The US military’s drawdown in Iraq and buildup in Afghanistan is the biggest movement of troops and equipment since World War II, a top general said on Friday.
“This is the largest operation, that we’ve been able to determine, since the buildup for World War II,” said Lieutenant-General William Webster, who oversees the effort as head of the Third Army.
Webster described a mammoth logistical task in moving 30,000 troops, more than 5,000 vehicles and tonnes of supplies to Afghanistan, while pulling out equipment and tens of thousands of forces from Iraq — all by September.
About 2.8 million pieces of equipment are being withdrawn from Iraq as part of a gradual US draw-down underway, and the army has to decide what items can be shifted to Afghanistan, shipped back to the US or left behind in Iraq, Webster said.
“We began, actually, last June moving equipment out of Iraq, and we’re sorting it out here in Kuwait,” he said by video link from a US base there.
“Some of it goes into Afghanistan; some of it goes back to the army to be reset back in the depots and then returned to our soldiers who are training back in” the US, he said.
The combined draw-down in Iraq and surge in Afghanistan has been dubbed “Nickel II,” the general said.
The codename plays off the Third Army’s role in World War II, when General Patton ordered a dramatic turnabout to attack the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. Patton called his operation “Nickel.”
“So when we looked at that operation historically and the size of it, we realized that we were many times greater than that and over a much longer duration,” he said.
While troops and weaponry are transported to Afghanistan by air, tonnes of supplies are ferried over land and sea, either through Pakistan’s port at Karachi and over the Khyber Pass or via Central Asian roads and rail lines into northern Afghanistan.
In other developments, a soldier with NATO’s International Security Assistance Force was killed in an explosion in volatile southern Afghanistan, the alliance said yesterday.
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