INDICATIONS & WARNINGS

The U.S. Doesn't Travel Light in Going to War

Bound for the Persian Gulf and a probable war with Iraq, the
piles and bags and crates of stuff cover 17 acres, all waiting to
be loaded on ship, all to help sustain U.S. troops in combat:

Tanks, rockets, machine gun ammo, extra boots, spare radios, bomb
cradles, trucks, field rations, surgical dressings and body bags.

Jackhammers, tongue depressors, communion wine and wafers, tire
chains for trucks driving in snow. Portapotties, of course.

A radio repair shop built into a large steel container, with
drawers full of tools and with plug-in electric lights, air
conditioning and telephones.

And a 3,800-foot portable airfield for jet fighters and cargo
planes that can be set up anywhere, complete with landing lights,
arresting gear, a control tower, firetrucks and tow tractors.

Does anyone go to war like the U.S. military?

Not even remotely. Being the world's unmatched military
superpower not only means the United States can boast about its
combat punch. It means it can take along pretty much whatever it
wants.

Like the sumo wrestling suit ($3,395), cappuccino machines
($51,200) and white beach sand ($4,638) the Air Force recently
purchased to support its combat operations against Iraq from air
bases in the Persian Gulf region.

"Why do we take all this stuff? Because we can," said James Jay
Carafano, a retired Army artillery officer and historian who
teaches at the Naval War College.

The furious activity here -- where the Marine Corps is preparing
to load one of 13 giant cargo ships crammed with war materiel
that float near the world's bad neighborhoods -- is only part of
the picture.

At the end of this month the MV Anderson, a 750-foot-long vessel,
will sail for the Persian Gulf to join four sister ships that
carry enough stuff to keep a 17,000-man Marine Air Ground Task
Force in combat for 30 days.

The ships are designed to offload their cargo near the
battlefield as Marines fly in to man the equipment.

The Army has seven such ships pre-positioned near the Persian
Gulf.

But in wartime the Pentagon can launch an additional 1,400 ships
and 360 heavy-lift cargo planes. If that's not enough, it can
draft around 650 planes out of the commercial air fleet to load
with soldiers and gear. A standard phrase in military travel
orders: "Excess baggage is authorized."

Then there are trucks. Nobody knows how many the military has. In
1990 the Army moved 114,000 of them to the Persian Gulf for
Desert Storm, but the Air Force and Marines had their own, and
there were all those rentals procured in Saudi Arabia to boot.

Military planners figure it takes 2,000 tons of materiel a day to
keep a division -- roughly 20,000 people -- supplied in combat.
The math looks like this: Four divisions in Iraq equals 16
million pounds a day, carried in five-ton (10,000-pound) trucks,
equals a traffic jam of overloaded vehicles growling over the 400
miles of sand between Kuwait and Baghdad.

Military operations chew up an astounding amount of "consumables"
like fuel, water, ammunition, grease, filters, gaskets and spare
parts.

An M-1A1 Abrams tank eats $150 worth of consumables an hour --
not including fuel. A CH-47 Chinook helicopter burns up $2,000
worth of non-fuel consumables an hour, Air Force planes around
$7,000 per flying hour, according to a Congressional Budget
Office analysis.

Other consumables being packed at this port run from massive gas
turbine engines that propel Abrams tanks to 746 cases of the
infamous field rations, "Meals, Ready to Eat." These are stowed
in 20-foot refrigerated steel containers -- not because they need
to be refrigerated, but because the huge containers double as
morgues to preserve bodies of battlefield casualties, said Marty
Lussier, Blount Island's container manager.

Lying around somewhere is 776,146 pounds of ammunition ranging
from flares, hand grenades and linked machine gun rounds to 105
mm howitzer shells, stinger missiles and 500-pound bombs.

Explosives get packed in the bottom of the ship. Abrams tanks,
Humvees and other wheeled and tracked combat vehicles go in
above, along with a 116-bed hospital, spare truck transmissions,
cartons of boot laces, firefighting suits with suspenders,
concertina razor wire, barbells, finger splints and a motorcycle
or two.

On this one ship will be 40,000 separate types of stuff. Vehicles
are stowed "three fingers tight" to make room, said Marine Corps
Maj. Lyle Layher, operations officer at Blount Island.

"It sounds excessive, but the rationale is that you can put
people into combat and sustain them and recuperate people and put
them back in," said Carafano, a historian and author of several
books on World War II.

Still, it's not surprising that some stuff gets lost or is
"borrowed" by a shifty-eyed sergeant who needs that widget nobody
seems to be using.

Investigators for the General Accounting Office found "billions
of dollars at risk of fraud, waste and abuse" from shipments the
Air Force made to bases in southwest Asia in fiscal year 2000.

And the stuff the GAO did account for opens an interesting window
on the American way of war.

According to a GAO report to Congress in May, the Air Force's
needs for its combat forces in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia included
such items as a $2,205 designer coffee table, a $35,000 golf
cart, a $49,500 bingo console, $4,896 worth of cowboy hats,
$18,980 worth of decorative rock, a $1,775 "executive pillow" and
a $14,835 "nostalgic juke box" -- as well as the white beach
sand, cappuccino machines and sumo wrestling suit mentioned
earlier. In a statement, the Air Force said the white beach sand
was needed to build barriers around ammunition bunkers. The other
items, it said, were authorized "in support of troop morale,
welfare and recreation activities." (David Wood can be contacted
at david.wood@newhouse.com)

Via Hillint: http://www.egroups.com/group/hillint