NATO air offensive snagged by politics

The theory that war is an extension of politics by other means is well illustrated by NATO's plans to unleash its bombers against the Serbs. On the face of it, Yugoslavia's army should be no match for the might of the Western alliance, but political considerations make these operations much more tricky.

NATO must bomb Serb military installations without losing pilots, without harming civilians, and finally, without killing too many Serb soldiers.

Two kinds of air strikes are planned. The first kind - punishment raids - are aimed at smashing Yugoslavia's military machine, step-by-step, until President Slobodan Milosevic caves in and agrees to sign a peace deal for Kosovo.

A second kind of strike may also be launched, aimed at stopping the present Serb offensive in central Kosovo before it triggers a humanitarian disaster.

Both strikes begin the same way - with the destruction of Yugoslavia's air defences. This also poses a political problem - limited strikes are impossible because the air defence network is interlocking. Either you hit all the sites, or none of them. Thus NATO commanders are stating the obvious when they warn Yugoslavia would be hit by "massive strikes". In fact, NATO has no choice - it must be all or nothing.

During the second World War, bombers simply took their chances flying through enemy flak. These days, the West hopes its jamming technology will overcome the radar technology of its enemy. In the Gulf War this worked superbly - few jets were downed as the United States blacked-out Iraqi radar.

Cruise missiles and radar-evading Stealth bombers will form the first wave of strikes, aimed at crippling eight key radar sites, plus approximately 50 air defence missile sites and communication centres.

Mobile missile launchers are harder to find, but NATO's boffins think they have the answer - the aircraft have a missile that flies down the radar beam and blows up the launcher, giving the crew the choice between leaving the radar switched off, and the jets unharmed, or turning it on and being blown to pieces.

In the "punishment" scenario, NATO would then begin the piece-by-piece destruction of Yugoslavia's military capability. Air bases, tank parks, ammunition dumps, even bridges and power plants would all be "taken out".

NATO did exactly this against the Bosnian Serbs in 1995 - almost running out of targets before the Serbs caved in and agreed to join talks that ended in a peace agreement.

The second scenario - hitting Yugoslavia's tanks as they smash through ethnic Albanian villages - is more difficult. Without ground observers to guide them in, NATO pilots must arrive over the target, at twice the speed of sound, and try and find a tank, hoping no civilians are too close, and bomb it at low level while avoiding anti-aircraft missiles.

In Bosnia, Britain's only lost plane, a Sea Harrier, was hit by a Serb missile on just such a mission, hunting through the clouds for a Serb tank to bomb outside the town of Gorazde.

"Give us a grid square and we can take it out," says one NATO veteran of Bosnia's war. If planners are sure that everything inside a square, probably a kilometre in each direction, is "hostile", they can hurl bombs and rockets into the area, knowing they are bound to hit something.

But NATO would have to be sure that the grid square identified early in the morning would, by late morning, still have tanks inside it, and would have no civilians who could get in the way.

One crumb of comfort came yesterday when a senior official with the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, Jaser Salihu, said his units would ensure any downed allied pilots were picked up, protected, and escorted to safety.

"Any pilot who lands anywhere in Kosovo must know that the KLA will give him their protection," said Mr Salihu, speaking from the rebels' headquarters in Geneva.

NATO's other option, an invasion by ground troops from neighbouring Macedonia, is more difficult still.

More than 20,000 troops, including top-range British and Dutch tanks, are based in Macedonia, some within earshot of Serb guns firing at ethnic Albanian rebels.

But an invasion is all but impossible over the jagged mountain peaks that separate the two countries. The bridges and tunnels on the few roads north into Kosovo have already been mined by the Yugoslav army.

The hills and forests are ideal defensive terrain, and while the Serbs lack top-line equipment, such as the reactive armour that make NATO tanks almost impregnable, they remain a tough force, with weapons that make up in robustness what they lack in sophistication.

Moreover, against an invasion Yugoslavia's army, which has two armoured brigades and elements of 14 more brigades in Kosovo, would be fighting the war for which it was designed by its former communist ruler, Tito - in-depth territorial defence.

This will be a small crumb of comfort for NATO planners who have a final worry - that escalating the current fighting, far from ending the war in Kosovo, will see it worsen. Mr Milosevic may decide to ride out the air strikes while NATO's willpower is sapped by dead pilots, anger from Russia, and the possibility of what the planners call "collateral damage" - a bomb or missile wandering off target and into a school or block of flats.