German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said Friday that "talks are urgently needed" among NATO members regarding the selection of targets for the NATO air campaign. Clarifying Fischer’s remarks, German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Erdmann said that NATO needed to plan its bombing campaign to "more effectively avoid damaging civilian targets." The German statements follow similar appeals on Thursday from Canada and Italy for NATO to reassess its target choices. They also echo concerns expressed by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder on Wednesday, when he suggested that NATO target selection was being monopolized by the U.S. and the UK.

Disaffection with both the strategic and tactical conduct of NATO’s air campaign is spreading within the organization. Debate has deepened from a general argument about whether the air war is proving effective at achieving NATO’s goals, to a substantive issue of whether, by damaging an increasing number of civilian and diplomatic facilities, the campaign is doing more harm than good. An increasing number of NATO members are expressing their unwillingness to take the fall for what they consider U.S. errors and their irritation at being frozen out of the decision-making process. As collateral damage mounts, and Washington must defend not only the bombing campaign in general but its tactical execution, Washington will find it increasingly hard to maintain support within NATO for the campaign. Having ruled out escalation to a ground war, and with time running out on the air campaign, we wonder how long U.S. intransigence at the Moscow and G-8 negotiations can last.

NATO has come under increasing public criticism, and has seen dissent from within its own ranks, following a series of accidental strikes on civilian and diplomatic targets. On Friday, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea told reporters that NATO had no intention of changing its targeting policy as a result of the incidents. Shea insisted that military commanders would continue to take every precaution to hit targets accurately. U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin replied to the criticism, saying, "In our view, NATO's air campaign clearly represents the most accurate and discriminating use of air power in history."

Thanks to PGM – precision guided munitions, not perfectly guided munitions – it no longer takes 300 bombs to destroy a target. It takes two. Reducing weapons systems’ CEP – circular error probable – to one square meter means that half – not all – of the rounds used will likely land in that one meter box. The others could hit nearby or go wildly astray, perhaps hitting another portion of the target, or a cow pasture, or an embassy. Add to this the intentional or unintentional jamming of weapons’ guidance systems – with smoke, flares, clouds, or electronic signals – and intelligence failures in target selection, and it is only surprising that so few embassies, refugee columns, apartment blocks and hospitals have been hit.