Air Force suffers from cargo limits

LOS ANGELES TIMES

Originally published Monday, May 6, 2002

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- Although hamstrung by its lowest cargo capacity in decades, the Air Force has managed to operate a supply bridge to Afghanistan that has proved invaluable.

But as the Bush administration lays the groundwork for expanding the war on terrorism to Iraq, military strategists say the Pentagon's diminished, aging and stressed cargo fleet will be hard-pressed to support such an invasion.

"If we had two contingencies that were similarly remote as the war in Afghanistan, we would be stretched to the breaking point," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute think tank.

The Pentagon promises that it would get the job done somehow, but any new mission would leave an already strapped cargo fleet cutting back on missions in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

During two weeks in November, all of the nation's C-17s, the new backbone of the Pentagon's cargo fleet, were flying war-related missions. Air Force officials say future demands could force them to activate emergency agreements allowing them to seize planes from commercial carriers.

"This entire process, from 9-11 to where we sit today, has been a dramatic stress" on cargo capacity, said Gen. John W. Handy, the commander in chief of the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.

The shortage of aircraft has its ironies. In 1990, the Pentagon -- headed by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney -- cut the number of C-17s the Air Force had planned to buy from 210 to 120 after the Soviet Union collapsed. Because of the enormous time lag in producing such planes, only 84 have been delivered to the Air Force.

McChord Air Force Base south of Tacoma and Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina are the nation's two Air Force bases with C-17 aircraft. The C-17 is now McChord's sole permanent aircraft.

Some analysts say the cuts were understandable at the time, but that the decision still haunts the Pentagon.

As now-Vice President Cheney helps run the war on terrorism, with its far-flung logistical demands, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has an acronym for items such as the C-17: LDHD -- low density, high demand.

"It's kind of a euphemism meaning we didn't buy the right things," Rumsfeld said recently in a general assessment of Pentagon budgeting.

In most wars, U.S. troops and their armored vehicles, helicopters and base-building equipment get to where they're going by sea, then rail or road.

That wasn't possible in landlocked Afghanistan, governed by a hostile militia, its roads controlled by bandits and rival warlords, and its rail lines not only damaged by bombing but constructed in a different gauge than those of neighboring countries.

For most of the war, the only option were the air lanes.

"We came in by pure air," Col. Frank Wiercinski, the 101st Airborne Division commander in charge of the military base here in Kandahar, said in a recent interview. "Everything that we eat, everything that we drank ... and all our equipment came in by air."

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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