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 was 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."
From Oct. 7 to March 26, Air Force carriers hauled 142,888 tons of cargo to the
theater of the Afghan war. On some days, more than a dozen flights arrived from
Frankfurt, Germany, and elsewhere into Kandahar, which is to become a
humanitarian aid hub as well as a military airstrip.
The Afghan airlift is the third-largest in history after the fabled Berlin
airlift of 1948-49 and Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1990-91.
The crunch will come when, as expected, the United States expands the
anti-terrorism campaign to another front. Nearly everyone agrees that there
aren't enough cargo planes to support two fronts at the level of the Afghan
airlift.
The United States has 126 massive C-5 cargo carriers. Because of its size and
weight, however, the C-5 has never landed on the short and heavily patched
runways in Afghanistan. It will face similar constraints in other prospective
theaters of the war on terrorism.
The Pentagon also has the 84 new C-17s, modern aircraft built at Boeing's Long
Beach plant that can carry perhaps four jeeps, or a helicopter and a
water-purification system--about half the load of a C-5.
In addition to its 1990 order of 120 C-17s at about $237 million apiece, the Air
Force is negotiating with Boeing to buy an additional 60. That's still short of
the 220 new C-17s that Transportation Command chief Handy says he needs.
"If Al Qaeda's the worst we're going to face, maybe 180 [C-17s] is enough,"
analyst Thompson said. But if the United States invades Iraq, he added, "maybe
220 aircraft will not be enough."
One option is to use standby contracts with commercial carriers--from FedEx
Corp. to passenger airlines--to fill the gap.
"If I can't fly you on [a] military airplane, I will then try to find a
commercial contract that will meet your requirement," Maj. Gen. William Welser
III, the No. 2 official at the U.S. Transportation Command, said in a recent
interview.
Meanwhile, planes are now sent to Afghanistan as fast as Boeing can supply them.
Another major limitation for the airlift effort is the availability of refueling
tankers. The lack of a land bridge and the difficulty in getting approval to use
local airspace--planes returning from Kyrgyzstan to Germany deliberately skirt
Iranian and Russian territory--have made the hazardous practice of midair
refueling increasingly necessary.
-- continued --