SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. – In a room dimly lit by television screens, dozens of Airmen tapped computers and worked on phones. Some were monitoring a high-priority mission to move a Russian Mi-17 helicopter from a base in Arizona to a destination near the Ukrainian border.
Earlier that day, a civilian colleague had checked a spreadsheet and found a C-17 transport plane in Washington state that was available to pick up the helicopter and begin a day trip.
It was up to the airmen to give orders to the aircrew, make sure the plane took off and landed on time, and deal with any problems along the way.
The C-17 would fly from McCord Air Force Base near Tacoma to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, where the helicopter was parked in a storage facility for retired military aircraft known as the “boneyard.”
“So it’s two and a half hours from McCord to Davis-Monthan,” said Col. Bob Buente, reviewing the first leg of the trip. “Then four hours to load, then they’ll take off around 7:30 tonight. Then five hours to Bangor, then we’ll put them to sleep because of the size of the next stage.’
From Bangor, Maine, the cargo flight — call sign: Reach 140 — will depart for Europe, the colonel said.
Since the war in Ukraine began four months ago, the Biden administration has provided billions of dollars in military aid to the Ukrainian government, including American-made machine guns, howitzers and artillery rocket launchers, as well as Russian-designed weapons that the country’s military still uses, such as Mi-17 helicopter.
The Pentagon has withdrawn many of the items from its own inventory. But the way they reach Ukraine often involves behind-the-scenes coordination by teams at a military base in Illinois, about 25 miles east of St. Louis.
There at Scott Air Force Base, where a half-dozen retired transport planes are on display just outside the main gate, several thousand logisticians from every branch of the armed forces work for the United States Transportation Command — or Transcom. In military parlance, it is a “combatant command” equal to the better-known units responsible for parts of the globe – such as the Central Command and the Indo-Pacific Command – and takes its orders directly from the Secretary of Defense.
Transcom has calculated the flow of every shipment of military aid from the United States to Ukraine, which began in August and intensified after the Russian invasion.
The process begins when the government in Kyiv sends a request to a call center at a US base in Stuttgart, Germany, where a coalition of more than 40 countries is coordinating aid. Some of the orders are carried out by a US partner or ally, while others are handled by the United States – routed through US European Command, also in Stuttgart, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who discusses them in weekly meetings with the service chiefs and combatant commanders.
If the desired items are available and the combatant commanders decide that providing them to Ukraine will not unduly harm their own military plans, General Milley makes a recommendation to Mr. Austin, who in turn makes a recommendation to President Biden. If the president signs, Transcom figures out how to move the aid to an airport or port near Ukraine.
The order to move the Russian helicopter went through the base in Illinois from Transcom headquarters to a one-story brick building that houses the 618th Airlift Operations Center, where red-glowing clocks showed the local time at major Air Force bases in California, Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Qatar and Germany.
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Col. Buente oversees day-to-day operations at the 618th Airlift Operations Center, where about 850 active-duty Airmen, reservists and civilians spend their days planning missions like the helicopter’s trip, he said. Making sure these plans are carried out falls to a smaller group – working in 60-person shifts, 24 hours a day, every day of the year – which follows the stream of missions posted on a constantly updated screen centered on the back wall through all the way to completion.
This is the same center that organized the mass evacuation of Americans and Afghans from Afghanistan’s capital in August. On the busiest day then, 21,000 passengers were flown out of Kabul airport, with planes taking off or landing every 90 minutes, officials said.
It was a busy time for Transcom, which on an average day not only plans and coordinates about 450 cargo flights, but also oversees about 20 cargo ships, along with a network of transcontinental railroads and more than a thousand trucks — all of which routinely carry war materiel .
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July 3, 2022, 6:47 am ET
The flights also transport humanitarian aid and other supplies when needed, including shipments of infant formula in May to ease shortages in the United States.
Commanding it all is Air Force Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost, who is only the second female officer to lead one of the Pentagon’s 11 combatant commands.
For aid deliveries to Ukraine, planning begins long before the White House announces a new aid package, she said.
“We can’t wait until the president signs or the secretary issues an order before we do the necessary planning,” Gen. Van Ovost said in an interview in her office, where a photo of Amelia Earhart hung on the wall. “We’re watching it unfold,” the general said of the aid discussions, “and creating plans that are ready.”
Mr. Biden authorized the first U.S. military equipment and weapons for Ukraine — a $60 million package — on August 27. At the time, it took about a month to get the items onto a plane after they were approved, according to Gen. Van Ovost, a test pilot who flew cargo planes.
The White House has announced 13 follow-up aid packages for Ukraine, and the planning process has advanced enough that it now takes less than a day from the president’s approval of the shipment to the first items being loaded onto the plane, she said. Three of the packages in the first 29 days of the war totaled $1.35 billion. As of Friday, the United States had provided $6.9 billion in military aid to Kyiv since the Russian invasion.
The Transcom Operations Center decides whether to send aid by cargo plane or by ship based on how quickly European Command needs it to arrive. Although military cargo planes like the C-17 offer the fastest delivery option, they carry the highest costs. About half of Transcom’s air traffic is handled by a fleet of contracted, commercially owned aircraft, including 747s, each of which can carry twice the weight of a C-17.
Whenever possible, however, military planners ship goods on cargo ships, a cheaper option.
“We activated two ships and used multiple ships of the line to deliver cargo bound for Ukraine,” said Scott Ross, a spokesman for the command. The ships and more than 220 flights have delivered just over 19,000 tons of military aid to Ukraine since August, he said.
On one of the large screens in Colonel Buente’s operations center, about a dozen missions were listed in order of importance. At the top were two “1A1” missions that supported some of the command’s most important clients: the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Directly below these missions was Reach 140, a C-17 flying to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Thousands of planes have baked in the sun there, including 13 Russian Mi-17 helicopters that the United States bought for Afghanistan before Kabul fell to the Taliban.
In recent months, 12 of the helicopters were sent to countries near Ukraine, returned to flying condition and handed over to Ukrainian pilots for the fight with Russia.
While the airmen tracked the C-17, a handful of soldiers and civilians in a small Army-run Transcom section oversaw a separate mission: four freight trains moving across the United States, as well as several cargo ships, some of which were owned by the Navy.
One of the Navy ships was heading from Norfolk, Va., to a military port in North Carolina, where it would be loaded with ammunition for M142 HIMARS rocket launchers long desired by the Ukrainian military. The rockets, packed in six-packs and loaded into 20-foot shipping containers, were also on their way to the port. Cranes would soon lift the metal boxes from tractor trailers and railcars, stack them aboard the ship and lock them in place for a voyage at sea that lasted about two weeks.
Most of the Pentagon’s military aid shipped to Ukraine goes to two German ports, one on the North Sea and the other on the Baltic Sea.
To prevent potential adversaries from closing off Ukraine’s military aid routes, Army planners can stage operations in any one of dozens of ports on both seas. Russian warships have largely shut down the most direct routes for supply missions – Ukrainian Black Sea ports.
At the 618th, where presidents and secretaries of defense can reassign aircraft instantly to emergencies around the world, a screen that normally displays a classified map of global threats to military air and sea supplies was blacked out for security reasons while a reporter was in the room.
And three of the television stations were set to broadcast cable news because, as Colonel Buente explained, “usually we end up responding to breaking news.”
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