Quote:
Originally Posted by Botnst
Take just food and water alone and assume everybody's gonna eat MRE's. Soldiers are assumed to need more cal/day than "normal" people because soldiers in the field get lots of aerobic exercise. That's why a single MRE contains about 1,300 cal. A soldier is expected to consume 3 per day.
14 pounds/person/day X 200,000 people = 2.8 millions pounds per person per day.
There is no deep-water port within what, a thousand miles of Afghanistan? How many trucks per day are required to move 2.8 million pounds/day? Aircraft?
What if we tried to sustain an army the size of what we currently maintain in Iraq? -- which has a deep water port, BTW.
Etc.
B
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One of my favorite statistics for the AN-225 transport
"The type's first flight in commercial service departed from
Stuttgart, Germany on 3 January 2002, and flew to
Thumrait, Oman with 216,000 prepared meals for American military personnel based in the region. This vast amount of ready meals was transported on some 375 pallets and weighed 187.5 tons."
Figure thats about 1/6 of what the daily requirements of food would be. Thats the largest transport in the world and theres only one right now. A C-5 couldn't carry anywhere near that amount.
If you can't bring the supplies in by rail or ship then you have to fly it in...which is very expensive and you would need pretty much every transport the US has in its inventory constantly flying.
So your pretty much screwed without forward bases and help in general.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Nickel_Grass