A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

The horizontal coordination among the units participating in hunting fielded Serbian forces did not work as well. During the first week, while most of the “players” were still at Aviano, it was fairly simple for an A-10 AFAC mission commander to drive down the street to pay a visit to the EC-130 ABCCC squadron to work out command and control kinks, or walk down the hall to compare notes with the F-16 AFACs. Once we moved to Gioia de Colle and the F-14 AFACs started flying KEZ sorties off the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), coordination among the AFAC units consisted of whatever handoff briefings we managed in the air. In general, we relied too much on the CAOC to provide coordination among units. There was no one playing “Daddy FAC” at the CAOC since there were few, if any, senior FAC-qualified pilots. We knew that the F-16 and F-14 FACs had different capabilities and therefore used different tactics. We had no insight into how they were doing—what did not work, or what worked and got results.

Lt Col Paul C. “Sticky” Strickland ably described our initial situation in an article entitled “USAF Aerospace-Power Doctrine: Decisive or Coercive?” He stated that the initial CAIFF operations did not have an air operations directive to guide them—that is, to provide clear, measurable objectives for the CAOC and the units to attain.[1] Our job was simply to hunt down and destroy Serb weaponry within 10 miles of the Albanian border. Although we enthusiastically applied our talents to this nebulous end, our frustration grew as we went out day after day, often without finding and destroying Serb targets and with no way of assessing our contribution. Certainly we were making a difference: after the first two days, the Serbs stopped driving in convoys, and after a week, they stopped driving armored vehicles during the day. After a month, we knew we had destroyed a significant amount of Serb weaponry, but was the destruction sufficient to achieve NATO objectives?

As FACs we became aware during the KEZ operations of what OAF’s commanding officers have since made public: Gen Wesley Clark was eager for a major NATO effort against Serb fielded forces, while General Short preferred using NATO’s air resources in a concentrated interdiction campaign against Serb infrastructure. (General Short was always a straight shooter with us and essentially explained these preferences during an official visit to Gioia del Colle after the end of the campaign, while graciously praising our contribution to NATO’s victory.) Through our contacts at the CAOC, we learned that, despite the good intentions of many superb officers, this tug-of-war for mission priorities had resulted in ambiguous guidance and a lack of overall direction on our ultimate objective.

During late April, Lt Col Arden B. “Surgeon” Dahl, our 52d Fighter Wing chief of weapons and tactics, had a “eureka style” revelation while we Hog drivers discussed this problem at Gioia. Surgeon drew on his experience at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies (SAASS) and noted that, while KEZ operations attacked ground forces, they did not explicitly seek a ground-force objective, such as “occupy the high terrain by X date” or “reduce the combat effectiveness of (named enemy unit) by X percent.” This should have been obvious to A-10 guys from the start, since we had grown up supporting the ground commander’s scheme of maneuver from the air. However, we had not been given an “on the ground” objective to achieve in Kosovo. We understood that our KEZ operations sought airpower victory over deployed enemy ground forces, but we did not know what would constitute “victory.” Through our chief CAOC representative, Lt Col Craig “Walrus” Heise, we proposed that intelligence experts identify Serb army units and their locations in Kosovo so we could systematically attack them and achieve a yet-to-be-defined joint objective. We also proposed a FAC conference at Vicenza that would allow us to compare notes and hammer out a common way forward. Both of those initiatives won approval. Afterward, our ATO listed the Serb Third Army as our main objective.

Defining our objectives did not make a big difference in our daily results, since KEZ operations did not have sufficient priority on reconnaissance assets to locate and track Third Army command posts and operational units (see chap. 5 for more details). We argued at the FAC conference for the need to develop a joint concept of attacking Serb ground forces that included NATO ground assets stationed in Macedonia and Albania. Later in the campaign, we understood that the CAOC was working closely with Army counterbattery radars. We, however, had practically no contact with our NATO ground colleagues throughout the campaign.