Air base routes weapons to Ukraine
Transcom staff key in logistical aspect of US military aid
SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. — In a room dimly lit by television screens, dozens of airmen tapped away at computers and worked the phones. Some were keeping watch over a high-priority mission to move a Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter from a base in Arizona to a destination near Ukraine’s 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 daylong trip.
It was up to the airmen to give the plane’s crew its orders, make sure the plane took off and landed on time, and handle any problems along the way.
The C-17 would fly from McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma, Washington, to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, Arizona, where the helicopter was parked in a repository for retired military airplanes known as “the boneyard.”
“So it’s 2 ½ hours from McChord to Davis-Monthan,” said Col. Bob Buente, reviewing the first leg of the journey. “Then four hours to load. Then they’ll take off about 7:30 tonight. Then five hours to Bangor. Then we’ll put them to bed because of the size of the next leg.”
From Bangor, Maine, the cargo flight — call sign Reach 140 — would leave for Europe, the colonel said.
Since the war in Ukraine began four months ago, the Biden administration has contributed billions of dollars in military aid to the Ukrainian government, including U.S.-made machine guns, howitzers
and artillery rocket launchers, as well as Russian-designed weaponry that the country’s military still uses, like the Mi-17 helicopter.
The Pentagon has drawn many of the items from its own inventory. But how 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 each branch of the armed forces work at the U.S. Transportation Command, or Transcom. In military parlance, it is a “combatant command,” equal to betterknown units that are responsible for parts of the globe — like Central Command
and Indo-Pacific Command — and takes its orders directly from the secretary of defense.
Transcom has worked out the flow of every shipment of military aid from the United States to Ukraine, which began in August and kicked into high gear after the Russian invasion.
The process begins when the government in Kyiv, Ukraine, sends a request to a call center on a U.S. base in Stuttgart, Germany, where a coalition of more than 40 nations coordinates the aid. Some of the orders are filled by a U.S. partner or ally, and the rest are handled by the United States — routed through U.S. European Command, which is also in Stuttgart, to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who
discuss them in weekly meetings with the service chiefs and combatant commanders.
If the desired items are available and the combatant commanders decide that giving them to Ukraine will not unduly harm their own readiness, Milley makes a recommendation to Austin, who in turn makes a recommendation to President Joe Biden. If the president signs off, Transcom figures out how to move the aid to an airfield or port near Ukraine.
The order to move the Russian helicopter zipped across the base in Illinois from Transcom’s headquarters to a one-story building housing the 618th Air Operations Center, where red-lit clocks offered the local time at major military aviation bases worldwide.
Buente runs the day-today
operations at the 618th Air Operations Center, where about 850 activeduty airmen, reservists and civilians spend their days planning missions like the helicopter’s trip, he said. Making sure those plans are carried out falls to a smaller group — working in shifts of 60 people, 24 hours a day — that follows the stream of missions posted on a constantly updated screen centered on the back wall all the way to completion.
It is the same center that orchestrated the mass evacuation from Afghanistan’s capital in August. On the busiest day then, 21,000 passengers were flown out of the Kabul airport, with planes taking off or landing every 90 minutes, officials said.
On one of the large screens in Buente’s operations center, about a dozen missions were listed in order of importance. At the top were two “1A1” missions supporting some of the command’s most important customers: the president, vice president, the secretaries of state and defense as well as the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Immediately below those missions was Reach 140, the C-17 flying to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Thousands of aircraft have baked there in the sun, including 13 Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters the U.S. had bought for Afghanistan before Kabul fell to the Taliban.
In recent months, 12 of the helicopters were shipped to countries near Ukraine, returned to flying condition and handed over to Ukrainian pilots.