Foreign Shipping
The other item in the Atlantic Monthly that I really wanted to point out was a two-page spread on American military logistics, which passes on three particularly interesting facts:
Today the combined weight of the daily food and water, ammunition, gear, and fuel necessary to equip a U.S. soldier has reached about 400 pounds
That's up from roughly 60 pounds during WWII. This burden has far surpassed our military's ability to have self-sufficient logistics. The story points to the U.S. military's increasing reliance on non-military sources:
P.W. Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on military privitization, estimates that one of every fifty American deployed in the Gulf War was a privately employed civilian... For a second war in Iraq, Singer estimates, the ratio could reach 1:8.
There is nothing inherently wrong with privatization, but in this case I think there is:
A recent report by the General Accounting Office noted that fully 43 percent of major U.S. military cargo deployed overseas in 2001 was carried on foreign-flagged ships. Some of the ships carried advanced weapons, such as Black Hawk and Apache helicopters, Bradley fighting vehicles, and Stinger-missile launchers.
This war effort would have been a lot more difficult if a few such ships mysteriously never made it to port. Looks like yet another security vulnerability that is begging to be exploited.
UPDATE: Here's a link to the GAO report, which contains this anecdote:
An example of the dangers of such loss of control occurred in summer 2000. While in the North Atlantic, the captain of a commercial vessel carrying Canadian military equipment and three Canadian Forces personnel from the Balkans refused to proceed to the ship’s destination port in Canada after a dispute over payment to the vessel’s owner. The vessel, GTS Katie, was owned by a U.S. company but registered in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and crewed by non-U.S. citizens. Alarmed at the loss of control over its equipment, including sensitive items, the Canadian government was compelled to board the Katie with a contingent of Canadian Forces naval personnel from a nearby warship. The vessel was then brought safely into a Canadian port.
The report gives no further breakdown on WHAT nation most of these ships and their crews belong to, and as PG suggests in the comments, if it's a country like Denmark, we might not have as much to worry about. But what if it's, say, Belgium? Or Germany? Or perhaps the problem will be less nefarious than I suggest, more along the lines of the financial dispute illustrated by this anecdote. As the GAO report suggests, the potential problems are widespread.
