Text: Defense's Hamre on Inadvertent Bombing of Chinese Embassy
("No one ... wanted to hit the Chinese embassy")The bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade by NATO forces was a tragic accident, according to Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre.
In testimony before the House Committee on Intelligence July 22, Hamre said a review of the circumstances leading up to the bombing shows that the accident occurred because of a small but important failure in targeting procedures.
"This review has led me to conclude that we could have avoided this accident knowing what we now know. But when the accident was made, it is clear that no one thought it was the Chinese embassy or wanted to hit the Chinese embassy."
Hamre pledged those targeting procedures would be changed.
Following is the text of Hamre's testimony, as prepared for delivery:
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TESTIMONY OF JOHN J. HAMRE, DEPUTY SECRETARY OF DEFENSE
BEFORE THE HOUSE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCEINADVERTENT BOMBING OF THE CHINESE EMBASSY
IN BELGRADE, YUGOSLAVIA, MAY 7, 1999THURSDAY, JULY 22, 1999
Thank you for inviting me to participate in the hearing today on the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia on May 7, 1999 while the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was undertaking air operations against the Government of Yugoslavia in response to their repression in Kosovo. I am also pleased to appear with Director George Tenet, whose service to America I have admired for years.
We are here today to discuss a painful subject -- the accidental bombing of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China located in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. War is a painful subject. War is about the intentional destruction of things in order to impose a change of policy of an enemy. We intended to bring destruction to the infrastructure of violence and coercion inside Yugoslavia in order to force the government of Yugoslavia to suspend its genocide against the citizens of Kosovo. We intended to destroy those things -- and only those things -- which the government of Yugoslavia used to conduct its hostilities and repression. We never intended to destroy anything that was not tied to Yugoslavia's war effort. Unfortunately, but not uncommon in the conduct of hostilities, we made mistakes.
Director Tenet has testified before you earlier, and has restated today, that the mistake that led to the unintended bombing of the Chinese Embassy was an intelligence error. I don't see it that way. We in the Defense Department have the responsibility for dropping bombs and winning wars. Ultimately, the bombing of the Chinese Embassy was our error. The intelligence community is indispensable to our work and they did an absolutely splendid job helping the Department of Defense during Operation Noble Anvil. I think our forces did a splendid job. The results speak for themselves. We flew over 9,300 strike sorties and attacked over 900 targets against a capable and sophisticated opponent. We lost only two aircraft in these operations and fortunately no NATO combatant was killed. But ultimately it was one of our air crews executing one of our orders that led to this tragic outcome. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Could it happen again? How can we prevent accidents like this from happening in the future?
After Action Assessment
Secretary Cohen has directed that the Department undertake a comprehensive assessment of our operations in Operation Noble Anvil and he put General Joe Ralston and me in charge of that assessment. We started this review only last month because the people who have to undertake the review are also the same ones who fought the war and are now enforcing the peace. Even though it is an extra burden just now, we must undertake this review because the experience is fresh. The data is still available.
The After Action Assessment will go into many more issues than the Embassy bombing. We will be asking ourselves a wide range of hard questions: Did fighting as a member of a coalition impose restrictions that made it harder to achieve our military goals? How effective is NATO, an organization designed for peacetime decision making, in the fast-paced decision making of war operations? How effective were Serbian deception procedures in blunting the effectiveness of our air strikes? These are just examples of the hard questions we will ask of ourselves in coming months.
The mistaken bombing of the Chinese embassy is only one of the important questions in our review. We are looking at all of the incidents of unintended damage during the air campaign. As I said, we flew over 9,300 strike sorties and attacked over 900 targets, dropping over 24,000 bombs or missiles. All together, we had 30 instances when we caused damage we did not intend. As Director Tenet said, the degree of accuracy is unprecedented in history. Never before has a military force gone to war and exercised such care to minimize unintended destruction and did so with such success. Where we expended enormous effort to minimize unintended damage to innocent civilians, our opponent fought a medieval war that attempted to maximize damage to innocent civilians. That story is just now unfolding.
Of the 30 instances of unintended damage, one third were instances where we damaged the target we wanted to destroy, but innocent civilians were killed at the same time. You will recall the time one of our electro-optically guided bombs homed in on a railroad bridge just when a passenger train raced to the aim point. We never wanted to destroy that train or kill its occupants. We did want to destroy the bridge and we regret this accident. As I said, 10 of the 30 instances of unintended damage fall in this category.
For the remaining 20 instances, 3 were caused by human error that identified the wrong target, and two were caused by mechanical error by our hardware. In 14 instances we have not yet determined whether the unintended damage was caused by human error or mechanical failure. We will determine that to the best of our ability during our after action assessment.
The one remaining case of course is the most dramatic and it is the subject of today's hearing. The bombing of the Chinese embassy was unique in that we had a legitimate target that we wanted to hit; the only problem is we had the target located in the wrong building. To my knowledge, this is the only example of this failing in all of our strike operations. Because it was such a tragedy, it merits special review and attention.
Let me say that we didn't suspend critical judgment until the shooting stopped. We knew we made a mistake in bombing the Chinese embassy within hours. We started almost immediately to try to find out why it happened and how to avoid similar mistakes in following air operations. During the past two months we have refined our understanding. Director Tenet outlined for you in his statement the errors that led to mistaken bombing of the embassy. I don't intend to repeat that in my testimony.
Three Key Questions
Instead I want to focus on the three key questions that are important to Secretary Cohen and to any subsequent Secretary of Defense. Human beings will always make mistakes. Where there are intentional acts, we need to punish those responsible for such acts. We hold our men and women in uniform to very high standards of performance. In this case, however, I have reviewed the record carefully and I see no evidence of intentional wrongdoing that led to this tragic accident. Where human failings are unintentional and purely accidental, we face a different challenge. Here we need to look at the systems and processes we impose to guide and constrain individuals. Where did our systems and procedures fail? Do our systems and procedures allow too many human failings which can result in tragic outcomes?
You and I can't prevent human beings from making honest mistakes. I and my colleagues at DoD are absolutely responsible for the systems and procedures. If those systems and procedures permit failure or exacerbate honest error, we are absolutely responsible for fixing them.
I believe there are three central questions that I must answer when I deliver our report back to Secretary Cohen.
First, is it too easy in our system to put things on a target list and attack them?
Second, can the Secretary of Defense trust the system used to geolocate or "site" a target?
Third, is the current 'no strike" process adequate to prevent unintentional damage in wartime?
In order to answer these three crucial questions, I must first begin with a broad description of our process.
There are four aspects to the comprehensive targeting process. I will use the following shorthand labels for these four sub-processes: targeting guidance, target development, target approval, and execution.
Target Guidance
This is arguably the most important sub-process. These are the steps we take when we receive from the President of the United States as the Commander in Chief the specific national-level instructions on how to fight the war, and what specifically he wants us to do and what he wants us to avoid. This guidance is further developed into specific instructions to battlefield commanders.
The President and his senior advisors decide, in broad strategic terms, how to fight the war -- how long, with what intensity, and with what limitations. It is in this sub-process that we decide what actions a battlefield commander can undertake on his own authority and what actions require specific approval from higher headquarters.
I have reviewed the record carefully and there is no evidence that this part of the process contributed in any way to the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy. The guidance was clear and unequivocal. No one had the authority to attack embassies and everybody knew it.
Target Development
This is the sub-process where various commands and offices review and develop specific target "folders" for consideration by senior commanders or civilian authorities. I must restrict what I say about the specific details of this sub-process for security reasons. I can say the following.
Targets are nominated and developed both at field headquarters and in Washington in the national security establishment. The target development process begins with a general proposition and results in a comprehensive proposal -- known in our business as a target folder -- for approval in the approval process I will discuss shortly.
Targets developed in Washington are supposed to be evaluated by multiple national intelligence agencies before they are submitted for formal approval. As mentioned previously, targets may also be developed in the field. Once approved by the CINC, any targets requiring NCA approval for execution are submitted to the Joint Staff for review and processing.
Targets that are developed in the field are submitted to the Joint Staff for review before they are submitted for formal approval. Targets developed in Washington are supposed to be evaluated by other organizations in the national security establishment before they are submitted for formal approval.
The crucial mistakes that were made -- as Director Tenet has testified -- were made in this target development sub-process. Inappropriate procedures were used to geo-locate a legitimate target. More important, the subsequent review of the target folder in this target development sub-process failed to catch the original mistake.
Target Approval
The third sub-process involves the review and approval of the target folder. This is a crucial step because this is the phase in the process when senior officers and individuals check to make sure the target development process conforms to the target guidance. All the important questions -- we thought -- were asked at this step: Is this a legitimate target? How does it relate to our military goals? What role does it play in our opponent's system of operations and how will it affect him if it is destroyed? Can we constrain our intended damage to this target only? What is the likelihood of unintended damage and how can we minimize unintended damage by changing the time of day or the physical direction of the attack?
My careful review of the process and the documentary evidence suggests that the second most important mistake occurred in this phase. More accurately, we didn't make a mistake by what we did in the approval phase, but what we normally do not do. Normally we do not question the mechanical aspects of target siting during the approval process. We assume that the target has been properly located in geo-spatial terms. And what we found was that in this case insufficient information was provided in the target development sub-phase to enable senior leadership to evaluate the physical siting decisions. I hasten to add, however, that of the 900 targets struck, this is the only case of misidentification during the target development process.
Execution
The fourth sub-phase is the execution phase, when our forces carry out their assigned mission. In this case the bomber crew did exactly what it was told to do. There is nothing in the execution phase that contributed to the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy.
Answering the Three Key Questions
With this background we can now answer the three key questions I posed earlier.
First, is it too easy in our system to put a target on the master targeting list?
I think the evidence here is that our system is not lacking in this regard. It is not too easy to get things targeted. We need to remember that the intended target was an appropriate target. We wanted to destroy the Headquarters of the Yugoslav Federal Directorate for Supply and Procurement. This organization was directly involved in Yugoslavia's war efforts and knocking it out would shorten the war and limit our opponents ability to continue their violence. The evidence suggests the target development and approval process appropriately asked all the right questions about the FDSP. Unfortunately we thought it was located in a building that turned out to be the Chinese embassy.
This leads me to the second question: Can the Secretary of Defense trust the system and process we use to "site" targets?
Here it is clear that, in this particular case, the current system failed us. It appears that the system worked well for 99.9 percent of the targets, but when it fails spectacularly as it did here, we have to say that the system must be improved.
There is always uncertainty in geo-locating targets. In some instances the nature of the target simplifies the problem. Locating a railroad switching yard or an oil refinery is relatively easy. They have a unique character that is easily seen on a picture and their size makes them relatively easy to locate on even the most general map. Geo- locating a target when it is an office building in a major city is dramatically harder and inherently less certain.
In this instance an analyst used an inappropriate procedure to geolocate the target. The larger system failure is that the target development process did not convey to other offices and individuals the technique that was used in the siting process. Senior officers in the approval process would have questioned the siting of the target had the target folder indicated the method that was used by the analyst. It did not. We have to fix that.
How we fix it is a matter of current review. Here we have to balance the need for reasonable checks and balances with the imperative for efficient operations in time of war. We will have specific recommendations later this summer. At this stage I believe that one possible remedy could be to include in the target folder some description of the target siting methodology. The standards should be higher for office buildings in urban settings than for large unique structures such as oil refineries.
Third, is the current "no strike" system adequate to minimize collateral damage?
Here again I have to conclude that the answer is no. The system is inadequate because it currently is dependent on data bases which are not adequately updated. The concept of the no strike system is fundamentally sound; the challenge lies in ensuring that the underlying data bases on which the system depends contain, to the maximum extent feasible, the most up-to date information available.
It is clear that no one wanted to attack the Chinese embassy. What is embarrassing to me is that no one knew where the Chinese embassy really was. There were a few individuals in our government Who knew where it really was, but they were not consulted in the target development process. But the bigger problem is that this episode has revealed how insufficient our data base development and review process is, given the extremely high standards that have evolved for modem warfare American style.
Fifty years ago we knew we couldn't discriminate between embassies and legitimate targets in a bombing campaign so we warned everyone accordingly and pressed ahead. We can't do that today and don't need to do that today. But that means we have to have data bases that are sufficiently accurate to catch mistakes that will be made.
Let me use this as an opportunity to say something about the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. There have been a lot of articles and editorials in recent weeks that have blamed NIMA for this tragic accident. NIMA is not at fault. The dedicated folks at NIMA did a superb job supporting our war fighters. They are unsung heroes. The fact is that an analyst inappropriately used a NIMA map developed for a different purpose, and used an inappropriate technique to locate the target on that map. The target development and approval process then failed to catch this error through procedures that NIMA does not control. I want to publicly thank LTG Jim King and the hard working patriots at NIMA who worked so hard to support our war fighters in this and every other operation.
Conclusion
Mr. Chairman, Congressman Dixon, let me conclude by saying that the unintended bombing of the Chinese embassy was a tragic accident. This review has led me to conclude that we could have avoided this accident knowing what we now know. But when the accident was made, it is clear that no one thought it was the Chinese embassy or wanted to hit the Chinese embassy. This accident occurred because of a small but important failure mode in our targeting system. It can be changed. It needs to be changed. I pledge to you that it will be changed.
Thank you.
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