Word: nato
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...coming days, they'll be going after more targets, many of them mobile. That will require more planes. Last week most allied planes did their bombing from about 25,000 ft. And much of the opposition was easy to handle: on five occasions, NATO planes downed Yugoslav MiG-29s. "These were modern dogfights, with the planes a couple of miles apart and moving at high speeds," says a U.S. Air Force officer...
This week, however, as they try to ferret out tough-to-hit targets, NATO flyers will go down, says an officer, "as low as they can get." That concerns Pentagon planners because Serbia's air defenses may spring to life at any moment. While NATO officials suggested that the early knockout punches disabled Milosevic's air-defense network, planners are betting that most of it is being held in reserve...
...Gulf War. "Plinking," perfected during the Gulf War, used the contrast between sun-warmed tanks and cooler desert sand to help pilots target the tanks with infrared equipment. How well that will work in the forested Balkans remains to be seen. But retired Navy Admiral Leighton Smith--who ordered NATO's first-ever bombing raid, against Bosnian Serb targets in 1994--thinks the tactic may be deadly for pilots: "It would be absolutely stupid...
...most recent U.S. air war was over Bosnia in 1995. It helped drive Milosevic to Dayton, Ohio, where he signed a peace accord. An Air Force study concluded that the key lessons were to hit hard and use precision weapons. "Precision weapons gave NATO airmen the ability to execute a major air campaign that was quick, potent and unlikely to kill people or destroy property to an extent that would cause world opinion to rise against the operation," the study concluded...
...Milosevic has again chosen war. Like a shark that has to keep moving to stay alive, he is willfully exposing the withered state of Serbia to the might of NATO for the sake of his own power. As always, he gambled that talk, hopes, threats and indecision would wear his enemies into retreat. When that didn't happen, he put in jeopardy virtually everything left to him, courting death for his people and damage to his country, the destruction of his military machine, the hastened secession of Kosovo and Montenegro, and perhaps even the end of his regime...