A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

After the first week of KEZ strikes, the Serbs rarely drove military vehicles in the open during the day. They became masters of hiding during the day and making full use of night or bad weather. They also built and deployed ingeniously simple decoys to impersonate mortars, artillery, trucks, APCs, and tanks. After noting that the APCs they parked in revetments would often be blown up when discovered by A-10s, they sometimes put a decoy in the revetment and then camouflaged the real vehicle outside. They also parked vehicles in agricultural fields and painted them the same color as the growing crops. They built tunnels, some real and some not.

Nevertheless, they made mistakes and were sometimes caught with their troops and vehicles in the open—usually when bad weather cleared up rapidly, as documented in a couple of the stories in this book. On one occasion, as 36 hours of heavy rain ended, I spied something very unusual through a small hole in the clouds. I soon understood the scene below me—a series of dark, metallic shapes and several bright-white tents of varying sizes in an area that included an asphalt road 500 meters long, bordered on either side by 10 to 20 meters of clearing and enclosed by woods. Using my binoculars I picked out mortars and artillery pieces in neat rows of revetments. Small, taut white tents covered the three revetments on one side of the road, and the three on the other side were in the open. A couple of APCs were visible, one of which was under a large, white tent. Other such tents were pitched in the trees. Taking extra time to rule out collateral damage, I made sure there were no civilian vehicles and no vehicles painted any other color than camouflage green. Why would a professional army use bright-white tents to cover camouflaged vehicles? The strange scene suddenly made sense. Evidently I had found them just as they were breaking camp after the deluge. This was one of the few times I saw a large group of military vehicles unaccompanied by civilian vehicles. They had apparently used the white tents not only to protect their equipment from the rain but also to pass themselves off as civilians to avoid attacks from anyone who might discover them.

It is easier to visually camouflage a professional army than it is to disguise its disciplined routines and habits. When moving, professional armies tend to drive their convoys at a constant speed with military spacing; when encamping, they tend to pitch their tents in neat, military rows. Today, that latter habit betrayed their attempt at disguise.

The hole in the clouds was closing and I reckoned that my airburst Mk-82s would be the most useful weapons to employ. Luck was with me as I rippled two bombs on an imperfect dive angle, on an axis that overlaid the most targets, hitting an APC in the open and another covered by a tent.

All pilots encountered similar situations when, with a little perseverance, they were able to figure out what was real and what wasn’t in the pictures they could see. Of course, that savvy improved with experience and after destroying a number of decoys. I certainly blew up my share of fake tanks.

Forcing NATO Mistakes

The Serb-escorted Kosovar refugee convoys comprised a mix of civilian and military vehicles and were a familiar sight from the very first day the weather allowed us to operate in Kosovo. As time went on, we were convinced that the Serb army and Interior Ministry police moved about in the large, white buses we saw everywhere. What Kosovar Albanian civilian would charter a bus to speed north on the highway towards Serbia? However, we never attacked the white buses because we couldn’t be sure there weren’t civilians in them.

Serb forces used many other unethical tactics to try to fool us and cause us to bomb noncombatant civilians and villages. They parked armored vehicles next to churches and other locations, many of which are too sensitive to mention here. Suffice it to say that the rigorous AFAC discipline in the KEZ precluded the Serbs from gaining much advantage from their efforts to trick us into bombing innocent civilians and other inappropriate targets. 

\Photo: Serb SA-9 decoy

Hit by a SAM Maj Phil “Goldie” Haun

As the 81st FS weapons officer during OAF, I was involved in most operational aspects of our squadron’s activities. We performed the Sandy CSAR role, one of our three OAF missions, which most notably included the rescue of an F-117 pilot near Belgrade on 27 March 1999 and an F-16 pilot on 2 May 1999. I had the exhilarating privilege of being the onscene Sandy flight lead during the pickup of the F-117 pilot. We were also the primary daytime AFACs and strikers over Kosovo, and I flew 25 of those missions from 30 March to 7 June 1999—19 of them as an AFAC mission commander.