How We Fight

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Above the fighters is the intel package: E-3 AWACS and E-2C radar planes, E-8 Joint STARS ground-surveillance planes and RC-135 Rivet Joint planes. They comb the sky and ground for the enemy, feed targets to pilots and keep allied warplanes safely apart. When you near your target, you peel off from your buddies, dodging antiaircraft artillery and corkscrewing missiles.

The 493rd Expeditionary Fighter Squadron at Cervia, in northern Italy, has shot down four of the five Serbian MiG-29s killed so far. A lieutenant colonel, call sign "Rico," 40, scored one of those kills from his F-15C. "I was in the right place at the right time, and had a little luck," he says. "He ran into my missile." He had to wait for an AWACS to confirm that it was a foe before taking it on. "That all took about 20, 30 sec., but it seemed like it lasted an hour," he recalls. "Your hands, your eyes, your mouth--everything goes into training mode," he said. "Combat still scares the hell out of me."

NATO remains flummoxed by the limp Serbian air defense. The Pentagon suggests it signifies allied success in taking down the Serbian air-defenses, by attacks, jamming and corrupting data, which the allies have fed into Yugoslav computers through microwave transmissions. Pentagon analyst Franklin Spinney says Serbia's plan echoes its World War II tactics. The Germans sent 700,000 troops into Serbia but were unable to root Serbian partisans out despite four years of fierce fighting. "The Serbs are using their air-defense system as a quasi guerrilla force to capture the attention and distract the focus of NATO air power," Spinney says. "They are not trying to attrit NATO's air force as much as to neutralize its effects."

It's working. NATO pilots rarely fly below 10,000 ft. for fear of being shot down. Proof of the havoc that can wreak could be seen last Wednesday, when a U.S. F-16 apparently fired on what the pilot thought was a military convoy from 15,000 ft.--nearly three miles up. Unfortunately, his laser-guided bomb obliterated a tractor and wagon carrying Albanian Kosovars. Belgrade said 75 people died.

Had the air defenses been crippled, the pilot could have flown closer to that target, seen it was civilian and aborted the strike and the resulting global horror it provoked. A fellow F-16 pilot, from the 555th Fighter Squadron at Aviano, call sign "Buster," was frustrated by the snafu. "The last thing we want to do," the major says, "is help Milosevic do his job." But mixing Serbian troops with Albanian civilians has been part of Milosevic's strategy. Buster says he has seen "truck, truck, tractor, military, military, bus" convoys. "They're using Albanians as shields," he says, "and that makes me sick."

Tactically, the U.S. military is at a disadvantage when an enemy won't fight on its terms. Iraq, with its tanks and warplanes, was probably the last foe to make that mistake. The death of 18 U.S. Army troops in Somalia in 1993 showed the perils of fighting a primitive foe. Even though some 500 Somalis died in the battle, the fight was seen as a defeat for the U.S., which withdrew shortly thereafter. Milosevic was the first test case following the Gulf War in which an enemy could choose, more or less, to try to engage the U.S. and its allies militarily. Knowing he could never win, he has decided simply to stretch out the campaign so much that NATO tires of it.