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Widening air bridge to Afghanistan no easy feat

From concrete runways in South Carolina to dirt airstrips in Afghanistan, the 10,000-mile “air bridge” is open.

Now, the work begins to widen it.

In the coming weeks, the Air Force will begin moving 30,000 troops and their gear to Afghanistan, a feat that the head of U.S. Transportation Command said can be accomplished with a mix of Air Force and chartered jets.

The Air Force has done it once already — earlier this year when the U.S. sent 30,000 troops into the war zone.

“You’re talking roughly the same number and the same [amount of] time,” Air Force Gen. Duncan McNabb, a veteran airlift pilot who now leads U.S. Transportation Command, said during a meeting with reporters Dec. 9.

As part of the new buildup, the Air Force needs to move at least three Army brigade combat teams of about 3,500 soldiers each.

Delivering one brigade combat team requires 50 to 60 C-17 flights from the U.S. carrying a total of 1,200 tons of essential cargo that is too valuable to send by sea or land, McNabb said.

Troops will be shuttled by chartered jets to Manas Air Base, Kyrgyzstan, where about 20 more C-17 flights will take the soldiers into Afghanistan. Most of the teams’ gear will arrive by cargo ship in the port city of Karachi in Pakistan, where it will be loaded onto trucks that will take it across the border.

Airlifted gear will be shipped to East Coast U.S. bases, then sent on C-17s that likely will stop at bases in Germany or Spain for refueling. From Europe, the jets zigzag their way across southern Europe and western Asia, avoiding restricted airspace over Iran and Russia before landing in Afghanistan.

McNabb said all this can be done without activating Air Mobility Command’s Air Guard and Reserve units, as long as land routes into Afghanistan remain open.

About 50 percent of supplies flow into Afghanistan from Pakistan and 30 percent cross into Afghanistan from the north. Harsh winter weather, attacks and political upheavals could close routes.

“If I have to bring it all in by air, you’re talking about a Berlin Airlift equation.” McNabb said, referring to the Air Force’s delivery in the late 1940s of 2.3 million tons of supplies to Berlin to break the Soviet blockade. “We don’t want to do that.”

The Air Force hasn’t seen numbers like that since, although the last troop buildup contributed to increases in fiscal 2009, which ended Sept. 30. Air Force and civilian planes moved 352,466 tons of cargo for Operation Enduring Freedom, a 10 percent increase over 2008, Air Mobility Command figures show. The airlift mission flew in 108,651 troops and civilians, about a 58 percent boost from the year before.

The ongoing supply mission includes airlifting armored vehicles on C-17s from Charleston Air Force Base, S.C., to Afghan bases. Since September, more than 235 Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected all-terrain vehicles, or MATVs, have been delivered to the war zone.

Getting the MATVs into the war zone is faster on a chartered 747-700 than on a C-17, McNabb said, because the chartered aircraft can take five MATVs and fly nonstop from Charleston to Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan. A C-17, with a maximum payload of three MATVs, must refuel en route.

But unloading MATVs from the chartered aircraft, which doesn’t have a cargo ramp, takes several hours, compared with the 30 minutes — or less — it takes loadmasters to get the vehicles off a C-17. The commercial aircraft also are more expensive at $130,000 per MATV, compared with $78,000 on a C-17. Sending an MATV by sea and land costs roughly $19,000.

The primary airfields in Afghanistan are Bagram in the north, Kandahar Airfield in the south and Camp Bastion Airfield, also in the south adjacent to the Marines’ Camp Leatherneck, supporting up to 14,000 Marines.

The Air Force also flies into smaller airfields such as Mazar-e Sharif in northeastern Afghanistan and is looking to add more airfields, McNabb said.

From those cargo hubs, C-130s can fly gear to forward bases, using small landing fields or airdropping goods.

McNabb said no decision has been made to determine if more C-130s are needed to fly missions inside Afghanistan. In response to the buildup earlier this year, the Air Force based a second C-130 squadron inside Afghanistan.

One of the issues driving the C-130 decision is the ongoing shortage of helicopters, such as CH-47 Chinooks, to reach remote bases and what the new requirements of ground commanders will be to supply outposts.

“If I can provide a C-130 to free up a CH-47, I’m more than glad to do that,” the general said.

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