perfidy

Right now, we have two armored divisions, several heavy mechanized infantry divisions, the 101st and 82nd Airborne divisions, and the 10th Mountain division. If we added a couple more armored and heavy infantry divisions, would we be little better off than now. Certainly, we would have more troops, which would ease the pressure on the existing units. Prepositioned stocks of equipment ease somewhat the cost and delay of shipping heavy equipment to the battle zone.

But the primary problem we have faced since 9/11 is getting troops, and more importantly their equipment, close to the enemy. Adding more heavy divisions will not ease this problem, it will exacerbate it. There are two aspects to the logistical bottleneck. First, lack of transport. The Air Force has a finite capacity for airlift. The Navy has a functionally infinite capacity, but it can take months to get gear in place by sealift. Second, the size and weight of the Army and Marine gear that must be moved.

The M1 Abrams tank is far and away the most lethal main battle tank ever built. It is virtually invulnerable to most enemy tank guns, while its main gun can shoot through a Soviet tank lengthwise. It is fast, accurate and on the whole reliable. It also weighs 70 tons. Only the two largest Air Force transports can carry the M1. The C17 can carry one, and the C5 can carry two. There are 100 C5s in the Air Force, so they could transport all the tanks in an armored division anywhere in the world in ten days. Of course, they would not be able to carry anything else, like fuel, food, ammunition, humvees, guns, troops, or whatever for the army. And of course they would not be moving missiles or armaments for any of the other services either.

It has been said many times that amateur strategists study tactics, professional strategists study logistics. So, let’s pretend to be professional. A division is more than 16,000 soldiers and all the equipment, ammunition, fuel, food and water they need to fight. We have several types of divisions. The airborne and mountain divisions are the easiest to transport, because they have the least amount of vehicles. The 82nd has its own Air Force transport wing, and they train to make deployments quickly and efficiently. In theory, the entire division can deploy in under a week to anywhere in the world.

The heavy divisions are in exactly the opposite situation. During the cold war, they had complete equipment sets positioned in Germany, and all the divisions had to do was fly to Europe and match up with their gear. They would hold off the Soviets while the Navy and Merchant Marine began shipping over equipment in quantity. When these divisions are needed elsewhere, we face the monumental problem of getting all their stuff to where its needed. As mentioned above, airlift is a narrow but fast pipe, while sealift is a fat but slow one.

The military gets around this to some extent by setting up equipment depots around the world, to cut the time needed to ship stuff where we need it. Roll-on, Roll-off cargo ships have all the tanks, trucks, humvees, Bradleys, fuel and so on for an entire division. The Air Force has detailed plans to use its airlift capacity at maximum efficiency. If we are to not only increase the size, but increase the deployability of our forces, we need to increase the logistical throughput of our military.

The simplest method would be to first of all more Air Force transports. No new technology is required, the planes have already been designed and tested. We just buy more of them - small intra-theater transports like the C-130 Hercules, up to the large airlift planes like the C-17 Globemaster and the C-5 Galaxy. The Air Force has a institutional prejudice against “trash-hauling”, preferring high tech wonders like the B-2 Spirit bomber and the F-22 Raptor fighter. However, the Air Force already has the ability to crush, decisively, every other air force in the world, and to penetrate the tightest air defenses and deliver precision munitions. Transport is the biggest priority.

The Navy is responsible, strangely enough, for sealift. The biggest limitation with sealift is the requirement for basing rights for storage, and safe harbors with docking facilities to unload all the gear. The latter means either convincing a conveniently located nation with port facilities to help us, or using one of the Airborne divisions or the Marines to take one from the enemy and convert it to our use. Even long-term allies like Turkey have denied us the right to use their ports to unload our gear.

However, the Navy came up with a solution: the JMOB, or Joint Mobile Offshore Base. The concept is simple – using technology developed for mobile drilling platforms, create several thousand foot long cargo ship modules designed to connect to each other. Each module can sail independently to a hot spot, where it would link up with four other modules to create the JMOB. On the top of each module would be a runway, and when all five modules are connected, the JMOB becomes an airport capable of handling C-17 and C-5 transports, and all but the largest civilian cargo jets. Inside each module is storage, and lots of it. Space for fuel, food, vehicles and everything else the well equipped soldier needs. And each module has port facilities, so that material stored on the JMOB, or arriving by plane or cargo ship can be rapidly and efficiently loaded onto landing craft to be dispatched to the beach.

The beauty of this concept is that it totally eliminates the need to get basing rights from other nations. Carriers allow us to project air power almost anywhere in the world. Mid-flight refueling gives our Air Force the ability to strike anywhere in the world. JMOB would give this same power projection to even heavy armor divisions. It would give us entirely new capabilities, while vastly increasing the usefulness of things we already have, like roll-on, roll-off cargo ships, landing craft and armored divisions. No JMOB has yet been authorized for construction, and at a billion dollars a pop, the JMOB is not cheap; and we’d need several of them, at least. However, the freedom of operation that they would give us would be well worth the price.

Other smaller, but still needed improvements could also be made that would improve our ability to transport soldiers to the battlefield, but if these two steps were taken, half the logistics battle would be won.