SOUTHWEST ASIA (unspecified location) -- If the war was up to the Air Force generals, the skies would be filled with stealth jets, shooting down enemy fighters. Bombers would be unloading on rows of tanks, and spy planes would be pinpointing enemy radars. But Afghanistan's not that kind of fight.
Instead, this has become a campaign of hauling cargo, transporting troops and dropping rations and water to lonely outposts. Sixty percent of the sorties that the Air Force flies over Afghanistan and Iraq come from the "mobility" units – the planes that lug people and gear from base to base. The bombers, the drones, the fighters, the tankers and the ears in the sky split the rest. It's a job that's about as glamorous as an assembly line, and as cushy as sewer repair. But without it, the American military effort in Central Asia and the Middle East would collapse.
"This was the air war that no one wanted to be in. But you don't get to fight the war you want," says Lt. Colonel Jon Olekszyk, who leads U.S. Air Forces Central's mobility division.
Every quarter, the mobility team based here flies more than 13,000 sorties, moving 50,000 cargo pallets and 340,000 people – the equivalent of the population of Tampa, Florida.
To the person on the ground, waiting to catch a flight from one outpost to the next, the system can be infuriating. It's not uncommon in Afghanistan to wait days for a lift. Flights get scratched as you wait on the tarmac. Expected cargo doesn't show up.
But watching it all come together is a thing of manic beauty. Olekszyk and I are standing on a wooden dais, in the back of a converted warehouse. Young airmen, sitting elbow to elbow at crammed workstations, shout out the latest changes in schedules for the C-130 turboprop cargo planes and hulking C-17 airhaulers. White boards are constantly being re-written, spreadsheets updated every second. There may be a few preplanned routes and steady schedules. But mostly, this is improv – a constantly-shifting effort to fill orders and last-minute requests.
And, of course, everyone's request is the most important on the planet. Everyone's passenger is high-impact. Everyone's cargo is the linchpin of the war machine. And when they don't get what they want, guess who takes the call.
"My job is pretty much the shit catcher," says Olekszyk, a Detroit native with a pinched face and a world-weary smile.
The mobility guys have at least eight different jobs. They've got a FedEx-like operation that moves cargo from point A to point B by a guaranteed date. There's the wartime equivalent of an airline reservations office, delivering gear and passengers when they can – usually within 72 hours. (An "itinerary" is developed for, say, 200 Army troops from Fort Benning to Talil; passengers are booked in a system most similar to budget airlines like Ryanair or Southwest and, no, you don't get to pick your seat.) They run an executive charter service, transporting generals and other "distinguished visitors," or "DVs." They evacuate injured troops. They manage a fleet of contracted airhaulers, spending up to $6 million a day on outsized or inconvenient loads, often carried by massive Russian cargo jets. And they drop giant crates of gear out of the sky, to stock isolated bases.
That last task has grown exponentially, with the escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Lousy roads and unforgiving landscapes make traditional convoys and cargo runs difficult, at best. Since 2005, there's been an 800 percent increase in air drops – from two to three per week to seven to eight per day. In July, they had 1,700 air drops over Afghanistan. That's the most since the start of the Afghan conflict, in 2001.
"It's an inherently inefficient, crazy way of doing business; I fly in twice as much cargo if I can land," Olekszyk says. "But the Taliban very ungraciously set themselves up in very inhospitable terrain. Which means we've got to set our FOBs [forward operating bases] in hospitable terrain." And the only way to supply those remote outposts is to drop the gear from the sky.
-- Noah Shachtman
[PHOTO: Staff Sgt. Robert Barney]
See Also:
- Ancient Jet Keeps the U.S. Air War Flying
- Danger Room in Afghanistan: The Perils of Armed Social Work ...
- Danger Room in Afghanistan: An Election Rehearsal
- Danger Room in Afghanistan: FedEx for the Front Line
- Danger Room in Afghanistan: Have It Your Way at Bagram?
- Danger Room With Afghanistan's Broke, Ammo-Starved Cops
