Word: air
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
Last Thursday he evidently did. Serbia's truculent, unpredictable leader startled the world by abruptly accepting all of NATO's demands, almost the exact terms he had rebuffed on March 23 when he set off the air war. Now he had decided to stop it. It took him just over six hours of businesslike question-and-answer with the emissaries to make up his mind and formally capitulate...