-Caveat Lector- >From Int'l Herald Tribune Paris, Wednesday, April 14, 1999 Escalation of Air War Underscores Its Flaws Low-Tech Serb Tactics Stymie NATO Plan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- By Joseph Fitchett International Herald Tribune ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- PARIS - NATO's announcement of major reinforcements, confronting Serbia with a U.S.-led air armada of more than 1,000 warplanes, underscored signs Tuesday that the alliance's initial battle plan had failed to deliver the expected results and needed an urgent escalation in firepower to offer a realistic prospect of military victory in Kosovo. ''Our high technology weapons' performance would be devastating against a sophisticated adversary fighting our kind of war,'' a North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander acknowledged privately, ''but they work much less well in a politically constrained campaign against Serbians who are skillfully using nearly obsolescent weapons to fight in ways we had almost forgotten about.'' Serbian forces, for example, have resorted to firing their surface-to-air missiles using radar mounted on each battery. That method reduces the effectiveness of the missiles in comparison to modern systems integrating individual batteries with remote radars that provide more time for aiming and firing. But missile crews operating independently only turn on their radars briefly, making it harder for warplanes to home in for the kill using anti-radar missiles. Even with sharply reduced capabilities, the surviving missiles pose a potent threat to low-flying warplanes, dissuading NATO from ordering ground-attack fighters to pursue low-level attacks to kill tanks. Serbia, meanwhile, also has broken up its armored units so that tanks operate alone or in pairs, reducing their exposure as targets. Senior officials in Washington said Monday that the Pentagon planned to approve the deployment of 300 additional warplanes. The added planes, which were requested by General Wesley Clark, NATO's top military commander, would increase the number of U.S. and NATO aircraft committed to the campaign to nearly 1,000, more than double the number - 430 - that the alliance had on hand when it began the strikes on March 24. The White House spokesman said Tuesday that Defense Secretary William Cohen might ask President Bill Clinton for authority to call up some military reserve forces. The spokesman, Joe Lockhart gave no figures and did not outline what the reservists would be doing. In miscalculating the impact of air strikes and underestimating Serbian abilities to elude a knockout blow and exploit Western blind spots, the initial NATO battle plan has created an uncomfortably exposed position for the Clinton administration and European governments. The lack of visible progress in the war has triggered calls for ground forces from hawks and threatens to fuel pressure from European moderates for political accommodation over Kosovo. A fundamental mistake in the Western approach, an increasing number of experts say, was the decision by President Bill Clinton and the other NATO leaders to announce at the outset that they would not use ground forces. That assured Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader, that he would have time for a sweeping ethnic cleansing of Kosovo - on a scale that Western capitals say they never suspected possible. ''Once Milosevic heard that he was not going to face Western troops,'' a British official said this weekend, ''it would have been natural for men with the mentality of his commanders to decide that they could take more punishment than the West was ready to dish out.'' Militarily, the decision meant that NATO lost the advantage that even the threat of a combination of air and land forces would have provided. As a French official said, ''Your armor and other forces on the ground pose a threat obliging the adversary to operate in strength, which exposes him to air attack.'' But Serbian forces remain masters of the terrain in Kosovo. General Clark said Tuesday that some units were regrouping and others were digging bunkers to conceal their tanks and artillery, apparently hoping to ride out the air war and deter any NATO ground incursion with the threat of sharp resistance. ''Militarily and psychologically, Milosevic has made some gains, and NATO may not be able to turn the tables in time unless we can start operating more smartly,'' a U.S. planner said this weekend. Sympathetic to the political leaders' view that it would have been risky to order infantry into combat from the outset, he noted that NATO could have ordered crack units into position in the Adriatic. That, he said, ''would have limited Milosevic's sense of his own impunity and room for maneuver - and meant that they were right there if and when we needed them.'' Such an approach seems to have been adopted this week as the strength of ground forces in the area has started to climb. The Apache helicopters heading for Albania are now said to need 4,800 U.S. soldiers - more than double the 2,000-strong contingent announced last week. In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair, while assuring Parliament that NATO had no advance inkling of Mr. Milosevic's plan to uproot most of Kosovo's population, announced Tuesday hat he was ordering an additional 1,800 British troops into the region. General Clark said Tuesday that he was sticking to an air war to destroy Serbian forces until Mr. Milosevic cedes politically, but his comments at a NATO briefing, also disclosed new tactics reflecting the lessons learned in the frustrating first three weeks of the campaign. Reinforced by the 300 U.S. warplanes promised late Monday by the Pentagon, NATO plans to concentrate on ''improving and refining our intelligence'' - meaning that NATO hopes to be able to shorten the time between allied spy flights to locate Serbian targets and attacks on the targets by aircraft. Among the 300 extra U.S. warplanes, a large proportion were said to be tankers - enabling more allied aircraft to stay over Serbia day and night. ''We'll sit up there and plink them,'' a U.S. officer said, implying that the alliance planners expected to be able to pursue the air war for weeks without exposing allied pilots to unacceptable risks involved in low-level attacks. This war of attrition, so different from earlier hopes for an overwhelming initial shock, will benefit from better flying weather, General Clark said. NATO aides have played up the weather as a factor in their adverse fortunes of war, but they have not said publicly, as officials disclosed privately, that the alliance started the offensive with a battle plan designed for a summer offensive last year and taken off the shelf without extensive rethinking when NATO started its war on March 24 - when bad weather was a statistical probability. General Clark claimed Tuesday that better bombing weather was on the way, justifying his confidence by citing seasonal weather patterns in Kosovo. He said that NATO was close to achieving the goal of starving Serbian forces of fuel, saying that air strikes had destroyed more than two-thirds of Serbia's facilities for refining, stocking and supplying oil. Defense Secretary Cohen said Sunday that the air war had achieved ''tactical maneuverability,'' meaning that NATO attack planes can operate anywhere they choose provided they are accompanied by electronic aircraft that can jam missile batteries and prevent them from aiming. But for two weeks the Pentagon has not changed its assessment of Serbian air defenses: ''degraded but functional.'' Even if they cannot function as an integrated system, ''the missiles are still there,'' according to an official with access to classified reports. NATO planes encountered stronger Serbian air defense activity Tuesday than on any recent occasion in the campaign, officials said. NATO's hopes of gradually gaining unchallenged control of Serbian skies will brighten as the cloud ceiling lifts, allowing pilots to get visual confirmation of military targets before firing from a safe distance. Bad weather meant that NATO warplanes only operated fully on about two-thirds of the 21 nights in the campaign, officials said. A laser-guided missile hit a passenger train in Serbia by mistake Monday, apparently because the pilot fired from far away and only saw the bridge through his guidance system - which revealed the train only when the missile was too close. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From NewsMax.CoM The Big Lie About Kosovo Richard Poe April 14, 1999 "Save the Albanian Kosovars!" Clinton cries. "Save the Sudeten Germans!" Hitler trumpeted in 1938. The names have changed, but the strategy remains the same. For more than 50 years, we Americans have looked down our noses at the Germans, for having followed Hitler so blindly. But now it's our turn. We are proving no more resistant to propaganda than those cheering crowds in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will. Back in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler needed an excuse to seize Czechoslovakia. So he invented one. Three and a quarter million ethnic Germans lived in the Sudetenland, under Czech rule. As William L. Shirer recounts in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Hitler secretly funded an extremist group called the Sudeten German Party and ordered it to provoke an uprising against the Czechs. Kosovo, too, appears to have been destabilized by outside forces. For years, Kosovars protested Milosevic peacefully. But in 1997, a group called the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) suddenly started shooting. Who were these people? The Times of London (March 24, 1999) described the KLA as "a Marxist-led force funded by dubious sources, including drug money." European police suspect the KLA of connections to Albanian gangsters. At least two of the group's backers appear to have been the CIA and the German spy agency BND, according to intelligence analyst John Whitley, quoted in the Truth in Media Global Watch Bulletin (April 2, 1999). The purpose of staging a provocation is to create a backlash. This strategy certainly worked for Hitler in 1938. As unrest spread in the Sudetenland, the Czechs cracked down. Czech President Eduard Benes ordered troops into the region and declared martial law. Right on cue, the German press went wild. "Women and Children Mowed Down by Armored Cars," ran a typical Berlin newspaper headline in September 1938. "Poison Gas Attack on Aussig" cried another. Hitler accused Benes of waging a "war of extermination" against Sudeten Germans. "The Germans he now drives out!" cried Hitler, in a September 16, 1938 speech. "We see the appalling figures: on one day 10,000 fugitives, on the next 20,000... and today 214,000. Whole stretches of country were depopulated, villages are burned down, attempts are made to smoke out the Germans with hand-grenades and gas." Sound familiar? Hitler's rhetoric bears an eerie resemblance to the CNN news blitz on Kosovo. Of course, Hitler was exaggerating. Many of the atrocities he alleged later turned out to be fabrications. But the same is true of our newscasts on Kosovo. Take the alleged massacre of 45 Albanian civilians at Racak, for instance, reported in January 1999. Forensic and other evidence now suggests that the bodies were those of KLA guerrillas killed in combat. The hoax has been widely discussed in the European press (including Le Monde, Die Welt, Le Figaro and the BBC). But U.S. news outlets have been as silent on the controversy as if they were taking orders from Goebbels himself. In the Sudeten crisis, Hitler claimed to be inspired by internationalist ideals. "Among the fourteen points which President Wilson promised ..." the Fuhrer proclaimed, "was the fundamental principle of the self-determination of all peoples ..." By freeing the Sudeten Germans, Hitler argued, he was fulfilling Wilson's vision. Clinton too claims he is fighting for human rights. But ethnic cleansing does not bother Clinton when his friends are the ones doing the cleansing. He ordered no bombing when the Croatians drove 300,000 Serbs from Krajina, burning their homes and killing many. Nor did he intervene when our NATO ally Turkey slaughtered over 35,000 Kurds. Every schoolchild today knows that Hitler's real goal, in seizing Czechoslovakia, was to use it as a stepping stone for his planned invasion of Russia. But what is Clinton's real interest in Kosovo? Nobody knows. Many theories have been floated. Some point to the Trepca mines of northern Kosovo, rich in gold, zinc, silver and lead. The New York Times called them the "Kosovo war's glittering prize" (July 8, 1998). Others see a more far-reaching strategy. The Russians claim that NATO, like Hitler, wants to use the Balkans as a stepping stone for extending its power eastward -- eventually meddling in the affairs of Russia itself. But this is all speculation. Only time will reveal Clinton's true intentions, as it ultimately did Hitler's. In his memoir Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer recalled the anxious mood of Berliners, in September 1939, as they digested the news that England and France had declared war. "The atmosphere was noticeably depressed," he recalls. "The people were full of fear about the future. None of the regiments marched off to war decorated with flowers as they had done at the beginning of the First World War. The streets remained empty. There was no crowd on Wilhelmsplatz shouting for Hitler." A wise man once said that those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it. Should Clinton actually succeed in sparking a world war, Americans will no doubt react with the same shock and fear as Berliners did in 1939. But we will have only ourselves to blame. Richard Poe is a freelance journalist and a New York Times-bestselling author. He writes frequently on historical themes. Poe's latest book, "Black Spark, White Fire", explores the Afrocentric controversy concerning ancient Egypt. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soapboxing! 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