesting because these took place when the Serbs
were starting to engage the KLA, you know, sort of up close and
personal, and had to, you know, concentrate their forces. Supposedly
on a couple of occasions, you know, NATO caught Serb units out
in the open. Now there were these reports that in one B-52 strike
they essentially wiped out a whole battalion of Serb infantry,
which would be maybe 600 or 700 troops. That's an open question.
People in NATO are backing away from that now. Again, they're
looking for the evidence, they're having trouble finding the evidence
that that actually happened. And they had nothing to confirm
it from the air. You know, 5,000 to 10,000 troops - it's possible
the numbers were that high, I just don't think anybody, it's gonna
take awhile before anybody knows.
LOTTMAN: I think some of the lower estimates were based on eyeball
observations of Serb forces pulling out of Kosovo, and trying
to compare those levels of troops and equipment with intelligence
reports about what they started with.
NEWMAN: Right.
LOTTMAN: Maybe you can help settle a little controversy around
the office here, about what I've started to call "the missing
peace." Is there an actual signed document formally ending
this conflict? Is there a peace agreement in the sense of a physical
document which responsible parties have signed?
NEWMAN: Well, there certainly is the military-technical
agreement, known as the MTA, which the Serbs did sign, and NATO
did sign, which is the thing which lays out the withdrawal timetable
for Serb forces. Did Milosevic sign a document? I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that. It's a good question. In a
sense it's a moot point, because NATO is in control of Kosovo
right now, but it's a good question.
LOTTMAN: What are the possible implications of this decision
to limit the Kosovo campaign to air power, and of the sense that
this was a victory for air power? What does that mean for the
American military looking out into the future?
NEWMAN: Well, there's been this talk of the Clinton Doctrine.
What is the Clinton doctrine, you know? And if there is such
a thing, one piece of the Clinton Doctrine would appear to be
to use the minimal amount of force necessary to get the job done.
And insist on the fewest number of casualties possible, which
is something opposite to the sort of Powell Doctrine, which has
been running the show for the last 10 years or so, which is, go
in with overwhelming force. So, it's you know, it's attractive
to political leaders to be able to conduct military action like
this and lesser military action, which we should also think about,
like the attacks on Afghanistan and Sudan last year with standoff
weapons like cruise missiles, where nobody goes in harm's way.
It's an astonishing thing that they conducted this campaign with
zero casualties. The Serbs appeared to be an impotent enemy at
the end, but they fired more than 700 Surface-to-Air missiles,
pilots did have to do evasive maneuvers a number of times to get
out of the way of these things. Two planes did get shot down.
But to look back on this and see zero casualties, it makes you
think, well, maybe we can do this again the next time. You know,
what if there's a war in Korea? Do you start trying to take out
Serb, uh excuse me, North Korean ground forces with precision
weapons on a one-by-one basis.
If you start trying to do that, you do start to get into some
very profound implications, such as, maybe you need less army
troops and more Air Force planes, or things like this. You know,
the types of weapons you need. Before Kosovo, people didn't really
think very much about using some of the most expensive and accurate
weapons in the arsenal, like the AGM-130 missile, which is a television
guided thing, where the pilot is actually looking at what the
missile sees until the point of impact. People didn't think
about using these kinds of expensive weapons to take out a single
truck, which they did a lot in Kosovo. So if you're gonna do
that more in the future, I think you're gonna have to change your
weapons mix, and that's one of the things people are talking about
right now. And maybe your force mix. But this question remains,
is that the right way to do it?
LOTTMAN: Is this conflict in any way a sound basis for making
those kinds of decisions?
NEWMAN: Well, that's the question. That's what all of this after-action
analysis is probably going to lead up to. You know, this is probably
going to lead to fairly intense infighting in the Pentagon. It's
already starting, with some air power people saying, you know,
"what do you need ground forces for? Look, we proved we can win
a war with air power alone, and the other side, people saying,
"yeah, but how effective were you, really?" And in the end, in
order to really do some damage to these people, it required, it
did require ground force. It just wasn't a NATO or U.S. ground
force, it was the KLA fighters that were forcing the Serbs to
come out in the open and concentrate their forces, and therefore
make them better targets. So, it'll be an interesting battle.
LOTTMAN: The President ruled out the use of ground troops in
Kosovo for political concerns - the fear that casualties would undermine
public support for the war. Do you think he was right to do so?
NEWMAN: Well, I mean, just about every military or tactical expert
you'll talk to will say that's foolish-to begin a war by saying
we're only gonna commit so much to it. It just makes
no sense, and it's hard to see how it does make sense. You can
bluff, you can put forces in place, even if you don't intend to
use them without showing your hand, which would seem to be a much
shrewder way to fight a war.
In the end, of course, President Clinton backtracked from that
view, and they did put these, you know, this Task Force Hawk,
which was this group of Apache helicopters, was something more
than just 24 Apache helicopters. There were a number of tanks,
Bradley fighting vehicles, and there was a significant ground
force attached with that. Not enough to invade Kosovo, but people
are saying that, that, even what they did put there did get the
Serbs' attention and did force the Serbs to sort of reorient their
defenses in that area, so they had to put more border posts down
there, set up more artillery positions, just in case. So even
that sort of had part of the effect that you want, which is you
want to determine what the enemy does instead of letting him decide.
LOTTMAN: That brings up another question: TF Hawk, and to the
extent that there were NATO ground troops in the area, but yet
they were never actually pushed into Kosovo - I'm assuming that
was because the permissive environment they were waiting for didn't
come about until whatever agreement was reached, so I guess the
basic question is: was this a victory of air power? Are we occupying
Kosovo now because of the success of this air campaign?
NEWMAN: Yes, I mean the answer is yes. You know, its, on the
face of it, they only used air power. They accomplished their
objectives for the most part, if you accept the fact that, if
you just accept that over a million people being kicked out of
their homes, you know, just was going to happen. And it's not
clear that it was going to happen, necessarily. But I guess you
do, you would have to say that U.S. forces are in there now because
air power established the conditions for them to get in there.
But there were other difficulties with considering
a ground war. I mean it's very difficult, it would have been
very difficult to invade Kosovo from Albania or Macedonia. In
fact they did ultimately develop some invasion plans. And the
invasion plans actually called for them to invade Kosovo from
Macedonia by going into Serbia to the East of Kosovo, and then
coming up, coming back down or looping back down and actually
going into Kosovo from the North of Kosovo, because it was so
difficult to do from the South because of the terrain and the
mountains and single roads that go right through valleys that
would leave them sitting ducks.
LOTTMAN: Sounds like that would be pretty hard to pull off.
NEWMAN: It would have been, there would have been casualties.
There's just no doubt there would have been casualties.
LOTTMAN: Military leaders are now expressing concerns that the
bar has been raised by fighting a war with zero casualties. Is there
pressure to repeat that successful aspect of this, do you see
that being repeated in future conflict?
NEWMAN: It's a paradoxical thing, because of course, it's very,
it's a good thing that there were no casualties. But clearly
it establishes an expectation that you can have bloodless war,
that the American people don't have to worry, you know, they don't
have to get that involved, you know, because the Pentagon can
just go off and drop some bombs and get foreign leaders to bend
to their will.
The problem here is that the couple of wars, potential wars that
the Pentagon prepares for, won't be like this. If there is ever
a war in Korea, it's just gonna be a totally different story.
And are Americans prepared for a war in which there could be
thousands, thousands of U.S. casualties? After going through a
war like this, you know? I think that the Americans could come
around to accepting a reality like that, but you know, they have
to believe it's worth, it's worth the sacrifice.
So I, you know, in a sense there could be a little bit too much
made of this because when faced with the issue, Americans will
sort it out for themselves on that case alone whether it seems
worth the sacrifice or not. But clearly this establishes an expectation
that, you know, it would be very jolting to many Americans if
they found their country in a war where there were lots of casualties.
LOTTMAN: To me, part of the problem is that you're not just supposed
to find your country in a war. I look at the Kosovo
campaign and I think, "what about public support." I don't
think there's been any effort to bring people's hearts into this
to the extent where they could accept casualties. So are we moving
towards taking the decision to go to war maybe a little too lightly?
NEWMAN: Well, you know, Kosovo was a war for humanitarian purposes,
not a war because American security interests were at stake.
And I think most people, most officials have acknowledged that.
What do you do in a case like that? Do you say, you know,
"well, it's for humanitarian purposes, and therefore it's not worth
fighting for?" I doubt that that's the right answer. Do you say
that it's for humanitarian purposes so we're going to go all out
as if, you know, we were being attacked in our own back yard?
That doesn't really seem like the right answer. You know, and
then you're expecting Americans to engage their interests regarding
a place that really couldn't be more distant and more foreign
to them in many ways.
So how much can you ask of the American people? I mean, uh, you
know, how much do you need to rally around this cause? Maybe
if you can, maybe a sort of measured involvement is sort of the
right way to go about it. Um, I think the larger point, though,
is it could have gotten ugly. And you know, in some sense, they
were good, but they were lucky too. It could have got a lot uglier,
and that's where you really would have had some problems.
LOTTMAN: Is part of their being lucky the sense that they didn't
have any cover? That there was no congressional debate, no UN
resolution, per se. They were sort of all alone, out on a limb
with this.
NEWMAN: Yeah, that's part of it, and you know, if, you know,
no one really thought there would be zero casualties when they
started, I don't think. So, if there had been more casualties,
or if say this thing dragged on, or lets say, since we really
don't know why Milosevic gave in, it seems feasible that he may
not have given in for a long time. Serbian forces might have
been there for a long time that, you know, there was this backsliding
toward the possibility of a ground force. You know, it was on
the table there for awhile, then it was off the table, then it
was back on the table, supposedly.
What if this had really become intractable, and people were dying?
Would, then, how do you explain to America, without having done
the ground work really to educate people about this very foreign
place, why America's involved in this place, and so on. Then,
if you haven't done that ground work, then how do you persuade
them that this is a good cause, it's worth sacrificing American
blood for? That would have been very difficult, I think, especially
because you had congressional votes against US involvement and
you know, very tepid support elsewhere in, you know, certain places.
LOTTMAN: What if we could go back and do it over again? What would
we do differently? Are there any mistakes that were made or things
we wish we could have done?
NEWMAN: I think that the, I think the air force really wants
to get to the bottom of this question. I
think the Air Force really wants to get to the bottom of this
question of how could you do something like this better? And
the, this sort of Rubik's cube problem here is that you know,
if you go, what the Air Force would have liked to do is slam Serbia
hard in the beginning, just as happened during the Gulf War when
they, you know, there was almost this Blitzkrieg-type opening
where they just hit everything they could just in the opening
few days. Had they done that, NATO would have fallen apart.
The alliance just would have fallen apart because there was not
political support to, to hammer Yugoslavia at that level.
So this is the problem that they're trying to figure out, is,
how do you begin a war like this with a level of intensity that
can be decisive, and still hold together a number of nations with
divergent views about, frankly, whether NATO should be going to
war with this place in the first place? That's a hard problem,
but it's the problem that I think is gonna get the most attention.
|
