The Eaker Institute for Aerospace Concepts
Operation Allied Force: Strategy, Execution, Implications

An Eaker Colloquy on Aerospace Strategy, Requirements, and Forces

August 16, 1999
Ronald Reagan International Trade Center, Washington, D.C.

Gen. Dugan. I’m Mike Dugan, and on behalf of the elected leaders of the Foundation and the Air Force Association and our distinguished Eaker Fellows and our Eaker staff, we want to welcome you to the fourth of the 1999 colloquy sponsored by the Eaker Institute.

The Eaker Institute for Aerospace Concepts is the public policy and research arm of the Air Force Association’s Aerospace Education Foundation.

This is the third season of special events for the Eaker Institute. In late 1996, the Institute was founded and initially funded through a generous gift from the family of the late General Ira C. Eaker, one of the truly great air power advocates and a famed World War II commander of the 8^th Air Force. An aviation pioneer, General Eaker was a reasoned intellectual who succeeded in articulating the early case for strategic air power. He continued to write a syndicated column and to lecture on air power for several years following his retirement from the Air Force.

The Institute seeks to emulate General Eaker’s intellectual approach and unique ability to further air power thinking. We call this a colloquy, a conversation, because there needs to be candid discussions about aerospace strategy, forces and requirements -- today and into the future. We believe today’s distinguished panel can contribute to this conversation about air operations and integrating air & space strategy and forces.

Now let me introduce our panelists for today’s session on Operation Allied Force. Please refer to the brochure with more complete bios on our panelists. I’ve watched John Jumper from time to time over the past 15 years and he has grown from a bright, articulate young officer into an old, bright, and articulate officer. Air Vice Marshal Tony Mason - I believe that Tony Mason and I first met almost 30 years ago at the Air Force Academy where he was in the history department. He, in the Eaker tradition, is an intellectual, thinker and writer with 12 books behind him and is a worthy commentator on air and space operations. Dr. Edward Luttwak is a critic and is also a historian and thinker, about how air and space forces work and how the Pentagon works and other studies in general. I met him some 15 or so years ago. He had a most interesting set of questions - questions I just didn’t think about, and when the Gulf War began I introduced him to John Warden and asked that he bring that perspective and interesting questions to the Checkmate Team, a small planning cell buried in the bowels of the Pentagon. He was a very useful consultant to the Air Force throughout the Desert Storm activities.

To start our discussion, lets begin with the man on the scene throughout Operation Allied Force. Even though not in the chain of command, he ended up managing much of this and the principle air advisor to General Wesley Clark was General John Jumper. He was commander of Allied Air Force in Central Europe and daily participated in video teleconferences. Let’s have your perspective on what we saw in Allied Force.

Gen. Jumper: Thank you very much. First of all, it is a pleasure to be here. I am happy to come and sit before this very distinguished audience and share some of my reflections on what can only be described as a very exciting 78 days preceded by almost a year of planning that went into what we call Operation Allied Force.

I can start off with putting a vision into your head of 500 airplanes a day taking off from 47 bases scattered throughout Europe in all sorts of weather finding their way to a tanker, air-to-air refueling, strike forces of 8, 10, 12, 16 airplanes, going to a target, releasing weapons, coming back for post-strike refueling, again, in all weather and returning a great number of those airplanes to single runway operation at Aviano.

Anyone who has had anything to do with air power, airmanship, planning and execution of air power understands how fundamentally difficult this is to do. I tell our partners in the alliance and I tell those Americans seated in this audience that they should be extremely proud of our alliance airmen for being able to perform at this level on relatively short notice. It speaks volumes for success - success of an alliance, success of alliance interoperability, success of training and our success in gathering, especially in the U.S. Air Force, absolutely marvelous people.

Of all of those, the people are the most important. A close second is the training. I attribute, as I did in Desert Storm, the fact that as an alliance and as a nation, we have available to us the most rigorous standards of training and this is the primary contributor to our success.

It was also a success for the airlift community, as we saw more than 500 C-17 sorties transfer Task Force Hawk into Albania, over 22 thousand short tons with more than a 95 percent effectiveness rate. At the same time, the airlift community was supporting robust humanitarian operations as we did our best to relieve the humanitarian situation for the refugees crossing the border.

In an environment where the weather was bad and the terrain was bad, there were many things against us, we were able to do this without the loss of one single airman, speaks to the incredible professionals involved, but it also speaks to damn good luck. Anyone, again, who has ever been associated with planning and execution of airpower knows that the rates we were looking at here could be very deceiving because we don’t get that good results usually even in peace time and we have to be careful of the conclusions we draw.

It is interesting to see some of the conclusions that have already come out in the form of one-liners and bumper stickers. We see paraded through some elements of the press first that Desert Storm is a valid comparison and maybe we will be able to discuss more of these things later on. The other bumper sticker is that somehow “casualty-free” means “risk free.” Somehow, 15,000 feet was some sort of a sanctuary above which we had nothing to fear. I find that an interesting conclusion and I hope we have a chance to discuss.

Our problem with all of this is we make it look too easy. We set the bar fairly high when we fly more than 30 thousand combat sorties, and we don’t lose one pilot. It makes it look as if air power is indeed risk free and too easy a choice to make. Finally, what does this portend for the future? I can tell you what I worry about every day and I can tell you what General Clark worried about every day — that somehow Mr. Milosovic would find a way to float an SA-10 or SA-12 up the Danube River, put it together and bring it to bear as a part of this conflict. If that had happened, it would have profoundly changed the balance of the threat and our ability to maintain air superiority. Likewise, the existence of modern generations of fighters - Su-35s and their equivalents that are available today — would have had a profound impact of the balance that was so heavily tilted in our favor.

We did have in our favor an air force that was certainly equipped with some modern equipment, certainly had a command and control structure that was very redundant to include fiber optics. It had very modern 3-D radars, but it did not have the training and efficiency to employ those at the level that could make them effective. Their SAM operators were, in the end, afraid to bring the SAMS up and engage our fighters because of the lethality of our anti-SAM aircraft.

We also have to take away with us the lesson of rapid reaction. This gets to the future of our Expeditionary Air Force - the ability to respond quickly, to be there and ready to fight is a capability that we continue to develop within our Air Force, and we will continue to look at in the future.

The lessons learned will come out in a very formal after a very formal study. The first iteration of that will be put out next month so I won’t jump to conclusions on lessons. I think from a tactical point of view, the outstanding performers have been well documented. Certainly stealth and stand off continue to be high-leverage and high payoff items. The UAV (Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle), especially the Predator, came into its own as we not only took that weapon system, but we modified it and continued to enhance its procedures and tactics that we use with the Predator. Electronic warfare continued to play a leading part, with the EA-6s and of course our new innovations, to include the TOW decoys and other items of information warfare that were employed for the first time in this conflict.

That is a broad brush on what I bring to the table today and hopefully we’ll be able to discuss more of these things as the session goes on.

Gen. Dugan: This is an interesting mix and we will address many of these issues again. Air Vice-Marshal Mason, please proceed.

AVM Mason: First of all, let me thank the organization for inviting me to this enormously prestigious occasion. Before I go on, it brings up a lot of memories as General Dugan has said, there was a time when the young Tony Mason worked alongside Majors Dugan and Bob Oak and there was even a short spell as Ron Fogleman’s commanding officer from which his career never looked back. Also, it was John Frisbee who first encouraged me to put pen to paper in the airman’s book shelf. All in all, it is great to be back here.

There are obviously a tremendous number of things that a European can focus on. First of all, the obvious health warning that this is a European view, not the European view. Secondly, I would just like to select from a whole raft of things initially, just two items. One is the question of political control in the campaign and second is the question of targeting. I don’t have access to classified documents about either so my comments are based on open sources and I’m sure General John Jumper will get me right in any case before the end of the morning.

I think we probably agree that the air campaign failed to exploit the full potential of air power, the shock and simultaneous effect and undoubtedly the need to keep 19 alliance members on site was a very important element in it. The well intentioned decision to move quickly at the end of March contributed to the opening of the air campaign with relatively few resources. There was obviously a misapprehension that Milosovic would back down after little more than a show of force. I myself received an MOD (Ministry of Defence) briefing which emphasized that a large element of the opening campaign was for demonstrating effect, which is not necessarily a good idea. I think maybe we went up to too few targets with too few aircraft for almost too long a period.

You had the spectacle of the commander in chief one day threatening to destroy the Yugoslav military — but asking for triple reinforcements over just a couple of weeks which suggests there were question marks to be raised over initial planning assumptions. I believe at this point we should be very careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. The first is obviously that if we have to operate in a coalition, we have to be prepared for coalition interference. You really can’t say air power don’t do coalitions. Maybe you can, but it is not a good thing. Let’s not reject the concept of air power in support of or in cadence with diplomacy. I don’t think that was a mistake. The mistake, I believe, was underestimating the amount of air power needed to support the diplomacy. Diplomacy surely establishes the parameters within which air power of any military force should be employed. Air power in support of diplomacy will continue under the most operationally cost-effective and most humanitarian instruments.

One of the limitations as we do, living in the democratic bit of control, is the military must respond to political decisions. There is no point, really, for air power exponents grumbling about escalation or gradualism. If we are going to maximize air power responsiveness, we will have to turn it on and turn it off. The important thing is to make sure we reach the necessary impact before we turn it off and establish hard-nose rules for gaps. That is a pretty general point with al lot of implications. The second point, I don’t think we can blame the politicians for all the difficulties. I was uneasy and said so, and wrote so when I heard of the decision to phase out the F-111 Ravens and rely on Navy Prowlers. I thought that all the words had been written of the need to restore EW-capabilities after World War II and restore them again after Korea and restore them again after Vietnam, and so on. I was even more uneasy when I saw this small number of U.S. Air Force crews to be cross-trained into the Prowler. I assumed, and I still hope I wasn’t entirely wrong, that somewhere there was a “black” UAV program existing to make up for the deficiency. I believe the deficiency in Kosovo was particularly significant because do, perhaps, all of us, tend to forget that it really is the losers who tend to learn the real lessons of the conflict. I should say I am slightly cherry about using the word “lesson” at any time because you never know who is going to set the next examination. He might be working from a different book. You may learn lessons from this campaign and might finish up as the French did with Maginot in 1939 or in Bavaria. Those were the very important lessons of World War I.

What Milosovic obviously learned long ago about discipline, decoys, deception, concealment and it looks to the outside that consequently SEAD (Supressionof Enemy Air Defenses) drew a disproportion amount of shooter sorties. Priorities further emphasized by the conscious decision to seek zero casualties. I know it is very easy for me to sit here along way from the F-16 squadrons and bang on about casualties. Force preservation must be a major concern for any course commander. My own view that it if Saint George’s first priority with tackling dragons had been force protection I don’t think he would now be the patron saint of England.

It looks as if pride in force protection induced time consuming concentration on Serbian defenses seems to have precluded simultaneous targeting - in addition to political constraints. It inhibited lower-level target discrimination. It inhibited exploitation of PGM, which was the alliance’s biggest technical advantage and inadvertently as I found at three or four different parts of the world, it gave an impression to the world at large that an unfortunate minimum of civilian casualties was an unavoidable and acceptable future of a war waged for humanitarian causes but the loss of professional military aircrew was not. That was the unfortunate impression that was given.

There is a more important point I believe. There is obviously nothing dishonorable in seeking to minimize ones own casualties. I am somewhat at a loss, if I may say so, when I see some military formations apparently still thinking in terms of putting very large numbers of troops on the ground regardless of national inclinations in their area or direction. But to achieve maximum air power at the same time as force protection means resources allocations SEAD should be given a very high priority. It is no coincidence that many states are seeking to offset Western air power dominance by threatening casualties from surface-to-air defenses. Should deterrence become measured in single figures of shoot-downs, then air power’s effectiveness will be called into question and rightly so. May I stop there and just throw open to the two broad observations that perhaps we have as airmen. I think a little more even now about the transition from totality before 1989, the implications of cadence, responsiveness, of switching on and switching off, which was such an anathema in Vietnam, but may be now a fact of political life which we have to live with. Secondly, force protection by all means, but let us ensure its provision is also matched by sufficient procurement which will ensure that we don’t have to impair the effectiveness of air power itself.

Gen. Dugan: Now we will turn to Doctor Luttwak.

Dr. Luttwak: The careful analysis of what happened in this war shows the largest dramatic fact is that NATO could have failed, could have collapsed, and would have collapsed if Milosovic had not solved the problem by starting to send Albanians out of the country. When the bombing started and if Milosovic hadn’t moved and hadn’t expelled Albanians, I believe two crucial European governments, without which the war could not be pursued, would have insisted on the suspension of the air war. This entire air war, as fought, depended on the Italian bases and the Italians provided all the bases, and a lot of the air defense. But, the Italian government was about to demand a cessation of the air operations. It appeared that the Serbs were being bombed and also because of the decision made prior to the war to attempt to play a kind of information war on the Serbs by launching a very low number of actual strike sorties, but introducing it with the B-1, the B-2, the B-52 cruise launching, showing the fighter bombers of a great nations. There was an attempt at mystification, propaganda, let’s say amplification of the effect by talking out the whole thing - there was imagery of hundreds of cruise missiles carried off decks and now we know what the actual number of sorties flown in the first 14 hours was. This thing backfired and important key people were convinced that Belgrade was subject to massive bombardment of something like Dresden. Meantime, what the Serbs were doing in Kosovo was ambiguous. Then it emerges that it wasn’t Dresden and there were a tiny number of sorties, most of them SEAD operations. If Milosovic hadn’t solved the problem for us by sending out the Albanians, this war could have ended and been a fiasco that would have undermined the alliance. In other words, there were big risks in this war.

The national strategy of the United States, the actual de facto strategy, is to intervene. It is to go to places and operate. That is the real national strategy. There are all certain prices and reasons. President Clinton has apologized for our failure to intervene in Rwanda. Therefore, this notion that we would have intervene except in Africa, intervene for human rights reasons, whatever other reasons, but not only that, there is now a presumption in American politics that there will be the African intervention as well. That is the actual national strategy - to intervene. Please look at the whole list of interventions in the last four years.

At the political level, on the other hand, something new. The rules that Americans can kill themselves bungy jumping, skydiving and canyoneering, but they are not allowed to kill themselves in the country’s interest. That is a fact. This fact is covered over by the intellectual rationalization that Eaker would have laughed his way through - that it is related to something called national interest. In other words, there is a national interest computer and according to what it tells you the national interest is, you are willing to accept casualties for it. That is a very comforting thought. It is an idea that it is rational, there is a reason. In reality, when countries accept casualties, they will fight for the most silly reasons. Not exactly the war for Jenkins’ ear, but you know. When countries are no longer willing to accept casualties, they invent things like OOTW to say there is a whole category of things called operations other than war, they are not worth dying for and then there are these magic condition called war where the things are worth it.

Historically, when countries have reached this stage, what they do is rely on mercenaries, often their own citizens, who get into the mercenary uniform because they want to fight. If, in our case, we don’t rely on mercenaries — we have air power. Technology has provided a substitute. We do not have to hire the mercenary; we have air power. But the problem with air power, of course, is that we are not talking about Dresden. We are talking about very small volumes of air power, with very small ton-ages of air power, but delivered with dramatic increase in precision. At breakfast, Dr. Rebecca Grant reminded us that precision is not new. Precision goes back to the beginning of air power and Douhet. The reason a country went off the deep end exaggerating the value of air power is precisely because in 1916, 17 or 18 they could fly in negative space at negative altitudes and did drop the bombs right on the hostile munitions plant. Precision is not new, but we now have routine precision. This discovery was made even by the Air Force in the preparations for Desert Shield. Routine precision and it is such a revolution and innovation that the complexities have yet to be absorbed. This notion is really acupuncture and acupuncture means paralysis and paralysis means constriction.

This leads to a terrific problem. Precision requires targeting. Everything depends how good the targeting is. The problem with targeting in addition to all the known problems of targeting, which are tremendous, is that the crucial issue in order to make the other guy back down, you must understand his politics, his soul. You can’t photograph his soul. You have to have a level of targeting. And when organizations like the U.S. Air Force, which according to the books is supposed to rely on other organizations, in the exact degree in which they rely on other organizations, they will go wrong.

The targeting you have to do yourself and it involves intelligence. But as General Jumper found out, and a crucial point, the Serbian population forced Milosovic to call the war off when the life of the Serbian population was made very uncomfortable. Other populations will not have that reaction. Other populations are simply used to it, are passive, they are used to being maltreated and you can then persecute and make their lives so dramatic. The question is what is the difference between the Serbs and Iraq. You cannot photograph that difference. It is a question of culture and General Eaker would have said that is the right thing. The U.S. Air Force needs a department of culture.

The problem created is what happens in peace time? One of the things that happens in peace time, for example, ugly little black boxes are not going to get the money. You are going to buy the platform. The Raven story is no joke. It turns out this was the constraining limiting force in the entire array of U.S. forces. The level of national military strategy, on the other hand, which fortunately doesn’t concern this group, you have the problem of having a whole force structure, manpower-intensive elements of force structure, premised on the fact that the United States does in fact accept loss of casualties. You have all these manpower intensive ground forces and others which are non-usable. It is like a guy having 13 Cadillacs and one gallon of gasoline. You have thirteen Cadillacs to drive around in, and only one gallon of gasoline. That is the plug, that is the limiting factor — casualty tolerance. We find ourselves resource-constrained because most of our resources have to be employed for forces that are not usable under the current political culture of the United States. They are simply not usable.

The pretense that they would be usable if the national interest called for it, a vital national interest, and all these other Weinberger-Powell-Cheney doctrine of vital national interests; that means Nicaragua really does invade us. Then we stand and fight and defend. They are not usable in the wars that do exist. This is how we end up with situations like the Raven. We have an array of problems with the central problem is this: if we are going to make it with this kind of precision air power in very low volume akin to acupuncture we really have to know where to put the needle. We have been lucky in Kosovo. We should really focus on this. Targeteering becomes the crucial point within the level of the force strategy of the U.S. Air Force.

Gen. Dugan: I think we have enough to work with here. I have grown to despise the word targeting. Targeting is a terrific concept for the captain and for the sergeant. In my mind it is not a useful concept for the colonel and the general. They need to be thinking about what is the outcome of having targeted and destroyed or degraded or otherwise disposed of this spot on the ground where somebody puts the cross hairs. Somehow we ought to be talking about the objectives of this when we get in public and are trying to explain ourselves. John Jumper, how about talking about the direction of air and space war and how about talking that with relation to the selection of objectives and how one best proceeds. What have we learned?

Gen. Jumper: General Dugan as you well know we are going through a discussion right now internal to the Air Force on the integration of air and space. It has always been my contention that we spend too much time worrying about that because in this particular conflict, to me, the line was rather transparent. We need to concentrate on, I think Dr. Luttwak hit it right on the nose, targeting; I call it effects. Effects-based targeting is a word that is a term that gets bounced around and effects-based targeting has to be the objective of the air-campaign planners as opposed to campaign-by-target-list management, which means that you take a list of approved targets and you sort of manage them on a day-to-day basis. Effects-based targeting is when you take down the electrical grid and to do that a sophisticated target analysis tells us to get the desired effects measured in days, hours, weeks or months, we have to hit these critical nodes in this network. You go after that effect. That assumes you have the freedom to go after all those targets in a near-simultaneous way and the political sensitivities to one or two of those targets might disrupt the whole plan. We have to find a way to get the political consensus behind the effect rather than focused on the target.

The other things that we need to do that became apparent in this is some of the same bugaboos we dealt with in Vietnam when we were trying to find tanks under trees in 1964. I spent a lot of time personally at 100 feet and 500 knots trying to find tanks under trees and I lost a lot of my friends doing that and they’ll even tell you it is a loser’s game. This is where the Predator and others of our systems, when we tie them together in ways that are transparent to those who are trying to gather the information and we continue as we are already doing to worry less about platforms and more about effects, then we will have arrived at what General Fogleman called find, fix, track, target, engage and assess continuum that I think defines the star we ought to be guiding our ship towards into the next century.

There is also the age-old problem of hitting the mobile target under the weather. The effect is not available to us today. We don’t have the means to deal with this problem in an efficient way. We are getting there but we have to continue to develop this ability to get to those targets that are most important to the field commander in an effective and efficient way. Dr. Luttwak and Tony Mason hit very well on electronic warfare aspects of this and on the suppression of enemy air defenses. We learned from this war that it is a different ballgame when the SAMs don’t come up to fight. Everything that we do is predicated on the bad guy’s willingness to engage. When he folds his tent and hides his SAMs under the trees during the day time, he gives you access. It has the desired effect, but it also keeps that element of doubt out there that you have to continually deal with. We have to figure out how to deal with this particular problem. Those are sub elements of a larger target-effects based mentality that you and I have talked about and is very important for our future.

Dr. Luttwak: General, for the question of finding the moving, low-contrast targets, the aim of force strategy should be to succeed by attacking the large, fixed target of classic form but attacking those targets in the right order to achieve those effects. That is how you are going to do it. Because for the low-contrest, non-fixed targets, that is why we have far different air machine - the armed helicopter. I was under the impression that I paid for Apaches with my taxes so when they wanted to go and hint these armored vehicles, I wanted the Apaches to go into action. When they told me they couldn’t send them into action because they might get shot down, I had no sympathy for that. None whatsoever. I operate a ranch in South America and I fly with low over Bolivia. That is more dangerous to fly in peace than to fly in the NATO air force in war? An attack helicopter pilot is supposed to be sent into action. If you are fighting a humanitarian war and you send him into action, of course some will get killed, but by getting killed you affirm that at least you are trying to help the people who are getting killed. I don’t think the Air Force should go down that track. I don’t think we should solve that problem.

Gen. Jumper: The fact is we have to find these problems. Who finds them.

Dr. Luttwak: Low-altitude, very slow, negative speed…

Gen. Jumper: No hiding under trees, no electronic devices. It is the finding and killing of them that are two different things. I don’t argue with you taking the weapon of choice and that could indeed be an armed helicopter if it is within range and they are there, etc…I have no argument with that.

Dr. Luttwak: But I think every time air power goes that path, air power loses its way. You are trying to achieve the political victory at the political level which you are going to achieve only when you apply the leverage. The word targeting is no good but we know what we need. Your payoff has always been from the large fixed target in classic war. The problem will always been to be able to attack them subject to political constraint. As you pointed out General, the target which gives us the victory, which ends the war which achieves humanitarian aim, will be very often the same target that provokes the reaction - the negative political reaction and positive move. This brings the Air Force into a new level, this should be the focus of strategic force. The target which pays off is the target they will tend to not let you attack. That makes perfect sense. That opens an area we should look at.

Gen. Jumper: The point is that when the Army dials 911, we can’t say we can’t answer the phone and there are instances when we are obliged to respond and when we are obliged to respond against this category of targets, we need to have some, maybe not the most competent capability that exists within the U.S. military, but we have to have the competence to respond reliably to that set of targets on behalf of the ground commander. That is our obligation.

Dr. Luttwak: You can solve that problem of finding the low-(unintelligible), but you cannot solve it if the other guy has an air defense. There is a thing called close air support and we have seen people buying specifically designed aircraft, talking about it, trying it, doing it and actually if the other guy has air defense, nothing is ever done. People have only gotten themselves shot down trying to do it. There are some problems in life which are no solvable. How do you solve the problem of going down looking for that elusive hard to find target.

Gen. Jumper: You don’t go down; you use your technology to locate those targets looking through trees, through camouflage and there are people I see in this audience who can tell us how to do that and put the UAV below the clouds with a laser spot and drop the laser bomb through the clouds. We were just about to start doing that with a laser-equipped UAV when the war ended.

Dr. Luttwak: Was the UAV smarter than your piloted aircraft?

Gen. Jumper: No, it is braver (laughter).

Gen. Dugan: We did not have in fact friendly forces on the ground where the circumstances are essential and where they are important in a close air support situation. That is where we would have the equipment to communicate with, or that were in a position to see, point out, in some cases designate these small tactical vehicles. So the circumstances in which we have trained, prepared the team was not perfect.

Dr. Luttwak: We did not send in the team to designate the target.

Gen. Dugan: We didn’t.

Gen. Jumper: The boys on the ground have to be in the right place. They have to be looking into the right valley. They have to be there at exactly the right time. The UAV can go from valley to valley, and it can loiter. Loitering becomes part of the problem. Loitering to make sure that not only that you’ve located the target, but you’ve located the right aim point, but that target and aim point is not a friendly one in disguise. We have documented instances of Serbian special police using the very tractors that the civilians were using to go from house to house and to burn and to kill. It takes some time loitering over a particular point at fairly low altitude to distinguish the difference between the two. This is the thing for which the UAV is particularly suited.

Dr. Luttwak: And UAV have no mothers. The reason you come by UAVs is that we still have a situation where people do have real mothers and as a consequence are not usable and that is how we find ourselves in this constrained environment.

Gen. Dugan: We heard the word victory used. How should we think about victory? There is opinion in the United States that says the battle was never actually joined. It wasn’t exactly a war at all. It began with a formal declaration and it ended without complete victory. It had ended not with unconditional surrender but only a cease fire. Are Americans so narrow that they only view unconditional surrender as an appropriate end to a war? What do Americans look like from Europe?

AVM Mason: Yes, there has been in history a residue of thinking about total war where you either win or lose, and accept the consequences. It is probably a little more difficult today for the United States. Perhaps because Europe over a thousand years or more has seen two different kinds of wars - one particular kind was finished with a treaty and a compromise and everybody started living again. Then this last century we’ve seen the two total devastation of World War I and II. There may be an inclination in Europe, a willingness to accept compromise, even with all that implies with democratic leaders, which may be to say a rather more in the European tradition.

In my opening comment I specifically didn’t refer to the overall implications of the choice of air power as an instrument or the overall relationship between Europe and the United States, specifically between the United States Air Force and European air forces. We have acknowledged - we now being Europeans - we know there are two kinds of air powers — the United States’ air power and there is everybody else’s. When we talk about what air power can do and what air power can’t do, we’ve really got to decide whose air power we are talking about. When we look at Kosovo and the air campaign, General Jumper has made some very complimentary comments about the contribution of X number of air forces, but we all know what proportions were done by the United States Air Force. We also know what kind bombs were done by the United States Air Force. Europeans spend over $160 billion a year on defense, and you better ask what you get for it. We spend for example less than one-half of the United States on air craft and less than one-third on R&D. Kosovo further emphasized shortages in PGMs, security, and communications. You are familiar with the list, airlift, IFV, electronic warfare, sound discrimination and so on and so on. But it seems to me that there is a third implication of Kosovo which has tremendous significance for both of us — a concentration on the high, expensive confidential end of technology, information and all-weather pursuit is a concern in Europe. Unless we in Europe do get our act together, we are going to finish up as spear carriers to the United States. There is a rather more deeper issue than that because we have to consider what the United States Air Force is looking for from its coalition partners. It is not just a question of interoperability. It is a question over all if the United States wishes to sustain its leading edge, how far is it going willing to share their technology with Europe and how far does the United States Air Force itself wish to go to allow European allies to make contributions to coalition operations. I won’t belabor that point, but it is much more at stake here than just the ability of the Europeans to drop PGMs. And if I can make just one final point, a great deal of publicity has been given to installation of a defense agreement of the European Union. I simply observe that while that is a step on the road, the is going to be long, tortuous, full of obstacles and it is going to need a lot of digital navigation. But behind Kosovo, or emerging from Kosovo I think there will be a reassessment, not only of the NATO alliance itself, but of the relationship between the air forces. Thank God, perhaps, we do have a great deal in common to build on. But I do think we have to very great deal about the interaction of coalition’s air power and the interaction of air power in the coaltion.

Dr. Luttwak: Under this $160 billion, we are buying forces that are not useable in war. That is why when the Congress declares, in talking about ground forces in Germany and Italy, Germany and Italy have two immense armies. Together they are about four times as high as the Chinese. Reaction at the political level was…you take it for granted after 50 years of peace that you spend most of your money on armed forces that are not really armed forces, they are theatrical props. The second point is that under this $160 billion, you can maintain a defense industry, which gives you independence for peacetime — an industrial independence in peace time from the United States. So the choice they made is this: I keep this industry that gives me peace time independence and the only price is that if I go to war, I become fully depend. In other words, the priorities in European spending are to have an industrial independence. The price for it are inefficiencies that mean when you go to war, you become completely dependent. They must answer the question whether to be independent in peace or independent in war? They say, well, it comes to war. Then, how expensive is it to have the capability to fight an advanced air war. For example, look at the Swedes and what they have done historically in terms of generating air power. Look at the example of the Israelis in using UAVs, using the laser-guided as opposed to going into the more expensive imaging stealth-guided. The example of the Israelis shows that you can do it within European budgets so long as you are willing to actually allocate the money for sensors and munitions as opposed to the upkeep of larger forces that you have no intention of using in war and other such luxuries.

It is not an impossibly costly thing to get the capability. The Israelis have the capability to do it. Do they have an all-weather capability, definitely not. The question is, what kind of all-weather capability do you need if you are going to go after the large, fixed target of classic force. You don’t need that coverage. You are really going to end up spending a huge amounts of money if you are trying to go attack these elusive low-contrast targets. The last time the United States has done that successfully was during the Korean War when the Chinese extended themselves with infantry forces, had no air defense whatsoever, engulfed the Marines and Marine air came in and delivered that close-air support. It has never been done since. You can spend a lot of money down that rat hole and you will not do it.

Why? Because the other guy will always have some air defense. The UAV will solve a lot of your problems, but that is also a function of assuming their immunity. UAV is immune if it is really cheap; if it really doesn’t have a mother. He may not have a mother, but he may have a father in your treasury department if you will go down the track of very expensive, very fancy UAVs. And yet you need those very expensive UAVs if you are going to go after the low-contrast target in really lousy weather.

Gen. Dugan: Isn’t it in fact that those targets are the ones that are really critical for the center of gravity.

Dr. Luttwak: General Eaker would have said it is very difficult to go down that road, but more important, don’t do it. Don’t go there. That is not the road to victory.

Gen. Dugan: But there are a lot of Americans and indeed those in policy positions in this city who think that those are, in fact, the objectives that need to be destroyed. A former assistant secretary of state claimed that the war ended with aiming at targets in Serbia that were collateral to the war efforts in Kosovo. You’ve talked about, among other things, acupuncture. What is acupuncture mean? Put that in context.

Dr. Luttwak: In World War II, there was precision, but by and large, the target definition that was given to bomber pilots was something like Dresden. If you can find Dresden and drop the bomb within the municipal boundaries of Dresden, you had done everything you’ve been asked for. Today, on the one side, there is much less volume. We have physically much less volume. By the way, if we had the volume, we still couldn’t use it because of the political constraints. Therefore, we are armed with very little volume. On the other hand, we can acquire with routine precision.

That creates the problem of knowing not merely where Dresden is, but what the particular building and not even the particular building, but what end of a building sometimes. That creates two problems. First, it is hard to find the right building. Sometimes you can even hit the wrong embassy and so forth. The much more important problem is the decision as to what kind of effects you are trying to achieve. In acupuncture, you put a needle somewhere in order to achieve a feeling of well-being or to reduce pain somewhere else.

That creates a terrific set of problems that we encountered first during Desert Shield and then in Kosovo. We came close to losing this one. If Milosovic had not sent the refugees out en mass, I believe the Italian government and the German government would have forced a cessation of this fighting. The Italian prime minister could have stopped this war with one phone call. If he had called Vicenza and said that’s it; there will be no more take offs from Italian air bases. We could still have done the war, but it would have been a different volume and such. These are acupuncture can be magically powerful and it can fail catastrophically. If you did a Dresden, one thing was certain, that after you bombed Dresden and you did it three or four times because once was not going to be enough, he wasn’t going to generate a lot of output out of Dresden.

But today with this kind of bombing you do, you have no idea. For example, you cut the bridges in Baghdad, you cut off the power supply, you cut off the television, and you make the population completely miserable, then Saddam Hussein just says I just discovered it is easier to rule them when they are running around desperately trying to keep alive. You have consolidated his power. We have made it easier for Saddam Hussein to stay in power by forcing his population into survival mode.

With the Serbs, it was exactly the opposite. If we had promised the Serbs a grand campaign, if we had said the U.S. Army is not available or the European armies are not available, or the Marine Corps is not available, but we are going to hire some mercenaries and they are going to attack you on the ground, then that would have been credible. At that point, Milosovic could have turned around to the Serbs, you are suffering a great deal but now thank God, they are giving us the ground war, we can, therefore, go into the Serb Heroic mode and the other Serbs would have said, "that is great. Let’s hold on. Let’s not surrender. Let’s wait until we have a chance to fight a little war like my father and my grand father did."

So, instead of the ground war precipitating your victory, it may have had the exact contrary effect. The question is that according to the textbooks, the Air Force doesn’t have to worry its pretty little head about any of these things because there is a higher level that will give you all that intelligence and will give you all that guidance. They will only give you that intelligence and guidance in peace time. When the actual war event, when the actual crises happens, these people fade away. These realities are unavoidable. General Eaker would have said, all the better. Let’s deal with it.

Gen. Dugan: General Jumper, you offered earlier to compare and contrast Allied Force with Desert Storm. What are some of the observations that you would make.

Gen. Jumper: The first and most obvious is that on the first of January 1991, Saddam Hussein had 66 divisions, 43 of which were arrayed along the Kuwaiti-Saudi Arabian border. There were 1,700 airplanes at his disposal, to include more than 700 fighters; and the impending nature of his ground array made it look like he could attack at any moment which then puts the prospect of negotiation of a Ramboulliet like negotiation on the back burner as the military urgency takes over.

In this situation, we didn’t start this on the 24^th of March. The genocide started much earlier than that. We watched during Ramoulliet as the forces that we would later be graded on, that is, the tanks and the heavy vehicles, massed north of the border and came down into Kosovo deployed into tactical formations into the villages, and joined, as Dr. Luttwak pointed out, with a paramilitary who actually did most of the killing, but the real weapons that were used against the population were handguns against the temples of the people. The forces that did this were already arrayed and in position at the time that the consensus within the alliance solidified to the point that military action was allowed to happen.

Then there was that abiding belief, Dr. Luttwak and Tony Mason pointed it out, that the campaign will last two nights and that after two nights, Mr. Milosovic would be compelled to come to the table. It didn’t work out that way. What we saw was a solidification of the political will to intensify and certainly at the end of the Washington Summit we had the consensus to do the sort of intensification that was necessary. The analysis of the conditions and the situation, to say nothing of the other factors, will show we had about 24 days of good weather out of 78 and the terrain, and the trees and all of those things that remind us Vietnam conspired to work against what I would call an efficient air campaign. I can only say that I was convinced that even without the efficiency I would have hoped for, we were able to do it any way.

AVM Mason: If I could just follow those comments of General Jumper, if you feel it back through Desert Storm through Bosnia and to Kosovo, you can identify a series of common themes which I think were very important to all of us in the room. If we get beyond the detail of the targeting and beyond the detail of the questioning of the Prowler decision, I think what we’ve got in all three environments is the fact that air power shaped an environment. In all three environments, the opposition had his own agenda, his own strategy. In different ways, he wanted a ground-force strategy as General Jumper has just reinforced and as Ed Luttwak mentioned earlier. Milosovic really wanted us to get into ravines and into gorges. He really wanted to relive the Serbian situation in the 1940s again. The use of air power to shape an environment, to deny an opponent the strategy of his choice is a fundamental one. When you add to that, despite the mistakes, just one piece of targeting which is difficult to live with, it was achieved with minimal casualties and it was achieved with ultimately securing coalition objectives.

If I could come back to that question that you hit me with earlier about perceptions of victory. I think yes there may be, reinforcing what I said earlier, a stronger legacy of the United States of victory meaning we totally dictate the peace, rather than, OK guys, let’s see what we can negotiate out of this, which means we are not in a zero-sum game anymore. Perhaps those who say, why the hell didn’t we go on to Baghdad and sort out Saddam, whatever that may have meant, and no matter how totally impossible it was, that is the mentality that is looking for total victory rather than perhaps securing a better managed situation than you had before. This is why you have air power shaping an environment, you have it denying an opponent the strategy of his choice, and imposing our strategy and capitalizing on Western advantages. As I said in an earlier case in Washington not too long ago, it seems to be totally honorable in a society like yours and ours which sets a high premium on individual life, it seems to me to be a very noble aspiration to seek a way of war which not only reduces our casualties to a minimum, but reduces the oppositions casualties to a minimum as well.

Gen. Dugan: Dr. Luttwak, you’ve written about classical war and post-heroic warfare. Then you describe some of the consequences of what that means for casualties. Is this transition that you pose permanent or temporary? Is it local to the United States or is it Western or is it broader? What does that mean for the future of force structures and requirements and military operations?

Dr. Luttwak: The refusal to accept casualties as a new phenomenon was first observed in Afghanistan where the Russians were traumatized by casualties of the kind that they had historically suffered before breakfast. Of all the people killed in Afghanistan, the maximum number of Russians was 14,000. There were many days in Russian history where they lost 14,000 before breakfast and they went on to win the war. It was noticed that although the Russian population was larger in the absolute, that it was composed of completely different demographic basis. Instead of a family with 7,8, or 9 children of whom one or two would die normally of disease so that death was accepted, now suddenly everybody had one son or 1.2 sons and even without television, without Congress, without the Duma, the casualty constraint made itself felt in the Kremlin so powerfully that the war in Afghanistan was constrained. The commander of the motorized rifle division, was told don’t do this, don’t do that. You have a wonderful little battle there, but please don’t do it. That is where it first emerges.

Incidentally, that shows that the whole theory that Vietnam War was shaped by television, of which hundreds of books fill the libraries, is totally false because in Afghanistan with zero television, it was exactly the same reaction in a refusal to accept casualties. These are the facts.

If the demographic theory is true and I really have no investment in that, then it won’t change. You have 1.1 boys per family and that boy is no longer expendable. Yet you have organizations like the United States Marine Corps which are based on the assumption that you have expendable boys. If you have no expendable boys you cannot use the Marine Corps. If you keep the Marine Corps and then use it for operations other than war, as they call them, that means you are maintaining a very expensive paramilitary police, so expensive in manpower to sustain all the combat support to back up the combat that you are not actually going to do it, that even putting a few thousand men on the ground in Bosnia-Macedonia becomes a terrible burden because you have all these people in the support structure for a major war so the number of people deployable maneuver are very few. Once you put a few thousand, your whole organization becomes over-stretched. This is to me like going down the road of the close air support. It is a very expensive way to do it and in the end you never succeed. As grown ups, we should accept in our military strategy that these are the ways that "A" we are terrifically interventionists and "B" we refuse to accept casualties. That has enormous implications for our military policy as indeed for European military policy. We know what to do except we don’t want to do it out of inertia, out of sentimentalism, and out of entrenched vested interests and so on. In our case, luckily we still manage to generate the capabilities, the all-service air power that we can still use. In the European case, they can’t generate enough of that capability for their purposes. Nothing is more common place than to find yourself militarily weak because you are spending a lot of money for the royal guards and the imperial guards who have long ago settled down. It is a very common thing to have military forces that are not usable, which eat up your budget. That is what Kosovo warfare is giving us.

Gen. Dugan: There is enough issues on the table to probably last a few years and I’m sure some of these discussions will persist for a few years. I’d like to sum up and I don’t think I can. We came to some conclusions about individual and coalition performance, both by personnel and by equipment and there were high grades there. I remember when we flew at night in the U.S. Air Force, but we flew solely to fly at night. We weren’t doing much. We are now in the mode where we’ve seized the night. We have advantages at night time that we just don’t have in day time. In that regard the technology and the training has just changed the lay of the land entirely. We have seen a trend of shaping the military environment through air power over the past decade and indeed we’ve seen it in a mode that honors our Western commitments to the preservation of life, both enemy and friendly. We’ve seen the shaping of battle space by air power in an effective manner although we don’t know what the outcomes are from Allied Force yet. Then again, we didn’t know the outcomes of World War I for 30 or 40 years and the outcomes of World War II may have finally concluded with the wall coming down in 1989 and the outcomes of this activity I suspect are still in the air and still flexible and still changing and transitory. We will entertain questions at this time.

Question: This is a question for General Jumper. I heard a lot about how the air campaign only got 13 tanks. Is that the correct number of tanks and is that correct measure of merit for the operation?

Gen. Jumper: I just got finished with a very extensive search for all of the impact points that are relative to mobile targets. Hundreds were visited and looked at by a joint team whose report will be out in the near future. The answer will be the number is certainly greater than 13. That is the first part of your question. What is the relevance of that is another question that in my personal view has more to do with preparing the battlefield for a ground invasion and other things that make tanks more relevant to the battle. However, we are doing a count on armored vehicles and it will be exhaustive. We are also looking at some of the effects of other munitions on some of our munitions against deeply buried targets and against airfields. One of the myths that was dispelled in this conflict was that you can’t close an airfield - yes, we closed airfields. As a matter of fact, we closed almost all the airfields so there was no active air activity off of them. The tanks are being counted as well as the pieces of artillery, the pieces of mortar, the armored personnel carriers, and the decoys that we hit. Another element of this was how many decoys did we hit. We did hit decoys. I was happy to hit decoys. We had plenty of bombs and I was happy to have Serb manpower employed in the business of making decoys. We didn’t hesitate to knock out decoys any time we found them. Those answers will be forthcoming and be made very public.

Question: We lost one F-117 and another was damaged. How did that happen and what does it say about the state of electronic warfare and what we need to do for it? Was it a mistake not to bomb the wreckage and where is the wreckage today?

Gen. Jumper: As you know, in Desert Storm and Operation Allied Force, we put our stealth assets into the most dangerous places night after night and after these hundreds of sorties that have been flown in most dangerous situations, the loss of one is certainly better than any of us expected. It is also true that the technology of the F-117 is several iterations old as stealth goes, and we have never claimed that those airplanes are invisible. The other elements that go into what might have caused the airplane to get shot down we can’t go into in a public forum, but bombing the wreckage was certainly considered. And it was a matter of risk versus reward and the problem of being able to precisely fix where that wreckage was. The decision not to go after it was made after balancing all of those factors. Where is it now? I have no idea.

Question: The Air Force Association’s issue brief talks about NATO not stopping the original depopulation of Kosovo or the thousands of deaths that resulted from the ethnic cleansing campaigns. From a professional airman’s standpoint, is that a fair thing to judge the air campaign against? As a professional airman, was that your going in goal? It certainly was the going-in goal articulated by President Clinton, Javiar Solano and George Robertson, but is that a fair goal to judge the air campaign against?

Gen. Jumper: No airman ever claimed that air power would be able to stop genocide, especially genocide that was started long before the air campaign even started. The situation we found ourselves in was one that was starting an air campaign with the political conditions that we described before. The belief that only a few days of bombing would bring about the political result that was the objective of the initial campaign and then escalation that resulted from the influx of refugees that then began to solidify that political consensus. There was no claim ever that air power was going to stop genocide. There was certainly every attempt on our part throughout to do what we could do deter his prosecution of genocide on the ground and the treatment of the refugees. It was the most difficult that you can deal with when you are dealing with air power.

AVM Mason: If I could just offer a Brit supplement to that. We know there are different kinds of enunciation that were objectives as the campaign progressed. The statements coming out of the British MOD were very consistent — we were stopping the repression and creating circumstances in which the refugees could return. If you apply those two objectives, than clearly air power brought about a success. The other point I wish to make, it is very easy to look at air power and criticize air power for what it did or didn’t do. That is rather like looking at Vietnam and criticizing air power for what it did and didn’t do and forgetting what were 450,000 ground troops doing in Vietnam and what was the measure of their success at the time? The fact of the matter here is that politically, operationally, temporally and for every other conceivable reason, it could only be air power, whether airmen wished it to be air power on its own or not, that is what it had to be. Certainly I know I can speak from colleagues in the British Royal Air Force and I am reasonably certain I can speak for my American cousins, at no time did any airman of any repute every suggest that this could be done or should be done by air power on its own.

Question: Air Vice Marshall Mason, you touched on the spending problems for our European allies and the focuses and the problems that were highlighted in this campaign. Can you go into any specific highlights of what Europeans need to spend more on system-wise - airlift, PGM, etc…

AVM Mason: It is a very difficult question to answer because Ed Luttwak has given part of the grounds for the answer that anybody has got to give. But I think it is perhaps difficult here in Washington to remember that most European countries do not see a distant threat. Most do not see an obvious need for airlift. I have to say, I suppose some of the governments are quite happy to go along and allow the high tech to remain the domination of the United States. If one looks at recent statements, taking a certain amount of support in Europe, airlift is a priority. Electronic warfare is a priority and particularly airborne surveillance and information systems are priorities. A problem arises not just as political perceptions of threats, but also structures which were designed not just for Cold War, but as expressions of nationality. I am thinking of conscription, for example. Debates on conscription abound, but how do you transit from conscript services to professional services at the same time you are downsizing, at the same time you are re-equipping, at the same time as you are wishing to expand military capacity. All at the same time. These are other questions which mean, I am quite certain and very sound, that the gap between identification of weakness after Kosovo and its realization or correction is going to be a long time.

Dr. Luttwak: The European inadequacies are very rarely in the nature of gross absence - for example, no airlift. That is a gross absence. Much more typically, they have on the whole necessary system to accomplish the mission, they might have 80 percent, which they require because of different reasons. If you have some military force, you need to have the accoutrements. What they don’t acquire are the necessary completing subsystems on the equipment side and what they don’t acquire are the necessary kind of training. They drive about, shoot, and fly, but they don’t necessarily engage in the appropriate combat flying exercise. Therefore, there is a money problem. There is a much bigger mentality problem. The mentality of saying, I am really going to operate. It is dramatic when you see wonderfully, perfectly competent platforms, certainly very expensive platforms and then look at the systems actually there. Then look at the training they did and the similar platforms are actually engaging them. You would conclude that you don’t actually need a lot of money - you do need a change of lethality and where you are going to need the money most likely will be more on the training side than the equipment side. That is where you are really going to need the big bucks, more than equipment. Because 90 percent of the thing is in place. It is just the missing subsystems that don’t cost very much money. Let’s say you compare the average European air force with the Israeli air force, what you find out is, the Israelis have simply bought the necessary subsystems. Where is the big difference between the Europeans and the Americans budget wise is not the equipment - it is on the training side.

AVM Mason: Could I just make one final observation? I ask friends to bear in mind that Europe remains a geographical expression and not a political description.

Dr. Luttwak: Except that the Royal Air Force enters the Gulf War with the very expensive Tornado and the very expensive training and the only they were missing were the little designators so they were tied to the traditional, NATO-context low-altitude suppression strategy which made perfect sense, but in order to have the rest of the capability was not to double the budget, but with a few thousand bucks. I was just pointing out that the British participate to some degree to this phenomenon.

Question: There was a lot of talk this morning about evolving some of the risk to unmanned platforms. Obviously played a big role in the conflict. At the same time, the numbers of those platforms are extremely limited and they are losses were in some ways substantial - something like 24 or so of these aircraft, including four or five Predators were either shot down or lost in operational accidents. Are you concerned with both the pace of acquisition of these systems in replacing the lost assets and the loss rates that they sustained against what is arguably now seen as a very limited air defense capability? If you face a more robust capability in the future, are UAVs going to remain viable, at least the generation that is being procured now?

Gen. Jumper: In the area of shoulder-fired SAMS and Triple A, the Serbs can be called very robust. Those are the main threats against the UAV. I think we are on a good program schedule. You have to remember that the Predator only in April of 1999 delivered its first fully operational system. Remember, this was an ACTD that was taken by the air force and essentially from 1994 until 1999 we had the system deployed in Bosnia with pre-production equipment - breadboard systems and not enough assets to train at Indian Springs where the squadrons are stationed. We are bringing on a system that is still very much in the test phase and what we can say here is we were just able to conclude a very extensive test and evaluation over the skies of Kosovo which taught us several things, not the least of which was the laser capability which I’ve described earlier. I think we are on track with the UAV capability we have now. We will put the UAV much more in the targeting loop than in the collection loop. I think we will be doing more aggressive air controlling directly from the Predator in those situations where targets are either hidden away or very difficult to get to and require extensive loiter time to sort out. Programmatically we are pretty much on track with the modifications I’ve described.

Question: There is one mobile ground target which has the potential to be a real show-stopper militarily and politically and that is a ballistic missile carrying chem-bio or God forbid, nuclear warheads. Where is the air force going in terms of finding and killing those kinds of targets quickly.

Gen. Jumper: First of all, we operated for at least 30 years in the NATO alliance under the assumption that we would be operating under a chemical and biological threat. It amazes me that we’ve forgotten that we grew up dealing with that environment. Not only as ground-based air forces, but as U.S. Navy aboard ships and the U.S. Army in the field continue to be proficient at dealing with these sorts of threats. Is it of concern? You bet it is of concern. If you look at a priority list among the regional commanders in chief, you will find this very high on each one’s priority list and we are putting a great deal of technology against this particular problem. It is not without a great deal of attention. I don’t buy into the notion that you can make Aviano go away with some chemical weapons. Concerning the notion that this is some how easy to do - they may be easy to manufacture, but easy to package, easy to weaponize, but easy to deliver is not always true. Still in all, it is a capability we have to be very alert to and we have to continue to deal with. The point you make on the nuclear weapons is a very good point, and we have to continue with our counter-proliferation efforts to stop in any way we can the availability of nuclear parts and pieces that we might have to contend with in the future. If I had to worry about any one thing, it would be that for the near future.

Question: Talking about the degree of political control and how that will play in the future, I would like to hear your comments on the complications of pursing a coherent effects-based strategy in view of high political constraints. Then, General Jumper, if you could comment on that cycle of effects-based strategy on where we are at in combat and operational assessment.

AVM Mason: I singled that point out, out of several, because I believe it is probably the most difficult challenge that faces us. It seems to me you do have the ability of air power to impose by simultaneous attack considerable shock. Unfortunately, when that kind of strategy is proposed, it inevitably, looking at the effects which are required, requires targeting which could have both civilian and military implications. I will defer to General John on my right, but I suspect that they may have been one of the inhibiting factors, initial disagreements over alliance targeting. You may actually have to ask a much more fundamental question and that is whether you should be looking at a coalition of the willing in future operations rather than an established alliance of 19 members which was established with complete different reasons. I know for example that although very quietly questioning is already taking place in Europe about some of the thinking behind the current or revised NATO strategic concept. Just how realistic is this because how can you square this circle of 19 uncertain decision makers with a requirement for simultaneous effect and swift effect. I don’t like to use the word never or incompatible but the two must be very close to it. You seek continuity of political objective, political unanimity and military method as you always have done and you choose your coalition accordingly.

Gen. Jumper: From the air campaign planning point of view, it is always the neatest and tidyist when you can get a political consensus of the objective of a certain phase and then go about that objective with freedom to act as you see militarily best. That has been pointed out several times today and is not the situation we find ourselves in. We can rile against that but it does no good. It is the politics of the moment that is going to dictate what we are able to do. If the politics of the moment, if the limit of that consensus means gradualism, then we are going to have to find a way to deal with a phased-air campaign with gradual escalation and with the turning of rheostats with regard to air power. Efficiency may be sacrificed. It is not the way we want it. We hope to be able to convince that is not the best way to do it but in some cases we are going to have to live with that situation.

Dr. Luttwak: From the outside, you look like the only way to keep this alliance together is one by gradualism. Did it play a role? Was it significant that after the Gulf War, the United States military as a whole and even the U.S. Air Force did not in fact make that state-of-the-art benchmark model phase. In fact it was a bit of a repudiation of the air campaign of Desert Storm. Instead of being accused of fighting the old war and the refusal to evoke the old war - here is the old warrior, he won a great victory. Instead of coming to the table and saying this is the way I won in the old days, what happens immediately after Desert Storm, is that everybody explains, "Oh, it is a special case. It doesn’t really matter. It was really because there were no trees there. The weather was good." The weather was not good - I remember day after day the weather was lousy. It was incredibly bad. But no, no, the weather was good. The people associated with it were themselves repudiated. I worked for a Colonel, and as far as I know he didn’t collect any major offenses during that time. However, the guy wasn’t promoted, he was kicked out - he was retired. The colonel was not allowed a normal retirement schedule.

The repudiation of the Gulf War as the model of simultaneous attack to achieve in addition to the physical effect to achieve a shock effect that was not available on the table even though the allies might have said, ok, this is the right way to do it militarily but you know we have coalitions. That is real life. But in fact the model was not presented. The general begins by saying this is the way it ought to be done to achieve the maximum effect and now let’s see what we must live with because we are significant, we are important, hence we are subject to political constraints and that is normal. But I don’t think the model was presented. Am I wrong?

Gen. Jumper: You are wrong. The model was presented. The principles of parallel warfare are well understood by everyone and that is the desired mode.

Dr. Luttwak: So we go in and present this and say this is the right way to do it. So now we have real life - if you want to be left alone by the politicians, do something insignificant.

Gen. Jumper: There is also another part of this argument. This is the myth of the 72-hour ATO cycle. We stand accused in air power of having to put everything on the table at least 72 hours in advance — inside the 72 hours is inviolate. I have sitting here on the front row is Lieutenant Colonel Dave Nichols, commander of 510^th Fighter Squadron at Aviano, who led his troops into battle the first night of the war and acquitted himself and his squadron marvelously during the 78 days of the war. He will be the first one I think to tell you otherwise. The 72-hour cycle was not an execution cycle but an attempt to force a planning cycle so you are having some means within your phased operation to look out on the horizon. But for the execution, many times it was within four and six hours when we were not only changing targets, but also changing munitions on airplanes to accommodate targets. This is not obviously the way that we would like to do it when you talk about minimizing risks to pilots, but it was done because that was the way the target set presented itself and that is another aspect of the same problem that you described. But we need to work on both of those things and continue to shrink those cycles.

Gen. Dugan: But in fact the good doctor is correct in that the model was repudiated. It was repudiated by all that force beyond the classical image of warfare as opposed to the post-heroic image you described.

Gen. Jumper: There was no one kicked out of a briefing room because they presented parallel warfare.

Dr. Luttwak: Normally after the Gulf War people would have stupidly taken the Gulf War as the rule for everything.

Gen. Dugan: Nations only change in the face of disaster. In the face of success, they continue.

Dr. Luttwak: They do all sorts of stupidities and habits and routines and whatever. It is terrible thing, victory. You learn nothing from it. What will the Milosovics of the world learn from the Kosovo war.

Gen. Jumper: They will learn some of the things that we should worry about have to do with SA-10s and SA-12s and MIG-35s.

Dr. Luttwak: But again, in so far as you remain attached to the yellow strip on the road and you attack the civilian infrastructure, he can’t do anything about it because if you do the right thing, to that he cannot respond because that is where you are hitting the core.

AVM Mason: Can I just finish the answer to this question by asking another question of General John on my right? It concerns the question about effective political control in a coalition or alliance and simultaneous effect and so on. I am under the impression that as the campaign evolved, the original procedure by which an awful lot of countries were saying yes or no evolved into one in which just those air forces which were using the aircraft were clearing targets. You may not feel able to comment on that, but that was the assumption that I and other people in the UK had made that if the only people who could veto a target being flown by the UK was the UK, nobody else. In the same way the United States Air Force was flying targets without regard for whatever country X or country Y said.

Gen. Jumper: I can’t comment because I don’t know - I wasn’t working at that level. Exactly what the interfaces were that presented targets or made them acceptable to nations. But this was a part of the process and as was pointed out we have an alliance that spent 50 years worrying mostly about Article 5 defensive borders and finds themselves now in an offensive out of area, out of region operation, this was to be expected. I have no problem with that. What we tried to do over time was to build the credibility to get ourselves back to the effects-based campaign planning that would produce an overall results that as the consensus solidified, everybody wanted to see. When it was agreed that electrical power should be a target, it was agreed over some short period of time that we needed to do the whole job, even though some of the particular targets in there may have been difficult for certain nations to accept. But the point is that this is the reality of the game and we have to figure out ways to deal with it.

Dr. Luttwak: Targets were scrapped because chiefs of staffs of countries not doing the bombing called at the last minute to say, "Please don’t bomb there tonight because my government will fall on it." This happened as a historical fact and it happened without tearing anything apart or doing terrific damage because of our very good relations. They respected each other. The U.S. guy who gets the phone call knows that this European who calls him up is not fantasizing, is not foolish, is a serious guy and knows how to read his government. He understands the realities, and there is mutual respect and on the American side. The general taking the phone call is not some jerk trying to assert his authority by saying no and risking the whole war over it. So, it worked out, but the veto wasn’t just with the owners.

Gen. Dugan: Not withstanding high technology, warfare is still a very human activity that needs to be done with give and take.

Question: Acknowledging the discussion that took place on CAS and VAI, particularly with engaged ground forces, for the forces that are not engaged and for the kinds of effects targeting you are discussing, I am interested in your comments on space and air integration and radar and can you discuss the ISR operations and possibly more autonomous platform operations for either acquisition or geo-location of current conditions.

Gen. Jumper: We will be where we need to be in the ISR world when we have transparent linkages in what I call the battle space internet linkages among our platforms that display the collective information of everything that is both space-borne and airborne and ground-borne. By the way, the Q-36 and Q-37 counter battery radars played a very big part in our targeting in the latter stages of the conflict. When the amalgamation of these and the product of these sensors are presented in a way that can give us the information that is in targetable, quality data, that is when ISR will have come of age. Right now, we still tend to, in my opinion, talk to much about platforms. We tend to exaggerate the differences between air and space in ways in which when you talk about effects are not necessary. But we are getting one helluva a lot better. It was a helluva lot better this time. We had U-2s that allowed us to dynamically re-task to take a picture of a reported SA-6; beam that picture back to Beale AFB for a coordinate assessment within minutes and have the results back to the F-15E as it turned to shoot an AGM 130. All of this occurred in a matter of minutes. It wasn’t all like that, but that is the capability we demonstrated more than once in that situation.

We need to get that U-2 imagery tied up with UAVs so you are always selecting from the best and most available thing at any one time to give you the information you need rather than trying to sort out by platform. There is a great deal more to talk about with regard to information warfare that we were able to do for the first time in this campaign and points our way to the future that has to do with both ground and space-based assets. Those we can’t talk about now, but hopefully we can some time in the future.

Question: If you can go back to 1994 and 1995, would you kill off the F-111 Raven program and what is the future for a dedicated electronic fighter platform as far as the Air Force is concerned?

Gen. Dugan: I have been spending a few days with Air Force Scientific Advisory Board here in the past month or two looking at the intersection between stealth vehicles and electronic combat. After listening to a lot of briefings and doing a little bit of thinking, it seemed to me that electronic combat in general and the Raven program in particular got in trouble probably on my watch in 1990, short as it was, when we did not replace a couple of the senior officers both in the acquisition community and in the operational community that looked at the contribution of electronic combat to the warfighting output.

Gradually what happened since there was nobody at the table to argue and there is a huge debating society that argues priorities and argues relative importance and argues for ideas and for resources. When there was nobody at the table to argue for this kind of capability and I think you are right we’ve talked too much about platforms, but the natural consequence of that was for the resources to go away and we’ve made a serious misstep. I don't know how to build that back. I am going to rely on the serving senior officer who is responsible for it now cleaning up after my mess.

Gen. Jumper: Thanks, Dad. Here again I think it is a question of effects and not platforms. The focus has to be on the best way to get the airplanes or the platforms in and out safely in a high-threat environment. Is it defensive systems that you put on board the airplane? Is it a combination of stealth and defensive systems or is it sort of the offensive electron bashers that are represented by the EA-6 and formerly the Raven community? We have to reopen and re-ask ourselves the question how to address this affect. It is a fundamental and basic part and a core competency of air power and aerospace power. Do we have to take a look at this again? The answer is yes. But the answer is not necessarily another platform.

The answer could be a combination of things — space-based, air-based, — to produce the same effect. That is where we have to rely on technology and the industry to answer these questions for us. We shouldn’t home in on a single-node answer. Quite frankly, this is where we had a bit of a problem with those folks who pay a lot of attention to this - they tend to want to home in on a platform answer, rather than what other alternatives are out there from the technology that is available today.

Gen. Dugan: I want to thank each of you for participating today in our Eaker Colloquy on Operation Allied Force Strategy, Execution and Implications. I especially want to thank the three panelists for bringing their expertise, their background and their willingness to participate in this in public. What we saw for the first time in some 5,000 years of military history, 5,000 thousand years of history of man taking organized forces into combat, we saw an independent air operation produce a political result. What that means for the future we will still have to divine. You’ve heard some of the implications here today. But I do think there are tides and trends in history, some of which have been enumerated, in politics, in technology and in demographics that say the utility of air and space forces brings a special quality to politicians the world over. It brings a special quality in terms of rapidity, in terms of precision, in terms of responsiveness both military responsiveness and political responsiveness. This kind of utility can do nothing but place greater demands on air and space forces for the future. The Air Force Association and the Aerospace Education Foundation understand those demands and help to promote those in public. Thanks for coming and joining us today.

The Panelists

General Michael J. Dugan

(Moderator)

Michael J. Dugan is the President and C.E.O. of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. He leads a force of 800,000 volunteers committed to ending the devastating effects of multiple sclerosis. He assumed this role in June 1992.

He has taken the Society into new campaigns in the fight against MS, balancing the need for services today with the goal of finding effective treatments and cures tomorrow. As spokesperson, lobbyist, promoter and volunteer recruiter, he has vigorously pursued greater public awareness and involvement in defeating multiple sclerosis. Additionally, he is an active volunteer in the world-wide MS movement, participating the affairs of the International Federation of MS Societies.

He is a retired Air Force General; his 36 years of military service, principally in operations management, culminated in assignments as Commander-in-Chief, United States Air Forces Europe, Commander of NATO's Allied Air Forces Central Europe and as the thirteenth Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force. He has received numerous military awards for distinguished service, personal gallantry and meritorious achievement. He has logged 4,700 hours of military flying and over 300 combat missions.

He was born in Albany, New York; graduated from the United States Military Academy--BS, 1958, and the University of Colorado--MBA, 1972. He is married to Grace Anne Robinson of Troy, New York. They have six children, four in military service.

As an active volunteer, he also serves as Chairman of the Board of the Aerospace Education Foundation, Chairman, Air University Foundation; President, Air War College Alumni Association; and President, Irongate Chapter, Air Force Association; the Air Force Historical Foundation and the Falcon Foundation; and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

General John P. Jumper

General John P. Jumper is Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe, and Commander, Allied Air Forces