Friend of mine was the Air Force LNO to I Corps about the time this happened. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not in that article which isn’t mentioned, like the Italian air traffic control people who were refusing the NATO requests to allow for different approaches and vectors on those targets, a few of which are predicated on departure from those Italian air bases. There’s a bunch of inside-baseball stuff like that, which an Air Force officer familiar with it all could probably break out for us, but the reality was that not only were there spies from Serbia in Italy, the Italians themselves were playing games, as were the French and the Germans. The NATO headquarters leaked like a sieve, and all the political BS that was going on in the background meant that the poor bastards flying the planes were programmed for failure by the environment.

It also did not help that the people doing the air mission planning were not all that bright, entirely too arrogant, and dismissive of the “primitive Serbian” ADA efforts. The possibility that anyone could figure out countermeasures to their planning wasn’t something that they saw coming, just in the rear-view mirror.

Another part of the issue was trying to fight a teapot war with a military designed and predicated for total war, in an environment of small-time local politics going on in between putative allies. The assumption was that the Italians were on board with NATO over this whole thing, and that simply was not true. They had their preferred outcomes in the former Yugoslavia, and those weren’t the ones we were looking for, so… Yeah. There were probably spies in the Italian air traffic control authorities, and probably their military, and those spies were not even Serbian, but Italians doing their own thing.

It’s not a question of the stealth technology working or not, but the surrounding mess of politics and petty rivalry. Frankly, my take on it is that the whole thing was an egregious error. There’s no real solution to the problem that was Yugoslavia, and it was always going to end in tears and blood. Best not to get any splattered all over you–Intervention in Yugoslavia was like doing a domestic violence complaint as a cop, and there’s a reason no police officer likes those sorts of calls.

The USAAF sacrificed the B-17′s payload and range for armor and added crew and weapons in the belief they could fight through Germany’s defenses. We suffered horrendous losses until tactics changed and the long range P-51 became available. There will be unpleasant surprises for our stealth aircraft if war comes.