- WASHINGTON, DC -- Just over
five days or 120 hours after a major earthquake hit the area of Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, it is increasingly clear that the US approach to organizing the
delivery of emergency assistance and supplies is so ineffective that the
general directing the distribution of emergency aid needs to be fired without
further delay. The catastrophic blunder involved is the decision by the
US military in the person of Gen. Ken Keen to insist on routing all external
aid through a single substandard, inadequate, and partially destroyed landing
field, the Toussaint L'Ouverture airport.
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- This airport has a single runway, and room to park only
about half a dozen medium to long range aircraft. The result is that once
six aircraft are parked in the unloading area, all incoming traffic must
be waved off until one of the six planes has taken off again, as a colonel
on the ground explained in a press conference broadcast on C-SPAN radio
here this afternoon. The control tower, radar, and other facilities have
been destroyed by the earthquake. Even once cargo has been offloaded,
it has been tending to build up at the airport because the streets and
roads leading from the airport towards the main population concentrations
are blocked by collapsed buildings and other debris. The result is an
agonizing slowness in delivering vital supplies upon which the immediate
survival of up to 3 million Haitians now depends.
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- THE SINGLE AIRPORT AS BOTTLENECK
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- This single airport approach fulfills the textbook definitions
of a logistical bottleneck and logistical nightmare. It was a fatal mistake
to ever decide to make this single runway the only supply line for the
stricken populations around the Haitian capital. The officer who is said
to be running the US logistical effort on the ground is Lieutenant General
P.K. "Ken" Keen, second in command of the US Southern Command.
Interviewed today by Brit Hume on Fox News Sunday, General Keen stated:
" Well, we had a very good day yesterday, Brit. Paratroopers from
the 82nd Airborne division who have only arrived within the last day or
two delivered over 70,000 bottles of water and 130,000 rations." General
Keane was referring to Saturday, January 16, three days and 96 hours after
the earthquake.
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- This statement is comparable to the recent remark of
Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to the effect that, although an
airplane had almost been blown up aloft, "The system worked."
General Keen, like Secretary Napolitano, appears incapable of recognizing
defeat and failure when they are staring him in the face, and human lives
have already been lost as a result of his incompetence. Gen. Keen is well
on his way to becoming the new Brownie of the Haitian crisis, surpassing
in ineptitude the infamous Bush FEMA director who received the accolade
of "heckuva job, Brownie" at the height of the 2005 debacle.
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- To put General Keen's comment into perspective, let us
assume for the sake of argument that 3 million earthquake victims in the
area of the Haitian capital are now more or less totally dependent on foreign
deliveries for their near-term survival. To be reasonably fed under crisis
conditions, 3 million people would require 9 million meals per day. They
would also need something like 9 million liters of water. General Keen
boasts of having been able to deliver a tiny fraction of the required amount.
It is time for General Keen to be cashiered. His approach to delivering
aid is excessively militarized, and results in an oversized population
of US forces who consume supplies and, given the excruciating slowness
of a deliveries, are likely to become targets of popular rage. Is this
what General Keen wants? Is time for him to go.
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- To be fair General Keen, it is also clear that his background
has not suited him for his current critical responsibility. General Keen
comes from the Special Forces and the Joint Special Operations Command.
General Keen's background, in short, is that of an airborne commando.
This is the area of military life were logistics plays the smallest role.
What is obviously required for an emergency like the one now unfolding
in Haiti is an officer who is specialized in logistics, in what the Army
has traditionally called G-4, and preferably a graduate of the Army Quartermaster
School.
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- An army travels on its stomach, and the rescue operation
even more so, so it is time for the Special Forces "global war on
terror" types to clear out and be replaced by officers who know something
about supply. Logistics experts are never the most glamorous figures,
and especially not now when the enemy is assumed to be the chimera known
as "Al Qaeda." Both the Iraq and Afghanistan deployments of
the US forces display a fatal incompetence of logistical planning which
could still lead to terrible consequences for the occupiers of both countries.
Now in Haiti, the logistical failure moves to center stage.
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- General Keen seems to be determined to deliver vital
aid to the Haitian population using an eye dropper. Is he trying to promote
an insurrection for political purposes? When Japan was gripped by hunger
in 1945, General MacArthur wired Washington "Give me bread or give
me bullets," and quickly got bread. General Keen seems more interested
in bullets, and one wonders why. Given General Keane's extensive record
in Latin America, one wonders whether he has ever been associated with
the infamous US Army School of the Americas in Fort Benning Georgia, where
military officers are routinely taught that the populations of Latin America
are the enemy, with Haiti being no exception.
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- General Keen is lucky that he is not fighting a real
enemy on Haiti, because if he were the enemy commander might find a way
to destroy the single airport which is now the totality of the US supply
line, leaving General Keen's forces cut off and doomed. General Keane
seems to have forgotten the one thing he should have remembered from his
special forces training, which is that when units like his actually go
into action, they are supported by air drops.
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- IMMEDIATE WIDESPREAD AIR DROPS OF CRITICAL SUPPLIES THE
KEY
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- Effective generals know they need to rush to the scene
of operations for an indispensable coup d'oeil well before their leading
units arrive. Think of General MacArthur sizing up the situation in Korea
during the first desperate hours in July of 1950. Such reconnoitering,
or even the memory of a previous visit, would have shown that relying on
the airport alone was a recipe for disaster. Instead, the US should have
emphasized speedy air drops by parachute of pallets containing large quantities
of food, water, medical supplies, blankets, fuel, and tents, plus small
electrical generators and small tractors and earth moving equipment. The
drop zones for these deliveries should have been scouted and cleared of
any civilians by small numbers of airborne Rangers -- parachute infantry
-- coming in at dawn last Wednesday, about twelve hours after the quake.
Under the current Global Strike strategic doctrine, the US is supposed
to be able to destroy any point in the world within 24 hours. Surely they
could have dropped airborne scouts into the Haitian capital, which is not
far from Guantánamo and from Florida, within 12 hours after the
earthquake.
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- The goal of this operation would have been to saturate
the environment of Haitian capital with abundant supplies of food, water,
medical necessities, and related equipment. Security need not have absorbed
inordinate manpower at that point. The stricken population needed to be
invited to help themselves, carrying off as much as they could handle in
any reasonable proportion. They needed to be told that air drops would
henceforth be continuous, and that they would not want for anything. Looting
and stealing would have been obviated by convincing the people of the simple
fact that they were futile and pointless, since food, water, and other
supplies were abundant everywhere. With a little imagination, a dozen
drop zones could have been set up in parks, in athletic stadiums, on beaches,
and in the fields immediately outside the city. The inclusion of large
quantities of tents of different sizes would have given the stricken population
something constructive to do to help themselves. Instead of gunfights
over scarce food and water, instead of machetes and street barricades of
corpses, instead of riots, the Haitians could have peacefully busied themselves
in constructing tent cities for the short to medium run.
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- The best aircraft for these precision air drops in the
first wave on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in particular, would have
been Lockheed Hercules C-130 air transports. The Hercules C-130 is also
capable of landing on a bumpy field in little more than 1,000 feet, assuming
that it will take off empty. C-130s could have landed in fields immediately
outside the city that had just been cleared of any civilians by a few members
of the 82nd or 101st airborne divisions, and could have rolled large pallets
of emergency goods out of their cargo bay directly onto the ground. Civilians
could have picked up what they needed. Electrical generators mounted on
trucks could have driven from these landing strips directly to area hospitals,
accompanied by truck-mounted water purification equipment.
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- If the joint USTRANSCOM (the military airlift command)
and the United States Air Force Air Mobility Command do not have enough
C-130s, then these can be supplemented by identical aircraft brought in
from the European NATO states and from Japan. Major air forces all over
the world fly the C-130, as the Lockheed scandal some years ago reminds
us.
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- Another aircraft which could prove valuable is ironically
the the much-maligned V-22 Osprey, a propeller aircraft which can take
off and land vertically. If an Osprey can carry 20 infantry, it should
also be able to carry a ton or two of supplies, and it can land on fields
that are too small even for a C-130. With the help of of a small fleet
of Ospreys, distribution points could have been established, in virtually
every neighborhood of the Haitian capital, saving many lives and calming
the entire situation.
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- By channeling the vast majority of routine deliveries
of food, water, medical supplies, blankets, tents, and other basics directly
into Port-au-Prince and the other cities hit by the earthquake, the single
runway of the single airport could have been reserved for high value deliveries
like the French field hospital which was turned away in a blunder which
has deservedly become an international scandal and humiliation for the
United States. The airport would thus have been available for special
cargoes and above all for doctors, nurses, military field hospitals, heavy
water purification and earth-moving equipment, aid technicians, and emergency
workers with sniffer dogs, although some of these could also arrive inland
through the Ospreys. Traffic coming from international donors would have
a much better chance of being expedited through the airport if it did not
have to compete for space with large bulk deliveries of food and water.
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- If Wednesday January 13 was D-Day, when the effort should
have got going, by D+2 or D+3, US aircraft carriers, helicopter carriers,
and other warships proceeding at flank speed would have arrived in Haitian
waters, making it possible to begin large-scale deliveries of bulk emergency
supplies by helicopter into even less accessible corners of the stricken
region. This would be the hour of the Chinooks and especially the Soviet-made
Halos capable of carrying a 20-ton payload, which the US has some experience
in renting. It appears that the US Coast Guard, which gave such a good
account of itself in the midst of the Katrina disaster, was the one effective
organization which began helicopter deliveries very early in the crisis,
without that obsessive concern for force protection which seems to have
been the main preoccupation of the Army Special Forces-JSOC "GWOT"
types.
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- If the port remained inoperable by D+2 or D+3, it would
be time to identify suitable beaches for the offloading of supplies by
amphibious landing craft operating from vessels offshore. Otherwise, a
makeshift Mulberry harbor could be constructed for offloading freighters.
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- GET THE IMF OUT OF HAITI ONCE AND FOR ALL
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- US television commentators and politicians are fond of
asking why Haiti is so poor. Some of them are embracing a crackpot theory
of the late Samuel Huntington according to which Haiti has a dysfunctional
culture, and the poverty there is the fault of the people. We beg to differ.
The United States has occupied Haiti for several decades at different
times and has a special responsibility for the welfare of this country.
The most acute problem of Haiti right now is represented by the fact that
especially since 1994, Haiti has been crushed under the iron heel of the
International Monetary Fund and World Bank by virtue of the ferocious conditionalities
which these international lending institutions have imposed.
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- These conditionalities include the usual dismal catalogue
of IMF shock therapy: deregulation, privatization, union busting, the destruction
of the state sector, the wrecking of any social safety net, the abolition
of labor legislation, downward pressure on the standard of living, free
trade, tax advantages for predatory foreign investors, and the looting
of any pension funds or unemployment insurance -- the litany of reactionary
"free market" barbarism in all of its inhuman fury.
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- Americans may be interested to know that the poorest
country in the hemisphere carries a debt burden in the neighborhood of
1.5 billion US dollars, most of it owed to the Inter-American Development
Bank, itself a creature of the United States. As of September 2009, this
desperately poor country was struggling to meet the benchmarks imposed
by the IMF and World Bank to qualify for their cruel and deceptive "Heavily
Indebted Poor Countries" program, which promises minimal debt forgiveness
in exchange for an even more acute humiliation of national sovereignty
and an even more savage and draconian application of conditionalities.
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- CANCEL HAITI'S $1.5 BILLION FOREIGN DEBT
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- If Obama is capable of any human compassion whatsoever,
he will interrupt his nonstop blathering to declare a unilateral, total,
and irrevocable cancellation of all financial debt owed by Haiti to any
institutions controlled or influenced by the United States. All countries
of the London Club and Paris Club should be informed that the United States
expects them to imitate this immediate and unconditional debt cancellation
in favor of Haiti. Haiti will undoubtedly default anyway, so they would
simply be bowing to the inevitable. All these countries should be informed
in unmistakable terms that failure to cancel the Haitian external financial
debt will be considered an unfriendly act by the United States. The State
Department knows very well how to do this -- they strong-armed most of
the world into canceling the debts owed by Iraq after Bush's lunatic invasion
of that country in 2003.
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- The corollary of the debt cancellation is an announcement
that all IMF and World Bank conditionalities, appropriate technology limitations,
and so forth are lifted and will never be reimposed. Officials of the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development
Bank, and other organs of the supernational bankers' faction should be
treated as looters and driven out of Haiti.
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- Haiti requires a Marshall Plan in the form of large-scale
foreign deliveries of modern capital goods for economic modernization --
not of cash, given the desperate circumstances prevail there. Agriculture,
fisheries, and related activities need capital investments to develop.
Haiti needs to urgently upgrade its labor force to allow the production
of high-value exports in industrial settings. Infrastructure needs to
be developed for health services, education, energy production, transportation,
and sanitation. The number of new housing units that will need to be built
runs into the millions. Idle Detroit's factories could be quickly retooled
to produce modular housing for Haiti, and tens of thousands of unemployed
auto workers rehired as part of this effort. The United States should
participate in the reconstruction of Haiti by forcing the Federal Reserve
to free up an initial tranche of $100 billion in the form of 0% Federal
credit for US exports to Haiti via the US Export-Import Bank. The $100
billion line of credit already promised by Obama to the IMF should be commandeered
and diverted to Haiti for this purpose. Nations with industrial capacity
should be strongly encouraged to join in this effort on the basis of parity
and equality.
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- During the 1940s, logistics was known to be the decisive
strong suit of the US military. It was logistical depth which allowed
such achievements as the Normandy landings and the Berlin airlift of 1948-1949.
(West Berlin, it should be noted, had three airports which functioned
throughout that crisis, so airdrops were not necessary in that case.) Since
then, US military logistics has declined, as van Creveld and others
have pointed out. All of the protagonists of those great 1940s operations
are long gone and the logistical apparatus of the US military has atrophied
to the point we see today. The rebuilding of the logistical capacity of
the US military to be able to deal effectively with emergencies like the
one in Haiti today must proceed pari passu with urgent efforts to rebuild
the infrastructure and production base of the entire US economy in the
present context of world economic depression.
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