If the American public were to believe Newsweek's May 15 expose on “The Kosovo Cover-Up,” NATO aircraft only managed to destroy 14 tanks, 18 armored personnel carriers, and 20 artillery pieces in the nearly 2,000 strike missions flown over Kosovo.

According to Newsweek, a report supposedly “suppressed” by the U.S. Air Force says just that, conflicting starkly with figures released by Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander in Europe, last September.

Not surprisingly, a number of media outlets have jumped on this juicy revelation. On May 8, the day advance copies of Newsweek hit the street, the New York Post called the magazine's story a “bombshell.” On May 9, the Cleveland Plain Dealer charged the Pentagon with “fibbery.” A day later, the Charleston, S.C., Post and Courier took Defense Secretary William Cohen to task for making “extravagant claims.” By May 12, The New York Daily News had weighed in, headlining the “costly scandal.”

On the broadcast side, NBC Nightly News was first out of the blocks with a May 7 report that uncritically laid out the Newsweek claims, featuring a sound bite from the article's co-author, Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek. ABC World News Tonight followed a day later with a short anchor report from Peter Jennings, who mused about the truth being the first casualty of war — without ever mentioning Newsweek as the source for his smart remark.

Perhaps Jennings should have said that the first casualties of journalism today are truth and context. Unfortunately, “The Kosovo Cover-Up” expose is only the latest example of how journalistic standards continue to erode.

In their book, Warp Speed, media scholars Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel describe a disturbing trend they call the “new journalism of assertion,” which is “less interested in substantiating whether something is true and more interested in getting it into the public discussion.”

The Newsweek story is a case in point. Many media organizations did jump on the sensational tidbit, without bothering to check out Newsweek's shaky findings. The dull description of the Air Force's tedious but thorough methodology for bomb damage assessment was not as sexy as a “cover-up” and “scandal.” So many in the media simply chose to put Newsweek's assertions into the public discussion. Unfortunately for them, Newsweek's reporting does not hold up, either against the journalistic standard of truth or context.

Not since CNN's Tailwind fiasco has so much assertion about a military operation been based on so little evidence. In CNN's “Valley of Death” expose on Operation Tailwind, two seasoned producers ignored the inconvenient facts and stuck to their guns to the bitter end, insisting that the U.S. military had used nerve gas in Vietnam. That “bombshell” cost them their jobs and heavily dented CNN's credibility.

The cover-up thesis presented by Newsweek's national security correspondent, John Barry, and co-author Thomas, rests primarily on the so-called “suppressed” report, the existence of which is a mystery to Air Force officials closest to the campaign analysis. Air Force Brig. Gen. John Corley, who headed the studies and analysis team at the headquarters of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said he knew of “absolutely no report, no study that has been suppressed.” He could only conjecture that what Newsweek had was, in all likelihood, part of the ground survey of the munition effects taken in July after Serb forces had withdrawn from Kosovo (and taken much of their equipment with them, including damaged tanks, armored personnel carriers and artillery).

But the ground survey was only one piece of the bomb damage puzzle. As Corley told all who would listen, the starting point in the process were the pilots' initial mission reports. And not one of the 1,955 mission reports was automatically taken at face value, since it is easy to be mistaken in the heat of combat. Each had to be corroborated by multiple sources before that particular mission was counted as a successful strike. Each target report was treated as a separate case and researched using a combination of national imagery, cockpit video, unmanned aerial vehicle video, film from the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, and other information.

Corley had 200 personnel working 24 hours a day for nine weeks before Clark briefed the international media in September. The results: the team documented successful strikes on 93 tanks, 153 armored personnel carriers, and 389 artillery pieces. Not surprisingly, these results scaled back the initial bomb damage assessments that had been released by both NATO and the Pentagon in June. They were, after all, preliminary findings that did not have the benefit of in-depth correlation using multiple sources. So why had they released premature results? Answer: the media had been clamoring for these numbers, and Clark finally relented. Those tallies were 110 tanks, 210 APCs, and 449 pieces of artillery (NATO) and 120, 220, and 450 (Pentagon).

If anything, Corley's team was conservative in its approach. And although the Air Force gave Newsweek correspondent John Barry special access to Corley and his documentation, Barry chose not to let the facts get in the way of reporting his sensational thesis. Contrast the methodologies. Corley had 200 people working day and night with access to the ground survey, classified imagery, cockpit videos, mission reports, human intelligence, and other sources. Barry and Thomas had an early report from the ground assessment team, backed by innuendo from unnamed NATO sources, an unnamed CIA official, and an unnamed Pentagon source.

Moreover, Newsweek was not even the first to assert that NATO missed the bulk of its ground targets. That distinction belongs to Michael Evans, defence editor of the London Times, who in a June 24, 1999, dispatch from Pristina wrote that NATO had only destroyed 13 tanks. That is the same number Serbia's 3^rd Army Commander, Lt. Gen. Nebojsa Pavkovic, used on June 16, according to the Yugoslav press. But as Clark pointed out in his September 16 press conference, Pavkovic also claimed that Yugoslav air defense units had shot down 47 NATO planes, 4 helicopters, and 21 drones.

The appearance of the Newsweek article, however, did not escape Evans, who in a May 11 article in the London Times tied the “leaked report” cited by Newsweek to testimony by British Gen. Sir Michael Jackson before the House of Commons Defence Committee. Evans wrote that Jackson, who gained international attention after refusing Clark's order to block Russian forces from occupying the Pristina airport in the days following the Kosovo campaign, said that it was now a matter of record that the actual damage on the ground in Kosovo was rather less than the estimated damage.

But Evans failed to report the rest of what Jackson said. According to a raw, unedited transcript provided to this writer by the Defence Committee, but which has not yet been publicly released, Jackson stated, “We can play with the numbers forever. I am not privy to the information on which the numbers have been assembled.”

Unfortunately, Newsweek's article was not just about bad numbers ricocheting back and forth across the Atlantic. Apart from their sloppy reliance on a small slice of the overall bomb damage assessment, Barry and Thomas also missed the most basic context of the bombing campaign. Early in their expose, they confused what turned out to be one of the most precise exercises in limited bombing — an exercise Clark now describes as “coercive diplomacy” — with “terror- bombing civilians,” adding that “the surgical strike remains a mirage.”

There is of course plenty of room to criticize NATO's limited, escalation strategy, but modern aerospace power provides a military commander with the capability to simultaneously strike tactical and strategic targets in order to achieve a range of desired “effects.” Those effects may be limited or overwhelming. In contrast to the limited effects the early bombing had in Kosovo (Slobodan Milosevic didn't blink), simultaneous strikes at the outset of the Gulf War essentially paralyzed Saddam Hussein's military.

As for the strategic strikes in Kosovo, which Barry and Thomas equate to “terror bombing,” William M. Arkin of Washingtonpost.com, operating under the auspices of Human Rights Watch, actually walked the ground in Serbia, completing an independent survey of the widely, but falsely, reported civilian bomb damage. The results, published in the May/June 2000 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, will give little comfort to Newsweek's investigative duo or to others who have embraced the myth of widespread collateral damage.

For his part, Arkin was highly critical of NATO's targeting strategy. He concluded that NATO planners did not seem to understand their opponent well enough to create a targeting plan that would produce effective results. At the same time, he noted that “in the new American style of air warfare, the effects of bombing are no longer firestorms and widespread rubble, as was true in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.” In those days, civilian casualties were “awesomely” high, but today, he adds, “the accuracy standard applied by the military is so extraordinarily strict that civilians are seldom put at risk.”

Newsweek, however, did not stop with its assault on strategic bombing. It also repeated the popular myth that the Air Force was flying too high at 15,000 feet altitude, using some fancy graphics to illustrate this point. In reality, Gen. John Jumper, who was the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe at the time, said that flying at 15,000 feet was intentional. He told a DFI International Aerospace Power seminar on April 13 that today's technology makes it possible to avoid the hail of anti-aircraft artillery that downed thousands of airplanes in Vietnam. NATO pilots had every right to avoid becoming casualties, and there was nothing “ignoble” about that, he said. “At 15,000 feet, a laser bomb doesn't care [about] the altitude from which it's dropped, as long as it sees that little laser spot on the ground. And they do very well.” Jumper also said that the altitude wasn't categorically restricted to 15,000 feet. Forward air controllers, for example, regularly flew much lower when necessary.

In the end, however, aircraft altitudes and the number of tanks destroyed is not what mattered in the Kosovo air campaign, no matter how ill-conceived the operation was from the standpoint of preferred military strategy. What mattered was the combined effects from the military, political, economic, and diplomatic actions taken by NATO. Aerospace power alone did not win the Kosovo military campaign, but it was the dominant feature of NATO's exercise in coercive diplomacy, and it did provide NATO's leaders with a range of options that would have been hard to conceive of as recently as the Gulf War.

There are still many aspects of Operation Allied Force that can be debated. By focusing on the 14 tanks the ground assessment team found during its foray into Kosovo, Newsweek distorted a number of key military and political issues related to NATO's targeting and grossly misled the American and international public.

The public deserves better, and often says so. A look at any poll today will reveal how much the news media's credibility has eroded. How many more major news organizations are going to tolerate the journalism of assertion before they learn their lesson?

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Stephen P. Aubin is director of policy and communications for the Air Force Association and the author of Distorting Defense: Network News and National Security (Praeger). He is also on the adjunct faculty of Georgetown University's National Security Studies Program. 
Email: SAubin@afa.org

The Air Force Association promotes public understanding of the role aerospace power plays in national defense.