Word: air
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Before a conflict, the military's job is to plan for the worst case. Yet obviously the minds behind Operation Allied Force didn't really think it would be as bad as this. After more than a week of NATO air raids, Kosovo was still hemorrhaging victims of horror. Ordered out of their homes at gunpoint, often separated from husbands and sons, ethnic Albanian women, children and old people were marched, bused, packed into trains. As the long columns stumbled into neighboring states, Serb soldiers stripped the refugees of passports, identity papers, even license plates to eradicate any trace...
...crush the K.L.A. and then gradually drive out the entire ethnic Albanian population. Among political decision makers at NATO and at the White House, conventional wisdom also said Milosevic would cave after a few days of bombing. That scenario seemed so convincing that they settled on an air campaign of gradual escalation, beginning with limited attacks and building in sufficient pauses for Belgrade to capitulate. U.S. intelligence had no qualms about the military plan: even if Milosevic stepped up Operation Horseshoe, they believed, he couldn't empty Kosovo in a week...
NATO and Serbia are fighting very different wars. While NATO was attempting to grind down Belgrade's air defenses, Milosevic was fighting the only war he really cares about. He refused to fire spasms of SAMs into the swarming skies over Yugoslavia. That kept NATO's low-and-slow tank- and troop-killing warplanes away and confined vaunted alliance firepower to Everest-high altitudes. In Belgrade government officials chortled that the damage to their air-defense systems was "minimal" despite a NATO expenditure of "230 grams of high explosives per head" of every Yugoslav. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia's well-armed infantry...
While Milosevic moved fast to stay ahead of the impact of the air strikes, NATO was plagued by bad luck. Only about half the bombing sorties actually dropped ordnance on targets. Some planes were socked in by bad weather; other pilots couldn't eyeball their prey--NATO rules required visual identification of a target to prevent civilian casualties--through the thick cloud cover, and returned to base with bomb bays still loaded. "Everybody is surprised," says a White House aide, "that we're not as far along as we wanted...
...radar-visible Apache helicopter gunships that could lay down a withering blanket of bullets and rockets against small concentrations of Serb tanks and armor. There was also some worry within defense circles about a dwindling supply of American cruise missiles. Defense officials reported that there were only about 100 air-launched cruises available, but some 2,000 sea-launched Tomahawks remained. NATO political bosses--reassured perhaps by the impressive accuracy of the Tomahawks so far--agreed to widen the target base by 20% to include the Defense and Interior ministries in downtown Belgrade, then scrapped the phases entirely...