-Caveat Lector-
"But the Apaches never fired a shot in combat."
--------------------------
Army's Apache Helicopter Rendered
Impotent in Kosovo
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 29, 1999; Page A01
The Army spent a half billion dollars sending two
dozen AH-64 Apache
attack helicopters to Albania this spring for NATO's
fight against Yugoslav
troops tearing up Kosovo. But the Apaches never fired
a shot in combat.
Instead, they were grounded by Pentagon fears about
potential U.S.
casualties. Field commanders were convinced the
casualties would be low
and they argued forcefully in secret video
teleconferences to go into action.
But top military officials and the White House never
came close to using
the helicopters.
A detailed reconstruction of the operation known as
Task Force Hawk,
based on interviews with more than four dozen pilots
and U.S. military
commanders in Europe and top defense officials in
Washington, including
seven four-star generals, reveals how White House and
Pentagon concerns
over the risks inherent in combat can sideline the
very weapons that the
government has spent decades and trillions of dollars
to acquire and
perfect.
The issue was particularly relevant to Kosovo.
Yugoslav leader Slobodan
Milosevic's campaign against ethnic Albanians killed
10,000 by U.S.
government estimates before he withdrew his troops and
allowed in
NATO peacekeepers. Had the Apaches been used early
enough, some
military officials believe, the fearsome tank-killers
may have saved some of
those lives.
Instead, the vaunted helicopters came to symbolize
everything wrong with
the Army as it enters the 21st century: its inability
to move quickly; its
resistance to change; its obsession with casualties;
its post-Cold War
identity crisis.
"Task Force Hawk is a useful metaphor for the Army and
why we need to
transition to a lighter, more agile force," Army
Secretary Louis Caldera
said in an interview. "I use it to talk to senior
leaders about whether the
Army was willing and able to get into the fight."
Looking back on the Kosovo war, Caldera said, "We seem
to be more
willing to suffer casualties in training than in real
operations. It sets the
wrong standard for the soldiers."
Some current and former members of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and other
Pentagon officials dismiss the notion that they were
overly concerned about
casualties. They say Task Force Hawk had many
problems. It was too
unconventional. Too slow getting to Albania. Unlikely
to hit enough targets
to make a difference. Unlikely to do anything the Air
Force couldn't do
more safely, especially by the time the slow-flying,
tank-busting A-10
"Warthog" jets arrived in mid-May.
Retired Marine Corps commandant Gen. Charles C.
Krulak, who voted
against using the Apaches in the Joint Chiefs' secret
"tank" sessions, said
the difference of opinion with field commanders
reflects the military's
historical checks-and-balances system, one "that has
kept mothers and
fathers from suffering more white crosses. It is not
bad. It is good."
Army Lays Out 'Risks'
From the beginning, the NATO mission in Kosovo was
beset by a
strategic Catch-22.
NATO political leaders ruled out sending ground troops
to Kosovo
because they believed their people would not support
it. Instead, they
backed a limited air campaign that used jets and Navy
ships to hit
Yugoslav targets with missiles and bombs from three
miles up, a strategy
designed to limit pilot losses. They believed that
such a show of force
would within days make Milosevic call off the Serbian
paramilitaries and
the Yugoslav army troops carrying out the "ethnic
cleansing."
Top Pentagon officials and NATO's top commander, Gen.
Wesley K.
Clark, repeatedly warned the White House that jets
could not reliably
destroy troops and tanks on the ground.
Just hours after the cautious air war began on March
24, the White House
was faced with reports of massacres and hordes of
refugees created by
Milosevic's rampaging forces. A senior Joint Staff
official phoned Clark
with a question from White Housse national security
adviser Samuel
"Sandy" R. Berger: When would they hit the Yugoslav
troops and tanks?
There was no quick fix in sight, but it was the kind
of mission the Apaches
had been created to perform.
The Army has spent $15 billion over the past two
decades to make the
Apache the most lethal and least vulnerable attack
helicopter in the world.
It had proved its tank-killing capabilities in the
Persian Gulf War. One
Apache, carrying 46 rockets and missiles, can fly at
night, just above the
tree tops, at 100 miles per hour, without a single
visible light. Armored
flaps on the side windows shield the control panel's
illumination, curved
rotor blade tips dampen its noise and the exhaust
system cools the engine
quickly to fool heat sensors.
The Apache can also fly in the kind of rainy, cloudy
weather that was
grounding so many jets in the first month of Kosovo
war.
The notion of using the Apaches had surfaced earlier.
The week before the
war began, the Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of
Staff, mentioned the Apaches to Clark, who then tasked
his subordinates
to develop a plan to use them.
Traditionally, Apaches are used to attack enemy troops
far behind the
front lines. Long-range artillery barrages secure safe
passage for the
Apaches deep inside enemy territory, and nearby Army
troops and armor
help spot and herd masses of enemy forces so the
Apaches can destroy
them.
But there were no U.S. ground troops in Kosovo, so
Clark's plan would
rely on drones, radars and satellites to find targets.
Air Force Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, the vice chief of
the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, was immediately dubious. He and the service
chiefs thought Clark's
operational plan to use the Apaches was too vague and
unconventional.
Ralston believed a stepped-up air campaign by Air
Force jets hitting
"strategic" targets such as ministries and power
stations in Belgrade was
more likely to cause Milosevic to relent.
Clark and his field commanders disagreed. However,
they weren't just
dealing with Air Force qualms, but also with
reluctance among the Army
leadership.
Army Chief of Staff Dennis J. Reimer, then the
top-ranking Army officer,
saw a "classic risk-benefit analysis. Does the benefit
exceed the risk?" He
doubted the task force could locate good targets.
"It's like looking through
a soda straw," Reimer said. He worried that Army's
Apaches would be a
step toward the use of ground forces, something the
Army leadership did
not favor.
Risk dominated the Army's thinking. Early in the war,
Army officers gave
Clark a preliminary briefing on the Apaches using
three pages of slides
labeled "Risks." They included every type of caliber
of weapon known to
be in use in Yugoslavia, from the smallest bullet to
the biggest shell: "5.56
millimeter. 7.62 millimeter. 12.51 millimeter. . . ."
The briefing infuriated Clark, who believed it
revealed that the Army was
resistant to using the Apaches, according to two
participants.
On March 29, five days after the war began, the Joint
Chiefs met on
Clark's proposal to use the Apaches. They were not
supportive. As Clark
later explained in a video teleconference with his
commanders: "People
look at this as a ground war if you put Apaches in."
Shelton and Ralston came up with a compromise. They
recommended to
Defense Secretary William S. Cohen that the Apaches be
sent to Albania
but not used in combat until the Pentagon generals
were convinced that the
mission made sense. Shelton would then make a
recommendation to
President Clinton, who had the final say.
Cohen bought the idea and on April 3 Clinton signed
the order sending the
Apaches to Albania.
In announcing the deployment, Pentagon spokesman
Kenneth H. Bacon
suggested that the Apache's arrival could change the
course of a war. The
helicopters, he explained, "will give us the
capability to get up-close and
personal to the Milosevic armor units in Kosovo."
Albania's Sea of Mud
The expectation, even at the top levels of government,
including Army
Secretary Caldera, was that the Apaches would arrive
within 10 days and
dive into combat.
But that was not to be.
The Apaches were supposed to go to Macedonia, where a
NATO base
was set up in Skopje. But, flooded by hundreds of
thousands of Kosovo
refugees, Macedonia refused permission.
Albania quickly agreed to provide a base for the
Apaches, but there was
no suitable airport and no base close to the border
for the artillery support
the Apaches required. The Army settled on the Rinas
airport in Tirana,
about 45 miles from the border of Montenegro, where
40,000 troops from
the Yugoslav 2nd Army and jets at the Podgorica
Airfield were both within
striking range.
Then there was the mud at Tirana. It was so thick that
one military
intelligence officer sank up to her chest. Soldiers
were ordering thigh-high
fishing boots from home.
It took just four days for the Army to remake the tiny
Tirana airport into a
24-hour thoroughfare that could support 20 flights a
day. This required
667,000 square meters of rock fill. Because of the
muck and a record
rainfall, engineers had to construct 58 specially
designed landing pads for
the Apache base. They were delayed for nearly a week
in finishing
because they did not have enough landing pad mesh.
To construct the base and make Task Force Hawk as
invincible as
possible, the Army brought in 10,300 pieces of
equipment on 550 flights of
the huge C-17. The cargo included 14 70-ton M1A1
Abrams tanks--too
heavy to use on most Albanian roads--42 Bradley
Fighting Vehicles, 20
5-ton Expando Vans for the V Corps headquarters, 190
containers of
ammunition and enough repair kits for twice the number
of Apaches there.
Thirty-seven Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters went
along too.
All that heavy equipment was baffling to some.
"Those of us looking at it said to ourselves, 'Why are
you bringing M1
tanks to Tirana?' " remarked one Air Force general
involved in the move.
In all, the Army sent 6,200 troops and 26,000 tons of
equipment to
Tirana, at a cost of $480 million, to support and
protect the Apaches.
"We probably went in a little too heavy," said Reimer.
"Army people will
always err on the side of overwhelming force necessary
to do the job. I
don't apologize for that. . . . The people on the
ground knew they were
protected and that gives them a lot of confidence."
While soldiers worked furiously to build the base,
Gen. John W. Hendrix,
then commander of Task Force Hawk and the Army's V
Corps, said
Washington was far from a decision to use the
helicopters in combat, so
"there was no rush."
"I didn't realize the world was waiting to see an
Apache landing in
Albania," Hendrix said.
The first Apaches finally lifted off on April 14 from
their base in Germany,
but it took 12 long days for all 24 of them to get to
Albania. The weather
delayed some. Then the Italian government held them in
Pisa for five days
while it debated whether to permit overflights with
live ammunition. And
the French, who were blocking the Apache landing ramp
at the Tirana
airport with a refueling depot, refused to budge for a
week.
A 'Bleak' Casualty Estimate
Back in Washington, Shelton and Ralston were making a
persuasive case
to White House officials that the Apaches should not
fly. It was not a hard
sell, given the White House's own aversion to
casualties. Key to the
discussion were the casualty estimates, which
commanders in the field said
were merely fluid projections based on computer
simulations. Privately,
they called them "WAGs," Wild Ass Guesses.
Clark and Hendrix had told Pentagon officials that any
casualty estimates
would not be reliable, given the unique mission. But
in an air war designed
in part to safeguard pilots, it was a central
question.
In a teleconference with top Pentagon officials April
16, Hendrix was
pressed for an answer on what casualty rates could be.
Around 5 per 100
sorties, maybe slightly higher, the Task Force Hawk
leader said, according
to interviews with Hendrix and several people who were
at the meeting.
One officer's notes show that Hendrix estimated there
might be "zero to
five" pilot casualties. But a senior Pentagon official
recalls Hendrix giving a
higher figure, six to 15, which was one estimate the
Joint Staff used in
White House discussions. That higher figure is
disputed by several Army
generals in attendance.
Somehow, an even higher figure made its way to the
White House,
although senior Pentagon officials said the Joint
Staff produced no
independent estimates of its own.
One senior White House official recalls Pentagon
officials saying that the
Apache deployment could result in casualties as high
as "50 percent within
days."
"Their assessment was so bleak," the official said.
"It was almost a
no-brainer."
Pentagon officials now say they have no record or
recollection of having
mentioned a 50 percent figure at the White House. But
such a figure was
included in a confidential message sent to officers in
Germany by an Army
major on an early base planning mission to Macedonia.
It was a back-of-the envelope guess, but it was
informally passed on to the
Joint Staff. One senior Pentagon official queried
Clark about the figure.
"There was no analytical basis for the 50 percent
figure," Clark said. "It
was just pulled out of the air. I conveyed that."
The casualty estimates remain to this day a point of
disagreement between
the Pentagon and the commanders who were in the field.
Friction Between Services
These stratospheric discussions went on unbeknownst to
the pilots, who
believed they had been brought to Albania to fly into
Kosovo within days.
They faced plenty of difficulties of their own.
The enemy had time to disperse into small groups
before the Apaches
arrived. The wooded mountain passes of Albania were
shelter for
scattered refugees and hundreds of Serbs with
shoulder-fired,
surface-to-air missiles.
And then there was the terrain itself. Chief Warrant
Officer Dennis
Seymour remembers the first time he saw the spiked
Albanian mountains.
"It's like, 'This is ugly, this is really ugly,' " he
said in an interview in
Germany.
Pilots would have to fly through three micro-climates
to reach Kosovo
from Albania. Extra fuel tanks made the aircraft hard
to handle, and there
were only a few mountain passes wide enough to
navigate. On the third
day of mission rehearsals, these conditions caused one
pilot to lose control
and crash. He survived, but the mission's public
profile was wounded.
Although qualified to Army standards, none of the
pilots was used to flying
with night-vision goggles. More than 65 percent were
relatively
inexperienced. At times there was a "complete loss" of
radio contact
because of the high mountains, a confidential military
after-action report
states.
"It was painful and high risk [during] the first three
weeks in Albania," Maj.
Gen. Richard A. Cody, the task force deputy commander
and a legendary
special operations Apache pilot, wrote in a separate
memo.
The Army and Air Force did not work well together,
according to the
report: "There was friction. . . . Individuals in both
services neither
understand nor appreciate the capabilities of one
another."
Sixty percent of all rehearsals were canceled because
the supporting Air
Force aircraft were not available, either because they
were engaged in air
war operations or were grounded by weather.
To convince the Pentagon to employ the Apaches, task
force commanders
worked at speeding intelligence-gathering on targets
and synchronizing
operations with a huge array of aircraft: U-2 spy
planes, AWACS airborne
warning and control planes, three types of
helicopters, air tankers and Air
Force jets.
When two pilots died May 4 in a crash, apparently
caused by a
mechanical failure, their colleagues were determined
that "it wasn't all for
naught," said pilot Seymour. "Everybody was saying,
'Let's go in there and
kick their tails now.' "
By mid-May, the commanders felt the risk had been
minimized. What
Washington saw as threats, the pilots viewed as
advantages. "That terrain
was our friend," said Cody. "That night-time was our
friend."
Most of all, each pilot had a $14.5 million Apache,
the world's best
combat helicopter. The plan was to zip through the
Albanian mountains at
90 miles per hour. Bomblet-spewing ATACMS tactical
missiles would
have already pummeled the enemy troops along the
flight path. Dart-filled
rockets would deal with the remnants. Six rescue
helicopters would be 10
minutes away. Five Apaches would fly a feint close by.
A half dozen Air
Force jets would provide protective cover.
Like a mosquito darting for blood, each Apache would
stay in the battle
zone a mere five minutes, with its infrared jammer
turned on to throw off
incoming missiles.
Still, nothing could give a guarantee against what
Seymour called "a little
bullet in the big sky" shot by some lucky Serb with an
AK-47 or, worse, a
shoulder-fired SA-7 missile.
Fear of more losses seemed to obsess Washington
visitors to Albania. Lt.
Col. George M. Bilafer, a Task Force Hawk squadron
commander, got
asked repeatedly: Don't you think the Apaches are too
risky?
"Listen," Bilafer said he would reply, "you're not the
one who has to go
notify the family, I am. . . . Am I worried about a
guy with an SA-7 on the
ground shooting at me? No, I'm not because he can't
see me and he has to
be able to see me to shoot me."
Hendrix said he tried "over and over again" to
convince Pentagon officials
that the risk would be less than they expected and the
military rewards
would be significant.
Around that time, Gen. Reimer faced a roomful of
Apache pilots who had
what he recalls as an "I-can-take-on-the-world"
confidence. "I still felt,"
said Reimer, "that we really didn't have the targets
to justify their use."
Besides, he said, the Air Force's A-10 jets were about
to arrive. But the
A-10s, like the Air Force's high-flying jets, did not
manage to destroy a
large part of the Yugoslav Army in Kosovo.
Hendrix said in an interview he believed the Apaches
would have hit "12 to
15 tanks" each mission. Pentagon officials still
disagree that there were
enough available targets. "There weren't 12 to 15
tanks to be taken out" in
the open, said Krulak.
That's not the way Cody, the deputy commander,
remembers it. By June,
he said, "We would have taken [the Yugoslav army] out,
and I don't think
we would have lost anybody."
Some military officers suggest the nation has
forgotten that the Army's job
is inherently dangerous. "Wake up, hello! Ding! Ding!
Ding! Ding!" said
Col. Oliver R. Hunter IV, former commander of Task
Force Hawk's 11th
Aviation Regiment. "We were accepting the risk. It was
within our
limitations."
The Apaches are now back at their base in Germany. It
took 30 trains, 20
ships and 81 C-17 flights to send Task Force Hawk back
home.
The Army is now spending $1.9 billion to upgrade
one-third of its
743-helicopter Apache fleet to make the helicopters
even more lethal.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/forum/drudge_frame.htm
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