The three major governing factors in war are: the enemy, the terrain and the weather. In the Balkans, all three work against high-performance aircraft taking out Serbian heavy artillery and armored vehicles and closing down supply routes. Bosnia’s terrain is mainly tree covered and mountainous. The cloud ceilings are low, and the valley floors covered by fog. Similar ground and weather conditions made Soviet and U.S. air power ineffective in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Both superpowers lost hundreds of aircraft and helicopters to insurgent groundfire.
The Bosnian Serbs are also essentially light-infantry guerrillas. If tactical air is applied, the Serbs, like the Viet Cong and Afghan guerrillas before them, will hide their heavy stuff, go to ground and strike like rattlesnakes from every hilltop, behind every tree and at every bend in the road. Allied aircraft, U.S. spotter teams and U.N. peacekeepers on the ground will be their main targets.
U.S. tactical air power has seldom worked against a determined enemy ground force. Hundreds of thousands of raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail never put the Vietnamese out of business. Yes, laser flash-bam weapons were devastating during Desert Storm. But more than 94 percent of all ordnance used there was the same old dumb, unguided iron bombs dropped over Tokyo in 1942, and which later pummeled the mountains of Korea and the jungles of Vietnam.
The smart stuff highlighted on General Schwarzkopf’s show-and-tell TV programs represented about 6 percent of all ordnance employed. It did the job on specific high-signature targets, but the price was mind-boggling. One cruise missile costs $2 million, and its payload is only 1,000 pounds of TNT. Studies after the gulf war show that more than 88,500 tons of bombs dropped on Iraqi troops in the open desert killed about 10,000 soldiers and destroyed only 15 to 20 percent of Saddam’s tanks and artillery during the air campaign that preceded the ground attack. Victory came not because of decisive air power, but because of hard-hitting armor attacks against an Iraqi army with no will to fight.
Since the 1960s, U.S. Air Force brass have not given a grunt’s damn about its ground-support mission. This form of air power is not sexy enough and doesn’t pull in the big defense bucks that a $2 billion bomber or acres of sleek missiles with nuclear-tipped warheads do. To get around this during the Vietnam period, the army developed its own tactical-air-support weapons-the attack helicopter gunship-to ensure its grunts would have the right stuff in a fight. Now the Pentagon has two tactical air forces: the U.S. Army’s, which works, and the U.S. Air Force’s, which is all show and no go and is not trusted to do the job by the grunts and their leaders.
During Operation Desert Storm, General Schwarzkopf assigned the most critical air mission of the war to army attack helicopters: blast a hole in Iraq’s airdefense screen so high-performance aircraft could streak through and batter Baghdad with total surprise. Fighters were not reliable enough. During the ground-attack phase, the Cobra and Apache attack choppers were the top armored-vehicle and artillery killers, far outperforming every air force tactical aircraft except the A-10 Warthog.
The Warthog was a tough player throughout the war, But even its deadly effectiveness was limited, as the top air force brass put a ceiling of 8,000 feet on how low it could fly. At that altitude an armored vehicle looks like an ant, making target identification and iron-bomb accuracy almost impossible. The Maverick missiles carried by the A-10s did a good job, except they took out more clever dummy plywood decoys than the real thing. Since Desert Storm, except for a few active-duty squadrons, the A-10 has been relegated to the air guard and replaced by “fast burner” jets.
The top brass say the fast burners can do a better tactical-air-support job, but savvy pilots say this is not true. Contrary to hype, they go too fast, can’t loiter long enough to become familiar with the battlefield and are so vulnerable that one AK-47 assault-rifle slug will bring them down. Last January 110 aircraft were massed to knock out missile and radar sites in Iraqs southern no-fly zone. The results were disastrous: only 25 percent of the targeted sites were disabled.
Warfare is like surgery. You should use exactly the right instrument. A chain saw is no good for a brain tumor, and high-performance aircraft will be a disaster in the Balkans. The bottom line is: we don’t have the right stuff to do the job; and if we did, it wouldn’t work against a guerrilla fighting in favorable terrain. Many brave pilots will be put at great risk, and America will once again be stuck in another unwinnable war.
