- guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 June 2000 16.39 BST
A report by the National Audit Office said the additional cost to the taxpayer of operations in Kosovo was estimated to total £866m over five years.
The MoD has so far disclosed only the expected costs for the first year of the operation - put at £342m. Even these figures were not released until last January - six months after the end of the air war - despite a promise to parliament after the Bosnia conflict that it would in future publish cost details at the outset.
Nor did the MoD's figures include the estimated £50m cost of replacing used ammunition and lost equipment - including an RAF Hercules transport aircraft which crashed on take-off and 12 unmanned reconnaissance "drones". The audit office said the MoD should now report the full costs of the deployment in Kosovo to parliament "at the earliest possible opportunity".
The audit office highlighted a number of failings, in particular, a "real risk" that the RAF would run out of precision-guided "smart bombs" during the air campaign against the forces of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. The RAF had only been able to keep going because bad weather over the Balkans meant many operations were cancelled and that a quarter of all sorties were aborted without the aircraft launching their weapons.
In addition, Royal Navy Sea Harriers on HMS Invincible found that within two months more than half their stocks of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles were "unserviceable" due to the heat and vibration sustained during take-off and landing, the audit office said.
The report also criticised the six-year delay in supplying the army's new secure Bowman radio system, which meant that Serb forces and even the media were able to "listen in" to their ageing Clansman radios. The Clansman was so unreliable the paratroops in Kosovo found that at any one time up to 35% of their radios were in need of repair and unit commanders had to resort to mobile telephones.
The lack of an effective communications system meant that at times the only working systems were the normal civilian systems and commanders found that they had to compete with the media to "get on air".
Moreover, troops had to spend the cold Balkan winter, with sub-zero temperatures, in tents because of a five-month delay in a £113m contract to provide prefabricated accommodation.
The MoD's own report, Kosovo - Lessons from the Crisis, was also published today. It found that some equipment was below standard, surveillance and intelligence gathering could have been improved, and British aircraft on precision bombing raids were affected to a surprising degree by bad weather.
Defence secretary Geoff Hoon insisted that the military campaign overall had been an outstanding success but said that more money would have to be spent if the shortcomings were to be addressed.
"Nato was right to have acted in Kosovo," Mr Hoon said. "Nato successfully achieved its objectives, averting a major humanitarian catastrophe and enabling 1,300,000 Kosovans to return home. The UK's armed forces played a key role. Our armed forces and civilian support personnel performed superbly. "For any military operation, and particularly a multinational operation of the size and complexity of the Kosovo operation, we examine the lessons to be learned. Many have already been implemented and work is in hand to improve our secure communications and precision attack capabilities.
"The determination of the Nato allies was essential to our success and now we need to work together to ensure that the lessons we have learned are implemented."
