UAVs over Kosovo - did the Earth move?

1 December 1999

Tim Ripley looks behind the marketing hype and points up the real lessons from unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations during the Kosovo conflict. In the wake of the NATO's Operation Allied Force, senior US military leaders and industry figures have been enthusing about the contribution of UAVs to the successful outcome of the NATO air campaign.

Rear Admiral Robert Nutwell, the Pentagon's command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance chief's declaration that "NATO's Operation Allied Force in Yugoslavia demonstrated that a new age in reconnaissance is in fact dawning", were typical of the way UAVs were portrayed. However, it is worth noting that the further away you are from western capitals and the closer you get to Kosovo, the more sceptical western military men are about UAVs.

It is becoming clear that many military officers are increasingly worried that UAVs are opening the door to micro-management of operations by senior politicians or commanders far from the theatre of action. UAVs were also found to have their own vulnerabilities and limitations, which make many senior commanders loath to throw all their surveillance and reconnaissance "eggs into the UAV basket".

NATO's UAVs FORCE

The launching of NATO air strikes against Yugoslavia on 24th March 1999 opened the way for the largest deployment of UAV assets by western forces since the 1991 Gulf War. The predictions that the Yugoslav's would fold to NATO's will after only three days of bombing proved hopelessly optimistic and contingency plans to significantly enhance the scope and intensity of the air campaign had to be activated. These included the deployment of UAVs to improve NATO's surveillance capability. UAVs were seen as a way for NATO to find targets in Kosovo, below bad weather, without exposing alliance pilots to hostile fire.

UAVs were not new to the southern Balkan theatre of operations, with USAF General Atomics RQ-1 Predators, flying from Hungary, being employed to support the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) verification mission in October and November of 1998. The Predators were withdrawn with the on-set of the Balkan winter because of icing problems to be replaced by German Army Bombardier/Dornier CL-289 drones, based in Macedonia, from December 1998. The Bundeswehr's 100th Drone Battery was the only NATO UAV unit in the southern Balkans at the start of the conflict.

Within days of the air campaign getting underway, the Predators, of the USAF's 11th Reconnaissance Squadron, were on their way back to the Balkans and the US Army had mobilised a task force of IAI/TRW Hunter UAVs to go to Macedonia. French Army CL-289s were also soon dispatched to Macedonia to support Operation Allied Force. The Germans also reinforced their CL-289 battery in Macedonia.

For the first two months these assets were the only UAVs supporting the growing air campaign. British Marconi Phoenix UAVs later joined the campaign and the US Navy dispatched a USMC TRW/IAI RQ-2A Pioneer unit to the Adriatic, embarked on ships, to provide surveillance of Yugoslav naval forces operating from Montenegrian ports. The Pioneers helped find targets for Boeing AGM-84 Stand-off Land Attack Missiles (SLAM) fired by US Navy Lockheed Martin P-3C Orions.

OPERATION ALLIED FORCE

The air campaign was run from NATO's Combined Air Operations Centre (CAOC) at Dal Molin AB, Vicenza, Italy, and this hi-tech battle management facility also became the co-ordinating centre for NATO UAV activity. The exact command relationship of NATO UAV assets to the CAOC was constantly evolving as the campaign progressed. The only unit that was solely under control of senior USAF officers in the CAOC through out the conflict was the USAF Predator squadron, operating from Tuzla AB in north-eastern Bosnia and on occasions from Petrovec airport in Macedonia.

The Hunters were transferred to command of the US Army Task Force Hawk when it deployed to Albania in late April to conduct attack helicopter strikes into Kosovo. The German, French, and later British, UAV assets always remained under the command of their respective brigades based in Macedonia and their tasking tended to reflected the priorities of these ground force commanders, not the CAOC. While the Pioneers worked exclusively for the US Navy's 6th Fleet.

Every UAV mission over the Balkans had to be co-ordinated beforehand with CAOC planners and to be included in the daily NATO air tasking order (ATO). All UAV units posted liaison officers to the CAOC to ensure their operations were included in the ATO and to become the focal point for request for "product" from the intelligence staff in the CAOC.

These co-ordination measures worked most of the time but the complex and convoluted chains of command, particularly within the US armed forces, sometimes led to inefficient tasking with Predators and Hunters on occasions being sent to look at the same target and ending up filming each other.

Deconfliction of manned aircraft and UAVs increasingly became a problem as NATO air operations intensified. During the air campaign the requirement for allied manned aircraft to stay above 15,000 feet for reasons of safety helped deconfliction because the UAVs just stayed below the "hard deck". Once NATO peacekeepers entered Kosovo in June, keeping UAVs away from NATO helicopters and transport aircraft landing at the newly re-opened Pristina airport provided new challenges to allied air planners.

Still imagery from UAV units without a real-time capability was passed to the CAOC by high quality fax or e-mail if needed urgently, other wise written summaries were provided by unit photographic interpreters. The Zeiss Krt 8/24D camera on the German CL-289 was particularly praised by strike planners and bomb damage assessment (BDA) analysts because of its high quality and sharp definition, while the video imagery from the Predator was given high marks by NATO air planners because it was available in colour.

Each UAV unit received daily tasking of targets of interest from the CAOC intelligence staff, which included confirming existence of targets reported by other means, such as refugee reports and electronic intelligence, as well as BDA of targets hit by NATO air strikes. Usually during an individual sorties a UAV would be tasked to look at up to a dozen targets. While flight paths of the turbojet powered CL-289 had to be planned carefully to cover the target requirements because of their inability to be re-tasked after launch. The Hunters and Predators mission planners had to be aware of their air vehicle's relatively slow flight speed and hence long transit time between targets.

REAL-TIME

Task Force Hunter was resourced to be able to have two air vehicles airborne at anyone time and the Predator unit is believed to have a similar mission requirement. So at any one time the CAOC, in theory, could look at only four places in Kosovo. Given that by the end of the campaign NATO was launching around 300 strike sorties a day into Kosovo air space, there was never enough UAV real-time imagery to provide dynamic targeting for anything but a handful of sorties on each day of the campaign.

The Hunters and Predators were the only UAVs in theatre with the capability to transmit near real-time imagery back to CAOC and elsewhere, via Pentagon's Global Broadcast System (GBS). This led to perhaps the most controversial episode in UAV operations during the campaign. Incidents such as "tractor" and "bus" bombings in which civilians were killed by USAF bombs and missiles, led to NATO introducing very tight rules of engagement (ROE) for air strikes inside Kosovo.

Before allied aircraft could attack "targets of opportunity", such as tanks, artillery and mobile missile batteries, NATO required "two sets of eyes" to confirm the identity of targets. The second pair of eyes could either be a airborne forward air controller (AFACs) or UAV imagery that were relayed back to the CAOC, where Lieutenant General Mike Short, NATO's southern European air commander, could give the "go or no go" command for the attack.

Not surprisingly, many NATO pilots were not very impressed by being second guessed by a three star general siting in the safety of Italy, using a UAV as his "eye in the sky". Many NATO pilots blamed the UAV based system as being responsible for the slow kill rate of Serb tanks, because the slow speed of the UAVs meant it could often take up to an hour to get a UAV over a target to confirm its identity. In this time the target may have moved or the original pilot had to break off from his mission to refuel, forcing the target approval procedure to have to be begun again. This problem persisted until large numbers of AFACs were available in-theatre in mid-May.

The British tried to circumvent this problem by proposing to use a forward air controller based in the ground control station of a Phoenix system, operating from Macedonia, to direct RAF BAe Harrier GR7 strikes. The USAF senior leadership in the CAOC refused to go along with the idea unless a satellite link could be installed to allow the CAOC to view the imagery and give the final authorisation of any strike. The war ended before the British could get the necessary satellite links up and running.

The USAF was thinking along these lines as well and ordered a crash programme to integrate laser designators onto its Predators. This was to allow them to guide precision guided ordnance dropped from aircraft operating at higher - and safer - altitudes. This equipment was deployed to Europe but the war ended before it could be used in anger.

A more debilitating problem for NATO air planners was the availability of Hunter and Predator imagery to high level decision makers, such as General Wesley Clark, NATO's Supreme Commander Allied Force Europe (SACEUR) who had a GBS down-link of video imagery into his office and official residence in Mons, Belgium, throughout the war. According to CAOC staffers, the General would on occasions telephone the CAOC demanding that UAVs break off from their tasking and go and look at things of interest to him. Clark was in daily telephone contact with Kosovo Liberation Army chief, Hashim Thaci, and immediately after these conversations would dispatch a UAV to look at what often turned out to be spurious targets.

The increasing interest of senior commanders and political leaders in real-time imagery often led to the still imagery sensor platforms being sidelined in the CAOC, even though the latter's product on many occasions was far more useful for BDA and mission planning. "The CL-289 guys turned out some great stuff [imagery] but because of it wasn't real-time the CAOC battle staff tended to ignore them and they got left in a back room" said one CAOC staffer.

This problem was faced on a smaller scale within the NATO ground force in Macedonia prior to the move into Kosovo. The Hunter and Predator imagery was piped, via the GBS, into the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) Headquarters operations room, where senior commanders could watch it. Other systems had to rely on presenting their product in still form, video clips or written reports.

These were received with varying degrees of enthusiasm by the predominately British ARRC senior staff. "We in Britain have traditionally shied away from providing real-time video for senior commanders to prevent them micro-managing things but the lesson of Kosovo is unless you have real-time you will be sidelined" said one officer familiar with Phoenix operations in the Balkans. Immediately after the move into Kosovo, the UK's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) began work to develop a fibre optic cable system to allow Phoenix video to be networked from GCS to monitors within headquarters facilities.

LOSSES

The level of UAV losses came as a shock to some NATO officers and it soon became apparent that the Serbs were employing special developed tactics to counter the UAV threat.

Serb air defence forces were clearly prepared for NATO's UAV operations and had learned many lessons from the alliance's use of UAVs over Bosnia from 1994 onwards.

The Yugoslav air force museum in Belgrade proudly displays the remains of a Predator, shot down in 1995, so the system's performance and technology were well know to Serb air defence units.

The photograph shows the identification plate of a Predator UAV claimed by the Serbs. As Operation Allied Force progressed the Yugoslavs began to acquire an impressive collection of downed UAV's including Hunters, CL-289s, Crecerelles and Phoenix.

Kosovo's geography to a certain extent played into the hands of the Serb defenders because they only had to plan on UAVs approaching from a limited number of directions.

The majority of NATO UAV units were based in Macedonia and could only be launched from a handful of sites which were well know to Serb intelligence. It was therefore easy to position guns and hand-held heat seeking missiles under likely UAV flight paths. The German UAV unit also fell into a very predictable pattern of operation and launched their drones at the same time everyday for several weeks. The Serb air defence forces could expect targets to appear at this time and had their gun and missile crews ready for action.

The most innovative Serb anti-UAV tactic was the use of helicopters. It appears that the first Hunter of the campaign was lost after the Serbs launched a Mil Mi-8 HIP helicopter to fly alongside the UAV and then a door gunner blasted the air vehicle with a 7.62mm machine gun. This then became a favourite tactic until allied fighters made it rather dangerous.

The vulnerability of UAVs to hostile fire quickly made operators want to move to almost exclusively night flying to reduce attrition rates on the small number of air frames available.

UAV losses is a matter of some debate. The Yugoslav's claim 25 were shot down over Kosovo alone and scored more hits over Serbia and Montenegro [the map records their claims].

They have displayed a large amount of UAV wreckage to the international media. There is even a pro-Serb website which contains scores of photographs of what is obviously the remains of shotdown NATO UAVs.

No collated NATO figures for UAV losses has been published but a number of sources in UAV units have made information available to the author, as follows:

BASING ISSUES

One of the major issues to emerge from the Kosovo experience was the problem of basing rights, in countries neighbouring Kosovo and Serbia. These countries and western governments were worried about the presence of UAV launch assets attracting Serb counter moves. For this reason, the fact that UAVs were contributing to Operation Allied Force targeting had to played down at the time and still has some sensitivity.

The short range UAVs were all based in Macedonia, which had refused to allow its territory to be used for offensive purposes. Each NATO country made agreements on basing rights with the Macedonian government and used very different justifications.

One NATO officer familiar with the issues, described some of the requests as being the diplomatic equivalent of "fibs" or "white lies". "The Germans said their CL-289s were just being used to protect German forces, the French said nothing and the Americans made all sorts of threats" said the officer. "While the British got into such a tangle over the issue that they ended up not deploying their UAVs until the end of May and even then they promised to ask the permission of the Macadonians before the were to be used for targeting."

Even the Predators had to remain "invisible" because of Bosnia's supposable neutral status in the conflict and continued claims by NATO that its peacekeeping forces in the country were not participating in offensive operations against Yugoslavia.

Western governments were also keen to protect their UAV launch assets from attack and this was a factor in keeping them in Macedonia, beside the main NATO ground forces, rather than moving into Albania. Although Albania had fewer operating and political restrictions it was considered very vulnerable to Serb attack. This would have also opened the way to a ground engagement between NATO and Yugoslavia, which was counter to the word from the White House - "No ground war."

PEACEKEEPING

After the Serb agreement to withdraw their forces from Kosovo, NATO ground troops moved into the province to establish an interim UN-led civil administration. Allied UAVs supported the initial move into the province flying reconnaissance missions to monitor the Serb withdrawal. British Army Phoenix UAVs found 11 Serb MiG-21 fighters at Pristina airport which had survived the NATO air campaign and they were filmed taking off for Belgrade.

Once Kosovo Force (KFOR) was in place, UAV operations changed in character. The US Army Hunters and British Army Phoenix were employed for force protection and area surveillance tasks to assist the operations of NATO peacekeeping troops. The other UAV units were withdrawn from theatre by their nations.

It is becoming clear that the peacekeeping experience resulted in some major limitations being identified in the Phoenix and Hunter systems, which were designed to meet very different "general war" roles such as artillery target location and tactical surveillance. British officers with experience of internal security operations in Northern Ireland compared the Phoenix unfavourably with the "heli-telly" close circuit television used in the province, mounted on a Lynx or Gazelle helicopter. "The sensors on Phoenix are no way good enough to provide evidence that would stand up in a court of law" said one British officer in Kosovo. "The UAVs we have here just don't have the endurance and performance of helicopters".

The US Army uses its Hunters primarily for force protection around the two large American bases inside Kosovo. This is a priority requirement for US forces and means the Task Force Hunter is too remain in the Balkans for the foreseeable future. The British withdrew their Phoenix unit from Kosovo in August 1999 and they were happy to rely on FLIR equipped Canadian Forces CH146 Griffon helicopters for night time surveillance tasks.

LESSONS

The employment of UAV by NATO forces during the Kosovo crisis has produced a number of interesting lessons. Some not immediately apparent, amid the media hype from many members of the US UAV lobby. UAVs did provide a major component in the allied reconnaissance effort but it has to be stressed they were part of a combined effort involving a variety of land, air and space based assets.

It is very clear that the availability of real-time surveillance capability is a two edged sword. Senior leaders loved having the ability to look at Kosovo from the safety of their office's in Mons and Washington but given the limited real-time capable UAV assets available it questionable if this was a valid use of them.

While there were many lesson learnt from the experience - in terms of air vehicle operations, sensor packages and logistic support - NATO officers report that biggest lessons to emerge relate to doctrine, concepts of operation, command and control. Many of the NATO UAVs were being used "out of role" and employed for missions that they were not designed for. The requirement to support a strategic air campaign with essentially tactical systems proved an immense challenge.

The British experience of trying to get their Phoenix UAVs linked up to the CAOC, via satellites, was illustrative of the importance of having an effective system for co-ordinating operations with other air platforms and distributing imagery to commanders, intelligence and operations experts. Clearly these were major lessons from the conflict. The fact that most UAV used, except for the USAF Predators, were owned by ground force units, raised many questions during Operation Allied Force concerning the ownership of UAVs and whether they should be part of air forces, army aviation or special intelligence units. This is an issue that some armed forces clearly do not want to address for parochial service reasons.

The basing issue emerged as a big problem, which had the potential to derail many of the NATO UAV operations before they even started.

Vulnerability to low level air defences is also going to be growing problem for UAVs as many states around the world look to countering the UAV threat. The market in low level air defence equipment looks set to increase off the back of the need to counter UAVs.

Kosovo has provided western armed forces with a plethora of experience in the use of UAVs in a wide range of scenarios, ranging from supporting a strategic air campaign, sea surveillance, providing reconnaissance ahead of the NATO move into Kosovo and then participating in the peacekeeping effort in the newly liberate province. It remains to be seen if these lessons are taken on board in the rush to digitize and automate the battlefield. While the casualty free nature of the air campaign has been hailed as a success by UAV proponents, many veterans of the Kosovo campaign are not convinced that UAVs are the answer to all future surveillance requirements.

REF XQQFS

editor@defence-data.com

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