NATO said it won a great victory, but the war did very  
        little damage to Serb forces. By not conceding this,  
        the Pentagon may mislead future presidents about  
        the limits of U.S. power

        It was acclaimed as the most successful air campaign ever. "A turning point in the 
        history of  warfare," wrote the noted military historian John Keegan,  proof positive 
        that "a war can be won by airpower alone."  

        At a press conference last June, after Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic agreed to  
        pull his Army from Kosovo at the end of a 78-day aerial bombardment that had not cost  
        the life of a single NATO soldier or airman, Defense Secretary William Cohen declared,  
        "We severely crippled the [Serb] military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50  
        percent of the artillery and one third of the armored vehicles." Displaying colorful charts,  
        Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Henry Shelton claimed that NATO's air forces had  
        killed "around 120 tanks," "about 220 armored personnel carriers" and "up to 450 
        artillery  and mortar pieces."  

        An antiseptic war, fought by pilots flying safely three miles high. It seems almost too good  
        to be true - and it was. In fact - as some critics suspected at the time - the air campaign  
        against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely ineffective. NATO bombs plowed up  
        some fields, blew up hundreds of cars, trucks and decoys, and barely dented Serb  
        artillery and armor. According to a suppressed Air Force report obtained by  
        NEWSWEEK, the number of targets verifiably destroyed was a tiny fraction of those  
        claimed: 14 tanks, not 120; 18 armored personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artillery pieces,  
        not 450. Out of the 744 "confirmed" strikes by NATO pilots during the war, the Air Force  
        investigators, who spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and by foot, found  
        evidence of just 58.  

        The damage report has been buried by top military officers and Pentagon officials, who in  
        interviews with NEWSWEEK over the last three weeks were still glossing over or denying  
        its significance. Why the evasions and dissembling, with the disturbing echoes of the  
        inflated "body counts" of the Vietnam War? All during the Balkan war, Gen. Wesley Clark,  
        the top NATO commander, was under pressure from Washington to produce positive  
        bombing results from politicians who were desperate not to commit ground troops to  
        combat. The Air Force protested that tanks are hard to hit from 15,000 feet, but Clark  
        insisted. Now that the war is long over, neither the generals nor their civilian masters are  
        eager to delve into what really happened. Asked how many Serb tanks and other vehicles  
        were destroyed in Kosovo, General Clark will only answer, "Enough."  

        In one sense, history is simply repeating itself. Pilots have been exaggerating their "kills"  
        at least since the Battle of Britain in 1940. But this latest distortion could badly mislead  
        future policymakers. Air power was effective in the Kosovo war not against military targets  
        but against civilian ones. Military planners do not like to talk frankly about terror-bombing  
        civilians ("strategic targeting" is the preferred euphemism), but what got Milosevic's  
        attention was turning out the lights in downtown Belgrade. Making the Serb populace  
        suffer by striking power stations - not "plinking" tanks in the Kosovo  
        countryside - threatened his hold on power. The Serb dictator was not so much defeated  
        as pushed back into his lair - for a time. The surgical strike remains a mirage. Even with  
        the best technology, pilots can destroy mobile targets on the ground only by flying low and  
        slow, exposed to ground fire. But NATO didn't want to see pilots killed or captured.  

        Instead, the Pentagon essentially declared victory and hushed up any doubts about what  
        the air war exactly had achieved. The story of the cover-up is revealing of the way military  
        bureaucracies can twist the truth - not so much by outright lying, but by "reanalyzing" the  
        problem and winking at inconvenient facts. Caught in the middle was General Clark, who  
        last week relinquished his post in a controversial early retirement. Mistrusted by his  
        masters in Washington, Clark will retire from the Army next month with none of the fanfare  
        that greeted other conquering heroes like Dwight Eisenhower after World War II or  
        Norman Schwarzkopf after Desert Storm. To his credit, Clark was dubious about Air  
        Force claims and tried - at least at first - to gain an accurate picture of the bombing in  
        Kosovo. At the end of the war the Serbs' ground commander, Gen. Nobojsa Pavkovic,  
        claimed to have lost only 13 tanks. "Serb disinformation," scoffed Clark. But quietly,  
        Clark's own staff told him the Serb general might be right. "We need to get to the bottom  
        of this," Clark said. So at the end of June, Clark dispatched a team into Kosovo to do an  
        on-the-ground survey. The 30 experts, some from NATO but most from the U.S. Air Force,  
        were known as the Munitions Effectiveness Assessment Team, or MEAT. Later, a few of  
        the officers would refer to themselves as "dead meat."  

        The bombing, they discovered, was highly accurate against fixed targets, like bunkers  
        and bridges. "But we were spoofed a lot," said one team member. The Serbs protected  
        one bridge from the high-flying NATO bombers by constructing, 300 yards upstream, a  
        fake bridge made of polyethylene sheeting stretched over the river. NATO "destroyed" the  
        phony bridge many times. Artillery pieces were faked out of long black logs stuck on old  
        truck wheels. A two-thirds scale SA-9 antiaircraft missile launcher was fabricated from the  
        metal-lined paper used to make European milk cartons. "It would have looked perfect  
        from three miles up," said a MEAT analyst.  

        The team found dozens of burnt-out cars, buses and trucks - but very few tanks. When  
        General Clark heard this unwelcome news, he ordered the team out of their helicopters:  
        "Goddammit, drive to each one of those places. Walk the terrain." The team grubbed  
        about in bomb craters, where more than once they were showered with garbage the local  
        villagers were throwing into these impromptu rubbish pits. At the beginning of August,  
        MEAT returned to Air Force headquarters at Ramstein air base in Germany with 2,600  
        photographs. They briefed Gen. Walter Begert, the Air Force deputy commander in  
        Europe. "What do you mean we didn't hit tanks?" Begert demanded. Clark had the same  
        reaction. "This can't be," he said. "I don't believe it." Clark insisted that the Serbs had  
        hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn't looked hard enough. Not so,  
        he was told. A 50-ton tank can't be dragged away without leaving raw gouges in the earth,  
        which the team had not seen.  

        The Air Force was ordered to prepare a new report. In a month, Brig. Gen. John Corley  
        was able to turn around a survey that pleased Clark. It showed that NATO had  
        successfully struck 93 tanks, close to the 120 claimed by General Shelton at the end of  
        the war, and 153 armored personnel carriers, not far off the 220 touted by Shelton.  
        Corley's team did not do any new field research. Rather, they looked for any support for  
        the pilots' claims. "The methodology is rock solid," said Corley, who strongly denied any  
        attempt to obfuscate. "Smoke and mirrors" is more like it, according to a senior officer at  
        NATO headquarters who examined the data. For more than half of the hits declared by  
        Corley to be "validated kills," there was only one piece of evidence - usually, a blurred  
        cockpit video or a flash detected by a spy satellite. But satellites usually can't discern  
        whether a bomb hits anything when it explodes.  

        The Corley report was greeted with quiet disbelief outside the Air Force. NATO sources  
        say that Clark's deputy, British Gen. Sir Rupert Smith, and his chief of staff, German Gen.  
        Dieter Stockmann, both privately cautioned Clark not to accept Corley's numbers. The  
        U.S. intelligence community was also doubtful. The CIA puts far more credence in a  
        November get-together of U.S. and British intelligence experts, which determined that the  
        Yugoslav Army after the war was only marginally smaller than it had been before. "Nobody  
        is very keen to talk about this topic," a CIA official told NEWSWEEK.  

        Lately, the Defense Department has tried to fudge. In January Defense Secretary Cohen  
        and General Shelton put their names to a formal After-Action Report to Congress on the  
        Kosovo war. The 194-page report was so devoid of hard data that Pentagon officials  
        jokingly called it "fiber-free." The report did include Corley's chart showing that NATO  
        killed 93 tanks. But the text included a caveat: "the assessment provides no data on what  
        proportion of total mobile targets were hit or the level of damage inflicted." Translation,  
        according to a senior Pentagon official: "Here's the Air Force chart. We don't think it  
        means anything." In its most recent report extolling the triumph of the air war, even the Air  
        Force stopped using data from the Corley report.  

        Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, General Clark refused to get into an on-the-record  
        discussion of the numbers. A spokesman for General Shelton asserted that the media,  
        not the military, are obsessed with "bean-counting." But there are a lot of beans at stake.  
        After the November election, the Pentagon will go through one of its quadrennial reviews,  
        assigning spending priorities. The Air Force will claim the lion's share. A slide shown by  
        one of the lecturers at a recent symposium on air power organized by the Air Force  
        Association, a potent Washington lobby, proclaimed: "It's no myth... the American Way of  
        War."  

        The risk is that policymakers and politicians will become even more wedded to myths like  
        "surgical strikes." The lesson of Kosovo is that civilian bombing works, though it raises  
        moral qualms and may not suffice to oust tyrants like Milosevic. Against military targets,  
        high-altitude bombing is overrated. Any commander in chief who does not face up to  
        those hard realities will be fooling himself.