Foundation Forum

Major General William J. Begert
Director, Operations and Logistics
U.S. Transportation Command
Global Presence--The USTRANSCOM Perspective
Mid-America AFA Symposium
St. Louis
May 3, 1996

Thank you, General Shaud. It is a pleasure for me to be here, although I am a little daunted by following General Cassidy after lunch. I also have flown in a Super Connie, and the closest I came to a mid-air collision was with an O-2 against the Super Connie in the dark over Vietnam. I eventually returned from Vietnam and got into the C-5 business. General Cassidy's remarks hit home because my very first trip as a C-5 aircraft commander was during the Israeli airlift. It was a defining circumstance in my career because I realized the power of this country. During the Israeli airlift, no nation in Europe would let us land and Lajes Field [Azores] was our only base in the Atlantic. In fact, for us to move artillery ammunition to Israel, we had to fly out of Europe to Lajes and then on to Israel. We are still the only nation in the world with this power and capability. Just recently in Operation Assured Response, we demonstrated this same capability with the evacuation of American citizens and the reinforcement of the American Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia. My sister-in-law asked me a few days into the operation, "Why in the world are we going to Liberia?" My answer to her was, "Because we are the only nation in the world that can do things like that." We shouldn't take that capability for granted. U.S. Transportation Command integrates all modes of transportation into this capability. We are in the business of moving stuff and knowing where the stuff is. The TRANSCOM pitch is much like the one for the Guard, the Reserve and AMC, it is one of high Ops Tempo, of teamwork, of how we fit together as an Air Force component. We are blessed to have great support from the National Command Authorities. They recognize the value of lift and have been very vocal in proclaiming it as their number one priority. The Chairman visited TRANSCOM about three weeks ago, and he reiterated that strategic lift is his number one priority. Time and time again, when we have needed his help, Secretary Perry has been equally supportive. The job we are asked to do is only possible with a full team effort. So, let me show you who is on our team. You already know the core competencies of the Air Mobility Command. The Military Sealift Command, our sea component, and the Military Traffic Management Command, our Army component, are also very important parts of this nation's capability to extend its power around the world. More than half of our capability, in each of our components, resides in the civil sector. For a contingency, 90 percent of all passengers are going to travel via commercial transportation. That is part of our power as a nation. It is equally true on the sealift and on the surface side; most of our capability resides in the civil sector. We are heavily dependent on the Guard and Reserve for our organic capability. For air mobility, at least half of those crews reside in the Guard and the Reserve. Our C-5s and C-141s have been our backbone force for many years. We are pretty happy with the 20 C-17s in the fleet, and we wish we had a lot more already. It is rapidly becoming the weapon of choice when it comes to actually operations. In my message traffic over the past few months, I have noticed our customers now ask for C-17s whenever they go into an operation instead of just asking for lift. That is a problem. I have an education problem because not only might they not get a C-17, they might not even get an airplane. It might be a train or a ship, if that is what is available. The C-141 is getting tired and is a warhorse who has seen its better days. We are now down to 191 C-141s and are retiring those airplanes. The KC-10 is still a great airplane. We have a lot of KC-135s in the fleet, and we use them a lot. We are also dependent in terms of capability on the commercial sector and the Civil Reserve Air Fleet [CRAF], especially if an operation goes on for any duration. For the sealift side, some of my terms may not be as familiar to this audience. If we do a large operation over many months, no matter how hard we work the airlift fleet, the sealift will end up closing about 90 percent of the dry cargo. That is a matter of physics and size. I'll give you an example going back to the Israeli airlift. We worked hard for several weeks on the Israeli airlift given the restrictions in terms of distance, limited air refueling capabilities and little enroute support. We did about three times what the Russians were doing for their airlift to Egypt and Syria. After about three weeks, the first ship docked at Israel. That ship carried more than all the airlift airplanes up to that time. The only trouble was, the war was over. It just gives you a feel for the importance of both modes of transportation. The Israeli's were desperate. They couldn't wait for the ship. They off-loaded our airplanes, put the artillery shells on trucks and drove them to the Golan Heights. Within six hours after the C-5 landed, the artillery shells were landing on the enemy. They had no territory to trade for time. The sealift and airlift pieces are both very important, and you must keep things in context and relative to each other so they work together properly. We have a lot of old breakbulk ships which are loaded the same way today as in the Spanish-American War. We hope to retire some as we build other ships. In contrast, the rest of the nation's commercial fleets, by and large, are container ships. TRANSCOM is trying to educate all of the services on how to use containers during sealift. No battalion commander likes to see his things disappear into a box. But if we are going to get our nation's capability optimized, we must use the commercial sector and that means we must use 20 and 40 foot containers. We sponsor some JCS exercises to get the Army, Marines and others to use containers and use them effectively. We have 29 Roll-on/Roll-off ships or RO/ROs. These are ships that are moderate size ships that can carry between 100-140,000 square feet of cargo. They have aft and side ramps that let you drive tanks on and drive tanks off. They don't exist in the U.S. commercial sector but offer a great deal of military capability. We keep some of our organic fleet in a readiness status with a reduced crew so we can break out in four to five days and put to sea. We are trying to build toward 36 RO/ROs and we should have 24 by the end of June. There are seven more currently being used in the afloat, prepositioning force. Large, Medium Speed, Roll-on/Roll-off ships are currently being built in U.S. yards. They are very large ships, almost as long as an aircraft carrier. They can carry about 1,500 C-141 equivalent loads. We are building 19 with 11 going into our surge sealift fleet, and the rest will go into the afloat, prepositioning fleet. Four LASH [Landing Amphibious Support/Helicopter] ships can off load at sites that don't have a sophisticated pier or handling system. As the backbone of our fleet, there are eight Fast Sealift Ships built in the 1970s. Almost as long as an aircraft carrier, they only carry about a third of what our LMSRs [Roll-on/Roll-off Ships] will carry because of the hull shape. The Fast Sealift Ships can do over 30 knots underway, and get to the Middle East in about two weeks carrying about 180,000 square feet of cargo. The LMSRs will carry two times that amount, up to 350,00 square feet of cargo. This is our number one priority as we are currently at 65 percent of our needs for the Two-MRC [Major Regional Contingency] strategy. The Army supports the surface side and is blessed right now, from the military perspective, with excess capacity in the civil sector. We have lots of trucks, buses and trains. I am not sure that is always going to be true but for right now, we have had no problems getting that kind of lift in order to get the Army from the forts to the ports to be able to project our power overseas. MTMC also operates port facilities, about 25 on any given week. Although we don't formally own the Afloat Preposition Ships, we have management responsibilities and we watch this carefully. The Marines have been doing this for awhile and they have three squadrons with 13 ships. The Army, since the Gulf War, has placed a heavy brigade afloat in 14 ships. DLA [Defense Logistics Agency] has resupply stuff on ships also at sea, and the Air Force has three ships carrying mainly ammunition. An operation using these ships requires air power support. If the Marines take one of those squadrons into an operation, it takes about 40 C-141 sortie equivalents to bring in the p eople and the roundout equipment associated. This is a very efficient way for us to move a lot of cargo quickly. They are prepositioned around the globe Diego Garcia, Guam, Saipan, in the Mediterranean and since last fall, inside the Persian Gulf because Saddam Hussein was acting up. Let me turn now to some of the TRANSCOM challenges. We cannot afford to do things slowly, so TRANSCOM brings a value and power that synchronizes the nation's ability to project power overseas. Let me give you a hypothetical scenario. What will TRANSCOM go through to support a contingency if CENTCOM sets a requirement to move 24,000 passengers over 8,000 miles, and 7,200 short tons in two weeks followed by sealift moving 3 million square feet over 8,000 miles in about a month? In fact, this was an operation called Vigilant Warrior which occurred about a year and a half ago when Saddam Hussein started acting up. Here are some key decisions and things that have to occur. First, we have to find out the concept of operations for CENTCOM. It is very important to know whether we are moving the 24th Mechanized Division or the 82nd Airborne. One is a lot heavier than the other, and is a very different requirement for us. Once the CINC does that, we can develop our own CONOPS to support him. Second, we clarify who is going to pay the bill. The decision to break a ship out of reduced operating status is about a million dollar decision per ship. Third, do we call up the reserves or the CRAF [Civil Reserve Air Fleet]? We cannot afford to go from a dead stop on C-Day, which is deployment day. We better have warning and be planning with the people at the other end earlier than this. We even look at getting the lawyers working the issue of war risk insurance because the commercial sector loses their insurance coverage in a war zone. Now I am going to take you through each component and just give you a flavor the kinds of decisions and the kinds of actions that need to be made to pull all this together and make the airlift an the sealift and the ground all work together. For airlift, AMC [Air Mobility Command] through the TACC [Tanker Airlift Control Center] quickly pulls their crews and their airplanes from around the world. In a typical week, they are in about 70 countries and fly about 1,400 missions. They are spread out all over the place. If you are going to marshal airplanes, bring them back and put crews into crew rest and prepare to deploy the Tanker Airlift Control Elements, you must do it as a system for the specific purpose of going from point "a" to "b". They will do this very quickly, and put airplanes in heavy maintenance back together. While that is going on, the sealift side is going to be breaking out the ships. The eight Fast Sealift Ships must get full crews and get on berth within four days. Today as we talk, we have two FSSs out operating and working real world missions. We would be breaking out the 22 RO/ROs, looking at procuring commercial ships and putting them into berths to load the Army and the Marines for deployment to the AOR. All theses ships are manned by merchant mariners, not by U.S. Navy personnel. When we fully break out the Ready Reserve Fleet, it involves about 4,000 mariners, which is a significant number. That force is getting smaller as the U.S. merchant fleet gets smaller, and they are getting older. During Desert Shield, we had gentlemen in their 70s manning some of these ships. That is a concern for us. Our Army component would be getting commercial trucks and buses and making sure rail cars are marshaled to load up tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and all the equipment the Army needs. Moving an Army division is a big deal. You can't imagine the size of an Army division until you see it aboard several of these large ships. We sent 500,000 to the Middle East, and that equates to 468 ships. At one point during Desert Shield, we had a ship every 30 miles going to the Middle East. The Army component also works the port operations and making sure the stuff is loaded properly. When you put all that together, it becomes pretty complex. This is about as simple as I can make the TRANSCOM support for a day-to-day in a contingency. Recent activities drive the point home. 1995 was a busy year, and 1996 is coming to be equally interesting for us. Hurricane Marilyn happened very quickly over a weekend. We had airplanes moving toward the Caribbean before the hurricane had completely passed through St. Thomas and St. Croix. In a few weeks, over 1,200 sorties airlift sorties moved a lot of stuff but didn t gain much notoriety. We convinced the Army and FEMA that they need to move some material by sea and the one half ship load was equivalent to over 200 C-141 sorties. Hurricane Marilyn relief provided our first glimpse of the operational capabilities of the C-17. It was the only airplane to carry outsized items into St. Thomas. Joint Endeavor required a large and continuous airlift component and some sealift. We found out the C-17 is a great airplane. It is now the weapon system of choice and everybody wants it for every operation, which can't happen. We are planning for the redeployment, and have quietly sent two ships from the Ready Reserve Fleet. Britain paid to move some troops and some NATO equipment from northern Europe and Great Britain down to Croatia. Each ship made two voyages with almost 400,000 square feet and 1,800 vehicles. Sealift is a very powerful part of our nation's capability. Easter Sunday the phone rang and warned of a potential evacuation operation in Liberia. We quickly executed preliminary planning. American citizens were in danger and the embassy only had about a half dozen Marines. As the only nation that could do something like this, we started moving helicopters and special operations forces from Europe to staging bases in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Dakar in Senegal. By Sunday evening we had the first helicopter aboard a C-5 and it was moving to the staging area. By the next night, it had already flown its first missions between Freetown and Monrovia. We have now evacuated over 2,000 people, including almost 500 American citizens. The operation is essentially over and the SOF and the Army forces have been replaced by Marines, which came down from the Mediterranean aboard the USS Guam and it took about seven days to get there. That is why we had to use airlift. With no fuel for our forces in Freetown and very little fuel in Senegal, we conducted very heavy air refueling both from Europe and the United States. It again proved the power of Air Mobility Command. I don't know where the next operation is going to be, but we will be ready to do it. Let me turn now to the future. We are getting better and better at moving stuff and knowing where the stuff is. Technology is moving very fast, and we are working to take advantage of technology in our command. The Joint Mobility Control Group will stand up to operate in a different command and control environment than we ve had in the past. All the requirements will come to the JMCG in TRANSCOM and the execution will be by the components with the core competencies to do that. We are watching what is going on in the commercial industry and the services and then taking advantage of both the technology and our human resources to continue to do the kind of job that we've done in the recent past. I am very proud to be part of the transportation command as an Air Force officer; I am proud of the air component of the transportation command; and I strongly defend the honor of the other components because airlift and air refueling can't do it alone. Thank you all very much for your attention and if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

GEN. SHAUD: Bill, that was super. Let me say two really quick things that again will underscore the obvious. You are a team builder of the first order to get Air Mobility Command, Military Sealift Command and Military Traffic Management Command working together so cooperatively. Best wishes to you and thank you.

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