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Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Amateurs Worry About Tactics,
Professionals Worry About Logistics
President Obama has ordered roughly two more divisions into Afghanistan. I'm having a rough time trying to figure out what the rate of supply is for an Army division in combat.
A US Army division in Europe during WW2 consumed about 600+ tons of goods a day, which was ten times or so of the rate of consumption from WW1. I've seen reports that 1,000 tons a day is a rough working figure.
A standard 40' shipping container can hold 30 tons (short tons, about 26.7 metric tons) of cargo. A thousand tons of stuff would take 34 containers a day. That may include fuel, so we can cut the number of containers and add in tanker trucks, probably a lot more tanker trucks to support the mechanized vehicles and helicopters. Two divisions, at least 70 more trucks of stuff have to arrive in Afghanistan each day and my wholly unsupported guess would be maybe 100 truckloads. That's just to support the additional guys, you can quadruple that for the amount of cargo needed to support all of the foreign forces and we are also supplying the Afghan Army, so maybe quintuple that.
That is a shitload of stuff.
Go look at a map of South and Central Asia. See if you can find how the stuff gets to Afghanistan. There are few options to move that amount of stuff other than by ship to Karachi and then by truck into Afghanistan, a supply line that runs more or less right through territory disputed by Islamic militants. Afghanistan has no railroad network of note, but, as experience from back in the days of T.E. Lawrence has shown, railroads are very vulnerable to demolition devices. The trucking supply line has been attacked by militants before and most assuredly will be again.
Stuff cannot be shipped in through Iran. It may be possible to send supplies through Russia and the neighboring `stans, but the price extracted by those nations may be too high and the transshipment of war supplies through Russia may be politically untouchable, even for the Russian government.
Even if all that stuff can be sent without sporadic interdiction by the militants, there is still the issue that we are propping up arguably the most corrupt national government in the world, a government that will assuredly fall as quickly as did the government of President Najibullah after the Red Army left.
Pakistan, regardless of how much our government prods them, is still playing a lesser version of the Great Game with India. The object of their version of the Great Game, as it was between the British and Russian Empires, is control of Afghanistan. Pakistan fought three formal wars with India (all of which they lost) and has been sponsoring a sputtering guerrilla war over Kashmir for decades.
Elements of Pakistan's intelligence service have always seen the Taliban as a counterweight to India. They may be closer to recognizing that the militants recognize no borders whatsoever and that the militants now see Pakistan itself as a prize to be won. Pakistan's offensive in South Waziristan has apparently done little other than force the militants to relocate. As any study of any insurgency-type war will show, measuring how much territory a uniformed army claims to control is a false metric. In any event, the Pakistanis are concerned about their own militants, not the Afghan Taliban.
You have little chance of winning a counter-insurgency war if your enemy has a place where they can regroup, rearm, retrain and where you cannot go. That is the situation now. If Pakistan will not commit to helping to defeat the Afghan Taliban, then it matters little if the President sends in 30,000 more troops or 100,000.
8 comments:
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Dear Miss Fit:
ReplyDeleteIt says HERE that a C-17 loaded with 130,000 pounds of cargo has an unrefueled range of 5,200nm. That's just about the distance from Frankfurt to Kabul.
1,000 tons/day is, if I have my sums right, just about 15 additional C-17 loads from Europe. May want to get some CRAF 747's into the act.
Not easy, but doable.
Regards,
Frank
Not cheap, either, if you plan to supply entirely by air. And then you need to discuss air transit rights, as the most direct route would appear to cross Russian airspace.
ReplyDelete1KT/day is per division and it may be an underestimate.
If the Nation is to be believed, the transport companies have worked out a modus vivendi with the Taliban. In return for sufficient bribes to allow passage, the Talibs can support both their military efforts and administrative efforts in the parts of the country that the Kabul Cabal can't reach. This should allow the war to continue until the money runs out or we succeed in eliminating the "necessary" corruption.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston
Uhm, Najibullah lasted for five years after the Red Army left. He was overthrown because of the collapse of the Soviet Union cutting off the money he needed to make payroll for the Afghan "army" (actually, tribal militias that he was paying off to serve him), not because of being defeated by the mujahdeen. Without the Soviet money flowing through Najibullah's fingers, the tribal militias had no use for him and instead fell to fighting amongst themselves for control of Afghanistan.
ReplyDeleteAt this point I'm wondering WTF we can't do the same thing the Soviets did -- set up an appropriate puppet (Karzai would do in a pinch though honestly I think he's overstayed his welcome even amongst the tribal militias getting paid off through him), and go home. It's not as if most Afghans give a shit who is mayor of Kabul anyhow, as long as he keeps the money spigot going...
-- Badtux the Practical Penguin
Frank, Also, they will have to have a buttload of tankers in the air to refuel the C-17s, no?
ReplyDeleteBadTux, still, the time will come when the Congress gets tired of shoveling tens of billions a year to prop up the Afghan government. Then it will fall, just like Najibullah's and Thieu's governments did.
Montag, I've seen similar reports. It's sort of as if we paid the Kriegsmarine not to torpedo the ships bringing supplies to Europe.
Actually, the 30,000 includes a lot of support troops. I think it's more like one division-equivalent than two. On the other hand, there is a "civilian" contractor associated with every uniformed soldier. These guys didn't really exist in WW2 yet they consume as supply.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, there is a massive demand for supplies to support the nation-building going on. I haven't seen any firm figures on this, either, but everything from concrete to school books has to be laboriously brought in along the same routes.
Russia will not allow uniformed military personnel or military vehicles to transit their territory but they have been allowing "supplies," meaning fuel and building materials, etc, to travel on their railways south to the 'Stans. The problem is that the railways end short of the Afghan border and that, for reasons going back to the Soviet reconstruction programs after WW2, all railways go through Moscow. To really make use of US-friendly dictators in Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, you must keep the Russians sweet. It takes a lot of sugar to make Russians sweet.
Miss Fit:
ReplyDeleteRe: "Frank, Also, they will have to have a buttload of tankers in the air to refuel the C-17s, no?"
I think a C-17 can do Frankfurt to Bagram un-refueled with a reasonable load. And they'll be coming back light. Of course, maybe we want to use one of those nice ex-Soviet AF bases in Poland. The Poles like us, don't they?
I'm sure that CRAF 747's can do it un-refuelled. Don't really need to get all tactical here. Doable.
For a good look at how it was done for Desert Shield/Desert Storm, written from a pilot's perspective, find a copy of THIS.
Frank
PS: Friend of mine is in the Pentagon procurement zoo, DoD office, and has the job of making sure the Zoomies don't f/u the tanker procurement again this time. He swears they've learnt their lesson and it's Really Gonna Work.
Frank,
ReplyDeleteHe swears they've learnt their lesson and it's Really Gonna Work.
Uh, huh. Ayup. Suure it will. KC-135s and KC-10s will be at work when almost everyone who reads this blog is taking a dirt nap.
James, there are over 100,000 contractors at work *now*. True, 70% or so are locals, but they are working for us.
NATO is going to add in 5,000 or so troops to Obama's 30,000. Color me less than impressed.