Tim Ripley/LONDON
With NATO airpower striking at Yugoslavia, details have emerged of the performance of US "smart" weapons used during the organisation's last Balkan air offensive in 1995.
The USAF's Balkan Air Campaign Study, which remains unpublished, even though it is available through the Freedom of Information Act, says many of the US military's precision guided ordnance performed with mixed effectiveness in Bosnia. Some are again in use in the latest campaign.
The Raytheon Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) proved to be the star of the Bosnian operation. "The TLAMs - proved remarkably accurate" the study says. "Seven TLAMs hit the Lisina early warning radar site, while the others hit the radio relay station. Post strike reconnaissance showed the latter was "completely destroyed". The buildings at the Lisina site also suffered direct hits. The impact of three missiles south of the site's radar position rendered it non-operational."
Questions were raised, however, about the performance of the Raytheon AGM-88 High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM), the US military's principal anti-radar weapon.
Bosnian Serb air defence operators proved to be highly skilled and their radars proved difficult to hit with HARMs. The only Serb air defence radars confirmed destroyed in the campaign were hit by laser-guided bombs. A major suppression of enemy air defence (SEAD) strike on 9 September with a package of 30 SEAD aircraft failed to destroy any Serb surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries after they closed down their radars. "Aircraft in the package fired 33 HARMs at seven SAM sites, including those at Majikici, Donji Vakuf, Sipovo and Kolonija with less than optimal results," say US Air Force analysts.
USAF Boeing GBU-15 guided bombs and US Navy AGM-84E Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) stand-off weapons also had "less than optimal" performance during Operation Deliberate Force. The high cost of the weapons limited peacetime live firing, underlying the problems .
Difficulties first arose when a USAF Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle and US Navy Boeing F/A-18C Hornets attempted a joint strike with stand-off weapons against Bosnian Serb air defences around Banja Luka.
"The joint employment of the GBU-15 and SLAM in close proximity produced datalinked interference problems that were a big surprise" says the report. "The datalink interference resulted in the electro-optical [EO] presentation of the GBU-15 picture normally presented in the F-15E intruding on the F/A-18's video screen when the Hornets were attempting to guide their SLAMs.
"The consequences of the frequency interference destroyed seven SLAMs because of command guidance failures. Because of these technical problems, intelligence analysts reviewing post-strike data deemed all the SLAMs to have missed their targets."
A subsequent SLAM strike was successful, with three out of four weapons hitting their targets. But one of the missile's datalinks failed, preventing the pilot from guiding it to the target. USAF crews found Bosnia's deep valleys and heavy cloud a major challenge, which prevented them finding their targets. "A total of nine GBU-15s were employed during Deliberate Force. Only four found their target. Of those that missed, four were due to target non-acquisition and one to a weapon malfunction."
Source: Flight International
