How to Leave Iraq - ' A Heavy Load'
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: The Nuts and Bolts of a Pullout">
A Heavy Load: The Nuts and Bolts of a Pullout
Sorting
Each piece of equipment must be
categorized as serviceable, unserviceable
or recoverable and then further sorted
as scrap, hazardous material or requiring
demilitarization.
The Challenge:
Getting to each and every
piece of equipment and crate of supplies
while conducting daily war activities.
The Transportation Command has offered
to supply additional personnel if needed.
Packing
The items must be packed
into standard shipping
containers, with radio frequency
identification tags attached to
the outside.
How It's Done:
The tags, from Savi Technology, acquired
last year by Lockheed Martin, are programmed with codes to
identify the items inside, their owner, stock number, final destination
and other identifiers.
The same tags used on supplies traveling to Iraq can be reused
for material on the return trip, but they have to be rewritten in-theater
with new destination codes.
The Challenge:
RFID tags fall off or get ripped off in transit,
radio frequencies are sometimes unavailable and batteries in
active, programmable tags run out. All of which renders the cargo
intermittently invisible to military computer systems.
And Bringing Home the Soldiers
How It's Done:
Though there are 160,000 troops
deployed now, the
Transportation Command has
overseen 4 million passenger round trips—which include deployments,
redeployments and troops otherwise moving in and out of the war
zone. Commercial airlines will fly many of the troops home and the
Transportation Command maintains those schedules, with input on
the number of people to be moved provided by the service branches.
The systems for coordinating troop redeployment are classified; some
are part of JOPES. The Transportation Command would provide daily
movement statistics, as well as analysis of problems en route and
workloads at the ports, to the joint commands and supporting
entities. Wounded troops are tracked in a Transportation Command
application called Transcom Regulating and Command and Control
Evacuation System, or TRAC2ES.
The Challenge:
Military branches and the Transportation Command
must create "time-phased force and deployment data" plans, which
means, in part, they consider contingencies when scheduling the exit
of their troops: Who will provide physical protection to troops moving
to air and sea ports? How many noncombat troops will stay behind
to maintain infrastructure for the last troops in? Most troops will
arrive in the U.S. ahead of their equipment, which will take weeks or
months to return by ship.
Next Page: What Stays And What Goes
Projects: Supply Chain 
