Moving U.S. Forces: Options for Strategic Mobility
The Administration's plan for new strategic mobility forces--C-17 airlift planes; large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off ships; and prepositioned sets of equipment--could cost more than $54 bil-lion (in 1997 dollars) between 1998 and 2020. Those forces would allow the United States to transport troops and equipment quickly around the world. In its new study Moving U.S.
Summary
The Administration's plan for new strategic mobility forces--C-17 airlift planes; large, medium-speed roll-on/roll-off ships; and prepositioned sets of equipment--could cost more than $54 bil-lion (in 1997 dollars) between 1998 and 2020. Those forces would allow the United States to transport troops and equipment quickly around the world. In its new study Moving U.S. Forces: Options for Strategic Mobility, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examines the Administration's plan and compares its costs and capabilities with those of five alternative approaches to modernizing DoD's strategic lift forces.
Each mode of lift has its own combination of strengths and weaknesses. Airlift allows the United States to move forces quickly anywhere in the world, but its great expense makes it impractical for delivering more than a small portion of cargo in a large-scale deployment. For a major conflict, sealift ships would deliver the vast majority of cargo, but they would need at least three weeks to travel from the United States to regions as far away as the Persian Gulf. The Department of Defense (DoD) can combine the speed of airlift with the volume of cargo provided by sealift by prepositioning sets of equipment abroad. But with prepositioning, military commanders would not have as much flexibility to rearrange the order in which they deployed units, and political factors could constrain how and when DoD used the equipment.
Although the Administration is sizing its forces to fight and win two major regional conflicts, other types of military operations also affect what DoD needs for strategic mobility. The Administration's investment plan includes enough C-17s--the Air Force's newest cargo plane--so that DoD could conduct a variety of other military missions, such as air-dropping large numbers of paratroopers after intercontinental flights. Such operations may require larger numbers of C-17s than DoD would need for two major regional conflicts. Thus, the Congress may want to balance the cost of larger numbers of C-17s against the likelihood that the United States will need to perform such missions.