Truck Topics
Winning through logistics
There is an old proverb in the military, paraphrased many ways and attributed to everyone from Field Marshal Erwin Rommel to Tom Clancy: Good generals study tactics. Great generals study logistics.
"It's not a new thing," said Professor Roger Beaumont, who teaches military history at Texas A&M. "You have a network essentially behind a modern army ... like a spider web."
The effort is part of the modern Army, which uses bar-code tracking and a new system of long-haul trucking schedules to get supplies to forward units moving across a vast desert.
The United States' emphasis on speed and firepower, combined with several goals set out by the Americans, combine to raise new questions that will play out over the course of the war, several historians and analysts said.
"There is no war without logistics," said John A. Lynn, a professor of history at the University of Illinois. "Unless you feed your soldiers, unless you can supply them with the weapons they need, they are ineffective."
Where it begins
The road to Baghdad begins on a pier in Kuwait. There cranes and forklifts manhandled by U.S. soldiers off-load cargo from ships ranging from container-carrying behemoths to drop-ramp landing craft reminiscent of D-Day.
The pre-invasion buildup was massive. The port crews worked 24 hours a day, unloading 184 ships involving thousands of containers. Just before Christmas, 420 fuel trucks were brought in.
At one point, 3.5 million liters of bottled water were on the ground. Some 2.5 million Meals Ready to Eat - the plastic-wrapped field rations - were issued.
From millions of bottles of water to spare tires or even spare tanks, the goods are sorted, mounted on convoys of trucks and driven to the front to keep the American and British forces fighting.
Wearing a helmet and chemical warfare clothing, a captain with the 368th Transportation Company supervises the unloading of a gray, rust-streaked ship, his men driving off pallets of MREs, the army's prepackaged field rations.
"If there are soldiers up there on the front line, there are soldiers back here doing jobs to make it happen," he says. "If you don't have stevedores, they don't fight."
The land-based supply chain starts at Shuaiba, a port south of Kuwait City near a massive oil refinery. There, supplies are processed through a sand-swept marshaling yard the size of a Texas ranch. Some are loaded onto trucks and run up to combat units; some are stored at the sprawling base at Arifjan next door.
Six months ago, it was an expanse of desert with a few tents, no running water and no electrical generator. Now, it is a self-contained industrial zone and nerve center for the 377th Theater Support Command, logistics coordinator for the war.
The base symbolizes the U.S. army doctrine that overwhelming logistics, not just overwhelming firepower, wins wars.
The transport
Already, Operation Iraqi Freedom has involved the third-largest airlift in history -- behind the Berlin Airlift in 1948-1949 and Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990-1991 -- with 163,000 passengers shipped by air and 360,000 tons of cargo shipped by air and sea as of Tuesday, according to Transportation Command.
At the same time, supplies have reached troops in the current conflict much more quickly than in past campaigns, military officials and analysts say, thanks to a combination of improving technology and streamlining.
U.S. Army officials say equipment prepositioned on ships and in bases in Europe, Africa and elsewhere and standardization of parts and equipment have allowed them to do more with less, moving in days a quantity of equipment and support troops that would have taken months during the 1991 Gulf War.
At the same time, an improved fleet of airplanes and ships, according to Transportation Command, is supplying the front lines. Those include the Air Force's C-17 Globemaster, which can carry 179,000 pounds of cargo, and large roll on/roll off ships, each of which can move the equivalent of 300 loaded C-17s.
In Iraq, analysts and military officials say, those supplies are moved overland from the south and west, and by air to captured Iraqi airstrips deep within the country. Sea borne supplies now move through the southern Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, already expected to be a major port for humanitarian aid.
The accounting process
Every crate of ammunition or box of boots is tracked on computer systems modeled on Federal Express. Soldiers face banks of computers in an auditorium-style war room, tracking how each brigade is burning through fuel, ammo and water. Supply runs are planned to replenish them.
A 20,000-soldier division burns through 600,000 to 750,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day. Getting enough fuel pre-positioned in Kuwait for Army and Marine divisions before the war started was one of the chief logistic concerns.
Some 9 million gallons of diesel were placed in underground Kuwaiti "bag farms" containing envelopes of fuel. With the divisions on the move, resupply comes from fleets of 5,000-gallon tanker trucks, moving in a slower stream behind the sand-churning tanks.
Tank divisions need to refuel every four to six hours, mostly because of the thirsty M1 Abrams tank, which requires roughly two gallons of fuel to drive a mile.
"This isn't just a refueling operation, it's a massive re-supply chain," said one Pentagon planner. "We're talking about thousands of tanker trucks, container trucks filled with ammunition and supplies, medical equipment, spare parts, water, food - we're still trying to give them one or two hot meals a day."
For this war, the military is breaking with past practice of layered supply - establishing a main supply dump, advancing a distance and building another one, and so on - to instead feed the front directly from Arifjan.
A chain of drivers cover 180 to 200 miles a day - about 14 hours of driving - and then shift trailers to another rig hauling it a similar distance. The first driver heads back to Arifjan the next day for another load.
"The soldiers and Marines at the highest risk are the logisticians coming up behind the maneuver forces," a commander said. "They don't have tanks, they don't have big guns. And it's hard to miss a 5,000-gallon tanker coming down the road."
Water becomes increasingly more important as the heat rises in the coming weeks. To augment bottled water, the units have purification units that can make 5,000 gallons of drinkable water daily from sources like the Euphrates River.
Convoys lumbering up-country vary from 10 vehicles to 80 and range from amphibious light armored vehicles to heavy transports similar to extra-rugged semis. One recent convoy numbered 72 trucks, all spaced 10 yards apart, lumbering forward at 5 mph.
Some of the other codenames the military is using as the supply lines are created in southern Iraq are just as random. For instance, rest areas for convoys have been named after heavy-truck manufacturers. There's Kenworth, Mack and Peterbilt.
As U.S. ground forces press rapidly and farther into Iraq, trailing behind are mechanics, cooks, doctors and drivers -- many of them vulnerable to attack or capture.
In Iraq, troops have moved rapidly into hostile territory. At the same time, the supplies needed to fuel them are potentially open to attack by those loyal to Saddam Hussein, who are part of or hidden among -- the general population.
Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies and a former British infantry officer, called the vulnerability of a supply chain that in some areas stretches hundreds of miles with little protection unacceptable.
"I couldn't find a supply chain that long in history that's unprotected," he said. With a coordinated attack in the right location, he added, "(Iraqi forces) could halt the flow of supplies for 24 hours or so. When it comes to fuel and ammunition, that's critical."
Long supply lines
With a supply line that stretches about 300 miles, armored cavalry regiments - with their helicopters, tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles - along with military police battalions, should be providing security for the convoys servicing the frontline troops.
The re-supply operation taking place behind the troops advancing toward Baghdad is one of the most complicated and critical components of the invasion, Pentagon officials say.
As soon as the first tanks breached the Iraqi border, a steady flow of fuel tankers, water trucks and other support vehicles followed them, racing back and forth to the front lines.
Sticking to the major highways, those support troops have established "forward logistics bases" roughly every 50 miles, stocked them with supplies, and even opened small maintenance facilities.
Each base is roughly 10 acres in size, ringed with concertina wire and staffed by 200 or more troops, Pentagon planners say.
The strategy for re-supplying troops headed for Baghdad calls for "leap-frogging" materials from base to base, following as closely behind the front lines as practicable.
American engineers have also been laying a fuel pipeline from Kuwait, to shorten the distance that tanker trucks must travel to refill.
Tank divisions need to refuel every four to six hours, mostly because of the thirsty M1 Abrams tank, which requires roughly two gallons of fuel to drive a mile.
"This isn't just a refueling operation, it's a massive re-supply chain," said one Pentagon planner. "We're talking about thousands of tanker trucks, container trucks filled with ammunition and supplies, medical equipment, spare parts, water, food - we're still trying to give them one or two hot meals a day."
Travel in no-man's land
The re-supply operation is also vulnerable, as the first few days of the war have shown. Vehicles traveling between bases - be they water trucks, food haulers or 5,000-gallon tankers loaded with fuel - must traverse a vast no-man's land that might require them to travel in small convoys that momentarily leave communications range.
The re-supply effort is so mammoth that the open highways are busy with coalition vehicles, including tanks and other armored vehicles. And soldiers within the supply units are outfitted with 50-caliber machine guns, grenade launchers, shoulder-fired weapons and other protection.
Even more potentially vulnerable are the forward area refueling points - FARPs - that the Army has established in Iraq as temporary refueling posts for helicopters. Because the helicopters must work so close to the front, the FARPs are sometimes stand-alone operations without nearby tank units to protect them.
But the supply chain is so long that empty stretches of road are common. The maintenance unit captured by Iraqi troops in the very early days of the conflict was believed to have been on a mission to collect and repair broken-down equipment between forward logistics bases.
Two dozen American soldiers were attacked by Iraqi irregular forces after their convoy of six vehicles made a wrong turn near An Nasiriya, about 230 miles south of Baghdad. Ten soldiers were rescued by U.S. Marines, seven others were reported killed and five - including a woman - were taken prisoner.
This attack however, was not the first support unit to suffer casualties. Sniper attacks on supply trains were common in World War II.
During the first Gulf War, the most casualties suffered by any allied unit came from the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, a water purification unit based in Greensburg, Pa., which lost 13 soldiers when a barracks was hit by pieces of an Iraqi missile in February 1991.
Support personnel understand they can come under fire and accept it as part of their mission.
"That's what they're facing, the distance between where they're picking their supplies up and where they're delivering to their customers," one logistician says. "But that's the nature of the beast. The front line's got to move, and if the supply depot isn't moving fast enough, that's what you've got to do."
"The key objective in this war is not capturing little towns on the way to Baghdad, its capturing Baghdad. You win Baghdad, you win the war," says Patrick Garrett, an analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.