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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: D. Long who wrote (70176)1/30/2003 2:16:59 PM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
Hi D. Long; Re: "You're operating from the assumption that:
a. we would need a massive sealift operation to station materiel in the region
b. we will preposition all the forces in Kuwait from the start"

If you read the military analyses of the logistics of the Gulf War, you will discover that the Sealift was not required only for prepositioning of materiel. You need constant ongoing logistics in order to keep troops alive in the field. Yes, they can get started with prepositioning, but as soon as they're over there, you have to keep feeding them. For this, the Sealift needs to operate.

You can absorb this fact by looking at the charts that show the number of ships involved in operations. The Sealift continued long after the war had started.

What prepositioning does is reduce the amount of time required to mount the first assaults, (and that only by a few weeks). It does not reduce the peak logistics load. The reason for this is that troops expend materiel during a war.

So one of the things you have to do before a war is get the Sealift operating with all the ships full. That way, you can keep the boys armed with ammo no matter how fast they burn it up.

While it is theoretically possible that you could fight a war that was so short that you didn't need significant resupply, this is risky (if the war turns out not to be so short) and taking unnecessary risks is not how the US military operates.

So if there is a war, there will be an activation of the Sealift to a much higher degree than it currently is at.

-- Carl
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