MILITARY GEOGRAPHY
FOR PROFESSIONALS AND THE PUBLIC
11. LINES OF COMMUNICATION
The Moving Finger writes:
and having writ,
Moves on; nor all Piety
nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel
half a line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out
a Word of it.Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam
Edward Fitzgerald's Translation
OMAR THE TENTMAKER EMPHASIZED THE IMPORTANCE OF IRRETRIEVABLE TIME THROUGHOUT HIS RUBÁIYÁT. So do seasoned military commanders, who know full well that a few minutes often spell the difference between military success and failure, victory and defeat. They therefore strive to make best use of land, sea, air, and space lines of communication (LOCs) that link nations with essential resources, connect military theaters of operation, facilitate support for deployed armed forces, simplify their movement from present positions at Point A to points of decision at B, C, and D, then enable formations to maneuver most effectively after arrival.1 Assured access to essential LOCs is crucially important, because large modern armed forces, unlike their predecessors, cannot live off the land. Commanders and staffs at every level consequently need intimate knowledge about the current status of roads, railways, seaports, airfields, inland waterways, and pipelines that facilitate fluid military operations and simplify logistical support. The capabilities, limitations, and vulnerabilities of primary routes attract constant attention, with particular concern for bottlenecks, bypasses, maintenance requirements, and possibilities for new construction.
ROADS
Militarily useful roads probably predate the first chariots, which Egyptian Pharaohs imported from Caanan early in the 15th century B.C. Twenty-nine turnpikes that totaled about 50,000 miles (80,000 kilometers) later radiated from ancient Rome to every conquered province. Adolph Hitler built multilane Autobahns in the 1930s to shift armed forces rapidly from one front to another, and the value of overland routes since then has in no way diminished.
ROUTE RECONNAISSANCE
Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr., read The Norman Conquest before his Third Army entered France in 1944, "paying particular attention to the roads William the Conqueror used in his operations in Normandy and Brittany." Lessons learned informed him of medieval thoroughfares that had to be on solid ground and therefore promised easy bypassing if the German Wehrmacht demolished high-speed routes.2 Elements of Israeli Colonel Yigael Allon's Negev Brigade outflanked Egyptian forces in the northern Sinai desert on Christmas Day 1948 after aerial photograph interpreters identified the remains of a long-idle Roman road that defenders overlooked.3
On-site reconnaissance and route classifications, however, commonly are required, because historical records, maps, and photo surveys seldom disclose enough information in sufficient detail about the following factors:
ROUTE CLASSIFICATIONS
Every well-constructed road consists of a surface; a base course of gravel or crushed rock that distributes stresses from heavy traffic; a foundation (subgrade) of natural materials; and a drainage system of crowns, cambers, culverts, ditches, and drains which disposes of ground water as well as runoff that could cause rapid deteriorization (figure 31). The width of each traveled way determines the number of lanes, which must average 11 to 12 feet (3.5 meters) for large trucks and 13 feet or so (4 meters) for most armored vehicles--single-lane roads make it impossible to pass or reverse course. Cracked pavements, unsealed roadbeds, pot holes, bumps, ruts, soft shoulders, grades greater than seven percent, sharp curves with a radius less than 100 feet (30 meters), and clogged drainage systems reduce the value of otherwise suitable roads until improvements are complete.4
All-weather roads have solid subgrades and base courses, traveled ways paved with concrete or bituminous mixtures, adequate drainage, enough width to accommodate two-way vehicular traffic, and throughput capacities that never are appreciably less than their
Figure
31. Highway and Byway Attributes
maximum, regardless of seasonal conditions, given reasonable maintenance. Similar routes topped with brick, stones, or gravel are somewhat less serviceable, while limited all-weather roads remain open at reduced capacity after heavy precipitation only by dint of greater effort.5
Fair-weather roads that meet less stringent standards often must suffice in combat zones, but LOCs that link front-line forces with sources of supply rate rapid upgrading. So do routes that interconnect senior command posts, communication centers, ports, airfields, and theater-level support installations in the rear. Stringent controls may also be necessary. Logisticians sustained U.S. Armed Forces over tenuous routes from the Normandy beachhead to the German border in late summer 1944 only because Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) designated Red Ball Highways, banned unessential traffic, operated every available truck 20 hours a day with brief stops to load, unload, and refuel, scraped the bottom of the barrel for relief drivers, and ran engineers ragged around-the-clock to keep those battered roads serviceable.6
WEAK LINKS AND BOTTLENECKS
Bridges, fords, ferries, tunnels, and underpasses are weak links and potentially troublesome bottlenecks along land lines of communication during military operations in peacetime or in war. Reconnaissance and classification crews consequently pay close attention to their characteristics.
Bridges. Thomas Macaulay immortalized one-eyed Captain of the Gate Gaius Horatius, the 6th century B.C. savior of Rome who, with two other warriors, held off 90,000 Etruscans while troops on the far side of the swollen Tiber River chopped underpinnings beneath Pons Sublicus, the only available bridge.7 Warfare has repeatedly focused on key bridges ever since. The last span left standing over the Rhine on March 7, 1945, became the most important piece of property on the Western Front when German demolition teams at Remagen tried but failed to destroy it before engineers of the U.S. 9th Armored Division raced across to secure the east bank. That badly damaged bridge served well for the next 10 days, despite enemy artillery and air attacks, until weakened structures finally collapsed.8
Both offensive and defensive forces designate bridges as key terrain whenever seizure, retention, destruction, or control would afford marked advantage. Load-bearing capacities are crucially important--flimsy construction, for example, excludes tanks with heavy "footprints." Detailed data additionally are in demand concerning precise map coordinates, approaches and adjacent topography, designs, construction materials, critical dimensions (heights above gaps, lengths of spans, widths of traveled ways, overhead obstacles), and special features, such as those inherent in draw, swinging, and vertical lift bridges that let ships pass.9
A few civilian-style floating bridges, such as the mile-long model across Lake Washington near Seattle, rest on pontoons, but most permanent bridges feature solid construction. Designs depicted in figure 32 range from short, simple slabs that seldom exceed 30 feet (9 meters) to cantilevers and complex suspension bridges, several of which possess spans that extend more than 4,000 feet (1,200 meters). All bridges, regardless of type, share most militarily significant characteristics that figure 33 displays.
Figure 32. Bridge Types Depicted
Figure
33. Bridge Superstructures and Substructures
Substructures consist essentially of abutments that rest on natural footings ashore, retaining walls that support banks at both ends to keep connecting roads from sinking and, if required, underpinning piers interspersed in stream at carefully calculated intervals. Superstructure assemblies vary according to site characteristics, construction materials, the length of each span, and intended capacities: arch, slab, beam, girder, and pontoon bridges sport decks, treads, and generally guardrails; truss bridges add load-bearing beams that form horizontal and vertical triangles; suspension bridges hang roadways from two thick cables anchored at both ends and draped between towers.10
Fords and Ferries. Armed forces ford unbridged water barriers where depths are shallow enough, currents are slow enough, and approaches as well as bottoms are solid enough for wheeled and tracked vehicles to proceed at reduced rates of speed under their own power or assisted by winches (refer to figure 5 on page 33 and accompanying text). Waterproofing kits and underwater roadways built of unprocessed timber, wooden planks, gravel, metal mats, even concrete can increase throughput capabilities considerably. Tanks equipped with snorkels sometimes cross completely submerged. Ferries propelled by drift, oars, poles, pulleys, gasoline, diesel, or steam see service where fords are infeasible, given a sufficiently slow current, enough depth to float from shore to shore, an absence of serious obstacles in stream, above freezing temperatures, and approach ramps that allow landings whether water levels are high or low. Rubber rafts, amphibious vehicles, assault landing craft, and motor boats typify possible conveyances.11
Tunnels and Underpasses. Tunnels, underpasses, and snow sheds that penetrate mountains or burrow beneath Earth's surface constitute formidable obstacles along land lines of communication, because they never would have been blasted, bored, or cut, covered, and excavated at great expense if attractive alternatives existed. Portal-to-portal lengths are less important than configurations, which may be semicircular, elliptical, square, or horseshoe-shaped and follow straight, curved, or irregular paths between walls that are natural or lined with brick, masonry, or concrete. Interior dimensions, together with ceiling shapes, wires, and other fixtures that influence overhead clearance, determine which vehicles and outsize loads can pass and which must detour.12
CONSTRUCTION PROBLEMS
Armed forces expend money, manpower, and materiel to construct new roads only when existing networks are poorly aligned or capacities are inadequate., but many monumental endeavors nevertheless come to mind. The 1,506-mile long (2,424 kilometers) Alaska Highway built by the Army Corps of Engineers and private contractors between Dawson Creek, British Columbia, and Fairbanks as a main military supply route during World War II is among them.13 So are interlacing land lines that U.S. and Soviet engineers laid across Afghanistan in the 1960s as part of competing programs to aid that impoverished but strategically well-placed nation.14
No project, however, overshadowed the "poor man's turnpike" that countless coolies built between Ledo, Assam, and Kunming, China, during World War II (map 17, on page 107, and map 27). The cost in human lives was high, but the benefits were incalculable.
Burma Road Obstacles. The eastern half of that prodigious endeavor, known as the Burma Road, led over three towering fingers from the Tibetan Plateau plus raging upper reaches of the Salween, Mekong, and Yangpi Rivers. Every stone for a strip 23 feet wide (6.7
Map 27. Profile of the Burma Road
meters) and 7 to 10 inches deep was set in place one at a time by local peasants who planted them like seedlings in rice paddies. The first 85 miles (135 kilometers) from Burma's eastern border to Lungling contained "every torment that nature could devise," according to Tan Pei-Ying, the project manager: "Rain unending for months at a time; stifling heat and humidity; mountains of the slipperiest mud; and worst of all malaria." More than half of those bitten by mosquitoes died before partly effective antidotes belatedly became available. Men, women, and children who lacked modern equipment and used a poor grade of gunpowder as a substitute for dynamite chiseled through 250 linear miles (400 kilometers) of bedrock to a depth of 50 to 100 feet (15 to 30 meters), 3,860,000 cubic yards all told, while clinging to precipice faces like flies. "The most trying of all [such jobs]," Pei-Ying recalled, "was in the gorges running back from the Salween, where we had to cut one hairpin turn after another out of the sheerest cliffs, taking the Road up from 2,000 feet above sea level to 6,800 feet [610 to 2,075 meters] within a distance of 18 miles [29 kilometers]."15
Burma Road Bridges. It was hard enough to build 460 bridges of different types across relatively small streams, but the three biggest rivers posed prodigious challenges. Mr Hsu Yi-fang, without benefit of blueprints, designed three single-span suspension bridges to solve related problems--the longest was 410 feet (125 meters). Factorymen in Rangoon thereafter cut huge beams, steel rods, wire ropes, cables and other parts to his specifications and delivered them to Lashio by rail, whereupon hundreds of men and mules bore heavy burdens for 300 more miles over awesome terrain. Some construction methods were centuries old, enemy actions caused recurrent nightmares, several thousand died before the last bridge was complete, trucks crossed one at a time because the maximum bearable load on the best of them was 10 tons, and jerry-rigged ferries had to take up some slack, but results in the end even so were satisfying. Some in fact say without tongue in cheek that building the Burma Road was comparable in scope to erecting ancient Egyptian pyramids.16
DESTRUCTION TECHNIQUES
Fictional Robert Jordan rigged a Nationalist bridge for demolition during the Spanish Civil War in Ernest Hemingway's classic novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Movie actor William Holden portrayed a U.S. Navy pilot who dive-bombed The Bridges of Toko-Ri in North Korea. Real world warriors at different times and places have long employed those and additional techniques to interdict overland lines of communication using aircraft, missiles, artillery, mines, and explosive charges. Gravity bombs as well as air-to-surface and surface-to-surface missiles armed with precision-guided munitions currently can strike bridges, tunnel mouths, fords, and ferries with far greater effectiveness than in the recent past, and technologists promise to couple pinpoint accuracy with unprecedented nonnuclear destructive power in the future.17 There are times, however, when total destruction is undesirable, because friendly armed forces and civilians might find repairable facilities useful at later dates.
Covert operations that conceal the identity of, or permit plausible denial by, perpetrators moreover may be politically prudent, especially in "peacetime." Demolition specialists able to infiltrate clandestinely, position charges precisely, then slip away sometimes prove invaluable under combat conditions, because they impose disproportionately heavy security burdens on defenders. First, they calculate how much of what type charge (TNT, tetrytol, plastic, or sheet explosives) to place where, taking into account the size, shape, and strength of targets to be attacked, required degrees of destruction, and collateral damage limitations, if any. Multiple charges may be more effective than one big blast against oddly shaped, large, or very hard objects, such as concrete bridge abutments and tunnels. Brittle cast iron breaks easily, but acetylene torches or thermite may be needed to slice nickel-molybdenum steel, which strongly resists conventional explosives. Proper placement is at least as important as destructive power. Large trees dropped to form an abatis across defiles fall in the wrong direction if cut improperly. Professionals whose mission is to stop road and river traffic temporarily cut supports at one end of truss bridges so affected spans fall in the water; they cut trusses at midspan to make bridges buckle if long-lasting destruction is the intent. Massive towers and thick cables on major suspension bridges resist powerful explosive charges, but slender suspenders that hang therefrom do not--roadway sections collapse if they are cut.18 Tunnels in solid rock are tough targets to destroy unless saboteurs detonate truckloads of conventional explosives or man-portable nuclear weapons deep inside.
RAILROADS
Far-sighted German economist Friedrich List in 1833 was the first to visualize the military importance of railroads and General Helmut Karl von Moltke the Elder, as Chief of the Prussian General Staff, put principles into practice during the Austro-Prussian War in 1866.19 The first grand test, however, took place during the U.S. Civil War, when Union and Confederate forces both used rail lines to redeploy large formations over great distances and support them for long periods 20 (the first Medals of Honor ever awarded went to members of James J. Andrews' raiding party, who hijacked a rebel train at Marietta, Georgia, on April 11, 1862.21). Railroads subsequently played crucial roles in most major armed conflicts the world over.22
RAILROADS RELATED TO TROUBLE SPOTS
The United States, Canada, most of Europe, Japan, and a few other highly industrialized nations have modernized their railway systems since the 1950s. High-speed trains and computerized controls are common; lightweight rails are passé; steel and plastic replace wooden and concrete ties; flatcars carry more trailers and containers than any other cargo; steam locomotives, reefers, water towers, and hump yards have virtually disappeared.23 Discussions that follow nevertheless concentrate on traditional railroads in underdeveloped countries, many of which are present or projected trouble spots, because U.S. and allied military transportation specialists could be called to cope with unanticipated problems.
RAILWAYS COMPARED WITH ROADS
Railways and roads are complementary lines of communication, each with strengths that compensate for the other's weaknesses. Trains rather than trucks carry the heaviest overland loads, just as ships rather than aircraft carry most bulky cargo between homelands and theaters of operation overseas. U.S. Army divisions at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, depended on rail transportation to move them from widely separated bases in Colorado, Texas, Kentucky, and North Carolina to ports of embarkation scattered along the seaboard from Baltimore, Maryland, to Beaumont, Texas. That task was humongous, because it then took 4,200 flat cars and 820 pullmans (the equivalent of 100 trains end-to-end on 45 miles of track) to handle just one armored division with accompanying supplies. U.S. railroads also served extensively throughout World War II, the Korean War (1950-53), the Vietnam War (1965-72), and during altercations with Iraq (1991-92).23
Rail lines nevertheless are inflexible for most tactical purposes, because cross-country bypasses are infeasible for trains confined to tracks. That fact is especially significant wherever washouts, rock falls, snow slides, and manmade bottlenecks abound, as is the case with the Trans-Iranian Railroad, which encounters 224 tunnels and more than 4,100 bridges on its 895-mile (1,340-kilometer) trek from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. Trains on the Trans-Siberian Railroad once passed through 51 tunnels in rapid succession along a 52-mile stretch of track (84 kilometers) that skirted the southern banks of Lake Baikal before work crews built a better route. Construction costs, always higher than for roads, increase when many cuts and fills are required to reduce grades and smooth out sharp turns.
Railway reconnaissance teams, like colleagues who classify roads, catalog distances between selected points, the nature of nearby terrain, foundation materials, maximum grades, minimum curve radii, cuts, fills, obstacles, bridges, tunnels, ferries, and current conditions. They also look for characteristics peculiar to railroads, which are listed below:24
RAILWAY INFRASTRUCTURES
Railroad infrastructures encompass all routes, real estate, rolling stock, and facilities required to operate and maintain trains. Military users are concerned primarily with the improvement and preservation of throughput capabilities, whereas enemy targeteers diligently study soft spots that, if interdicted, would deprive possessors of essential support at crucial times and places.
Roadbeds and Rails. All trains run on tracks, but not all tracks are the same. Some main-line roadbeds are merely compacted earth or thinly spread cinders, while sturdier bases that ensure proper drainage and distribute loads evenly consist of slag chips or crushed stone in layers up to 24 to 30 inches thick (61 to 76 centimeters). Crossties embedded in that ballast to support and align rails not only range from untreated timber to concrete but vary considerably in size and spacing. Steel rails may weigh less than 40 or more than 150 pounds per yard (20 to 68 kilograms per meter), tie plates and anchors called "anticreepers" may or may not hold rails in place, builders may or may not use 50- to 60-foot-long rails (15 to 18 meters) to reduce the number of joints, and they may or may not butt-weld or bolt rails together to strengthen construction. Firm ballast, solid crossties, heavy steel rails, welded joints, banked curves of no more than 1.5 degrees, and grades of 1.0 percent or less facilitate fast passenger and freight service.
Standard gauge tracks (4 feet 8.5 inches/1.435 meters) predominate in North America, Mexico, Great Britain, and most of continental Europe. Broader gauges (5 feet/1.524 meters or more) are the rule in former Soviet Socialist Republics, Finland, Ireland, Iberia, India, and Argentina, although trains waste valuable time while cars exchange undercarriages or transfer cargoes to other trains wherever dissimilar lines connect. Various gauges cover much of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Australia, but many nations there as elsewhere still maintain narrow gauge railroads on level as well as mountainous terrain because construction, maintenance, locomotives, and rolling stock all are relatively inexpensive.25
Rolling Stock and Locomotives. Logisticians who hope to use allied and captured enemy railway infrastructure most effectively must consider many factors, because imported locomotives and rolling stock must be compatible with local rail gauges and couplings. Steam, electric, diesel, and diesel-electric mainline locomotives are much longer and heavier than switch engines, which are geared to tow many cars at slow speeds. The military importance of sleeping and dining cars has declined dramatically since World War II, primarily because most personnel now move administratively by air, but boxcars, flatcars, gondolas, hoppers, tank cars, and refrigerators retain great utility.
Terminals Yards, Railheads, and Stations. An elaborate array of installations is required to assemble trains, point them in proper directions, and make them run on time. Traditional rail yards at major terminals receive, unload, separate, classify, and sort incoming locomotives and rolling stock, couple predetermined numbers and types together, then shunt strings to other yards where they are serviced, reloaded, stored, or prepared for departure (figure 34). Locomotives proceed to roundhouses where turntables and cranes assist inspections, repairs, and maintenance. Switch engines tug cars from one traditional yard to another unless gravity pulls them from the top of humps to lower levels. Each complex contains parallel tracks, switches, sidings, platforms, sheds, shops, warehouses, water towers, storage tanks, and command/control facilities. Stations along each route and railheads where transshipments to other modes of transportation take place complete the list of railway real estate inventories.26
RELATIVE UTILITY AND VULNERABILITY
Some regions rely extensively on rail transportation, others very little. Those with many alternative routes and installations well removed from present or potential enemies are most flexible, although choke points along lonesome stretches far removed from maintenance units are vulnerable and wreckage is hard to repair. Marshaling yards concentrate lucrative targets, as evidenced during World War II, when repeated air attacks seriously disrupted the redeployment of German troops and the distribution of ammunition, fuel, food, and other supplies to forces in the field. Duty in large rail yards throughout occupied France as well as in the Third Reich was almost as dangerous as front line service.27 Retreating Germans not only destroyed every right or left hand switch in classification yards, but uprooted rights of way by splitting ties down the middle and splaying rails with locomotive-mounted plows.
No major power during the Cold War had greater need for reliable rail service than the Soviet Union, but deficiencies were numerous.28 Connections with European satellite states were cumbersome because the change from broad- to standard-gauge undercarriages at each border consumed about 2 hours per 20-car train and 2 more on return trips. Worse yet, the rudimentary road network that served European Russia diminished rapidly east of the Ural Mountains and virtually disappeared for 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) between Omsk and Vladivostok. The ribbon-like Trans-Siberian Railroad, single-tracked for 2,000 miles along the Chinese frontier, therefore bore most burdens. Stalin consequently suffered such heartburn that he began to construct the Baikal-Amur Magistral (BAM) rail line somewhat farther north using slave labor (map 28). Progress ceased after his death in 1953, but Leonid Brezhnev later revived that stupendous project, which crosses five mountain ranges, seventeen wide rivers, and seismically active plains that turn swampy in summer; passes through Severo-Muisky Tunnel, which is nearly 10 miles long (16 kilometers), and several others of lesser length; and boasts 3,000 bridges. Underlying permafrost created countless construction problems before the first train made its maiden trip in 1989.29
Figure 34. Traditional Rail Yard Facilities
Map 28. The Trans-Siberian Railroad and Baikal-Amur Magistral
MILITARY AIRPORTS
Military airports must accommodate fixed- and rotary-wing combat, utility, and cargo aircraft that, when directed, fly missions around-the-clock under adverse weather conditions. One size field, however, by no means fits all. Ramstein Air Base, situated in a narrow valley near Kaiserslautern, Germany, for example, served a U.S. fighter wing well during the Cold War, but tight terrain, a relatively short runway, slender taxiways, cramped parking areas, and limited cargo-handling facilities restrict C-141 and C-5A transports, its present tenants.30
SITE SELECTION AND CONSTRUCTION CRITERIA
Military requirements determine the number, characteristics, essential service life, and acceptable construction time of airfields in any area of operations. Topography, climatic conditions, vegetation, hydrology, soils, and logistical convenience strongly influence locations. Preferable sites feature the flattest terrain, the clearest weather, the most favorable winds, the fewest obstructions, the freest drainage, and easiest access to prominent land lines of communication but, if that ideal is unattainable for political, military, geographic, or cultural reasons, decisionmakers must compromise.
Primary runways generally parallel the direction of prevailing winds, taking high-velocity cross-currents into account. Runway lengths required by any given type aircraft would be standard everywhere if Planet Earth were a perfectly flat plain at sea level, all thermometers consistently registered any given temperature, the surface never was slick with rain, sleet, or snow, and all pilots were equally competent. Military airfield designers in the real world, however, must extend runways to compensate for increases in altitude and do likewise where temperatures of the warmest month average more than 59 0F (15 0C), because those factors singly or in combination create rarefied air that degrades engine performance and affords less lift. Takeoffs up inclines and landings downhill also require longer runways. U.S. calculations in anticipation of foul weather and imperfect air crew performance add 25 percent more in combat zones, 50 percent more in rear areas, then tack a small "fudge factor" onto the adjusted total, as table 21 indicates.31
Table 21. U.S. Military Aircraft Runway Length Calculations
Basic Calculations Correction for Altitude Correction for Temperature Correction for Gradient Safety Factors
|
Takeoff Ground Run (TGR) at mean sea level; temperature 59 0F (15 0C) Add 10% to basic runway length for every 1,000-foot (305-meter) increase above 1,000 feet Add 4% to basic runway length for every 10 0F (6 0C) that temperatures of the warmest month average above 59 0F if the TGR is less than 5,000 feet (1,525 meters) Add 7% to basic runway length for every 10 0F that temperatures of the warmest month average above 59 0F if the TGR is 5,000 feet or more Never shorten basic runway lengths if temperatures of the warmest month average below 59 0F Add 8% to basic runway length for every 1% increase over a 2% gradient anywhere along the strip Add 25% for combat zone airfields; |
Minimum runway widths, consistent with degrees of lateral stability during final approaches and landings, increase with aircraft weights and sizes. Bombers and large transport aircraft need more elbow room than fighters, which are relatively maneuverable. Taxiways, parking aprons, and hangar floors, like runways, must have load-bearing capacities consistent with the heaviest aircraft for which the field is configured.32 Approach zones and overruns at each end of every runway are graded to minimize damage if pilots accidentally land short, overshoot, or experience engine failure on takeoff. Engineers clear obstructions to points well below glide paths or mark them prominently if that proves infeasible and alternative sites are less satisfactory.33
EXPEDITIONARY BASES AND UPGRADES
Featherweight combat aircraft were able to operate from sod fields as late as the Battle of Britain in 1940, but runways soon became essential for all but the lightest planes. U.S. expeditionary air bases established in foreign lands, often on the spur of the moment, occupy three categories:
Expeditionary airfield builders employ bulldozers, scrapers, back hoes, front loaders, dump trucks, and other earth-moving machinery deliverable by heavy lift helicopters ("flying cranes") and parachutes if necessary. Bare base kits, tailored for particular missions, include flight-line support, supply, maintenance, and housekeeping items of which the following are merely representative: durable runway membranes or matting; lights; navigation aids; approach apparatus; arresting gear; dust palliatives; prepackaged control facilities; portable shelters; power generators; field kitchens; and collapsible fuel storage containers.34
Drag chutes, thrust reversers, and jet/rocket-assisted take-off (JATO/RATO) propulsion systems benefit some aircraft that arrive while work on runways and approaches is still in progress. The Soviet Union, which lacked first-class bases in Siberia and found few in underdeveloped client states, put a premium on sturdy, short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) designs that as early as the 1970s vested cargo aircraft with high power-to-weight ratios, special flaps, strong, multi-wheeled undercarriages, adjustable tire pressures, self-starting engines, gravity refueling, built-in test sets, and on-board cargo-handling equipment.35
Phased upgrading of expeditionary air bases and captured enemy fields continues apace until they are fully able to support planned missions (figure 35). Stage I construction provides a loop that allows aircraft to land, taxi, park, unload, reload, and depart on expedient surfaces of minimum dimensions. Stage II increases capacities, safety, and operational efficiency, perhaps creates a second runway, and converts the original to a taxi strip that runs the length of the field. Stage III further expands facilities and paves surfaces if users plan long-term occupancy.36
AIR BASE DEFENSE
Military air terminals are even harder to protect than they are to construct, because no installations as yet possess credible ballistic missile defenses and all are vulnerable to attacks by such unsophisticated weapons as mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and portable air-defense missiles. Unshielded ammunition dumps, aviation fuel supplies, and aircraft taking flight, on final approaches, or in unrevetted parking lots are especially vulnerable.
Audacious hit-and-run raiders can wreak havoc. British Major David Stirling's nascent Special Air Service (SAS) repeatedly roared out of the Sahara Desert during World War II to hit German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's North African air bases. Eighteen jeeps with blazing machine guns ran straight down the runway at Sidi Haneish, Libya, on July 8,
Figure 35. Airfield Construction Stages
1942, and within a few minutes ruined more than two dozen aircraft parked on both sides, including Junker 52s which had been scarce since the Luftwaffe lost nearly 200 transports during the battle for Crete the previous year.37 U.S. Army Major Robert C. Kingston, in his capacity as Commanding Officer, Company C, 3d Battalion, British 16th Parachute Brigade, led six five-man teams whose mission during pre-dawn darkness was to test security procedures at U.S. Air Base Lakenheath near Aldershot, England, in April 1962. Civilian constabulary in the adjacent town and roving patrols assisted by scout dogs, trip wires, and flares were on red alert beforehand, but stealthy infiltrators even so were able to "assassinate" the base commander, plant simulated demolitions on parked aircraft, neutralize the combat operations center, "explode" a liquid oxygen plant, place charges that could have cratered the main runway, and accomplish other missions without unacceptable losses.38
Better safeguards typified by space surveillance satellites, extremely sensitive land-based sensors, night vision devices, better aircraft dispersion, and formidable physical barriers limit options open to present day counterparts of Majors Stirling and Kingston, but special operations forces even so still imperil the best protected air bases.
SEAPORTS AND HARBORS
Sea lines of communication terminate in harbors and ports that come in all sizes, shapes, and descriptions. Each harbor suitable for deep-draft ships features distinctive approaches, entrances, dredged channels, depths, protected anchorages, turning basins, and navigation aids. Each up-to-date seaport additionally displays a wide array of berthing, cargo-handling, storage, maintenance, and clearance facilities (figure 36).39
HARBOR ATTRIBUTES
Even fine natural harbors such as those that serve New York City, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo benefit from human improvements. Massive stone or masonry breakwaters, jetties (breakwaters that connect with the shore), and moles (jetties with a road on top) commonly depress swells and deflect stormy seas, dredges clear channels that are subject to silt, and sea walls reduce erosion along shore. Shapes, horizontal dimensions, depths, obstacles in stream, and ship characteristics (drafts, lengths, beams, mast heights, and hull forms) determine how many ships of what types any harbor can accommodate at one time.
Navigational aids in well-developed harbors normally include a lighthouse and channel-marking buoys. Huge buoys enable ships to moor in stream whenever suitable berths alongside moles, wharves, and piers are unavailable or soft bottoms make free anchorage unsafe. Deeply driven pilings called dolphins do likewise. Some basins rely on regulating gates, caissons, locks, and pumps to maintain requisite levels. Efficient harbor operations also employ various tugboats, ferries, salvage craft, fire-fighting vessels, launches, lighters, pile-drivers, dredges, rock breakers, barges and, in cold climes, icebreakers.
PORT FACILITIES
Harbors become seaports only when installations facilitate the transfer of personnel and cargo from ships to shore (figure 37). Most wharves (sometimes called quays) built for that purpose parallel and abut the harbor's perimeter or nearby islands (such as Ford Island inside Pearl Harbor), whereas piers project into the water at various angles and thereby provide berthage not only on both sides but at the head as well, given sufficient space. Petroleum tankers usually discharge products through submerged pipelines while tethered to deep-water terminal buoys.
The daily capacity of every port depends on ship types, percentages worked at wharfside compared with cargoes lightered from transports in stream, ratios of bulk to general cargoes, the efficiency of the labor force, and facilities ashore. Wheeled and tracked vehicles embark and debark from roll-on roll-off (RO/RO) ships under their own power while self-sustaining merchantmen use on-board booms or cranes to transfer freight, but containerships rely almost entirely on heavy hoists ashore. The largest gantry, jib, and cantilever cranes, which move on rails along wharves and piers, handle loads that range from 100 to 250 tons or more. Forklifts, jitneys, portable conveyers, and other mechanical devices serve stevedores. Transit
sheds, warehouses, refrigerators, storage tanks, bunkers, and open stacking spaces stash consignments until they clear port by road, rail, inland waterways, or pipelines.
Figure 36. Typical Naval Port Facilities
Figure 37. Wharf and Pier Configurations
EXPEDIENT PORT OPERATIONS
Imaginative (sometimes makeshift) operations are unavoidable when no convenient seaport is available, terminals lack modern amenities, or facilities are badly damaged. Such conditions are common in underdeveloped coastal countries and during wars.
Cold War Competition. U.S. military sealift during the Cold War was poorly prepared to compete with the Soviet Union and its surrogates, because the shrinking U.S. Merchant Marine, tailored mainly for commerce rather than military emergencies, emphasized profitable albeit inflexible container ships over self-sustaining, break-bulk tramp steamers that not only welcomed dry cargo in assorted sizes and shapes but plied much of their trade in small ports that afforded few amenities. LSTs, heavy lift helicopters, and time-consuming expedients had to help container ships unload weapons, equipment, and supplies for U.S. armed forces in Vietnam. Soviet merchant fleets in contrast featured smaller ships well adapted for business in primitive ports plagued by shallow water and skimpy facilities.40
Prefabricated Harbor and Port Facilities. The most elaborate logistical operation ever attempted over open beaches took place during the Normandy invasion before Allied troops captured Cherbourg on the northern tip of the Cotentin Peninsula.41 More than 80 ships filled with sand were sunk stem-to-stern in 12 to 15 feet (4 to 5 meters) of water where they formed five breakwaters code named Gooseberries, behind which small ships and landing craft could unload at low tide.
Large transports, however, needed better shelters. Two artificial harbors code named Mulberries A and B were designed and developed in Great Britain, towed across the English Channel by seagoing tugs, then installed off Omaha Beach at Vierville-sur-Mer and at Arromanches-les-Bains off Gold Beach 10 miles farther east. Each consisted of 50-some hollow concrete building blocks called Phoenixes, most of which measured 200 x 60 x 60 feet (61 x 18 x 18 meters). Floating breakwaters, pierheads, and causeways that rose and fell with each tide completed the complex with gratifying results: 74,000 troops, 10,000 vehicles, and 17,000 tons of supplies funneled inland during the first week.
Prospects for improvement were salutary until the worst storm in 40 years struck on June 19, 1944. Winds whipped in at 40 knots (stronger in gusts), waves washed over the Gooseberries, and spring tides amplified pounding surfs. Mulberry A was an irreparable wreck when calmer weather returned 4 days later, but that short-lived project nevertheless paid off handsomely during early days when rapid buildups were imperative.
Logistical benefits after Cherbourg fell into U.S. hands on July 26, 1944, initially were scant, because German defenders methodically destroyed most port facilities before they surrendered. Sea water poured through craters in the western breakwater; sunken ships and 20,000 cubic yards of masonry blocked basins; and quay walls and cranes were demolished or damaged so severely that Hitler awarded the Knight's Cross to Admiral Hennecke, whose forces conducted the demolitions. Rehabilitation, however, progressed so swiftly that Cherbourg within 4 weeks was handling more heavy freight than during its palmiest days in peacetime. More than one-fourth of all Allied cargo landed in Normandy passed through that port before over-the-beach operations ceased in November.
Practical Improvements. Visionaries in search of cost-effective ways to establish artificial port facilities expeditiously in out-of-the-way places have investigated an alphabet soup of candidates that variously included Logistics Over the Shore (LOTS) and a Ship-Helicopter Extended Delivery System (SHEDS). Recent proposals such as Mobile Offshore Bases (MOBs) and Landing Ship Quay/Causeways (LSQ/C) are much more ambitious, but nevertheless seem promising.42
LSQ/C concepts envision a large ship, likely a converted tanker, that would ballast down to rest on the ocean floor in water 40 to 50 feet deep (12 to 15 meters). Designers predict that engineers could connect each such quay with 3,000 feet of double-decked causeway (915 meters) in less than 72 hours, even if buffeted by 25-knot winds and 12-foot waves (sea state 5). Programmed capabilities would permit two container ships, break-bulk transports, or RO/ROs to moor alongside and simultaneously discharge cargoes for further conveyance ashore, while pumps and flexible pipelines would transfer petroleum and potable water. MOBs, which would function as floating logistical bases, contemplate six semisubmersible modules apiece, each of which could, if developed, furnish more than 2.7 million usable square feet of environmentally controlled storage space (250,000 centares) for use as follows:
Options |
Dry Cargo |
Liquid Cargo |
A B C |
115,000 short tons 145,000 short tons 164,000 short tons |
26,000,000 gallons 20,000,000 gallons 14,600,000 gallons |
Proponents praise MOBs for potential capabilities that outstrip competitive proposals, while skeptics point out flaws. Whether mechanisms that link such massive structures could tolerate hurricane-force shearing strains is subject to speculation. Temporary decoupling might suffice in such situations, but total program costs could be prohibitive at $2 to $3 billion per copy in 1996 dollars, because several Mobile Offshore Bases would be needed to cover widely separated contingencies. MOBs moving at the advertised rate of 8 to 10 knots might arrive too late to be useful if positioned far from erupting crises.
SPACEPORTS AND FLIGHT PATHS
Military lines of communication to and from space start and end with spaceports that are located exclusively on Earth at this moment, but almost certainly will appear on the moon and the nearest planets at unpredictable future dates. Such installations and flight paths that connect them must satisfy operational demands that differ significantly in several respects from civilian requirements.
MILITARY SPACE INFRASTRUCTURE
Civilian spaceports able to launch and retrieve passenger and cargo flights with the same regularity and degree of confidence that commercial airlines currently enjoy would be praiseworthy indeed, whereas military spaceports additionally must be able to perform all assigned missions competently in combat. Requirements ideally include fixed-site control centers, mobile command posts, redundant communication facilities, and secure logistical installations.
Military space officials in the Soviet Union had physical security firmly in mind when they located key infrastructure in remote regions at the height of the Cold War: armed forces and fortifications between the Baltic and Barents Seas protected Plesetsk; neither Tyuratam nor Kapustin Yar was near a large city or unfriendly frontier; and all three installations were safe from long-range missile attacks unless a general nuclear war erupted (map 29). Senior U.S. officials in contrast had peacetime safety measures rather than wartime survivability in mind when they located space launch sites close to coasts at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Wallops Island, Virginia, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, so that unsuccessful flights would fall harmlessly into the ocean. All consequently were, and still are, vulnerable to short-range sea-launched missiles and saboteurs who inhabit urban sanctuaries. The U.S. military space control center at Sunnyvale, California not only sits on a seashore, but straddles the San Andreas Fault, a potential earthquake epicenter.43
Map 29. U.S. and Soviet Space Launch Sites and Control Centers
PREDICTABLE FLIGHT PATHS
Objects in our Universe all orbit around the Earth, its moon, other planets, the sun, or stars, which makes military flight paths in space just as predictable as the routes that roads and railways follow. Accurate antisatellite weapons (ASATs) consequently could imperil strategic warning, reconnaissance, surveillance, communications, weather, navigation, and logistical satellites on their appointed rounds (map 30) until effective countermeasures such as maneuverable spacecraft and counter-ASAT defenses become available.44
INLAND WATERWAYS
Navigable rivers, canals, lakes, inland seas, and intracoastal connections make militarily useful LOCs where other lines of communication are lacking or less economical. Inland waterways also supplement or supplant roads, tracks, and trails in densely forested or swampy regions where air landing zones are scarce. Logisticians who load bulk consignments onto boats and barges can reserve faster modes of transportation for high-priority shipments.
UNIQUE CONSIDERATIONS
Data needed to evaluate inland waterways in many respects are much like those related to roads and railways. Common concerns include distances between selected points, horizontal and overhead clearances, obstacles, and the numbers, types, and capacities of locally available conveyances together with mechanical handling, storage, repair, and maintenance facilities. Considerations such as channel widths, controlling depths, freezing dates, navigational aids, wharfage, and dredging demands parallel those associated with seaports. Several informational requirements, however, are unique:
TACTICALLY USEFUL WATERCOURSES
Intratheater watercourses serve military purposes to great advantage, provided they are easily accessible, mainly navigable, reasonably dense, and oriented in required directions. Webs such as those that crisscross Western Europe and the Mekong Delta have played prominent roles in the relatively recent past. Inland waterways, however, are no more immune to natural and manmade impediments than other lines of communication. Freeze-ups seasonally stop traffic in cold climes, floods that follow thaws cause depths to fluctuate, rapids and waterfalls bar the way where gradients are steep, and newly-deposited sandbars menace navigation in slowly meandering streams. Enemies and "acts of God" may damage locks, drain canals, block river channels, and destroy or dismantle facilities. The Kiel, Wilhelm, Dortmund-Ems, and other canals built above ground level behind high levees in
Map 30. Earth Support Satellite Orbits
Germany oppose cross-country movement by motor vehicles, reduce flat-trajectory fields of fire and, if ruptured, would flood adjacent lowlands Commanders with resourceful subordinates even so sometimes work miracles along unfriendly waterways. Such was the case in autumn 1944, when General William Slim, on the banks of the Chindwin River in Burma, turned to his chief engineer and said, "Billy, there's the river and there are the trees. In two months I want five hundred tons of supplies a day" down that stream. He got them. Elephants lugged huge teak logs to an improvised shipyard where Burmese laborers under British supervision built several hundred "dumb barges." They "looked like Noah's arks," but carried 10 tons apiece and three lashed together could take a Sherman tank. Marine engines, dismantled and delivered by aircraft, provided power, while two pseudo "warships," each armed with one 40-mm Bofors gun, two 20-mm Oerlikons, and a couple of .30-caliber twin Browning antiaircraft guns provided protection.45
STRATEGICALLY CRUCIAL CANALS
Intertheater canals, unlike intratheater counterparts, tend to be strategically rather than tactically significant. One such sluiceway connects the Barents, Baltic, and Black Seas. The Panama Canal links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, while the Suez Canal simplifies movement from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.
Barents to Black Sea Connections. Colonel Sir Edward May, in his seminal writings entitled Geography in Relation to War, noted that Czarist Russia in the interest of sea power "projected the construction of a canal from Riga on the Baltic to Kherson on the Black Sea" early in the 20th century. Soviet nuclear-powered submarines built at Gorky seven decades later followed that route to Leningrad during warm weather, where they finished fitting out and, like destroyers and smaller surface ships, thereafter joined the Northern Fleet by way of inland waterways to the Barents Sea. All Soviet naval forces assigned to the Black Sea Fleet fed into the Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits (the Bosporus, Sea of Marmara, and Dardenelles), save submarines whose passage still is restricted in peacetime by the Montreux Convention of 1936. Russian and Ukrainian surface combatants honor that treaty today.46
Panama Canal. The United States is twice blessed by sheltered naval bases on ice-free coasts that open onto the world's largest oceans and, in turn, on every continent. The U.S. Navy since 1914 has been able to shift forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again through the Panama Canal to weight whatever effort takes priority. Table 22 illustrates time/distance savings that naval ships (excluding large aircraft carriers and supertankers) gain by passage through the Panama Canal. Treaties that granted sovereignty to Panama in 1979 and will confer operational control in the year 2000 preserve those U.S. prerogatives.
Suez Canal. The Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, remained economically beneficial to all until 1948, when the Egyptian Government banned ships en route to and from the infant state of Israel. The canal has been closed twice since then: first from November 1956 until March 1957, because Israeli, British, and French invasions prompted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to sink ships in the narrow freeway; then from the onset of the Six-Day War in June 1967 until June 1975, when sunken ships once again choked the channel.47
The Suez Canal never recovered economically from those two prolonged closures, which prompted petroleum producers to rely increasingly on fast supertankers that took other routes, but its strategic importance soared. U.S. Armed Forces and their allies benefited as long as the Canal was closed, because Soviet sea lines of communication from Europe to the Indian Ocean led all the way around Africa. Competition sharpened considerably after a stream of warships flying the hammer and sickle started to use the Suez shortcut in 1975. The U.S. Navy during the 1990-91 war with Iraq found that watercourse strategically valuable, because it reduced distances between the U.S. eastern seaboard and Persian Gulf ports by about 3,000 nautical miles (5,560 kilometers) and trimmed merchant ship transit times by eight or nine days compared with trips past the Cape of Good Hope.
PIPELINES
Welded steel pipes laid under ground or on the surface are the most expeditious and economical way to transport petroleum, natural gas, and water over land. Some lines run cross-country, while others follow established routes. The capabilities of petroleum pipelines, which generally vary in diameter from 4 to more than 40 inches (10 to 100 centimeters), are calculated in barrels, metric tons, or cubic meters per day. Conduits reserved for crude oil contaminate refined products unless attendants first clean them thoroughly, a costly, time-consuming process, but most lines accept gasoline, jet fuel, kerosene, and diesel in batches that minimize mixing. Associated facilities include pumps for liquids and compressors for natural gas, assorted valves, manifolds, and meters.
Table 22. Advantages Available from the Panama Canal
| San Diego, CA, Via Panama Canal |
Nautical Miles 8,875 |
Total Elapsed Time at 20 Knots 21 days 30 days 9 days 22 days 31 days 9 days |
POLITICAL PERILS
Most civilian pipelines are unobtrusive, but a few attract strong criticism. Political and ecological complaints accompanied by land claims of irate natives could have, but did not, turn violent during the construction of giant pipelines on Alaska's North Slope after prospectors discovered extensive petroleum deposits at Prudhoe Bay.48 Pipelines that cross international boundaries may also provoke disputes. Iraq, for example, lost three links between oil fields at Kirkuk and the outside world beginning in 1948, when Israel took control of the terminal at Haifa. Syria's President Hafez al-Assad eliminated a second outlet at Tripoli, Lebanon, when Saddam Hussein went to war with Iran in 1980 despite Syrian objections. Neither of those lines has ever reopened. Turkey turned off the third tap in 1990 after Iraq seized Kuwait and kept it closed until December 1996.49
MILITARY APPLICATIONS
The most innovative military pipeline, aptly dubbed Operation Pluto (Pipeline Under the Ocean), delivered petroleum to Allied forces in France after the Normandy invasion. Specialists welded 20-foot lengths of 3-inch pipe into 4,000-foot rolls (1,220 meters), then wound them on huge hollow bobbins, each of which fully loaded tipped scales at 1,600 tons, a weight then equivalent to that of an average destroyer. Three tugboats towed those monsters while they payed out four pipes on the sea bottom between the Isle of Wight and Cherbourg. Army engineers then laid pipe hundreds of miles inland as fast as they could to reduce strains on already overcommitted truck drivers and overcrowded roads.50 Petroleum pipelines that served similar purposes in NATO Europe during the Cold War as well as in Korea, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia during shooting wars seemed simple by comparison.
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