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 day trip. It was up to the airman to give his orders to the aircrew, 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 to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base outside Tucson, where the helicopter was parked at a depot for decommissioned military aircraft known as “the boneyard.” “So it’s two and a half hours from McCord to Davis-Monthan,” said Col. Bob Buente, reviewing the first leg of the trip. “Then four hours to load, then they’ll take off at 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 depart 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 US machine guns, artillery shells and rocket launchers, as well as Russian-designed weapons for 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 get to 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 half a dozen retired transport planes are on display just outside the main gate, several thousand maintainers from every branch of the armed forces work for the United States Transportation Command — or Transcom. In military parlance, it is a “combatant command”, equal to better-known units responsible for parts of the globe – such as Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command – and takes its orders directly from the Secretary of Defence. Transcom has processed the flow of every military aid mission from the United States to Ukraine, which began in August and began operating after the Russian invasion. The process begins when the government in Kyiv sends a request to a call center at a US base in Stuttgart, Germany, where a coalition of more than 40 nations is coordinating aid. Some of the mandates are fulfilled by a U.S. partner or ally, and the rest are handled by the United States — through the U.S. European Command, also based in Stuttgart, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman 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 providing them to Ukraine would not unduly harm their own war plans, General Milley makes a recommendation to Mr. Austin, who in turn makes a recommendation to President Biden . If the president signs, Transcom figures out how to get the aid to an airport or port near Ukraine. The order to transport the Russian helicopter was zipped to the Illinois base from Transcom headquarters to a one-story brick building that houses the 618th Air Operations Center, where red clocks gave local time to major military air bases in California , Alaska, Hawaii, Japan, Qatar and Germany.
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Col. Buente directs day-to-day operations at the 618th Air Operations Center, where about 850 active-duty Airmen, reservists and civilians spend their days planning missions like the helicopter’s trip, he said. Ensuring these plans are carried out falls to a smaller team – working in 60-man shifts, 24 hours a day, every day of the year – which follows the flow of missions posted on a constantly updated screen centered on the back wall of all method of completion. It is the same center that orchestrated the mass evacuation of Americans and Afghans from the Afghan capital in August. On the busiest day then, 21,000 passengers were turned away from Kabul airport, with planes taking off or landing every 90 minutes, officials said. This has been a busy time for Transcom, which on average not only plans and coordinates about 450 cargo flights, but also oversees about 20 cargo ships, along with a network of transcontinental rail lines and more than a thousand trucks – all of which typically carry war material. UPDATED July 3, 2022, 6:47 am ET The flights also carry humanitarian aid and other supplies when needed, including shipments of infant formula in May to ease shortages in the United States. Commanding them all is Air Force Gen. Jacqueline D. Van Ovost, who is only the second female officer to lead one of the Pentagon’s 11 combatant commands. For aid shipments to Ukraine, planning begins long before the White House announces a new aid package, he said. “We can’t wait until the president signs or the secretary issues an order before we do the necessary planning,” Gen. Van Ovost said in an interview in her office, where a picture of Amelia Earhart hung on the wall. “We’re watching it unfold,” the general said of the aid discussions, “and we’re creating plans that are in place.” Mr. Biden approved the first US military equipment and weapons for Ukraine — a $60 million package — on August 27. , test pilot who flew cargo planes. The White House has announced 13 next aid packages for Ukraine, and the planning process is far enough along that it now takes less than a day for the president to approve a shipment for the first items to be loaded onto a plane, he said. Three of the packages in the first 29 days of the war totaled $1.35 billion. As of Friday, the United States has pledged $6.9 billion in military aid to Kyiv following Russia’s invasion. Transcom’s operations center decides whether to send aid by cargo plane or by ship, depending on how quickly European Command needs it to arrive. Although military cargo planes like the C-17 offer the fastest delivery option, they incur the highest costs. About half of Transcom’s air cargo is handled by a fleet of contracted, commercially owned aircraft, including 747s, each of which can carry twice the weight of a C-17 canister. Whenever possible, however, military planners ship goods on cargo ships, a less expensive option. “We activated two vessels and used multiple liner service vessels to deliver cargo bound for Ukraine,” said Scott Ross, a spokesman for the administration. The ships and more than 220 flights had delivered just over 19,000 tons of military aid to Ukraine since August, he said. On one of the large screens in Colonel Buente’s operations center, about a dozen missions were listed in order of importance. At the top were two “1A1” missions that supported some of the administration’s most important clients: the president, the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Immediately below these missions was Reach 140, the C-17 flying at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona. Thousands of aircraft have baked in the sun there, including 13 Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters that the United States had bought for Afghanistan before Kabul fell to the Taliban. In recent months, 12 of the helicopters were sent to countries near Ukraine, returned to flying condition and handed over to Ukrainian pilots for the match against Russia. As the airmen watched the C-17, a handful of soldiers and civilians in a small Transcom military unit watched a separate mission: four freight trains moving across the United States as well as several cargo ships, some of which belonged to the Navy. One of the Navy ships was headed from Norfolk, Va., to a military port in North Carolina, where it would be loaded with ammunition for M142 HIMARS rocket launchers long desired by the Ukrainian military. The rockets, packed in bundles of six and loaded into 20-foot containers, were also en route to the port. Cranes would soon lift the metal boxes off the tractors and railcars, stack them aboard the ship and lock them into place for a sea voyage that would take about two weeks. Most of the Pentagon military aid sent to Ukraine by ship goes to two German ports — one in the North Sea and the other in the Baltic. To prevent potential adversaries from closing off routes for Ukrainian military aid, military planners can launch operations at any of dozens of ports on the two seas. Russian warships have largely shut down the most direct routes for supply missions – Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea. At the 618th, where presidents and defense secretaries can redeploy planes on a heartbeat for emergencies around the world, a screen that normally displays a classified map of global threats to military air and sea missions dims for security reasons while a reporter was in the room. And three of the televisions were tuned to cable news because, as Colonel Buente explained, “we usually end up reacting to breaking news.”
