Subotai Bahadur brought up that horribly ugly reality, for Afghanistan, called logistics. If memory serves, last year in comments to a post, Cannoneer spelt out many of the pertinent details of attempting to supply our forces in Afghanistan via air if the ground supply routes are cut off. The short version was that we had the airlift resources to keep them supplied for only a few weeks. This would allow our troops to undertake an evacuation of all forces but not to conduct anything like our current nation building or “normal” combat operations.
In order to continuously supply our forces in Afghanistan entirely by air we would need to cut our footprint to the bone. We would need to forgo nation building completely. We would have to abandon the central government to it’s own devices. We would have to reduce our overall forces on the ground to a few tens of thousands of troops, including support personnel, and pull them all back into two or three remote and extremely well fortified bases with good on-site water supplies. Such locations are extremely rare in Afghanistan.
From these secure bases our elite forces would perform targeted assassination against Jihadists of every stripe, including the Taliban leadership and Al Qaeda. No attempt would be made to hold or control any additional ground. Each secure base would contain a large, formidable ground security force for base defense including medium or heavy artillery, a large modern aerial port, one or two composite squadrons of fighter / attack / ground support aircraft, several helicopter aviation companies, and several composite predator / reaper / other UAV reconnaissance squadrons. Of the 10-15,000 personnel on a base perhaps 500-1000 would actually be special operators who went out to observe, locate and kill the enemy while conducting counter terrorism operations. Another 2500-3500 personnel would be conventional combat forces charged with protecting the base. The rest would be pilots, support people, contractors, etc. This envisions the use of zero local or 3rd country nationals on base. They are all potential security threats. Everyone on base should hold at least a secret level security clearance from his or her respective government. As a bonus, this would provide ample opportunities for skittish allies to supply up to two-thirds of the personnel at each base. The offensive operations could be left to the coalition of the willing: U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France, Netherlands, “New-Europe” allies, etc. The support functions would be dominated by everyone else or could be contracted out to thoroughly competent and vetted civilians. This is still a prodigious tooth to tail ratio, two or three support people for every shooter! A great deal of support work would have to be done at a secure logistics base within C-130 range of Khandahar Airport which would continue to serve as an excellent aerial hub. By coincidence, Bombay to Khandahar round trip is under 2000 miles. This means a C-130 could take off from Bombay fully fueled and loaded with supplies and equipment, fly to Khandahar, drop off new / refurbished equipment, and pick up equipment in need of repair, rotating troops, etc. for a flight back to Bombay. Little or no refueling should be necessary at Khandahar! Bombay is a world-class city and major seaport, and they have every reason to help us kill Jihadists everywhere, at any time. The only sticking point I see is maintaining Pakistani permission for over-flight of their airspace.
