Ramrodding the three-day, around-the-clock operation to load the Yano and get it under way was Clark Chambers, a retired Army first sergeant who has been a civilian employee of MTMC for the past 15 years. During ship loading operations at Charleston, he is the point man for American power projection.

Chambers is the cargo operations chief for MTMC’s Charleston-based 841st Transportation Battalion, and he has more experience loading LMSRs than anyone else in the command. He and his team figured out how to load the first LMSR that came into service, and they have loaded 45 more LMSRs since.

That is why on the morning of Christmas Eve -- when it became apparent that the previous night’s contracted stevedore shifts had fallen behind the load projection, and it started to rain, threatening to slow down the process even more as the ramps got slick -- Chambers did not appear particularly ruffled. He expects little things to go haywire. He focuses on big things: getting everything safely aboard and delivering the all-important documentation (which another of the battalion’s sections feverishly worked on while loading progressed) so the ship’s master can sail on schedule to meet the expected delivery date set by the requesting command, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in this case.

Every phase of a unit move -- from unit preparation and rail or truck movement to the port to shiploading, sailing time, unloading and delivery -- is designed to meet the overall plan of the combatant commander. That is a primary MTMC warfighting mission.

The Yano is a multistory, floating parking garage with a one-lane road snaking through it. Moving from the Yano’s stern, where the main ramp is located, to the most distant parking space in the ship’s bow seven decks below requires a slow, six-tenths of a mile drive. A LSMR can accommodate around 1,300 military vehicles, depending on type, besides stacks of containers on its weather deck.

While the Yano was tied up at the pier, operations centers around the world were keenly interested in the loading progress.

"A lot of people always want to know when a ship will be loaded, an absolute time," Chambers said, steering a government minivan around a staging area to count the number of vehicles still in the yard.

"I can give an estimate, but the fact is that the exact time that every ship is loaded is when the last vehicle is aboard and chained down," he said. "The unit that owns this gear will need every piece of it where it’s going, and we don’t intend to leave any of it sitting on the pier. We’ll still meet the timetable."

Chambers and the rest of the operations section and members of other sections in the 841st Transportation Battalion exemplify the expertise, dedication and professionalism within MTMC, the Army component of the joint U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) and the service component responsible for surface transportation.

Receiving little attention and less fanfare, MTMC has moved American equipment to some of the most remote and rugged places in the world to conduct campaigns supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. If President Bush decides to extend operations to disarm Iraq (at this writing he had not), MTMC will be responsible for delivering the combat power required.

The other part of MTMC’s wartime mission is sustaining the forces it helps deploy, and it is the command currently supplying American troops in Afghanistan over long, austere lines of communications in a transportation effort that rivals the celebrated logistics operations of World War II.

To create a sustained supply system for Bagram air base in Afghanistan, for example, MTMC established the northern route, which begins at a port in Latvia and crosses 2,300 miles across the bleak Russian steppe by rail to reach Uzbekistan, where shipments are transferred to trucks for the final leg across some of the roughest roads in the world. Shipments from Germany join along the way. Afghanistan’s southern route connects Kandahar air base to a port in Pakistan by equally bone-jarring roads over mountains and across Afghanistan’s southern desert.

They are the most cost-effective and reliable supply routes that could be established under diplomatic agreements for the two main American bases in Afghanistan. After the initial operational phases, when all supplies and equipment were transported by air, MTMC’s land supply routes assumed the bulk-load, long-term sustainment mission for U.S. forces in Afghanistan from Air Mobility Command, the Air Force component of TRANSCOM.

"Even a bottle of water gets very expensive if you have to fly it," explained Navy Capt. Ed Horres, MTMC’s director of global distribution, based at the MTMC Operations Center, Fort Eustis, Va. He calls sustainment the pig in the python -- the huge lump moving through the system in the mid-phases of an operation. To move that lump into Afghanistan, MTMC had to be inventive.

"We had to open lines of communication and lines of supply in places where we did not necessarily want to put boots on the ground," Capt. Horres explained. "The magic bullet we always talk about -- outsourcing -- came into play. We thought we could outsource in peacetime but not in war, but this is different logistics for a different war. We are going to have to respond to all the bells, and we don’t know where the next bell might ring."

To maintain flexibility, MTMC depends on commercial carriers.

"It’s said that the Army can’t go to war without the Reserves; well, MTMC can’t go to war without its industry partners," Capt. Horres noted. He said the main job now is establishing a total asset visibility system once and for all.

In a nutshell: the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) is the military’s buyer, and MTMC provides the surface delivery system. In the past, the deliverer was not generally told what was in the box to be delivered, just where to take it. MTMC’s responsibility was to keep track of the box along the way and to get it there.

Customers -- the requesting units -- never saw the buyer or anyone associated with the civilian manufacturer that packed and shipped the goods. Customers, however, did have direct contact with the deliverer, MTMC. They expected MTMC to know where any given delivery was located, when it would arrive and exactly what was in every box on the way. MTMC, generally, could only shrug and say that it did not know; it was only told where to take it and when to get it there. MTMC was in the precarious position of being held responsible for a process that it did not own, a situation that had changed little from Operation Desert Shield/Operation Desert Storm.

During 1990 and 1991, the logistics system literally delivered a mountain of containers to Saudi Arabia, each of which had to be combed through to sort out what had arrived in it.

"It was a bad situation. We didn’t know what was where," Capt. Horres said. "And we found that when we went into Afghanistan last year, we were not much better off. In August, we started turning that around. A July 31 message from CENTCOM essentially said if you can’t give me data, I don’t want the stuff. We turned to business and said if you can’t tell us what is in a container, we are not going to tell a carrier to pick it up. Data has become just as important a factor as on-time delivery in the best-value contracting equation."

Business and military cooperation, coupled with a simplified system developed to automatically translate commercial data into a form that military tracking systems could understand, are the primary factors that are turning around total asset visibility problems. While it is important from a military logistics standpoint, total asset visibility also is important from the standpoint of broader modern business practices.

"The transportation pipeline has become the de facto warehouse," explained Brig. Gen. Barbara Doornick, MTMC’s deputy commander. "That is good as long as you know where everything is and how to interact with it along the way. The key to that is total asset visibility," she said.

The MTMC Operations Center oversees the vast surface transportation system from Fort Eustis with teams dedicated to interfacing with each of the U.S. joint combatant commands. MTMC Headquarters is located in Alexandria, Va. The split-command structure is commanded by Maj. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody from Alexandria with Brig. Gen. Doornick directing day-to-day operations at Fort Eustis.

"Our first priority is support to the warfighter, from deployment through sustainment," Brig. Gen. Doornick said, adding that MTMC’s overall mission load has increased by 50 percent since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. "The operational tempo here is intense because there is a lot riding on what we do or don’t do," she said.

MTMC is a large command in terms of responsibility, but a relatively small organization in terms of numbers, having only about 300 active duty military personnel assigned to it along with approximately 1,700 civilian employees. The bulk of its wartime strength resides in its U.S. Army Reserve units -- about 2,800 personnel.

One MTMC Reserve unit, the 257th Transportation Battalion, was mobilized for a year to provide enhanced security for the Army’s high-value or sensitive ammunition moves across the United States, such as Stinger missiles for example, which no one wants to fall into the wrong hands.

Half of a Reserve deployment support brigade belonging to MTMC was mobilized last fall to cope with the substantial increase in unit moves handled since Operation Enduring Freedom began.

Now, nearly all of MTMC’s Reserve units, especially those involved with port operations, have been alerted for possible mobilization, should the President order a full-scale military buildup to disarm Iraq.

MTMC is set to handle such a large contingency, having set the conditions to improve all deployments since Operation Desert Storm.

Lt. Col. Kent R. Selby, the 841st Transportation Battalion commander, said there has been a lot of work to build synergy since 1991.

"The Transportation Corps and Quartermaster Corps have successfully gotten the word to warfighters that preparation for deployment starts at the lowest level," he said. "I think there is a level of cooperation and understanding today that did not exist then."

He said that the loading of the Yano represented in microcosm the level of interservice and intraservice cooperation today.

The load itself came from 10 different installations across the country, for example, with 200 container trucks and seven trains carrying materiel. The Navy provided the ship through its Military Sealift Command, the Navy’s TRANSCOM component, along with land perimeter force protection for the mission. The Coast Guard provided force protection for the water approaches.

"We also work with International Longshoremen’s Association labor and our contract shipper management to make the operation run like a partnership," Col. Selby said. "Those people are patriots, and we all have the same goals. This team is a machine that does this all the time and does it well every time."

"I think we in MTMC are sort of like offensive linemen in football," Col. Selby observed. "You only hear about us if we get a holding call."

Back at the pier, Chambers recalled the situation during the first Persian Gulf deployment, when he was dispatched to the Savannah, Ga., port to deploy the 24th Infantry Division (Mechanized), which was then stationed at Fort Stewart.

"We loaded two ships at a time, and it was wild," he said. "Our mission was to get as many Bradleys and Abrams aboard as possible and not worry about anything else. We didn’t even bother maintaining unit integrity. We deployed so fast that the basic ammunition load wasn’t even strapped down. You could look in the back of a truck and find a loose box of grenades. One ship master asked which part of the load was dangerous, and I told him that everything was dangerous," he said.

"We worked 10 labor gangs per shift, and I worked for two and a half days straight to get the first ships out," he added. "We started the first ship on August 13, 1990, and on August 25 we finished loading the last of 10 ships in the initial burst."

Chambers and his team now have helped deploy the remaining elements of the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) from Forts Stewart and Benning, Ga., which the President ordered to Kuwait at the end of December, and they are working to deploy other units. The mission could not be in better hands.

As the last vehicles were secured aboard the Yano, he said, "Unless a unit just plain sends too much stuff to fit, if the equipment gets here, it is going on the ship."

IRRIS: THE ALL-AROUND INFORMATION SYSTEM
The Military Traffic Management Command’s Transportation Engineering Agency (TEA) occupies an ordinary space in a Norfolk, Va., industrial park -- sort of a storefront in a silicon strip mall -- where Army civilian engineers hammer out an extraordinary array of services and products to support the command’s surface transportation mission. Suffice it to say that its engineers put a lot of brainpower into helping the U.S. military move.

TEA’s current star product is an adaptation of a web-based computer information system that has expanded its purpose and usefulness well beyond the original intended vision and which could very well serve as the foundation or model for an overarching homeland defense information network if it is taken to the next level. It is that good, and it is that expandable.

The system still goes by the name intelligent road/ rail information server (IRRIS), although it has evolved to cover a lot more than the name would imply. It is the system that MTMC is using to make total asset visibility a reality by allowing users to track equipment and supplies from their departure point through delivery around the globe with a few computer mouse clicks.

Expandability and adaptability are the beauty of the IRRIS web-based design, according to its developers. IRRIS’ evolution into a global transportation system management tool would lead one to imagine a legion of programmers and computer systems engineers toiling away inside the TEA works, but it was done by two Army civilian employees, Paul Allred and Marc Barthello, with a little bit of seed money for contracted information services.

The IRRIS project started late in 2000 as a way to present a lot of transportation information in a user-friendly format. It is a geospatial system, which essentially means putting information on a map, which becomes clickable -- layer under layer -- with increasing features and details in a web-based format.

For example, if you want to know if a certain sized load on a trailer will fit under all the underpasses between point X and point Y, you can click to get that. Will all the bridges between those points support the load’s weight? Click. Are there any construction bottlenecks? Click. What about the weather? Click.

With the layers of available information growing almost daily as local, state and federal agencies tie into the IRRIS network, there is almost no limit to what can be presented. For instance, an authorized user can log onto IRRIS and in a couple of clicks be watching state department of transportation highway video cameras in Seattle or Washington, D.C. or anywhere the thousands of such cameras are installed to see how traffic is moving in a particular area.

IRRIS is a secure system that gives authorized users access, and it is compartmentalized and layered so someone can only go as far into the information pile as access allows. At a high enough level, a user can track national force protection issues such as key transportation infrastructure vulnerabilities, according to William J. Cooper, TEA’s director. Every high-value ammunition shipment can be tracked over IRRIS, for example, with hundreds of icons jumping onto a national map instantly. Clicking one of the icons can tell you everything about a particular shipment, down to the last time the driver took a coffee break. The range of IRRIS is truly amazing, and it has drawn the attention of many potential government clients.

MTMC is excited about IRRIS because it is the system that finally gives the command a capability to make in-transit visibility and total asset visibility a reality. Anybody who needs such information can get it in a flash. The tracking system started with the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility (AOR) for obvious priority reasons, and it will be expanded by unified command AOR until it becomes global.

The U.S. military has been talking about in-transit visibility and total asset visibility since the Gulf War. It took Allred and Barthello four months to make it a computer-enabled reality from the time their boss turned to them and said, "Make it happen."

That is why IRRIS has already won a cartload of prestigious awards over the past year.


MTMC FACTS
MTMC operations on an average day include:

• 6,550 individual shipments moving by truck, rail barge or pipeline.
• 426 shipments of arms, ammunition or explosives.
• 1,596 ocean containers in transit.
• 50 ongoing stevedore and related terminal services under contract.
• 25 operations occurring at 25 seaports around the world.
• 597 MTMC personnel -- civilian employees, reserve component and active duty military -- deployed to support operations.