Jacko, I think that "The claim that Kosovo was won by air power alone may be a tad ambitious" is
very understated. My recollection of the post conflict BDA is that despite the massive claims to the contrary, very few Serbian AFV were destroyed despit that being one of the aims.
From a US Army War College Paper:
"
Independent accounts from reporters covering the battle for Kosovo offered an entirely different set of battle damage statistics from those offered by either General Clark or the Pentagon. Their perspective is interesting for it is offered from firsthand, on-the-ground analysis, just like the latter NATO and Pentagon estimates.
The first newspaper reports on battle damage appeared at the end of June. Indications were that only 13 Serb tanks and fewer than 100 armored personnel carriers had been destroyed. Reporters noted the ruins of many different types of decoys hit by NATO forces (e.g., rusted tanks with broken parts, wood or canvas mock-ups). Carlotta Gall of The New York Times, a veteran war correspondent from the first Russian war in Chechnya, saw little damage. Newsweek reporter Mark Dennis found only one destroyed tank after driving around Kosovo for ten days. Did the Serbs manage to extricate all of their destroyed vehicles during their publicly filmed withdrawal, did they hide them, or did they really experience much less damage than NATO sources declared?
In late July, Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that NATO had dropped 3,000 precision-guided weapons that resulted in 500 hits on decoys, but destroyed only 50 Yugoslav tanks. ....
U.S. News and World Report, in its 20 September 1999 edition, stated that a NATO team visited 900 "aim points" targeted by NATO in Kosovo and found only 26 tank and similar-looking self-propelled-artillery carcasses. This would again throw NATO's revised number of 93 tanks out the window. However, how many tank carcasses were in Serbia, where the NATO team did not visit, is not known, making this figure less provocative and contradictory than it originally appears. The article also reported increased friction between General Clark and his NATO air operations chief, Lieutenant General Michael Short, over target selection and strategy (mobile targets such as tanks versus infrastructure, respectively). The article concluded that it was not air power but Russia's withdrawal of support for Serbia that probably brought an end to the air war in Kosovo. The article noted that in future conflicts, the most merciful way to end them may be to conduct them swiftly and violently instead of by the trial-and-error, phased approach used in Kosovo.[19]
Finally, several British officers, both retired and serving, also noted that damage was much less than originally stated. One newspaper report, citing British Ministry of Defense sources, stated that the damage done to tanks was perhaps even less than the lowest quoted figure of 13 tank kills.[20] But the most damning comment could prove to be from an International Herald Tribune article on 1 October. Written by Frederick Bonnart, the editorial director of the independent but highly authoritative NATO's Nations, the article discusses how NATO "propaganda" was used against the West. He notes:
In democracies, it is the duty of the public services to present the truth even in wartime, and particularly when they are in sole control of the information. If it is deliberately designed to engender fear and hate, then the correct term is propaganda.[21]
In particular, Bonnart believes the armored vehicle totals did not properly represent the vehicles actually destroyed, and that NATO deliberately used the West's reputation for truth and fairness to carry out a highly charged information policy against the Serbs. This made NATO's information policy rife with propaganda, Bonnart contends