parts do—it hires a common carrier. “We
have a worldwide presence without own-
ing a truck, or a train, or a ship,” says Maj.
Gen. Jim Hodge, the commander of
SDDC. “We do it all through our com-
mercial partners.”
So when it came time to get the project
rolling, the military’s first move was to get
in touch with some of those commercial
partners. “We decided to call in the guys
who do this for a living and leverage them
the best we could,” says Col. Stan Wolosz,
the SDDC’s chief of staff. Military person-
nel quickly began contacting some of
their primary carrier partners—including
Maersk Line Ltd., APL, and Hapag-
Lloyd—to solicit their help. As Kevin
Speers, Maersk’s senior director of mar-
keting and administration, recalls, the
central question the military posed to
them was: “How can we bring in cargo
overland to Afghanistan without touching
Pakistan or Iran?”
The New Silk Road
What the military and its partners came
up with is what’s now known as the
Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a
set of multimodal routings that enter
Afghanistan from the North, bypassing
Pakistan completely. In some cases, these
journeys incorporate parts of the old
trade routes used for centuries by merchants, explorers, and warriors—routes
collectively known as the Silk Road.
Although the partners identified nine
options in total, most are variations on
two basic approaches. One route crosses
the Baltic Sea to Riga in Latvia, where the
freight is loaded onto rail for the journey
through Russia, Kazakhstan, and
Uzbekistan, where it’s offloaded onto
trucks and hauled into Afghanistan.
The other route goes east through the
Mediterranean and up the Dardanelles
into the Black Sea, with the freight
offloaded to rail at Tbilisi in Georgia. The
cargo then moves overland through
Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, before
being loaded onto ships again at Baku for
passage across the Caspian Sea to
Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, it’s loaded
back onto rail for movement to
Uzbekistan, where it’s ultimately
offloaded to trucks and hauled into
Afghanistan.
The main destination hubs for
cargo rolling into Afghanistan from
the north are Bagram Air Force Base,
Kabul, and Kandahar. In total, there
are 32 direct delivery locations in
Afghanistan.
As daunting as it might sound,
coordinating the various legs of
these complex multimodal moves is
only part of the challenge. The other
part is working with the various
jurisdictions involved to make sure
the shipments comply with each
country’s rules and requirements.
“You have to tie together the govern-
