The task force was to operate from March 1999 until June 1999 when Slobodan Milošević withdrew the Yugoslavian Army from Kosovo.

General Clark and Admiral James O. Ellis, while at the Warfighter Exercise, discussed how to utilize the Apaches to augment the Air Force assets poised to strike in four days.

[1] The Army's planners would be strapped for time to put together a plan to deploy a mission that had never been employed by an AH-64 Apache unit.

It was projected that the Apache units would be able to identify and eliminate these targets more efficiently, due to their effectiveness in the first Gulf War.

These plans projected that the forces would be deployed to Macedonia, but the Macedonian government refused to allow offensive NATO operations to be launched from their country.

The route taken was dictated by the fact that Austria and Switzerland would not allow use of their airspace due to the aircraft deploying to an armed conflict.

From the southeast corner of France the flight turned south towards the Mediterranean Sea to follow the coast into northwest Italy where the aircraft and crews were made to wait for several days until the assembly area at Tirana airport was prepared for their arrival.

Once the assembly area was built up enough to support the aircraft, the crews were given the go-ahead to continue south, down and across the Italian peninsula to the Brindisi airport where the aircraft were armed, and provisions made for the crews, for the 90-nautical-mile (170 km) flight over the open water of the Adriatic sea to Tirana.