How did the American Air Force change the Kosovo war forever?

April 12, 1999. It's in the afternoon, 12:30 and Brigadier General Dan Leaf was flying an F-16 plane to stop a massacre thousands of feet down.

He is commander of the air expedition's 315th wing, operating from the Aviano Air Base in Italy during Operation Allied Forces. The military campaign against criminal Slobodan Milosevic began on March 24, 1999, with Britain and the US. Using air strikes trying to curb a campaign of ethnic cleansing by former bloodbathing.

The war will be brief, just 78 days, but using air power to influence conditions on the ground will be revolutionary. The US Air Force embraced new technologies, such as aircraft without a pilot and adopted new tactics for existing ones, such as F-16 and B-2 bombers, which will be as important in the upcoming conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But now, Leaf and his butterfly are following a convoy with a truck to fill fuel in its center.

We can see the city that had just burned, part of the city, and we only had so much time”, he recalls. “They were going to the sanctuary of the city because they knew we wouldn't hit them when they were there. We will protect the city they wanted to burn”.

The double F-16s were flying without any support on the ground, relying on their cameras on board to identify the targets and lasers that run their weapons. One aircraft determines the target for impact and begins the use of weapons.

My flight will launch the missiles and then drop two 500-pound bombs and he's done with a”, says Leaf, who is now retired.

Almost a decade ago, the world took its first view of precise modern weapons during the Gulf War. Press conferences at the Pentagon showed images of bombs entering the chimneys and windows, dramatic presentations of the value of laser weapons, Kosovo Prees broadcast.

But the reality is that less than 10 percent of the ammunition dropped during the Desert Storm were accurately directed. During the operation Allied Forces, this number tripled to 29 percent, according to RAND.

F-16 were often searching for mobile targets, missions to be recognised by a decade later. They also received valuable experience in co-ordinating powerful attacks against fixed targets.

We arrived where four planes could issue eight bombs and have similar impacts from different planes in different parts of the sky”, Leaf says. “There's a war art there. ”

Great bombers carried much of their weight. Operation Allied Forces was the first to use the three heavy U bombers SAF in combat. Only 10 B-52s, B-1s and B-2 dropped nearly half of the 23,000 air-land ammunition during the campaign.

Bombers finally showed their important role in the exact impact of targets, and the main key is the use of Joint Direct Attack Ammo ( JDAMs, a converting tool that turns bombs into smart, GPS-led weapons.

It was B-2's combat debut, which showed combat commanders that it was suitable for conventional missions <x0-minute one-x1> in air space protected by radar and antiaircraft weapons. B-2 also uses synthetic opening radar to get images of their targets as they approached, using coordination to do Their JDAMs even more accurate.

Working on the fierce marine planes was another moment on the way to a battle of a team that would be so vital during the long wars of the new millennium.

We had mass. We had accuracy. But through the first application of B-1 and B-2 with JDAM in Allied Forces, it was a fundamental change, “says Leaf. I think the Taliban must have known it as a fundamental change... I think mass precision, with the risk of becoming cliche, was a change in the game”.

The Kosovo war was also a key moment for aircraft without a pilot. Predator RQ-1A can stay in the air for 24 hours, show the spectrum through the clouds using an synthetic opening radar, and monitor low power signals from Serbian radios and mobile phones. But real attraction has been the use of real - time videos that can be supplied without risking the life of a pilot in the process.

“was the first time that there is an MTS ball (multispectal targeting), with video moving to a Predator, using in a combat operation”, said Colonel Abizer “Beezer” Tyabji, current deputy director of the ISR division. This is definitely a big job when you have this whole video in motion, real time, sending. ”

Today, crews seem to fly around the globe from U.S. command centres, but crews had to be deployed at that time. Missions in Kosovo were sent through crews deployed in Taszar, Hungary. From there information was collected about Serb atrocities and troop movements. But they also improved in providing information on the limits that should be hit.

RAND analysis includes descriptions of new methods generated by the need for war:

A new procedure, demonstrated operational for the first time in Kosovo, has brought a clever merging of sensor The UAV and specialised command and control procedures, in which two predants orbiting 5,000 feet of altitude would ensure electro-optic identification and red rays of mobile targets and a third Predator would use his laser and map software to provide geolocation, after which they would shoot at targets discovered by A-10 or F-16 planes. Many strikes on tanks were defeated on the basis of this” technique.

Some of the greatest lessons in Kosovo have more to do with the people who carry them out, starting in airspace, emergency procedures and task orders should be invented in motion. And operators and pilots cut off from planes with crews discovered a lack of design.

“Were not built for a pilot, but for an engineer, “says Tyabji. “was built as a custom job. You know, there was not much I would call friendly characteristics for pilots. ”

Predator's combat missions, which was unarmed -- paved the way for subsequent programmes, such as the foundation of the UAV operations centres within the US, better controls and the formation of an entire family of fears. Lessons from Kosovo have been overshadowed by subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. For current aircraft operators like Tiabji, it's hard to find.

It's an unusual thing to interact with someone who had flown so far from”, he says. The “was a small, super small community, when it was in Kosovo and this community has increased exponentially since then”.

The war in Kosovo deeply affected the Pentagon, even though it is not often discussed. But for aircraft in modern conflict, practical lessons still resonance in their procedures and equipment even if they do not know him.