NATO Sees Flaws in Air
Campaign Against Qaddafi
By ERIC SCHMITT , Apr.
14, 2012
(a confidential NATO assessment confirms the
lack of ability to carry out campaign without support from the US)
WASHINGTON — Despite
widespread praise in Western capitals for NATO’s leadership
of the air campaign in Libya, a confidential NATO assessment
paints a sobering portrait of the alliance’s ability to carry out such
campaigns without significant support from the United States.
The report concluded
that the allies struggled to share crucial target information, lacked
specialized planners and analysts, and overly relied on the United States for
reconnaissance and refueling aircraft.
The findings undercut
the idea that the intervention was a model operation and that NATO could
effectively carry out a more complicated campaign in Syria without relying
disproportionately on the United States military. Even with the American help
in Libya, NATO had only about 40 percent of the aircraft needed to intercept
electronic communications, a shortage that hindered the operation’s
effectiveness, the report said.
Mounting an operation in
Syria would pose a bigger challenge than the seven-month campaign
that drove Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya from
power, American officials said. Syria has a more capable military as well as a
formidable array of sophisticated Russian-made air defenses that
Pentagon officials say would take weeks of airstrikes to destroy.
Also, the Syrian
opposition is more disjointed and dispersed than Libya’s, making allied efforts
to coordinate with the rebels more difficult, a senior NATO official said.
“If anything were to
be envisaged over Syria, even in purely hypothetical terms, it would also rely
heavily on U.S. capabilities,” said one senior European diplomat who reviewed
the 37-page NATO report, which was completed in late February.
The report, whose
findings and recommendations are expected to be endorsed by NATO ministers at a
meeting in Brussels this week, is consistent
with preliminary assessments that European and Canadian planes
carried out the bulk of the combat flights to protect Libyan civilians,
while the United States provided military support that was essential in
accomplishing the mission.
But the report and
more than 300 pages of supporting documents, copies of which were obtained by
The New York Times, offer telling new details about shortcomings in planning,
staffing and conducting the combat mission, as well as how commanders
improvised to adjust.
(NATO relies on the US particularly for ..)
The report also
spotlights an important issue for the alliance that dates to the Balkan wars
of the 1990s: that the United States has emerged “by default” as the
NATO specialist in providing precision-guided
munitions — which made up virtually all of the 7,700 bombs and missiles
dropped or fired on Libya — and a vast majority of specialized aircraft that
conduct aerial intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance missions, or I.S.R. in military parlance.
“NATO remains overly
reliant on a single ally to provide I.S.R. collection capabilities that are
essential to the commander,” the report said.
NATO’s efforts to
address the over-reliance
In this criticism,
however, several American and other allied officials said they saw a silver
lining. The NATO report played a significant role in helping the alliance
agree in February to acquire its own dedicated air-to-ground surveillance
system to track and target hostile ground forces, the officials said.
The assessment also
helped spur a French-led initiative backed by the Obama administration to
establish a hub for allied surveillance aircraft, including Predator and
Global Hawk drones, at an
Italian air base in Sicily. This concept is modeled after a similar approach
NATO has developed in Afghanistan, and it is expected to be approved by allied
leaders at a NATO summit meeting in Chicago next month.
In addition, European
defense ministers agreed last month on an ambitious proposal to expand
the allies’ aerial refueling fleet, another American-backed measure that
NATO officials will highlight in Chicago.
“NATO always draws the
lessons from its operations, and we’re already doing that with Libya,” Adm. James G. Stavridis,
an American officer who is the alliance’s senior military commander, said in an
e-mail statement.
Most of the
recommendations, particularly those that involve buying expensive aircraft
and technical equipment, could take years to put in place.
And those solutions
will not address the immediate concerns raised by advocates of using allied air
power to stop the slaughter of civilians in Syria.
Two of those
advocates, Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I.
Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, toured a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey
before a fragile, United Nations-brokered cease-fire took hold last week. They
once again called on the international community to arm the Syrian rebels and
to intervene militarily to create and protect havens for Syrian civilians and
rebels receiving training.
“Airstrikes would help
to establish and defend safe havens in Syria, especially in the north, in which
opposition forces can organize and plan their political and military activities
against Assad,” Mr. McCain said last month at a Senate Armed Services
Committee hearing, referring to President Bashar al-Assad of
Syria.
President Obama has
requested that the Pentagon begin preparing preliminary military options in
Syria — a routine step for military contingency planning during crises overseas
— but the administration still believes that using diplomatic and economic
pressure is the best way to stop the violent repression by the Syrian
government.
The report, completed
on Feb. 28 by NATO’s Joint Analysis and Lessons
Learned Center in Portugal, identified 15 political,
organizational and equipment lessons learned, including several shortcomings.
Information about
targets in Libya was drawn largely
from the databases of individual nations, and much of this could not be
shared rapidly among NATO members and partners because of
“classification or procedural reasons,” the report found.
“Nations did not
effectively and efficiently share national intelligence and targeting
information among allies and with partners,” the report said. “The inability to
share information presented a major hindrance to nations deciding if a target
could be engaged” based on information from another country.
The NATO command in
Italy suffered from serious shortages of political and legal advisers,
intelligence analysts, logistics planners, linguists, and specialists in
selecting targets, called targeteers. “Many targeteers had not been
adequately trained on deliberate, dynamic or time-sensitive targeting,” the
report said, adding that many specialists were assigned to the command for only
a few weeks.
The report was silent
on the controversies that have followed the campaign. These included questions
surrounding at least scores of civilian deaths caused by NATO action, which
have been documented by
independent researchers and the United Nations alike, and accusations by
survivors and human rights organizations that alliance naval vessels did not
assist boats in distress carrying migrants who later perished at sea.
Fred Abrahams, a
special adviser for Human Rights Watch, said the report was consistent with the
alliance’s refusal to acknowledge clear mistakes, and revealed a “willful
decision not to look at civilian casualties.”
“It’s not lessons
learned, it’s lessons lost,” he said by telephone from New York. “There is no
reason whatsoever, in an otherwise effective campaign, not to look back and
explore the areas where things went wrong.”
The report also passed
over a number of tactical details without examining the rationale for them or
their potential risks and consequences. It noted, for example, that the
alliance itself did not have what it called “boots on ground” but did not
disclose that forward air control teams — troops on the ground to help guide
planes to intended targets — were used later in the conflict by member nations,
or that the anti-Qaddafi forces were providing targeting recommendations to
NATO via informal means, sometimes even by way of Twitter or e-mail.
C. J. Chivers
contributed reporting.
