Rewriting the Last War - What new Pentagon Papers reveal - Operation Allied Force in Kosovo - overstated success

National Review, June 5, 2000 by Andrew J. Bacevich

THE war for Kosovo-famous as the first war in which the victors suffered not a single soldier killed in action-has claimed a late casualty: truth. The wound is one that the American military has inflicted on itself, but that does not make it any less serious. Left to fester, it may prove fatal.

When the war began in the spring of '99, Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO military commander, vowed, "We're going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate, and ultimately . . . destroy" the military forces of Slobodan Milosevic. Seventy-eight days and 38,000 combat sorties later, senior officials in the Defense Department claimed that Operation Allied Force-predominantly a U.S. operation, despite the name-had done just that. Secretary William Cohen declared that air power had "severely crippled" Serb forces in Kosovo, "destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and one-third of the armored vehicles." Gen. Henry Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chimed in with specifics. NATO air strikes had knocked out some 120 tanks, 220 other armored vehicles, and 450 mortars and artillery pieces. Allied Force was a textbook illustration of what the marriage of advanced technology and skilled airmen could accomplish, a precision war demonstrating once again the extraordinary U.S. ability to pick apart an enemy army virtually at will.

At war's end, the Yugoslav army's orderly and disciplined withdrawal from Kosovo cast some doubt on those claims; newspaper photos of clean- shaven, crisply dressed Serb tank crews lounging on undamaged vehicles did not suggest a beaten enemy. But such doubts tended to come from critics who, from the outset, had viewed the war as misguided. The Pentagon was therefore quick to reject this skepticism as tainted by bias.

Now it turns out that the skeptics were right, their suspicions confirmed by the military's own postwar analysis of the bombing campaign. As reported in the May 15 issue of Newsweek, that assessment, undertaken at Clark's behest and directed by a senior U.S. Air Force officer, determined that NATO investigators could confirm barely a dozen Yugoslav tanks destroyed, along with only 18 other armored vehicles and 20 artillery pieces. Investigators who walked the battlefield found that many of the "weapons" reported destroyed were instead crude decoys. In other words, Cohen and Shelton had overstated the effectiveness of attacks against Serb forces in the field by roughly a factor of ten.

Worse, confronted with conclusions at variance with the Clinton administration's approved narrative, senior defense officials decided to suppress their own report. Clark quietly commissioned a new study, this one employing more liberal evaluation criteria. What pilots thought they saw now counted as much as what investigators had found on the ground. Not surprisingly, this second study produced conclusions more closely in line with original claims for the air campaign's success and promptly earned the Pentagon's stamp of approval. All was well-until the original report was leaked.

Does it matter that the press caught the Pentagon trying to ditch a realistic look at an American war? Inured to a political culture in which misstatements, misinformation, and bald-faced lies have become as routine as kissing babies, Americans will treat this as a one-day story-if that. Prevarication in the corridors of power barely qualifies as newsworthy. But to place this incident on a par with, say, Al Gore's creative autobiography is to underestimate its significance. There remain some few areas of public life where integrity still matters. National security is-or should be-one of them.

For too many years now, Americans have taken U.S. military superiority for granted. They have become oblivious to the true source of that prowess, which is not gee-whiz technology or a big defense budget. No, to a very large extent, the superiority of American arms has derived from an officer corps imbued with a superior brand of military professionalism. That sense of professionalism grew directly out of Vietnam-a war in which the willingness of senior military leaders to fudge the truth had led to catastrophe. Central to the revitalized professionalism that emerged from Vietnam was an ethic that revered integrity, insisted on realism in the study of war, and refused to blink at uncomfortable facts.

What Newsweek calls the "Kosovo cover-up" points toward an officer corps that is losing touch with these values. Nor is this an isolated instance. An accumulation of evidence suggests a military establishment in which things that could once be counted on are coming unglued. Service chiefs who mask readiness problems and declare their absolute fealty to gender-integrated basic training invite the charge that they are more interested in political accommodation than in combat readiness. Their own subordinates are the first ones to figure out the real score. A damning survey of junior army officers-conducted recently by the Army itself to find out why so many are leaving-reveals widespread cynicism about the integrity and professionalism of ranking military leaders. As one officer commented, "Senior leaders will throw subordinates under the bus in a heartbeat to protect or advance their careers." The phony analysis of Allied Force is of a piece with these developments.