the Army is involved in running ports, the challenges of
moving a 68-ton tank, and what the military can learn from
the commercial sector and vice versa.
QOn behalf of DC VELOCITY and our readers, may we thank you for your service?
AI appreciate that, but as you go through the airports, please thank all those 18-, 19-, and 20-year-old kids in
uniform, not me. They deserve all the pats on the back.
QYou are both a career academic and a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Reserves. We all
know what a college professor does, but you have now done
two tours in Kuwait in an Army uniform working at the
military port. Can you give our readers an idea of just what
the Army is doing running a port? You
think of the Navy when you think of
ports.
AThis is one of those little skill sets that is critically important to the
entire Department of Defense and the
Army, but most people don’t understand
it. There are 12 reserve battalions just
like ours, and our mission is to help the
warfighter move through the port system to and from the fight. That means
we start all the way up at the foxhole
helping them come back to the port,
move through the port and onto the
ships, and go back to the United States
or vice versa. We meet them at the dock
and help them get through the process.
Since 2004, I guess it is, possibly back into 2003, reserve
battalions have been running that process, and we have
moved over 750,000 pieces of military equipment in and
out of the theater. In any given month, we might move
6,000 or 7,000 pieces of military equipment.
QWhen you talk about 7,000 pieces of military equip- ment, we’re not talking about typewriters and things
like that, are we?
AAbsolutely not. In my world, a small piece of equip- ment is a 20-foot container. We move lots of containers for the Army as well as pieces of equipment—an M- 1
battle tank, a Bradley tank, all the new high-speed MRAP
(mine resistant, ambush-protected) armored vehicles, all
the trucks, all the support equipment, the bridges, everything for an Army unit to do its mission.
QSo when we talk about something like a battle tank, just to give a frame of reference, how much does one
of those weigh?
AThe M1A1s and A2s that we have seen weigh right around 68 tons. That sounds like a horrific amount of
weight, but we are working in an area where we measure
things that we load on and off ship in thousands of gross
tons. As heavy as an M- 1 is, we can probably get 150 of
them on one of the big ships if we really need to.
QAre military ports a high-volume operation?
AIt depends on the port and where you are in the world. Ash Shuaibah, Kuwait, yes. We are by far the highest-volume port in the entire DOD system. Our sister ports, like
Our sister battalions are running places
like Aqaba, Jordan. They are doing the
same thing on a much smaller scale. Our
sister battalion in Bahrain is moving
cargo through Karachi [Pakistan, en
route to Afghanistan], but they’re doing
it all with third-party service providers,
no military, and they’re moving smaller
amounts of cargo.
Part of the training, part of the skill set
that the Army has given us is the ability to
operate in a high-throughput port like
Ash Shuaibah or in an unimproved port
and do logistics over the shore, which is painfully slow but
still a very important skill set if you are going into a Third
World country that doesn’t have good port facilities.
QGiven the breadth of the U.S. Army’s capabilities for managing the movement of cargo in and out of ports,
are there any lessons learned or any insights you can offer to
your commercial counterparts?
AI would almost argue the military is learning more les- sons from the commercial sector than vice versa. For
example, the commercial guys are very good at ship handling, very good at throughput because every hour a ship
sits on berth is costing money. Our carriers are just driven
on time efficiency. Although time is important to us in the
military as well, we have other things that are even more
important to us. Where the commercial guys are saying,
