DC Velocity - August 2010

had 550,000 troops on the ground in March 1991, when Desert Storm ended. We do not have that size of force on the ground in Iraq today—our maximum during the surge was 160,000.

QBut we’ve heard that the drawdown in Iraq, combined with the surge in Afghanistan, makes for the largest military movement since World War II? ADr. Ash Carter, the undersecretary for acquisitions, logistics, and technology, remarked in a recent speech that Desert Storm was like checking into a hotel room and checking out. Iraq is like living in a house for seven or eight years and then leaving. We have built up a great deal of infrastructure there, including 350 forward operating bases of varying sizes that we were running [at the peak of the surge]—the largest of which are the size of cities.

QHow is the drawdown in Iraq going? AObviously, Iraq is still constituting its government following the recent elections, so we have what we call a waterfall, a gradual drawdown and then a steeper drawdown until the August time frame. By our metrics, we are ahead of our schedule. We have gotten more equipment, more people, and more containers out of the country than our metrics said we had to get out in order to meet the August time frame. So overall, given all the complexities, we are doing extremely well in pulling out of Iraq.

QAt the same time that you’re over- seeing the drawdown in Iraq, you’re building up in Afghanistan. How does Afghanistan compare with Iraq? AIt is an incredible challenge. Iraq has roads, paved roads. It has electricity. Afghanistan has been completely war torn for 40 years, and it shows. When the wars in Afghanistan started in 1973, Afghanistan was a Third World nation at the lowest end of the Third World nations. Infrastructure in Afghanistan is almost non-existent.

QWhat do you mean by non-existent?

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AWell, let’s talk about roads. There are just a few major arteries around the country. The rest are dirt roads, if you want to call them roads. They are more like yak paths.

QSo how does that compare with what you’veseen in Iraq? AI flew in a helicopter for about an hour and a half from one base in Afghanistan to another. During that time, I probably saw five cars moving down one of the main roads, and I saw no cars out in front of farmhouses and houses along that route. Now if you go to the Al Anbar province in Iraq, you’re going to see plenty of vehicles.

QOK, we understand that logistics are challenging in Afghanistan, but we understand that getting there is a significant challenge as well. AWhen moving to Afghanistan, you are either moving through what used to be the Soviet Union to the north, or the routes through Pakistan. Of course, Pakistan has its own troubles, so those routes are at risk even before you cross into Afghanistan. To the west is Iran, and that isn’t an option, for obvious reasons.

QIs there anything that didn’t come up in the conversation that you’d like to share with our readers?

AWe need to talk about contractors on the battlefield. We talked about the supply, the industrial base that sustains our forces, but to support those large bases in the field, we do have a large contractor workforce deployed. A good portion of those people engage in what we would call logistics support in sustaining the base or in repairing equipment that’s on the battlefield, or they might be managing some of our supplies for us out there on the battlefield.

That is one of the new realities—we used contractors back in the Revolutionary War, but it is more prevalent today. We could not do this without the great support we have from the contractor community, our partners, and transportation providers through some third-party logistics service providers.

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