November 11, 1999
U.S. Military Acted Outside NATO Framework During Kosovo Conflict, France Says
Related Article
With Milosevic Unyielding on Kosovo, NATO Moved Toward Invasion (Nov. 7, 1999)
Issue in Depth: Kosovo in Transition
By CRAIG R. WHITNEY
ARIS -- France drew up
a list of lessons on Wednesday that it had
learned from the allied bombing of
Yugoslavia last spring. One of them
was that some missions were not
really allied at all, but 100 percent
American.
"The conclusion cannot be avoided
that part of the military operations
were conducted by the United States
outside the strict framework of
NATO and its procedures," said the
Ministry of Defense in a 55-page report approved by France's highest
civilian political authorities.
The French statement added that
the allied commander in charge of
the bombing that ended with the
withdrawal of Serbian military and
police forces from Kosovo last June,
Gen. Wesley K. Clark of the United
States, was "responsible not only to
the North Atlantic Council" of the
alliance "but also to his national hierarchy, at the highest level." General Clark is both Supreme Allied
Commander and the commander of
all American forces in Europe.
Defense Minister Alain Richard,
presenting the analysis to reporters
today, said France was not complaining that the Americans had
gone behind its back to hit targets
like bridges over the Danube in Belgrade that President Jacques Chirac
had refused to approve.
All he meant, Richard said
with a smile, was that France was
not the only member of the alliance
whose military structure was not entirely subordinated to NATO command.
"There was another country
not fully integrated into the alliance
-- the United States," he said.
American planes that were not under allied command, like the sophisticated B-2 stealth bombers based in
Missouri, flew many of the biggest
bombing raids, including the one that
the alliance said mistakenly hit the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.
France did not have the technology to enable its own planes to evade
detection by antiaircraft radar defenses, the ministry conceded today.
The French also lacked the Americans' ability to confuse enemy radar
defenses with airborne electronic devices, and they did not have any of
the precision weapons guidance systems using navigation satellites that
the B-2's used, French officials said.
France was still two to three years
away, officials said, from developing
cruise missiles like the American-made ones launched from American
B-52's and British and American
ships that landed with what the
French said was "remarkable" accuracy and precision.
"A country that has cruise missiles retains control over how they
are used, but on the other hand, a
country that doesn't have any can
find itself excluded from part of the
decision-making process on strikes,"
the ministry's report noted, referring to planning for the allied strikes
during the Kosovo campaign.
"There are a certain number of
things that we, France and other
Europeans, aren't yet able to do,"
said Gen. Jean-Pierre Kelche, the
French Army chief of staff.
For example, the French lacked
the ability to refuel in flight all of the
many French Mirage, Jaguar, and
Super Etendard planes that flew 12
percent of the 10,434 allied combat
missions, General Kelche said.
"Without American support, we
couldn't have done all that we did,"
he conceded.
But on the whole, he and Richard said they were satisfied with the
French performance in the Kosovo
campaign, and confident that efforts
to build stronger European defenses
would rectify the shortcomings the
operations had revealed.
Among these, the ministry's report said, were an inadequate stockpile of French-made laser-guidance
systems to drop bombs with greater
accuracy.
French planes dropped 582
laser-guided bombs during the campaign, the ministry has reported, but
apparently it nearly ran out of them.
"The high consumption rate of this
type of munitions raises the question
of the adequacy and the rebuilding of
those stocks," the ministry's report
said, "since it is possible to imagine
conflicts of greater intensity or longer duration."
Britain's Defense Ministry, in a
similar analysis made public earlier
this fall, concluded as the French
have done that Europeans needed to
build defense structures better suited to operations like Kosovo in the
future.
And the British, like the
French, said that Kosovo had shown
that the ability of their armed forces
to gather and pass battlefield information securely and quickly to and
from headquarters and individual
aircraft, tanks and ships needed
much improvement.
France and Britain, Richard
said, were now committed to building stronger European defenses.
"I
tell my American friends that one
day I hope they will be able to have
as much confidence in European defense capabilities as they have in the
Australians in East Timor," he said.
