Jkirk... As a marine colonel you must be aware of the capabilities of a MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit)..
usmc.mil
I see little reason to doubt that a brigade of shooters and their immediate combat support elements, as well as artillery, could be inserted onto any particular airfield they so desired to occupy in Afghanistan. After all, this was the entire rational of building the Osprey (not that we have sufficient numbers of them as of yet). And a large majority of Marine helicopters are capable of aerial refueling, if necessary.
Capture an airfield, suppress the AAA defenses in the area, and they could immediately commence flying in heavy ordnance and equipment.
And I concur that we would not attempt to sustain such an operation solely from a carrier based logistic base. Couldn't be done. But since all we need to do is capture an airfield, like that nifty one the Russians built at Mazar-e-Sharif, and we can be using heavy lift assets to immediately sustain operations.
And lest you doubt our capabilities, remember back to the Berlin airlift, when we supplied the needs of millions of people for over a year (granted the flight times were rather short but so are the quantity of people being supported).
But I believe the strategy is to maintain this as an Afghan against Afghan struggle to the largest degree possible. The US cannot be seen as imposing an artificial political solution in the country, but needs to maintain its role as a facilitator towards creating a broad-based government for post-Taliban Afghanistan... But we also have our primary mission of capturing/killing OBL and destroying his terrorist network in the region.
I hope the rumours that are being heard about internal fighting amongst the Pashtun tribes is correct. We need to help them dispose of the the more extremist elements who are inclined to support the Taliban.
This is going to be a fairly long war.. I would suspect, without some progress on an internal overthrow of the Taliban, this could last well into next spring.
It all comes down to the Afghani power brokers and how they opt to work things out, and whether US political pressures dictate we impose a political solution (however temporary), and putting the matter in the hands of the UN..
Hawk |
