Right now, the Department of Defense is finishing the Worldwide Intratheater Mobility Study to determine airlift and other mobility needs in typical combat theaters. More troops will move more often in a war, and more equipment will have to be airlifted to support them than before. The Army, with its new AirLand Battle doctrine, will need more airlift than ever before to support its new lightweight infantry divisions in combat. The requirements for this mission are not clear-cut.
#MAGIC NUMBER MACHINE MAC#
In addition, MAC has the mission of providing intratheater airlift within a theater of operations. The sixty-six MTM/D goal is for intertheater airlift, also called long-range or strategic airlift, between the US and overseas theater locations. It will continue to drop as C-5Bs and C-17s come into the inventory, General Ryan said. But this shortfall is down from 1984, when it was 33.6 MTM/D, and from 1983, when it was 37.3 MTM/D. The airlift requirement is a fiscally attainable goal.īy 1986, the study predicted, MAC would have a shortfall of twenty MTM/D today, there is a shortfall of about thirty MTM/D. The CMMS produced the sixty-six MTM/D requirement after examining possible scenarios that included Soviet invasions of Iran or Saudi Arabia, a Warsaw Pact attack on NATO, and a combination of a conflict in Southwest Asia followed by a Warsaw Pact attack. As the conflict continues, troop replacements and certain materiel will continue to go into the battle area on aircraft. In any conflict, the bulk of supplies for US forces will travel by ship, but important equipment needed to support them in the early days of the fighting can only be provided by air. “With capability improvements in recent years and enhancements like the C-5B and future procurement of the C-17, we will attain it before the end of the century.” Ryan, Jr., MAC Commander in Chief, shortly before his October 1 retirement. That is the goal-66,000,000 ton-miles per day (MTM/D) of cargo airlifted to support US forces in combat-established in a Congressionally Mandated Mobility Study (CMMS) carried out by DOD in 1981. In a fiscally constrained world, sixty-six is Military Airlift Command’s magic number.
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