Christopher Haave: A-10s over Kosovo (illustrations removed)

Air Force Doctrine Document (AFDD) 1, Air Force Basic Doctrine , 1 September 1997, 50.

AFDD 2-1.3, Counterland , 27 August 1999, 31.

Lt Gen Tony McPeak, “TACAIR Missions and the Fire Support Coordination Line,” Air University Review , September–October 1985, 70.

X-ray, Yankee, and Zulu are the military pronunciations for the letters X, Y, and Z, respectively.

Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Secretary of the Air Force, 1993), 12.

H. Norman Schwarzkopf and Peter Petre, It Doesn’t Take a Hero: General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the Autobiography (New York: Bantam, 1992), 371.

Keaney and Cohen, 65.

Gen Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 498.

Keaney and Cohen, 48–51.

Lt Col William F. Andrews, Airpower against an Army: Challenge and Response in CENTAF’s Duel with the Republican Army (Maxwell Air Force Base [AFB], Ala.: Air University Press, 1998), 14.

National Training Center Handbook 100-91, The Iraqi Army: Organization and Tactics , 1991, 25–31.

Keaney and Cohen, 51.

Ibid., 49.

Keaney and Cohen, vol. 5, A Statistical Compendium and Chronology, pt. 1, 463–539.

Andrews, 29. Air Force assets were not the only air assets attacking fielded forces. Carrier-based strikers, including F/A-18s, also attacked fielded forces; however, they did not begin to attack the Republican Guard in earnest until a week after the air war had started.

Lt Col Christopher P. Weggeman, F-16 pilot with 388th TFW flying the Killer Scout mission against the Republican Guard, E-mail interview with author, 28 November 2000. The Army was concerned not only with armor but also support assets such as artillery, mechanized infantry vehicles, support vehicles, ammunition supplies, and POL storage.

Keaney and Cohen, 106.

Keaney and Cohen, A Statistical Compendium, pt. 1, 463–539. The majority of these missions, 569, were delivered by F-16s employing nonprecision, free-falling general-purpose bombs as well as older-generation cluster bomb units (Mk-20 Rockeye, CBU-52, and CBU-58). Battlefield effectiveness was below expectations, which led to concern over the high consumption rates of the more modern, armor-piercing CBU-87 during the first two weeks. “CENTAF TACC/NCO Log, January-February 1991” (U), 30 January 1991, 21. (Secret) Information extracted is unclassified.

Weggeman interview.

William L. Smallwood, Warthog: Flying the A-10 in the Gulf War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1993), 123–24.

Andrews, 44.

Keaney and Cohen, Summary Report , 21; Andrews, 54; and Fred L. Frostic, Air Campaign against the Iraqi Army in the Kuwaiti Theater of Operations , Rand Report MR-357-AF (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 1994). F-111Fs developed the tank-plinking tactic using their Pave Tack laser designator. Lessons learned during a Desert Shield exercise had shown the potential for identifying and targeting armor from medium altitude. On 5 February, two F-111Fs successfully dropped two GBU-12s on revetted positions. Within three days, 50 sorties a night were devoted to tank plinking. Navy A-6Es began dropping a limited number of LGBs, as did F-15E crews. The F-15Es were limited by the number of LANTIRN pods and quickly developed buddy lasing techniques.

Andrews, 56.

AFDD 2-1.3, 102. Counterland doctrine now incorporates the Killer Scout mission.

Col Robert C. Owen, ed., Deliberate Force: A Case Study in Effective Air Campaigning (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 2000), xvii.

Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 341.

Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 62.

For purposes of this discussion, the term Kosovars refers to Kosovar Albanians.

William Buckley, ed., Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan Interventions (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2000), 100. For purposes of this discussion, the terms Serbia and Serbian will be used to refer to those forces from the Federal Republic of Yugoslav. Likewise Macedonia will be used to refer to the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

Judah, 171.

United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1160, 1998, n.p., on-line, Internet, 15 November 2001, available from http://www.un.org/Docs/scres/1998/sres1160.htm; UNSCR 1199, 1998, n.p., on-line, Internet, 15 November 2001, available from http://www.un.org/Docs/scres/1998/sres1199.htm.

Dick Leurdijk and Dick Zandee, Kosovo: From Crisis to Crisis (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Pub. Co., 2001), 34; and US Department of State, Erasing History: Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo (Washington, D.C.: US Department of State, May 1999), 6, on-line, Internet, 10 December 2002, available from http://www.state.gov/www/regions/eur/rpt_9905_ethnic_ksvo_toc.html. Though 2,000 observers of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had agreed to participate, OSCE was never able to get that many into country before their withdrawal in March 1999.

Albert Schnabel and Ramesh Thakur, eds., Kosovo and the Challenge of Humanitarian Intervention: Selective Indignation, Collective Action, and International Citizenship (New York: United Nations University Press, 2000), 35.

Judah, 195. The Serbs were threatened by the air strikes if they did not come to an agreement, and the Kosovars were threatened that NATO would leave them to the mercy of the Serbs if they did not sign.

Ibid., 206.

Ministry of Defence (MOD), Kosovo: Lessons from the Crisis (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 2000), 9.

Paul Strickland, “USAF Aerospace-Power Doctrine: Decisive or Coercive?” Aerospace Power Journal 14, no. 3 (fall 2000): 16.

MOD, Kosovo: Lessons from the Crisis , 34.

Wesley Clark, Waging Modern War (New York: Public Affairs, 2001), 176.

Strickland, 21.

HQ/USAFE Initial Report, The Air War over Serbia: Aerospace Power in Operation Allied Force (Ramstein AB, Germany: USAFE Studies and Analysis, 25 April 2000), 9.

R. Jeffrey Smith and William Drozdiak, “Anatomy of a Purge,” Washington Post , 11 April 1999, A1.