Iraq Withdrawal, Logistical Nightmare?

A few minutes ago, President Obama just announced officially his plan to withdraw the bulk of U.S. forces from Iraq by August, 2010. Which raises the question: How do you remove from the country in a year and a half 90,000 or so troops, 40,000 aircraft and vehicles, and 80,000 containers (not to mention 100,000 contractors) spread across more than 280 installations in anything approaching an orderly way?

For nearly two years, the American military has been "shipping battlefield equipment through
Jordan and Kuwait, testing possible exit routes," according to the Associated Press.

The problem "is the sheer volume of stuff," one general tells the *Baltimore Sun's *David Wood.

One Army office at [one base,] Anaconda[,] is tracking 1.2 million items of property worth $14 billion, a partial list of materiel that includes objects such as dentist's chairs, chapel pews, swimming pool filtration systems and surveillance blimps. Separately, the Army and Air Force Exchange
Service, which operates military supermarkets and shops across Iraq, holds an inventory that includes 2.7 million candy bars, 15,000 strips of beef jerky, 1.6 million cans of soda and 330,696 CDs and DVDs.

Closing U.S. bases is going to be particularly tough, the Government Accountability Office recently told Congress. "As of
November 2008, there were 286 U.S.
installations in Iraq that will need to be closed or turned over to the
Iraqi forces during a U.S. redeployment, depending on its scope."

According to U.S. Army officials, experience has shown it takes 1 to 2
months to close the smallest platoon- or company-size installations, which contain from 16 to 200 combat soldiers or marines. However,
MNF-I [Multi National Forces-Iraq] has never closed large, complex installations—such as Balad Air
Force Base, which contains about 24,000 inhabitants and has matured over 5 years—making it difficult to accurately predict the time it will take to close them. U.S. Army officials estimate it could take longer than 18 months to close a base of that size.

In 2006, when "two British bases in southern Iraq left behind when forces pulled out last year: Both were looted. Whatever remained was destroyed," Wood writes in the best report I've found so far on the logistics of withdrawal.

Another issue is how much gear can be run through Kuwait, really. Kuwait may be the central entrance and exit point for Iraq's men and materiel. But the government there likes to keep the American presence relatively quiet. And the U.S. Army staff based there has had more than its share of problems, Wood notes.

GAO investigators found that Army logistics staff at Camp Arifjan,
Kuwait, spent half their time scribbling notes on paper from one computer database and manually entering the data into another system.
One result, the GAO found this spring, is that one third of all the steel shipping containers in Iraq and Afghanistan - 54,390 containers -
are simply lost.

Then there are the four bases, loaded with "toxic stockpiles of hazardous material, including battery acid, contaminated oils, lead and industrial solvents, in stacks of 50-gallon drums." A military spokesman said he didn't know what would happen to all the gunk.

"Some of this stuff we can sell for scrap, some equipment we'd give to the Iraqis, but at the end of the day we will move a lot of this stuff back," said Air Force Maj. Gen.
Ron Ladnier, director of the Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air
Force Base, Ill. Most of it will move by truck, south to Kuwait or north into Turkey for eventual shipment home. Convoys will move along
Route Tampa, already jammed with 2,000 trucks a day needed for normal resupply of U.S. forces...

Insurgent attacks, truck breakdowns, blinding sandstorms - all can combine to turn a methodical withdrawal into a snarling snafu, said
Army Lt. Col. James Sears, a logistics battalion commander. He described the elegant choreography needed: tight deadlines for packing and loading trucks, inserting truck convoys into a stream of southbound traffic, coordinating the convoys with security patrol and overhead air cover, and feeding the convoys into ports and airfields in Kuwait at the precise moment when ships and aircraft are ready. "Anybody who takes six extra hours with a truck just crashes everybody else's schedule," he said. "The ripple effect can kill you." *

And while the U.S. works the logistics of withdrawal, the Iraqi Army is only at the earliest stages of being able to equip, fuel, feed and arm itself. "You may have heard some people say Iraqi logistics is broken. I don't think that's accurate," Army Brig. Gen. Steven Salazar tells the AP. "It remains under construction."

[Photo: U.S. Army]