BY STEVE GEARY, EDITOR AT LARGE
DEFENSE
specialreport
PHOTO COUR TES Y OF U.S. ARMY, HANK HEUSINKVELD (USACE AFGHANIS TAN ENGINEER DISTRIC T-NORTH)
coming into
the country
Escalating threats to Afghan supply routes spurred
U.S. military officials to begin searching for alternatives back in 2008. It took some doing—and some
help—but they found another way.
THE U.S. MILITARY MAY BE WINDING
down its operations in Iraq, but it’s a whole
different story in Afghanistan. Shortly after
taking office in 2009, President Obama
ordered the deployment of an additional
21,000 troops to Afghanistan. That number
swelled to more than 30,000 over the following months, and in December, the president
ordered another 30,000 troop bump by the
summer of 2010. That will push the total to
an estimated 98,000 U.S. troops, almost
triple the number stationed in that country
when President Bush left office.
The troop increase in Afghanistan might
look manageable compared with the peak
deployment in Iraq, which has been estimated at 170,000. But there’s a lot more to the
story than the numbers. In fact, looked at
from a purely logistics perspective,
Afghanistan in many ways represents a
worst-case scenario, military officials say.
To begin with, there’s the sheer volume of
material that has to be brought in to support
Afghan operations. Because Afghanistan
offers little in the way of basic infrastructure,
the military has to build things like housing.
That means that in addition to moving people and their equipment into the country, it
also has to bring in construction materials,
food, medicine, and munitions, along with
support contractors and everything else
needed to survive in one of the most difficult
environments on earth.
Then there’s the challenge of finding a way
to bring all that stuff in. Afghanistan has
only 16 airports with paved runways, and
only four are capable of handling international cargo traffic. There are no seaports—
it is a landlocked nation. And there are no
railroads into the country.
Under the circumstances, it’s little surprise that military logisticians consider providing support to troops in Afghanistan to
be the ultimate test. “If you [were asked]
where’s the last place you’d like to be fighting a war, other than Antarctica, you might
well pick Afghanistan [for its] landlocked,
very austere environment,” said Dr. Ash
