Return to Sender

Getting 66,000 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan over the next 22 months is the easy part. Colonel Andrew Rohling of the 173rd Airborne Brigade knows all about the hard part. In July 2012, he and his paratroopers arrived at Forward Operating Base Shank, the third largest U.S. military installation in Afghanistan, to find a sea of 20-ft.-long (6 m) shipping containers. They were stacked behind the gym, arrayed in dirt yards and lined up by the hundreds along roadways. Rohling ordered a census and came up with about 8,000–a figure that outnumbered the troops on base by nearly 2,000.

Inside the containers were aging ammunition and equipment that had been reported lost, along with hundreds of toilet seats and 30 broken treadmills. It took Rohling and his troops six months to ship out 3,000 containers. But as fast as they could get rid of them, new ones rolled in to be sorted and sent home. It is all part of a retrograde, the military term for the dismantling of everything the U.S. took to Afghanistan to fight the war. The list ranges from aircraft and weapons systems to computers and satellites to blimps that suspend security cameras high in the air. There are more than 50,000 military vehicles alone. Then there is what commanders call “stuff”: cables, repair parts, building materials and, yes, junk, sitting in tens of thousands of those containers. Most of it has to leave the country, and most of it will return to the U.S., somehow, in less than two years. It could cost as much as $5.7 billion.

The great retrograde is taking place even as the U.S. continues combat operations. Commanders thus have to strike a balance between giving units what they need to fight even as they determine what matériel to move in order to stay on the schedule set up by the Pentagon’s logisticians. Often those out in the field are reluctant to give up their stockpiles. “If we’re knee-deep in combat operations,” says Colonel Douglas McBride, commander of the Centcom Matériel Recovery Element (CMRE), which assists troops in the field with the repatriation, “the natural tendency is to hold on to matériel … just in case.” Says Rohling: “The challenge with the retrograde is, How do you ever start?”

Reversing the flow isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. “Everything in Afghanistan,” says Rohling, “is designed to get you stuff.” For the past 11 years, logisticians have focused on pushing equipment to remote bases where much of the fighting has taken place. All over the country, the U.S. military air-dropped any supplies that were needed. This included everything from large vehicle parts parachuted out of airplanes to “speedballs”–body bags filled with water and ammunition–tossed out of helicopters to troops under fire. As units rotated into and out of Afghanistan with no end date for the war, there was little incentive to get rid of equipment.

“The mentality that this can go on forever is exactly what has bred this big mess we’re sitting in with all this equipment,” says Major Adam Lackey, executive officer of the 173rd. “Why are we retrograding? It’s not just to get out of Afghanistan. It’s so that we can recoup some of the taxpayer dollars we’ve dumped into here–take this stuff and use it somewhere else.”

The stuff moves from smaller bases to larger ones for sorting to determine what makes financial sense to send home, what can be thrown away, what must be destroyed and what can be given to the Afghans (who will receive some matériel but cannot possibly absorb all the U.S. equipment). At FOB Shank, troops from the CMRE separate bins full of batteries, piles of tires and collections of rakes and snow shovels, along with broom handles, folders and binders. Afghans have been contracted to drive the trucks to Bagram airfield, the largest U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, for $5,000 per load. By sending only what needs to go, the CMRE team saves money, but more important, it cuts down on unnecessary convoys on dangerous roads.

Thousands of pieces of equipment arrive at Bagram every day. To process the flow, the CMRE runs a “retrosort” yard where civilian contractors work in shifts 24 hours a day classifying the matériel to decide what will be issued to units that remain in the country, what will be destroyed and what will be shipped home. The smaller pieces of equipment fill up white 4-by-4-ft. (122 by 122 cm) “kicker boxes,” which cost about $1,200 each to ship to the U.S. Each box can hold as much as $200,000 worth of equipment. Eight months ago, the CMRE was processing the equivalent of 250 shipping containers a month; now it averages close to 300 a week.

Armored vehicles are handled by a different unit. On the other side of Bagram, the 401st Army Field Support Brigade deals with equipment such as armored vehicles, radio sets, weapon mounts and repair kits. Many troops drive to Bagram straight from the field, and as a result, their transports are filthy and stuffed with ammunition. The 401st cleans the vehicles and checks for ammo four times, combing through the cracks and crevices with long metal tools and lipstick cameras. If live ammunition is detected at a port, it could shut down the entire facility.

There are three main routes out of Afghanistan: by road south into Pakistan to the port of Karachi; more expensively, by air to seaports in the Gulf region; and on convoys north into Central Asia. With the Pakistani route often complicated by politics and the Hindu Kush blocked with snow, taking to the air has become the main choice in the winter. On average, a plane takes off or lands at Bagram every minute and a half–nearly 900 such movements per day. Though most of the equipment is carried by civilian transport companies, the Port Dogs of the 455th Expeditionary Aerial Port Squadron play a huge role: on an average day, they move 1,300 troops and nearly 600 tons of cargo. The airmen of the 455th work 12-hour shifts, six days a week during their six-month tours. “We know we have until December 2014,” says Lieut. Colonel Luther King, commander of the 455th, “but every day, every week and every month that passes where we aren’t increasing that volume puts more of a potential strain on the logistics system.”

Afghanistan is called a logistician’s nightmare for many reasons, including landlocked geography, mountainous terrain, a stubborn enemy and an entrenched bureaucracy. Add to that mountains of equipment amassed over a decade and it might seem like an impossible mission. “The numbers look intimidating, but we’re a big organization,” says Brigadier Felix Gedney, a British exchange officer serving as deputy commanding general for the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. “It’s in the art of the possible that it’s achievable.” In the great retrograde, the task is enormous, the conditions are formidable, and the only standard for success is whether the mountains of equipment disappear. The clock is ticking, and the U.S. military has less than 22 months in America’s longest war to execute its final mission.