Air Bridge to Afghanistan : Why Expanding the War is so Difficult

It takes huge amounts of supplies and equipment to keep the US military going in any part of the world. To keep our forces supplied in Afghanistan is especially difficult.

Afghanistan is a land locked country so at great expense the US transports by air a significant percentage of the necessary food, ammo, Gatoraid, medical supplies, heavy equipment, troops, and everything else that a modern military force requires. From the US to Afghanistan is about a 17 hours flight. Even the expense of flying in toilet paper adds up.

While some supplies are sent from the US by ship they then have to be trucked long distances, say from the port of Karachi, in Pakistan, then by dangerous torturous roads into Afghanistan. The risk of supply convoys being attacked by insurgents or being hit by IED’s is always present. In the Afghanistan War there is just no easy or cheap way to supply our armed forces or the tens of thousands of contractors who must also be supplied.

David Wood is an experienced war correspondent who has written and filed the following account of the amazing air bridge to Afghanistan. As David Wood points out only the US is presently capable of or would even try to supply a major war theater by air. But the effort is not easy and the air lift forces and equipment are beginning to show the strain, especially with the escalation of the war under President Obama.

After reading the article give a little thought to how difficult and expensive it is going to be to supply any increase in troop levels. President Obama has already ordered an additional 21,000 troops to Afghanistan. As Obama’s War has been of late going badly there is talk of troops beyond that number being requested by American commanders.

How many more? It may well depend on how many we can support. Read the article and then wonder to yourself, as I did, just how many more missions our fleet of 30 to 50 year old cargo planes can safely fly. In the end we may have to withdraw from, or at least scale down, operations in Afghanistan because operating our aging fleet of cargo aircraft has become too dangerous and our air lift crews are being over worked, perhaps dangerously so. Then there is the enormous expense of it all.

It is unlikely that we can even supply our present force level entirely by ground when that ground is IED dangerous and long overland supply routes are impossible to completely defend. The Air Bridge to Afghanistan may be the weakest link in the United States determination to prevail in a conflict involving disastrously long supply lines.

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ABOARD FLIGHT REACH 4060 – At a cost of $44,351 an hour, this venerable leviathan of a C-5 cargo plane has struggled off a South Carolina runway bound for Afghanistan, some 17 hours away, carrying a cargo of two.

The payload consists of two very heavy armored trucks, known as MRAPs (Mine Resistant, Armor Protected vehicles). They are built specifically to resist the blast of roadside bombs, the main killers of American troops in Afghanistan. The huge trucks, each weighing 60,000 pounds, are lashed with webs of 25,000-pound test chain to the steel-plate deck of the C-5′s enormous cargo hold. There’s room in here for another three MRAPS, but even the C-5, largest cargo plane in the Pentagon’s inventory, couldn’t lift them. As it is, we carry barely enough fuel to make it up the coast to Bangor, Maine, to gas up for the next leg.

Only the United States can – and perhaps only the United States would – choose to fight a long-distance war by air. Especially a war in Afghanistan, a landlocked country accessible only by barely improved goat paths across tortuous mountain passes where laboring convoys are regularly set upon by insurgents and brigands.

That leaves the skies.

With little notice, the United States has established an unprecedented air bridge to Afghanistan. This aerial artery carries an unending stream of troops, munitions, ammo, water, concertina wire, tires, MRAPs, filing cabinets, relocatable buildings, porta-potties, cash, computers, rations, fresh blood and everything else needed for a long military campaign. Return trips bring out the dead and the injured: since 2001, roughly 135,000 wounded patients have been airlifted home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The numbers that describe the “air bridge” to Afghanistan are staggering, in part because the effort is almost invisible. Painted a dull, battleship gray, the airlifters – huge C-5s, the more modern C-17s with their lower cargo capacity but shorter takeoff and landing requirements, along with fleets of aerial refueling tankers — drone out of two major East Coast ports, at Dover, Del., and Charleston, S.C., with little fanfare. They are hardly the glamorous jets the Air Force uses in recruiting ads.

Long-haul airlifters like Reach 4060 haul 350 tons of cargo and 360 troops into Afghanistan every day from the United States. Most of the MRAPs and other heavy cargo go by sea (a container ship can carry 400 C-17-loads of stuff). Still, airlifters have flown 4,189 MRAPs to the war zone despite the airfare (which I figure at $376,983.50 apiece).

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To read the reminder of this article go to Air Lift to Afghanistan : An Invisible Bridge. To gain a better understanding of the war effort in Afghanistan be sure to read other David Wood well written and informative posts at www.politicsdaily.com