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NATO’s seven months of airstrikes and intelligence gathering over Libya helped defeat the forces of Moammar Gadhafi. But Operation Unified Protector also underscored the alliance’s reliance on American ISR planes and highlighted shortcomings in its standing command-and-control and target-analysis capabilities, interviews with participants in the operation show.
Officials expect these issues to be explored in an after-action report drafted by the operation’s commander, Lt. Gen. Charles Bouchard of the Royal Canadian Air Force, and in a series of lessons-learned projects by U.S. Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis, supreme allied commander, Europe.
In the end, NATO “demonstrated that daily we could mount around 150 aircraft sorties, 40 percent of which were air-to-ground strike sorties,” said one NATO official.
But getting there was not easy.
Speaking in mid-November, one senior British Royal Air Force officer said NATO was not ready to assume command of the Libyan operation following the handover from U.S. Africa Command in March.
“We don’t want a repeat of being that ill-prepared,” said Wing Cmdr. Rick Adams after a presentation at the Association of Old Crows symposium in Washington, D.C.
One issue was targeting. The alliance “did not have all the necessary expertise. We didn’t have targeteers, in particular. Intelligence analysts were also needed, as we weren’t studying Libya until earlier this year,” said a Brussels-based NATO official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Targeteers study imagery intelligence gathered from overhead reconnaissance and determine the function of a specific building.
According to the NATO official, the alliance was able to tackle this deficiency in targeteers by asking members to provide additional targeting staff and by redeploying personnel from other parts of NATO.
“This process has allowed us to understand the competencies we need to retain in the future,” the NATO official added.
NATO also had to rely heavily on U.S. aircraft, including EC-130Js to jam and disrupt the communications of the Libyan armed forces, U-2 spy planes to collect still imagery, Predator drones for full-motion video, and E-8 Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System planes for ground surveillance. For the most part, the operation underscored how few ISR aircraft the other alliance members have available, aside from important contributions made by the Royal Air Force’s Sentinel radar jets and the French Air Force’s C-160G Gabriel electronic intelligence-gathering aircraft.
“NATO’s secretary general has made it public that while our European and Canadian allies acquitted themselves very well, they need to acquire those ISR capabilities that the U.S. continues to bring to the table with increasing effect,” the NATO official said.
As for command and control, a Swedish Air Force officer drew on the memory of NATO operations over Kosovo in 1999.
“I think it was a challenge for NATO to take over the chain of command after the initial U.S.-led Odyssey Dawn operations, since it has been 12 years ago since NATO commanded a similar air campaign in the Balkans,” the Swedish officer said.
Adams of the Royal Air Force expressed similar concerns.
“The entire emphasis of NATO, for about 10 years, has been in Afghanistan. We very, very rapidly had to reconfigure the command and control,” he said, adding that “we could do this better. This should have been a walk in the park.”
The NATO official disagreed with such a stark description.
“We were not focused on North Africa in early 2011, but we proved we can get involved quickly and effectively when given a clear legal mandate,” the official said.
The U.K. Ministry of Defence press office supplied C4ISR Journal with a written statement about the situation: The Libya operation “has proven that the NATO alliance can step up quickly to command a complex operation involving a large number of partner nations, including those outside of NATO. Clearly, command and control will always be a challenge with a large number of different nations working together, but the construct has worked well for the Libyan operations.”
The NATO official said that in any operation, designing a command-and-control structure can take time:
“The last time we performed a similar operation was during Kosovo in 1999,” the official said. “We uncovered challenges, and these are being folded back into our training exercises and procedures.”
The real-world outcomes should not be overlooked, the official said: “Without NATO, the cities of Benghazi and Ajabiya would have been shelled into submission by Gadhafi’s forces.”
As the Swedish Air Force officer said, NATO “maybe showed some weaknesses, but performed strongly.”
This article appeared in the January-February issue of C4ISR Journal.
