If Clark was not in the early days of the war getting what he wanted in terms of targets and ground troops, he remained steady and confident because he understood the political equation in which he was now operating. He knew, from the moment the first NATO bombs fell on Serb targets and the war actually began, that unless he overtly angered the civilians and the military (perhaps a Somalia-like disaster, where a large number of NATO soldiers were killed in some careless action and it was videotaped and played on national television), he had the whip hand. He was the commander now, and Washington, civilian or military, would be loath to lose the war and, if victory or defeat hung in the balance, loath as well to deny the commander what he needed. That meant that a crucial part of his assignment, never openly articulated but always there, especially at this time with this administration, was to keep casualties and aircraft losses to a minimum, something he passed on to Mike Short—as if, Short later said rather angrily, I would have been careless about casualties without those warnings.
So Clark knew, given the dynamic that had been set in motion, the equation had changed with finality and now favored him. Two critical political points were at stake here. First, Washington was not going to lose; if it did not know this yet, it would discover it sooner or later as it became more and more embattled. And second, Washington, if things were going badly, would not want to be portrayed as not having given a commander what he needed to do the job, something that Clark was on occasion not averse to reminding General Hugh Shelton of, thereby making their relationship, hardly ideal, even edgier. Clark’s peers in Washington might not have accepted the original rationale for the war—to stop Milosevic and protect the Albanians—but that would change dramatically if things started going badly. The national security and humanitarian rationales would give way to other considerations: the ego and the vanity and the place in history of the Clinton (and Blair) administrations, and the need to show that NATO had not been defeated by some tinhorn dictator. Then Clark would get more of what he wanted: more important targets and perhaps even one day some ground troops. It was in the nature of war that power would pass to him. For Clark was not only a CINC, he was SACEUR, the supreme allied commander in Europe, and that doubly empowered him. CINCs had always been powerful, but with the passage of the Goldwater-Nichols Bill in 1986, that power had been greatly enhanced at the expense of the Joint Chiefs. Goldwater-Nichols had been created to streamline the chain of command and give maximum flexibility to respond to commanders in the field, and it had been expedited by the confusion over the abortive helicopter raid that had been designed to rescue the American prisoners in Teheran in 1980.
But its political impact on the command structure had surprised a good many people within the military. In the past the job as the head of a service—army chief of staff or chief of naval operations—had been the ultimate reward for a successful career. But Goldwater-Nichols changed that. It significantly upgraded the power and leverage of commanders and made the job of service chief more of a support and logistical position. All the real rewards and pleasures—all the fun, if that is the word—went to the CINC, as one military analyst said, “and all the shit jobs went to the service chiefs.” Of the chiefs, only the chairman had seen his power enhanced by Goldwater-Nichols, although when the shooting actually started, power tended to pass to the CINC, because he was the man on the spot. Colin Powell had great authority during the Iraqi crisis until the war began, and then power tended to flow to the CINC, Norman Schwarzkopf.
In the beginning, Clark, like others, almost certainly underestimated Milosevic’s resistance. Exact records are hard to pin down after Somalia, because a deliberate effort was made not to keep exact records of what was said and promised on the part of every participant. But once the campaign began, Clark drove his command with a singular purpose, intelligence, and skill, handling his immensely complicated and difficult constituencies deftly, knowing full well that he would in time get most of what he wanted, because the great fear in Washington and the European capitals would eventually be defeat. He was soon asking for ground troops, in part because he wanted them (or at least the threat of having them), and in part because in the complicated dynamics that take place between a commander in the field and his superiors and peers in Washington, he knew if they turned him down on that, they would surely have to give in on something else. They would not want NATO to lose the first real war in its history. “What Wes knew, because he was so smart and so far ahead of most of the others on the military side,” said one close friend, “is that if they gave him a weak hand at the start, he could always play it into a strong hand. It might be hard, but he knew he could do it. He not only knew Milosevic’s weaknesses, but he knew Washington’s weaknesses as well.”
That placed him in an ongoing struggle with Cohen, who, like the Joint Chiefs, was filled with doubts and extremely cautious about the course of action in Serbia. But now the dynamic had shifted. Clark, as the man in the field, had a special kind of power that rivaled or exceeded that of the senior Pentagon people. Clark and Cohen were supposed to be allies, but they would become antagonists, much more so than the normal, occasionally edgy relationship between a CINC and the secretary of defense. The irony was that Cohen had picked Clark for the job, well aware of the powerful institutional resistance against him within the army. Although he knew some of the army traditionalists thought Clark was too political, Cohen had been impressed by Clark’s pure intelligence and his ability to handle the diplomatic side, which would be so important in Brussels. But now under the pressure of a policy that was very much in jeopardy, their relationship was being torn apart. In Cohen’s eyes, Clark was putting him in constant conflict with the other senior military, who were opposed to any greater escalation in the Balkans, especially the use of ground troops. That might force Cohen to go against the Pentagon on issues about which he had grave doubts himself. Worse, Clark somehow seemed to be beyond his reach and, in Cohen’s mind, always going around him. But Clark’s own chain of command as a CINC did not go through the Joint Chiefs; it went directly to the secretary of defense.
Their relationship quickly became a disaster. Even after the bombing started, Clark could never, he later complained, talk to Cohen about substantive things. Whenever he called the secretary to tell him about his problems, Cohen would put him off and try to steer him to the uniformed military. “You better talk to Hugh about that,” he would say, clearly not wanting to be caught between an activist CINC and more dovish senior military men. Clark, in turn, decided he was being blocked by a man who was supposed to support him and began to look elsewhere for help. Clark told friends that dealing with Cohen was the worst professional experience he had had since his encounter with Jack Hudachek as a young battalion commander. Cohen felt the same way about Clark. “I rue the day I made him SACEUR,” he told aides at one point.
Why it worked out so badly between them, no one was ever sure. Part of it was the terrible issue they faced, a decision to go to war when the military had so many doubts and the top civilians had so little confidence, decision-making therefore deliberately masked in fog. But part of it was personal as well, for some people who knew them well thought that they were very much alike. Both were confident of their own abilities and judgment, both more than a little headstrong, each tending to believe that he was just a bit smarter than everyone else in the institution in which he served. Clark, frustrated by Cohen and the Joint Chiefs, quickly developed moves of his own, which made the people back in Washington even angrier with him. The Chiefs were convinced that he was talking to the people on the other side of the river, telling things to Albright and Berger that they felt he should keep to himself, always lobbying for more, in their opinion loading the dice they all had to play with. Cohen, it was said, would pick up the phone to talk with Albright or Berger and hear some bit of information that might undermine the Pentagon’s position that he was sure could only have come from Clark.
Nor were the top civilians, save Albright, all that enthusiastic about the constant pressure Clark was applying to them to do more. He might be their man, but every nudge from him was a reminder that their policy was in jeopardy, and that their military critics, who had always asked what would happen if airpower alone did not work, might have been right. Some of the senior people in the Pentagon had little sympathy for the SACEUR. To them Clark was being hoisted by his own petard. He had pushed to fight a war that was by army tradition an alien use of American force and had violated every tenet of the Powell Doctrine, which most of them accepted. If Wes Clark was having a hard time now that he was out there on his own, so be it.
What was taking place in the struggle over Kosovo was something new, virtual war from fifteen thousand feet or above. It was an antiseptic war waged by remote control, without casualties, if at all possible, or at least without casualties for the side with the higher level of technology. It was, thought those who were its witnesses and fortunate or unfortunate enough to be near any of the bombing sites, truly surrealistic. The NATO planes flew so high that they were never seen, although on rare occasions there might be a brief glimpse of the bombs themselves falling and then the sound of the explosions. The B-2 bomber pilots flying the missions were based in Missouri, and the question for some of the crews was whether they would get back in time to watch their children’s soccer and baseball games. It was war as envisioned by George Orwell or H. G. Wells: invisible planes sent on their missions from scientifically advanced bases elsewhere to pick out unseen targets from high-tech screens and to launch laser-guided or photo-guided weapons of destruction at them. The war, amazingly futuristic in the eyes of men who had fought in other wars, was obviously worthy of a science fiction novel. It seemed to lack only robotic figures at headquarters picking the sites and robotic figures piloting the planes, although in the case of the Tomahawk missiles, propelled by videotape in their electronic brains, the reality was close enough to the futuristic image. Ironically, the new technology of airpower was performing brilliantly—well above expectations—but because the target lists were so limited, the war was going poorly.
This was a new age in war, and one weapon represented just how much warfare had changed in only eight years: the B-2 Stealth bomber. Based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, its pilots and crews could leave their homes and take off for the fourteen-hour trip to the Balkans, penetrating Serb skies unobserved at night as mere F-117 fighters had been able to do eight years earlier over Iraq. It was an expeditionary force that could sleep in its own beds at night and then go from peace into war over a faraway continent, returning a little more than a day later.
Of the B-2’s validity and viability, however, there had always been considerable doubt and controversy. Many wondered whether Stealth technology really worked, including some of the F-117 pilots back in the Gulf War. There had been even greater doubts about the B-2. Some critics claimed it would not fly in the rain. Others said it was an expensive boondoggle. Les Aspin, as an influential congressman, had been dubious and had tried to set a sharp limit on its production.
As they were readied for the Kosovo mission, doubts about the B-2s remained. They had been held out of Desert Fox, the brief air campaign against Iraq in mid-December 1998, for fear of losing one. The same fear still existed on the eve of the Kosovo campaign. Wes Clark also had his doubts, but some persuasive briefings by the younger officers who actually commanded the planes reassured him. Not so at the highest level of the Pentagon. Just before the Kosovo bombing began, Clark told Mike Short, “You know that there are people very high up in your own service who don’t want to use the B-2.” Short answered that he was sure it was not his chief, Mike Ryan. No, Clark said with just a touch of irony, it was Joe Ralston, the vice chair of the JCS. “Joe’s afraid we might lose one,” Clark added.1
But whatever doubts that still existed about the B-2 were soon dispelled. It became the star piece of equipment of the Kosovo war. It carried the burden in the early weeks of the fighting when the weather was bad and some four thousand sorties by other aircraft had to be canceled. In all, B-2s flew only 3 percent of the missions but hit 33 percent of all the targets. They brought to the war a new dimension of technological excellence, one that seemed to place even greater distance between the warriors and their adversaries.
Even as they took off and headed for the Balkans, immensely sophisticated new devices kept tracking the combat area from satellites and spy planes and fed their information into a system that ended up in the B-2’s brain. Two pilots would fly the plane, one of them resting while the other had the controls. They would hit their target, get back to Whiteman, and try to make up some lost sleep while another set of pilots took their turn on the next bombing run.
The bombs they were dropping were, in the complicated terminology of the military, called JDAMs, or Joint Direct Attack Munitions. They were smart bombs, precision-guided and different from missiles because they had no power of their own. JDAMs were two-thousand-pound bombs that could hit their targets with astonishing accuracy and relatively little collateral damage. The radius of accuracy had shrunk dramatically, down now to a few feet, and the striking power had increased just as dramatically in only eight years. The F-117s that had flown over Iraq were called fighters, but they were really small bombers and could carry only two two-thousand-pound bombs. The B-2 bomber, however, could carry sixteen bombs, thus increasing the striking power a minimum of eight times. But because each bomb was so much more accurately guided and the explosive inside so much more powerful—a five-hundred-pound bomb in 1999 was far deadlier than a five-hundred-pound bomb in 1991, more like a two-thousand-pound bomb because of more lethal explosives—the attack capability was probably a factor of far above eight.
The JDAM itself was something of a small but important technological breakthrough, a smart bomb kit that, when attached to a dumb bomb, allowed it to respond to global positioning system (GPS) navigational controls. Bill Perry had helped push through the JDAM program after taking a ride in a B-2 in 1995. Impressed by the plane, he had been appalled to find that adequate munitions were not going to be available, and he had given specific orders to expedite the JDAM program and make it a high priority, a decision that would pay off handsomely in 1999.
The new bombs and missiles were smarter than the old, using the GPS and getting accurate, up-to-the-minute information fed into the B-2’s brains even as it was in flight to its targets. In fact, purists now referred to this as an example of aerospace power, not airpower, because of the importance of aerospace technology derived from the satellites. Both the B-2 and the much smaller F-117 resembled bats, but the B-2, with a wingspan of 172 feet, resembled a bat on a diet of steroids. Both planes required a special kind of surface that was radar-resistant, and they were designed so that there would be no flat surfaces that might bounce radar beams back to the sender. Thus the enemy radar instruments that liked to play Ping-Pong with hostile aircraft were, in effect, reduced to playing Ping-Pong with themselves, since no one was hitting the ball back. The B-2, like the F-117, also had great control over emissions and carried its weapons inside bomb bays, lest they give off a signal.
The B-2 was designed to look like a small bird on enemy radar rather than a singularly lethal bomber. Or as one air force officer said, it did not come up on radar as a goose that was much too big, but at the most as a sparrow. The degree to which the Stealth technology was effective surprised even its most ardent advocates. One Stealth plane, an F-117 fighter, was shot down early in the war, but the air force later believed that the plane was vulnerable because in the first few days of the fighting some of the pilots did not vary their take-off procedures and flew repetitious routes. The Serbs had placed observers around the Aviano air base, where the F-117s were stationed, knew roughly when they were taking off, and quite likely filled the flight path with anticipatory fire.
One of the B-2’s most memorable successes was against the Novi Sad Bridge in downtown Belgrade. Bridges are notoriously tough targets, especially those in urban areas where the flak is heavy. Certain bridges in North Vietnam had been extremely costly, with one the target of the first primitive laser bombs, which used two planes, one to drop the bomb, the other to hold the laser guidance on the target. Even B-2 pilots had considerable doubt that the Novi Sad Bridge could be hit. As it turned out, one B-2 dropping eight JDAMs—six for the center and two for one end—and making just one pass, took the bridge out.
The most notorious bombing mistake of the war was also caused by a B-2, striking Belgrade during the night of May 7–8. The target was a Milosevic logistical center, Target 493, the Federal Procurement and Supply Directorate. But because of a mistake in labeling among the targeteers, the building was, in fact, the Chinese embassy. Four staff members were killed, and an immense diplomatic crisis exploded. It was a reminder that technological brilliance was still at the mercy of human frailty.
The B-2s were used on the first day of bombing and proved to be the most effective new instrument of warfare. They were able to exploit almost all of the new technologies. Not only did they evade Serb radar defenses, but much of the planes’ unique value came from their invulnerability to bad weather. They could fly in all kinds of weather and could always find their targets. The laser bombs carried by other planes might be limited by weather, clouds interfering with the laser technology. But the JDAMs, guided by the GPS technology, were always effective. Only one B-2 mission was canceled due to weather, because support aircraft were unable to fly.
In all ways Kosovo presented an entirely new military dilemma. Because we did not want to use ground troops, we depended exclusively on airpower. But though we had the capacity to destroy Milosevic’s infrastructure in a matter of days, the nature of the multinational command structure and the fear of punishing the Serbs precipitously resulted in severe restrictions on the use of the awesome new technology. Even so, holding back in its use of power and its target selection, the American NATO military machinery, formidably powerful, was vulnerable to charges of brutality. The war may have started with Milosevic’s brutality against the Albanians, but what much of the world was soon watching was a big, rich, technologically advanced nation bombing a poor, little country, and doing it in a way that showed its unwillingness to accept casualties itself. Justified as the American and NATO policy might be to those who had authorized it, it was not an attractive picture for the millions of people in other countries who watched it on their television screens.
When Milosevic had attacked the Kosovar Albanians, he had been Goliath; now with NATO airpower being used, the roles had reversed. America, the monopoly superpower, was Goliath, and Milosevic a most unlikely David in a world that never roots for Goliath. Even at home, some traditionally hawkish figures spoke critically of the ethical basis of the war, of NATO and the Americans valuing the lives of their combatants more than they valued the lives of civilians on the ground.
In the early weeks and months of the war when NATO was struggling badly, it did not appear to be Bill Clinton’s war. For a time he who was so quick to go on national television in almost any crisis, large or small, to offer a ready and deft touch of presidential empathy now seemed to be the invisible man, keeping a surprisingly low profile. After he made that first statement telling the country we were going to bomb the Serbs, he had vanished. He had authorized the military strike, the country was at war whether it wanted to admit it or not, our bombers were hitting targets in Europe every day, and the country went about its business as usual. It was something stunningly new—war in a time of peace. The president, who by temperament and upbringing did not like the use of force, seemed to shy away from public responsibility for it, loath until much later in the war to make the case for it to the American people.
Instead, the more public figure on the American side, in part by design, in part by accident, became Madeleine Albright. She did not mind; she had advocated the bombing from the start, did not doubt the outcome, if we persevered. Nor was she averse to personal publicity. The cowboy hat and the bomber jacket she favored had always been effective PR ploys, giving the impression that though she was a woman, she could handle herself with the big boys, could if necessary pull a fast draw on the bad guys in the black hats, and therefore was not to be underestimated. In the beginning, it was called Madeleine’s War, a title that she did not mind, although she did not like the touch of sexism, the use of her first name. When Vietnam had gone on endlessly, it had been called McNamara’s War, and this she thought should be called Albright’s War. If the administration wanted her to be point person (at least until it was sure that it was going to work), that was all right with her. What was not all right, some of her allies thought, was the impression that the White House began to give off with the most delicate of leaks that it was annoyed with her because she had promised it would be an easier passage. The war was still going on and some of the scapegoating had already begun.
The other person making the case publicly for the war was Tony Blair, the British prime minister. In contrast to John Major, who had had his foot on the brake during the Bosnia years, Blair had helped NATO move toward a more activist course on Kosovo. Blair was young, articulate, a firm believer that this was the right moral path, and eager to be as visible as possible. He and Clinton had an unusually strong relationship because of their similar backgrounds, politicians who had started out somewhat on the left, had tacked with the changing times, and had moved to the center. Both thrived on their ability to use modern media effectively. If anything, Blair was the first of a generation of international politicians who had learned their craft by studying Clinton and the deft way he handled modern media, choosing which issues he wanted to be associated with, and, of course, which he wanted to avoid.
By early April, restless with the lack of success, Blair went to Brussels to try to find out what was going wrong. He spent several days there, much of the time with Clark, where he soon became Clark’s most important convert to the concept of greater force, especially ground troops. Clark was helped in Blair’s conversion because most of the senior British military men working with Clark shared his essential viewpoint: if they were going to do it, then they better damn well get it done. When Blair returned to London, he was much more hawkish on the use of ground troops. The White House was not entirely pleased by his conversion and by the appearance of a major figure in the alliance moving slightly ahead of the president. Though delighted to have Blair out front speaking for the war, the White House was not thrilled to have him and his people talking so openly about ground troops, which might cause fissures in the alliance and tended to make the prime minister look more assertive than the president. There was talk in private to reporters that Blair was grandstanding.
It also raised the question of whether Clark was on the team, if in fact there was a team. The White House began to suspect a British-Clark axis, a sense that the Brits, when they wanted something done, worked through Clark, and Clark, when he wanted something done, worked through the Brits. Somehow both parties were going through outside channels when it suited them, keeping each other informed of any potential blockages in the American system. Thus began a rather rude awakening, in a White House where none of the senior people had ever hunkered down in a war before, of how the equation of power changed once a war began, and how much more powerful a commander could be than they had suspected. The Bosnia bombing and the quick bombing of Iraq in Desert Storm had been throwaway exercises by comparison. The White House was occasionally quite irritated with Wes Clark, but could not do much about it.
After his visit to Brussels, Blair also recommended to Clinton that they become more aggressive in taking hold of the NATO decision-making machinery; the restraints placed on Clark and Short were unacceptable. That began to have some immediate effect, and the number of political people who could negate targets on the lists was cut back dramatically, although Clark and Short still regarded the French as a problem. Yet in the middle of April, the frustrations continued to mount. The war did not appear to be going well. The target lists were still considered inadequate. NATO, Sandy Berger said much later, was like a new airplane that had never flown before and was having trouble gaining altitude as it took off. In Brussels and Mons, the pressure increased to expand the bombing lists and to follow up with ground troops.
The pressure on Clark was almost unbearable, his aides thought. Everybody in NATO, and everybody in Washington, both civilian and military, knew what he should be doing, and their calls would soon be followed by a call from someone else, often from the same country and of the same or greater rank, telling him not to do it. Those around him, even senior officers who disagreed with him on policy or did not always like him personally, thought that Clark was at his very best during this period. He worked endlessly hard, generally treated subordinates well, kept his cool, balanced difficult warring constituencies with considerable grace, and never lost sight of his essential purpose. He was getting little support from his own military, but he did not whine and he remained resolute. To the degree he had allies, they were civilians, not military men. Whatever you thought of Wes Clark—that unusual but occasionally maddening blend of great talent, intelligence, ego, and purpose—this was him at his best. He had the job he had always wanted, and his confidence never flagged.
His calls for expanded target lists were met with growing success. But he had become sure that ground troops would bring Milosevic to heel, if not the actual use of them, then at the very least the threat of them. He did not think Milosevic would take the NATO mission seriously until he began to see ground troops coming. Clark was, after all, an army man, and the army believed that ground troops won wars; airpower, while immensely valuable, had never of its own been the decisive weapon. But that belief put Clark in direct conflict with Cohen and the Joint Chiefs, who were determined to hold the line on ground troops. There was constant sparring over this. Clark would make a move at least partially designed to come closer to the ground troop option, perhaps merely to get some troops in the area, and the Pentagon people would smell it out and try to block him.
At one point, he requested what the army calls a prefloat, a brigade that would be stationed in the area on standby. In this case, it would sit on a ship just off the coast of Greece, waiting for a call, one more obvious dagger aimed at Milosevic, forty-seven hundred elite troops ready to enter battle within twenty-four hours, which would tell him that they were heading toward more, not less, force as the war progressed. Into the Pentagon went the request, back came the rejection. How could they turn you down? one of Clark’s aides asked. “They said it was too expensive,” he replied. Too expensive? the aide said. How can it be too expensive to have a brigade just sitting there? “They say the whole operation is too expensive and they have major budget problems,” Clark answered. That, he and the aides knew, was not true. The truth was the Pentagon did not want ground troops anywhere near him; he was too quick on the draw, too driven, too given to operating on his own, to be trusted with a brigade. Both sides, it was obvious, were onto each other, and they were playing a tough, high-stakes game. At one point, one of Clark’s staff members prepared a report for Washington on what would be needed in Kosovo if the allies won, which included among other things a brand-new police system, since the previous one was Serbian and would not be allowed back in the region. The obvious solution was the use of foreign troops to fill the vacuum and police a predictably violent, hate-filled region. That part of the report was ordered deleted in Brussels before it was sent on.
But nothing that happened in the Balkans demonstrated the conflicting tensions as much as the struggle over the AH-64 Apache helicopters, the army’s fastest, most modern choppers, especially designed, it was believed, for a situation precisely like this. The Apaches were the army’s best and most modern weapon of this kind, designed to elude infantry gunners on the ground, even those armed with simple hand-carried surface-to-air missiles. They had the newest technology available, inventions that would not only keep their engines cool, but cool their exhaust systems as well, thereby protecting them from any heat-seeking missiles. They could also fly at night without showing any lights. Expectations of what the Apaches could achieve in Kosovo were exceptionally high, particularly on the part of those committed to army aviation who wanted to make the army quicker, more mobile, and more flexible in its responses. When the announcement was made that they were being sent to a base in Albania, Kenneth Bacon, the Pentagon’s senior press spokesman, suggested that they might change the course of the war and give the United States “the capability to get up close and personal to the Milosevic armored units in Kosovo.”
They were to be the military’s best weapon for air-to-ground support, particularly against slightly dated enemy armor and its accompanying infantry units. They were faster and more agile, with far greater capacity to scan the battlefield than armored vehicles on the ground, slower and more accurate with their firepower than jet fighters. “Instead,” as Dana Priest wrote in the Washington Post in a devastating critique of what happened, “the vaunted helicopters came to symbolize everything wrong with the army as it enters into the twenty-first century: its inability to move quickly; its resistance to change; its obsession with casualties; its post–Cold War identity crisis.”2 If the Apaches were a mistake, they were an expensive one. Some $15–$18 billion had been spent not only to make them an exceptional attack instrument, but also to limit their vulnerability to ground fire—the great Achilles’ heel of helicopter warfare. Each Apache cost $14.5 million. The end product was considered exceptional: it was fast, could fly just above tree level at high speeds, and even had curved rotor blades to muffle noise. Still they were helicopters, always vulnerable to ground fire if enemy soldiers did not panic. Surprise, stealth, and a limited time in the killing zone were obviously critical to their use.
Ironically, Hugh Shelton, an army man and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been the first to suggest using the Apaches in Kosovo, even before the bombing began. He had rather casually mentioned the idea to Clark, who immediately picked up on it, seeing their potential to fill a critical vacuum in his repertoire. At the very least, he believed, they would significantly upgrade the pressure on Milosevic. But the interior debate over the Apaches was never really about heliborne warfare; it was always about ground troops. What the Pentagon suspected was that Clark wanted the Apaches as a Trojan horse for ground troops. And so, of course, it resisted. A great many neutral observers, as well as a number of Clark’s allies, believed the senior military’s suspicions were absolutely correct.
In traditional battle plans, drawn up for Pentagon strategists, the Apaches were to be used with a full complement of infantry. But the first condition of the Kosovo commitment was no ground troops, which meant no infantry spotters on the ground for the helicopters. Because he would have no ground troops, Clark wanted to use drones and satellite photos for spotting Serb forces. From the intelligence gleaned that way, the Apaches would then strike at Serb army units. But his superiors in Washington were skeptical. Given the speed of the airships and the richness of the terrain, Dennis Reimer, the army chief of staff, said that it would be like looking for Serb ground troops through a straw. To the Chiefs back in Washington, there was little military upside to the Apaches. To them, the request for their use smacked of the worst kind of incrementalism. What happens if one of the Apaches is shot down? they asked. Won’t you have to send in a recovery team on the ground and in Serb-held territory? And if the Serbs surround the area with their troops and wait for the recovery team, won’t you have to send in an even larger force to protect your own men? To the Chiefs it was a replay of both Vietnam and Somalia. Start with something small and relatively innocent, then something larger and unpredictable is born of it. Were the civilians who had given them what was so far a quite limited mandate ready to open it up for a larger commitment? They doubted it. If they wanted a platform comparable to the Apaches, some senior military men thought, the A-10 Warthog, an air force plane that had been a surprise star of Desert Storm, was perfect and less vulnerable.
In Washington, Clark was virtually without support among the military. Shelton was at the very least ambivalent, and Reimer, the army chief of staff, was against sending them. Back and forth went their discussions, Clark pushing ever harder for the Apaches, Shelton reflecting the Pentagon (and White House) reluctance. “Wes,” Clark would quote Shelton as saying, “you should know that I’m having a hard time back here with the Chiefs. The army chief [Reimer] just doesn’t want to send them in.” But Clark had the perfect answer. Not only were they an ideal weapon for his needs, but, he added, “Surely we’re not going to deny a wartime commander in chief the assets we need to win.”3
For Reimer and others, the Apaches were the first step toward a ground war. Eventually Shelton came up with a compromise solution: send the Apaches to Albania, but don’t employ them until more of a consensus favored their use and everyone was more confident about the prospective rate of casualties. If that consensus was reached, Shelton would then make the recommendation to the president. That kicked at least part of the decision back to the White House, which had hardly shown itself eager to get more deeply involved and was still extremely nervous about casualties. The decision to go ahead without really going ahead was made on April 3. Everyone expected that the Apaches would get to Albania within ten days. That prediction, like many others about their usefulness, turned out to be quite optimistic. Now the army slow-walked the Apaches through the pipeline. Its every move seemed greased with molasses. Clearly someone at the very top had sent out a signal saying there was no rush. Deadline after deadline was missed. Excuses piled up. There was always some reason not to proceed. Nor was anyone in the army, one high army officer noted, ever punished for the appalling delay in getting a vital weapon to a hot combat zone.
Of course, no base was ready for the Apaches. Potential sites were studied, and finally the army selected a base near Tirana, close to the Montenegrin border, which offered them a shot at several divisions of Serb troops as well as a major Serb airfield at Podgorica. But the base itself was something of a disaster area, a sea of mud, and the army had to reclaim and rebuild it for the choppers. Enormous amounts of rock fill were brought in. Special landing pads were created, and tanks and armored personnel carriers were ferried over to protect the base. Five thousand ground troops were also sent just in case the Serbs became unusually cocky and attacked the base itself. Five hundred and fifty flights of giant cargo planes were required for the creation of the base and to get all the equipment there at a cost of some $480 million. It was late April before all the helicopters arrived. Clark had requested forty-eight of them; the army sent twenty-four.
Still there was no word on whether the Apaches would be able to fly. Then one crashed during a routine flight because of a mechanical failure, an event that made those already hesitant even more dubious. Back in Washington, Cohen, Shelton, and Ralston still did not want to use them and were telling the White House as much. Given Clinton’s own reluctance about taking casualties, as Dana Priest pointed out, that did not make for a difficult sell. There had long been an ongoing debate about projected casualty estimates. Clark and General John Hendrix, the commander of Task Force Hawk, the helicopter unit, were eager to use the Apaches and thought the risks were relatively slight. The senior officers in the Pentagon wanted to know what the casualty estimates might be. At first Clark and Hendrix said that it was hard to give an estimate because this was a new kind of mission. Pressed further, during a telephone linkup with the Pentagon in mid-April, Hendrix said that they would be about five for one hundred sorties, or perhaps even a bit higher. Of the figures being batted around by both sides there remained some question. Hendrix remembered using a figure of five, whereas some of the senior military remembered hearing six to fifteen, the figure given at least once to the White House. At the White House, civilians later said they began to hear figures that were perhaps as high as 50 percent over time. People, it appeared, heard the figure they wanted to hear.
Certainly helicopters were among the most vulnerable of aircraft, and the terrain was mountainous and the foliage thick, which meant it would be difficult and dangerous to fly through, especially when an adversary had countless small hand-held missile launchers. But the American commanders in the field remained eager to go; this was their mission and the first chance to try out a potentially wondrous piece of military equipment. Clark had spent three weeks since the Apaches arrived working with his commanders to make sure they had an acceptable tactical plan, that the choppers could be used with some degree of safety and that they would be a valuable instrument in the fighting. He and his commanders were irritated by the nervousness in Washington.
Like fighter pilots throughout the world, the Apache pilots and their commanders were aggressive, confident, sure they could mold their strategy to the needs of the occasion, anxious to justify all that training. The very nature of their profession demanded risks, and they were all prepared to take them. It was what they had signed up for in the first place and they wanted to get on with it. According to their tactical plan, air force planes would precede them with suppressing fire, and then the Apaches would come in fast, ninety miles an hour, guns blazing, and stay around briefly—five minutes in the battle zone. Overhead jets would provide extra cover.
But the doubts in Washington never went away. To Clark’s superiors the risks were constant. One Serb soldier with one hand-held missile launcher might just get lucky and turn what was ostensibly a victory into what would be deemed a defeat, one that CNN and the networks would immediately cover. In addition, it was an obvious place in the ongoing struggle with Clark to draw the line and to gain White House support. The generals back in Washington did not, Clark would later say with considerable bitterness, understand that the Apaches could fly at night and that the hand-held SAM-7s did not have night-sighting. Nor did his superiors understand, Clark said, that the Apaches had infrared jammers that would prevent a SAM-7 from locking on. The army, he would muse later, spent twenty years and all those billions creating a superb instrument and then was afraid to use it.
Eventually, the Apaches returned to their base in Germany. It took thirty trains, twenty ships, and eighty-one C-17 cargo flights to get everyone and everything back to their original bases. The fear of their vulnerability remained so great that despite the immense cost of getting them to Albania, the Apaches of Task Force Hawk engaged in no combat missions, fired no shots, and protected no Kosovar Albanians. When it was all over, Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera noted with a degree of melancholy that we seemed as a nation more willing to take casualties in training than in actual combat.