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Sunday Morning News

U.S. Troops Carry Out Firing Exercise as Tensions Increase in and Around Kosovo

Aired February 27, 2000 - 8:10 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: NATO is weighing a request for reinforcements in Kosovo. Every day in the divided town of Mitrovica, Serbs wait, ready to fight if ethnic Albanians try to cross into the Serb sector. Now, while NATO considers that request for more peacekeepers, CNN's Chris Burns report U.S. troops carried out a firing exercise for the benefit of Yugoslavia.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS BURNS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): U.S. Army M1A1 tanks, 70 tons of firepower backing up the American contingent in the KFOR peacekeeping force here. At this practice range, they fire at targets up to 1,500 meters away, almost one mile. When they miss, it means recalibrating with the aid of onboard computers then firing again. The tanks fire 120 millimeter training rounds of what in real combat would be uranium tipped shells with a range of 3,000 meters, almost two miles.

UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: They will complete the destruction on whatever target they engage. That's the kind of damage they'll do. They will take care of whatever business we have to do.

BURNS: The public show of force is also aimed at Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who has been massing forces in southern Serbia proper and talking tough lately. That's prompted neighboring Macedonia to put its troops on higher alert.

(on camera): Washington's warning to Milosevic is punctuated by this firing exercise, the target practice on the same terrain ruled by Yugoslav tanks less one year ago.

(voice-over): Yugoslavia withdrew from Kosovo, its army and security forces, known by their Serbian initials, V.J. and MUP after an 11 week NATO bombing campaign that ended last June. But KFOR isn't taking any chances.

LT. COL. JOE MILLER, U.S. ARMY: Our first mission is to provide a safe and secure environment and enforce U.N. Resolution 1244. The first piece of that is to make sure that the V.J. and the MUPs stay on their side of the border and in order to do that, the best way to do that is to be combat ready.

BURNS: More than a dozen of these tanks from the 63rd Armored Regiment based on Germany are here in Kosovo, weaponry stationed here in part to dissuade any temptation by Belgrade for a new military adventure in this volatile region.

Chris Burns, CNN, at the Ramiene (ph) firing range, Kosovo.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

O'BRIEN: That volatility is rooted in centuries of ethnic and religious hatred. It would be naive to conclude NATO's 78 day air war in the Balkans could mend such deep division. But as the anniversary of the campaign approaches, there are lingering questions about the way the war was managed or mismanaged.

On Tuesday night, PBS will air the second of a two part series entitled "War In Europe." "Frontline" correspondent Peter Boyer conducted interviews with all the major players on the NATO side except for President Clinton and the result is a candid, behind-the- scenes account of a fundamentally flawed strategy.

Thanks for being with us, Peter.

PETER BOYER, "FRONTLINE" CORRESPONDENT: Thanks for having me, Miles.

O'BRIEN: The person who you didn't get to interview, President Clinton, early on in all of this sort of laid out a certain caveat to the strategy which was critical. He said no ground troops. How did that affect the way this whole thing unfolded?

BOYER: Well, it was, you know, determinative, in a way. I mean Bill Clinton is a commander-in-chief who has always had to operate within certain constraints. At the time of Kosovo, he was facing the crisis of his presidency. He takes ground troops off the table, that means it has to be an air war and it's a politically conducted air war that had real effect.

O'BRIEN: It's interesting, you talked also to NATO's joint air force component, commander, that is, Lieutenant General Michael Short and we're going to go to a little clip here. He talks about being constrained as he was, not just by what the president took off the table but the fact that there was this unwieldy political coalition that was sort of driving the bus. Let's listen to what he had to say. It's fairly emotional.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEN. MICHAEL SHORT, NATO AIR COMMANDER: We have chosen to go to war and it's hard, it's hard to make war effectively using half measures. And a soft kill is nothing more than a signal because you recover from it in X number of days. And all we have done is sent a signal that, boy, we're really serious here. At least that's what the politicians seemed to believe, we were sending a signal.

I don't want to go to some young man's wife and explain that her husband died sending a signal. If I'm going to make that trip, if I'm going to write that letter, I want to look her in the eye and say young lady, your husband was packing the Sunday punch. He was part of the best we had. We were going for the jugular.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: Some strong words there. Some of this has to do with an inherent tension, I suppose, between the military and the political components of any government, but nevertheless, it seems like it was exacerbated in this campaign.

BOYER: You're right, Miles. But it was more pronounced here. I mean that's pretty powerful stuff, not wanting to face a flier's widow and say that he died sending a message. I mean, General Short told us a couple of other things that were astonishing to me. I mean he said, when he was talking about soft kills, he was talking about hitting targets that were not really militarily important, targets that sometimes, in some cases, were being hit for the second and even third times. You know, we ran out of targets toward the end of the war.

He said the most astonishing thing to us. He said that we had fliers up in the air sometimes on a mission heading for a target when a member of the NATO alliance council would come to him and say my parliament would never allow that target to be hit. You can't do that. Where we would have to turn the bomber around mid-flight and bring it back down for a landing. I mean that had a real consequence in the conduct of this war.

There are real questions about whether or not we should have been engaged in such a war, but once we were, the General Shorts of this world would argue let's go in, let's fight it, let's have a decisive end to it, a conclusion. And there was no decisive conclusion. And you could argue that we didn't really fight it.

O'BRIEN: It sort of adds to the fog of war when there's that much confusion. Of course, one of the things a lot of people remember about this campaign was the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and there's an interesting little description of how this happened behind-the-scenes between General Short, who you just heard, and then the Supreme Allied Commander, General Wesley Clark. Let's listen to that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHORT: Well, Clark called me direct and said Mike, you've hit the Chinese embassy. And I said boss, I can't, I can't imagine how we could have hit the Chinese embassy unless we just threw a bomb incredibly long or short or -- let me do my homework and I'll get back to you.

GEN. WESLEY CLARK, NATO SUPREME ALLIED COMMANDER: We looked at the maps. We found out where the China embassy was. We had a Belgrade map and we didn't strike any targets anywhere near the Chinese embassy that was marked on the Belgrade map.

SHORT: I went back to my room at Camp Ederling (ph) I guess about 3:30 in the morning pretty certain we had not hit the Chinese embassy. CLARK: About five o'clock I got another call that said oops, it looks like the embassy's been moved. We've hit an annex of a new embassy or a new embassy or something. He's down here. And we went back to the target photograph and you could see that we struck what was pictured on CNN as the Chinese embassy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: Whoops. Some of this is, quite frankly, shocking, Peter. I'm curious what, in the course of all this, amazed you the most.

BOYER: Hearing generals be so forthright as you just heard. You know, it comes down to oops. We hit the Chinese embassy. I mean that was important for two reasons. One, the generals, the Mike Shorts of this world had finally won from NATO because NATO, you remember the great NATO celebration, the 50th anniversary, which was nothing like a celebration. Tony Blair had gone there trying to give Bill Clinton some backbone, frankly, as people near the scene put it to us, convince him that we've got to be more aggressive in the air, we've got to at least put ground troops on the table as a threat.

And finally they did get more aggressive in the air and on April 7th, the most, you know, the night that everybody was looking forward to on our side from a warrior's standpoint was we're going to go into Belgrade, we're going to hit the head of the snake, as Short put it. Boom, oops. It had, it resulted in two things. One, they had to pull back again and fight this more constrained air war. And the other thing was that it put the diplomatic efforts, you know, sort of off key, to say the least.

O'BRIEN: Understatement of the morning.

Peter Boyer is the correspondent for the "Frontline" documentary "War In Europe." The second of a two part series airs Tuesday night, most places 10:00 P.M. Check your local listings. Peter, thanks for being with us on CNN SATURDAY MORNING.

BOYER: Thank you very much, Miles.

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