I have to tell you, I worked on the Air Staff in the Rice and McPeak [Dr. Donald B. Rice, Secretary of the Air Force 1989-1993; Gen. Merrill A. McPeak, USAF Chief of Staff 1990-1994] era where the first thing I learned is that it is always better to have about a thousand view graphs as you go out to brief the group. I have a pretty long presentation for you this morning.

SLIDE 1 What I want to talk with you about this morning is the myths about Kosovo and aerospace power. As you know, there is a group in Europe and back in Washington working hard under the direction of Brigadier General [John D.W.] Corley to give us a full and complete report about what aerospace power accomplished during the Kosovo crisis. But even in the months that have passed since the end of that campaign almost a year ago, we have seen a situation where there are a lot of myths about aerospace power. Many of them are the familiar myths that we heard after Desert Storm, that we heard after Operation Deliberate Force. I want to take on about nine of those myths here this morning.

SLIDE 2 The reason for doing this is quite simple. As we stand at the beginning of the 21^st century, there has been proof that aerospace power is really a decisive factor and element around which we construct our joint operations. We should be at a place in time where we are looking at simply improving aerospace power. Instead we often find ourselves questioning and going back over myths about what really was accomplished by airmen.

What are the myths? A myth is always a little bit of truth and a lot of speculation blended together. It is something that may be based on ostensibly historical events. It is something that tries to explain a marvelous event that we may not otherwise understand. Myths have an important place in our culture. But what we see as we look at myths and try to translate that into lessons about military operations is a real danger. The danger is in letting things that we believe run contrary to facts that we should know about.

SLIDE 3 SLIDE 4 These are the nine myths about aerospace power in Kosovo and air campaigns more generally that I’d like to talk with you about this morning. I will take each one of them in turn. Let me say first, these are not outlandish claims. Many of these myths have a kernel of truth. A lot of them have to be looked at very carefully from many different angles in order to understand what is really going on. SLIDE 5 That is what I want to do with you this morning for a little bit.

Why is it important to get at this? Simply because if we don’t, then we run the risk of not having that full understanding of aerospace power that we need both for those who execute and command aerospace power, for those who provide the industrial support and that military might, and those of us like me who just try to understand what is going on.

SLIDE 6 This is one that came up yesterday. Ever since the mid-1990s in particular, the U.S. Air Force has placed a lot of emphasis on being able to halt enemy forces. This leads to a lot of confusion, sometimes among the services. The Army perhaps has a very specific definition of what halt is and yet the Air Force has, incredibly, made a case and demonstrated in combat that it has the ability to use air to control enemy maneuver and to achieve objectives directly. Yet, we see criticisms in this case coming out from the Army that halt really failed and failed big time in Kosovo, with an implication that the Air Force really has not been telling the straight story all along.

SLIDE 7 This is a very tough one. Because as General [John P.] Jumper talked about yesterday, there was that frustrating position of having to watch [Yugoslav President Slobodan] Milosevic’s forces mass and increase their operation in the spring of 1999. Look at this chart and please note that this shows the situation in 1998, a year before the start of Allied Force. You can see the areas in green and purple. It may not be clear in the back but what I want you to see from this is that you have a situation where forces are already mixed in. This is already, for the Kosovars and Yugoslav Army, close combat taking place at a simmering level. Quite frankly, by the time the situation looks like this, there is not much of an opportunity for any force to achieve a halt.

SLIDE 8 It is easier to see this if you break apart the variables that go into a halt type of operation. I’ve looked at a bunch of them up here. You have got to have air dominance, the ability to command and control those forces. Some other things that are very important as well – good tactical target ID [identification]. A key down at the bottom left corner there, a separation of forces. That is why when you look back at an operation such as the Battle of Khafji [during Operation Desert Storm], where you have a degree of separation between friendly and adversary ground forces, you can clearly see the ability of air to move in and rapidly control, attrit and halt maneuvers. That simply, for a number of reasons, is not what goes on in Kosovo. The point I want to make to you is that Kosovo does not mean the halt strategy has failed. What it means is that there was simply not an opportunity in this conflict -- for a number of reasons, some military and some political – to test out rapid halt. We shouldn’t back away from it. We should understand the unique circumstances of this particular conflict.

SLIDE 9 The Army has also suggested that a better strategy than halt may be something like a quick strategic preemption using air to delay but using ground forces to achieve that final preemption. Again, here we have a lot of questions as we see this myth being created that air can’t really achieve what it needs to. In that map I showed you earlier of forces mixed in, I argue we have just as much, no, in fact more, trouble trying to use a land force in strategic preemption.

SLIDE 10 Myth number two. This is another big and complicated myth. It is something that runs all throughout the Air Force’s history. We talk about what is more important – strategic attack or tactical attack. This is a myth we really need to move beyond. Part of the myth says that true air doctrine places the greatest importance on attack of strategic targets -- ideally, perhaps, just a very few targets that would have the greatest impact on an enemy regime. That is why I put a few pictures in here that are a little bit questionable. Notice what they are really doing, these B-17s in World War II. Maybe they are bombing enemy rail lines. Maybe they are attacking an oil plant. What about the B-52 down at Linebacker? Maybe it is operating in the spring of 1972 countering North Vietnamese ground forces. Maybe it is flying during Linebacker II.

SLIDE 11 In Desert Storm, though, we see some very conclusive evidence. The area in red shows a number of sorties dedicated over that campaign to destroying the battlefield. The blue shows strategic sorties and white shows the particular sortie dedication to defense suppression. What you see here is that there is an enormous weight of effort placed on fielded forces.

SLIDE 12 I would contend that with myth two, the facts are that fielded forces almost always matter, and they matter a lot. For various reasons, reasons that vary with each conflict, a theater commander usually wants to place heavy pressure on a fielded force, particularly one that is running amuck as Milosevic’s force did in Kosovo. What about [Gen. Dwight D.] Eisenhower going after Rommel’s tanks in World War II? What of that greying picture up there showing a T-34 under napalm attack in Korea? Fielded forces do matter, and beyond that, they tend to drive often the size and duration of that air campaign. Those of us like me who like to think about doctrine and history and all this, we need to realize that this myth -- that one -- is more important than the other and leads us in the wrong direction. Fielded forces do matter. What we really see is that when you pair the two together -- strategic attack and relentless pressure on fielded forces-- then you have the winning combination. It worked in Desert Storm. SLIDE 13 It worked again in Kosovo.

SLIDE 14 Myth three. So, fielded forces may be important. But myth three says that the Yugoslav Army really got away unscathed. You began to see press reports about this fairly early on in the conflict. Subsequently more information came out, and yet some of the press reports even today still claim that there just wasn’t that much impact on these fielded forces.

SLIDE 15 But the data really show otherwise. I hope that every one of you has already seen this data that I am showing you here today. This is data that comes from, in my opinion, the most meticulous examination of air warfare ever done, and that is the work done during the summer out of USAFE [U.S. Air Forces Europe] at the request of General [Wesley K.] Clark [Commander-in-Chief, U.S. European Command] that went back and looked in great detail at each of the claimed strikes. They looked at over 2,000 mission reports, attempted to match them up with other sources - national imagery, cockpit video, on-site findings. This is the conclusion of that study released through NATO. What it shows is, yes, the Yugoslav Army was hit and hit hard during this conflict. This is very important in a year when we are starting to think about how the Air Force will prepare for the Quadrennial Defense Review [QDR].

SLIDE 16 So you know the raw numbers, but what do they really mean? In this slide, I’ve attempted to sketch out a comparison. The real data will have to wait until General Corley’s work is finished this summer, but what I show in the first graph on the left is a guess about what number of fielded forces may have been in that area. Hopefully it is a conservative guess. It shows the levels of destruction achieved in certain categories and on the right, pairing that off against what was done in Desert Storm. What you see is that while some of the categories vary, one is just eerily the same. A good level of destruction was achieved. The questions will come up at the next QDR about can the Air Force kill tanks? Can the Air Force kill APCs [Armored Personnel Carriers]? Do we have to use only land forces to control joint deep operations? We need to be able to step back from the myth and say, yes, the Yugoslav Army was heavily damaged by air power. Once again, we see the creation of a myth and its potential impact on defense planning.

SLIDE 17 If you assume that fielded forces are important and you assume that the Yugoslav Army was hit, but what about this decoy problem? This is something that many of the people involved in Allied Force have already spoken to eloquently and yet it keeps coming up again.

SLIDE 18 I want to remind all of you that you airmen have known about decoys since pretty much the dawn of time. These pictures are all from World War II. One of them shows a captured Japanese position where they’ve taken a searchlight and put it in a ditch so that, to aerial reconnaissance, it will look more like a gun emplacement. You remember, of course, fake factories: the Boeing plant up in Seattle had a camouflaged facility built next to it in order to protect it from potential attack. On the right, a camouflaged Japanese train.

SLIDE 19 Here, a tricky one, picked up after a Japanese island base was captured. On the left, the Japanese have attempted to construct a fake mobile artillery position, and on the right aerial reconnaissance has shown what the position nearby looked like. Decoys are really, really, old news to airmen.

SLIDE 20 In Kosovo, the evidence is simply overwhelming. The big green bar on the right shows things that were hit, including, in this case, multiple strikes, and the tiny little red bar on the left shows the number of decoys that were hit. Let’s get rid of this myth and acknowledge that decoys just weren’t a problem for airmen this time around.

SLIDE 21 This is my favorite myth. If you say fielded forces may be important, things were hit, only a few of them were decoys, but isn’t it really the case that air was effective because of the synergy of air and ground operations. We know that in certain scenarios that synergy of air and ground can be very important to achieving the warfighter’s objectives. But I’d really like to take away some of this myth about the KLA [Kosovo Liberation Army] offensive and what it ultimately achieved. SLIDE 22 To do that we have to ask a couple questions: What really went on, and is there a correlation between the effectiveness of air power and this offensive?

SLIDE 23 The KLA, as you probably know, was active obviously in the two years prior to Operation Allied Force and suffered quite a pushback in the period leading up to the months just prior to Allied Force. Yet, what we really see here is a case where they continue operations but in a very specific way, usually guerrilla operations involving a small number of fighters or parts of a brigade, going around -- really all over -- the region in places where there are still enclaves or strong enclaves of Albanians. They may respond when the Serbs go off on a foray. When the Serbs shell them, they are likely to respond. I looked through some of the claims from the Kosovo press agency as to what the KLA had done, and a typical claim is, we attacked a Serb vehicle and killed a couple of people that were inside. We have to see this perhaps not as a big coordinated offensive but as something that has gone on throughout at a particular level.

SLIDE 24 Also, what we see here really is another case where there is one specific point in time when there is an attempt to push back and launch operations in a specific area along the Albanian border. This is the so-called “Operation Arrow,” and it talks about a communique from the KLA general staff about what they are trying to accomplish. Recognize again that this is an offensive that, as reported at the time, wasn’t too successful. One of the DoD officials said, “Hey, they really got creamed when they went out and tried to do this.” We know there is activity here and reports of continued interaction and fighting between KLA and Serb forces. But what I want to show you here is it is really localized in a particular area. Keep that in mind in the next couple of slides.

SLIDE 25 This shows the validated hits that I showed you in the big chart earlier. It’s taken, this particular slide, from the 12^th of May through the 9^th of June, the last day these are recorded. What you see is, yes, some fluctuation going on up and down. If there were a strong air-ground operation going on, we would expect to see something that looked a little different from this. We would expect to see a correlation of more hits happening as this ground operation pushed through and flushed the targets. In the next couple of charts, I’ll show you that is just not what the evidence shows so far.

SLIDE 26 This one is a little bit hard to read, but look at the lines drawing down to 22 May. This shows just tank kills per day and APCs killed per day. In these two categories, particularly, you see a good day here and a bad day here and a good day here and a couple of good days in a row. I would argue that probably the strongest correlation comes from things like weather, availability of forces and not from this alleged air-ground operation that was going on.

SLIDE 27 When you look at all the categories again, you will see for example that the biggest day for hits on military vehicles happened much earlier, well before the KLA offensive. You may see, though, that there is some potential correlation with hits on artillery. That can be a valid correlation. But I suggest to you that overall, the evidence is overwhelming. The strong correlations come with better weather and more forces going into the theater.

SLIDE 28 Finally, as you look at what was hit overall -- this shows number of tank kills -- they are all over Kosovo. There is not a particular correlation with an offensive in the front pushing forward.

SLIDE 29 We need to really unpack this myth and say this is not an air-ground operation like you’d read about in [Army Field Manual] FM 100-5, by any stretch of the imagination. It is important to get rid of this myth because there are some valid questions to ask. That is, how can future commanders do that ground preparation of the battlespace faster? How can they identify targets more quickly? I think perhaps we see here that airmen know and will be working on ways to include better prep of the battlespace early on. That is where the real lesson lies. Not in the myth about a coordinated air-ground offensive.

You would think, since I just spent a long time talking about ground forces, that I wouldn’t even have to go over this myth about the threat of the ground invasion. And yet again one hears it very strongly. Here really is the creation of a myth, an attempt to explain an unusual conflict through things that we know or things that we believe to be tried and true and tested, the doctrine and principles that it takes ground forces to be decisive. It takes ground forces to really terminate a conflict and that perhaps the threat of ground invasion was more important in Milosevic’s capitulation. It really is a mythical statement for us to imagine that something that may have gone on in someone’s mind was more important than the real and physical effects of aerospace power going on throughout that battlespace day and night.

SLIDE 30 This is a myth with very old roots. We see it in “Desert Storm” with the endless debate about what air really achieved, the allegations about the 100-hour war, that famous poster, if it is still up in the second floor of the Pentagon, near the escalator that shows how everything was done in just 100 hours.

SLIDE 31 SLIDE 32 We see it in historians looking back on operations and particularly see it at this time in Army doctrine and what it has to say about what happened in that battlespace.

SLIDE 33 I want to try to take the rug out from part of this myth and review for a moment the Bosnia operations. There is a myth here, too, that there was a combined Croatian and Muslim Federation offensive that may really have done more than “Operation Deliberate Force” to lead to the Dayton agreements. Again, you’ve got to kind of look at the map to understand why you needed to not take that quite so seriously. This may be hard to read, but what it shows is that this offensive occurred in several phases, one in the spring of 1995, one in August 1995 and one that started during and continued after “Operation Deliberate Force.” By the time “Deliberate Force” started, yes, the Croatians and Muslims had taken back a lot of territory in the west. But the focus of “Deliberate Force” was those threatened safe areas in the east.

SLIDE 34 We can simply say that, really, aerospace power made it work in Kosovo. This is a conclusion of the DoD report that says any planning for a ground invasion would have been a long way off. In order for us to understand as a nation how to move forward in expeditionary operations, we need to come to terms with the power of this myth in our defense debate.

SLIDE 35 We are working quickly through the myths here, so we have to get to one that really is just a little bit hard to deal with. I am essentially a civilian. I don’t wear a uniform. I have never put myself at risk. And yet I felt this myth was so important that we had to talk about it publicly. Some claims have recently said things I hate to see. The implication is clear. If you don’t have blood shed by airmen, you may not have a just war.

SLIDE 36 You have to look back to understand why this comes about and to appreciate that there are three things that go into making this myth. One of them is a lack of understanding about airpower and what it can really achieve. We see this talked about in the time of the Bosnia air operations. The other two factors are factors in the military that you really don’t have much control over: those are domestic politics and international politics. As we look at this myth, let’s realize how many other myths and opinions are layered over the top of this.

SLIDE 37 We also have to realize that most of us just don’t understand how accurate you all really are. We tend to think that you have to do it like they did it in World War II, there on the left, with two B-25s practically on deck attacking this Japanese ship to get high accuracy. The fact is, altitude now is not a driving factor. Actually, I guess it is. You have to be at a certain altitude for your pods to work. That is something civilians have a hard time understanding, and I hope you all will go and take that on in every opportunity that you can.

SLIDE 38 There is a moral imperative here to understand that a just war is one that is based on just principles, not on the degree or apportionment of bloodshed. Vaclav Havel [President of the Czech Republic] probably said it best about Kosovo and the understanding that this really was an important humanitarian operation, so we can’t let ignorance about aerospace power and domestic and international politics cloud the fact that this was, at its root, a just operation.

I am almost wrapped up with my myths, but I have to do two more in particular. One, a little comment in the DoD report that somehow “Allied Force” really validated our joint doctrine.

Joint doctrine as it stands today is really good at synchronizing all the elements - air and land and sea - and it sort of implies that in expeditionary operations you will also have to synchronize those elements. I couldn’t resist throwing in again another little comment about how it really took this simultaneous application of air and ground to make “Allied Force” work. I hope that all those myths, talking about ground forces, have made you question that. Still, our joint doctrine would tell us that you’ve got to have everything come together.

SLIDE 39 Now, what General Jumper said yesterday about aerospace integration - we’ll know we’ve really got it done when we can stop talking about it. The same is true about jointness. Out in the field, jointness has prevailed for years. But back in the realm of planning and defense intellectuals, it is still important to understand where the joint doctrine does not necessarily reflect what aerospace power really does.

SLIDE 40 SLIDE 41 Our joint doctrine would tell us that you’ve got to have all of the components synchronized and that it takes land forces to achieve decisive effects.

SLIDE 42 Kosovo really looked a lot more like this - shaping and controlling an engagement done largely with air forces, also with maritime forces and their TLAMs [Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles]. Finally, objectives achieved and the termination coming with air. Then, an important phase, one that grows in importance now, that is ground forces going in to monitor this operation and attempt to keep the peace and continue carrying out objectives.

SLIDE 43 Where is the joint doctrine for this? Our doctrine ought to look a lot more like the way that CINCs [Commanders in Chief] constantly employ American military power, getting the optimum effect by using air all it can in shaping, controlling and achieving the same objectives.

SLIDE 44 Finally, maybe Kosovo really was an anomaly. Maybe we really don’t need to look at this for lessons about the future. Maybe, as this analyst suggested just right after the war, everything worked fine. So why on earth do we need to modernize our forces? This, in a way, brings all the myths together. The myths about air effectiveness. What was it effective at doing? SLIDE 45 What does our joint doctrine call for? What should we do as a nation? Why do we want to modernize and continue to improve aerospace power? Really, for very simple reasons. To win the next time and to win every time. Aerospace power has proved that it is indispensable in doing that in the last three major operations.

SLIDE 46 These are the nine myths, and I hope that I’ve helped you all to think a little bit about them and to question some of these. It is something that we all need to do as we struggle to understand the implications of aerospace power in expeditionary operations and what we need to do for the future.

SLIDE 47 I have to give credit, too, to two people who managed to go well beyond the myths, John Keegan, probably the most eminent scholar on military history alive today, who said frankly, “I was wrong. I didn’t understand. Air power really did the job this time.” And a senator here who says, “It wasn’t only Milosevic who lost. The conventional wisdom took a beating as well.” Following their example, we can help not only ourselves but others to move beyond the myths and understand what it is that aerospace power really does for us today.

SLIDE 48 There is that myth, of course, probably put in the shortest possible form - victory through airpower. There are those who would say, this has never happened and it never will. I would contend that Eisenhower knew better than that.

SLIDE 49 Aerospace power is really the American way of war. It is what we count on to make our joint operations as successful as they can be. It is what we count on to help save lives and help achieve objectives through our foreign policy. That concludes that my briefing.

Q&A Session

General Shaud: From your vantage point, were there any surprises in the DoD Kosovo report?

Dr. Grant: There weren’t enough surprises in the DoD Kosovo report. It was a quick look report. I’ve read an unclassified version, not the classified version. In this sense, I would have liked to have seen a little more examination of what the future of aerospace power really requires, more discussion about some of the things we’ve heard today, about how to improve the command of aerospace power and particularly -- and I think this is important for DoD -- how to bring together the intelligence and reconnaissance and surveillance assets in that command to make, within a couple of years, a really different means for controlling and executing air operations. That is something that will require department-wide help, and I’d like to see much more emphasis on that.

General Shaud: As a follow-on question, as we approach our Quadrennial Defense Review, it seems that there are two approaches, one is to speak to the synergism of forces and resources and the other is to pit one service versus another in their own centric observations. What are you comments on this?

Dr. Grant: I’d like to see us approach the QDR with a clean slate, obviously, but that slate should apply a lot of things. We should try to understand the extent to which our nation does rely on aerospace power. There is still quite a lot of debate that goes back and forth, and we saw this in 1997 with discussions about what kind of attack helicopters to use at 102 miles into the battlefield versus what fixed wing assets might do. To the extent that the next QDR spends time on issues like that, it is deviating from probably what are the most important issues, which are really about improving where aerospace power goes from here. There is a natural question that comes from that - do you want to change the shares that are allocated to each service? What does each service need to look to its own view of what future warfare will look like? But we need to go into that QDR with a strong understanding that our joint operations are really built around the mobility and the reach and the power provided by aerospace forces, joint aerospace forces. That is the idea we need to take into that, and I hope that we’ll see not such a concentration on synergy but on what we really used in the past so we don’t waste time arguing about whether airpower kills tanks or not.

General Shaud: Absent from the many analyses of Kosovo has been the contributions or shortfalls of electronic warfare. What have you found in your analysis of this situation?

Dr. Grant: I am going to pass on that question and let you ask that of General Short [Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short] the next time around.

General Shaud: Did NATO air planners identify specific center of gravity among fielded forces?

Dr. Grant: What we see in this operation is a desire by NATO to try to do what was done in Bosnia again, to attack a limited number of targets, and I want to make clear that I don’t think anyone involved in this operation was 100 percent satisfied with how it started out. But we see that, the consensus was that there may be a center of gravity in attacking a limited number of targets. What we see quickly then as the conflict changes is that this consensus doesn’t hold up any more. I have to give credit to the warriors who were there for deciding that the situation had changed dramatically. Milosevic had made a gamble to try to wipe out the KLA and press through and push out the Albanian Kosovars and get control over that province. The center of gravity has then changed within a couple of days, and there is that desire to have that relentless pressure, not just against the first 50-some targets selected, but against a thousand or two thousand targets -- if possible, against the fielded forces themselves. What this meant was that airpower got handed a really tough job, something difficult to do in order to deploy the forces needed to bring this relentless pressure across multiple centers of gravity. We should all understand that in the end, that is what made it work. That having the ability to go after fielded forces as well as after strategic targets meant that whatever was going on in Milosevic’s mind, you can be sure that the air campaign was affecting him in every area that matters to him - fielded forces, key strategic targets, etc. I have to give credit not only to the NATO alliance but to the warriors who were there and who are right here in front of me who identified what the centers of gravity were and got in place plans and forces and a style of operations necessary to carry it off and make it happen.

General Shaud: What do you think of the use of space assets and what did they achieve with regard to the Operation Allied Force?

Dr. Grant: I almost decided that one of the myths about this was that airpower can do it alone. I wanted to say that it isn’t a myth because what you really have is air and space working together, and it has been like that for a decade. Those of us who aren’t as deeply steeped in space tend to take this for granted. The fact is the level of precision that is achieved because of the use of space, the rapid deployment that is achieved because of the use of space, and certainly the ability to target rapidly within a matter of hours that is achieved because of the use of space, and the desire to bring that down to just a matter of minutes -these all point to an increasing reliance on the use of space. There is no airpower without space power at this point in time. It is only aerospace power. That is why, even though that is a tough word to wrap our mouths around, I hope we all begin to talk about aerospace power. Even if we don’t know how all that space stuff works, we must understand that it is absolutely integral to the type of operations that this nation expects the Air Force to carry out.

General Shaud: Do you plan to provide summaries of your report to the general media element -- newspaper, magazine articles, TV shows? What do we do now?

Dr. Grant:I will defer all those questions to General Shaud. There are a couple things going on here. As I mentioned before, I want to make sure to stress that, the Air Force’s big report on Kosovo will be out this summer, and I understand the Chief [Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan] has said, “You will be done by this summer, and it will be out at that point in time.” That is when you will really see the meat of this drawn out. I’ve kept up with that effort, and they are getting a lot out of it. That is when you will see the main meat of this coming. In between then and now, though, it is important that we use our common sense to keep whittling away at the myths that keep coming around, casting aspersions on what aerospace power achieved this time.

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