US Army Abrams tanks of the 2nd Brigade 69th Regiment 2nd Battalion are pictured at Mockava railway … [+]
AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. Army’s rail transportation system is a wreck, according to a recent U.S. government report.
The Army depends on railroads to move personnel and equipment, especially heavy vehicles like tanks. But the tracks connecting Army installations are in poor repair, and the Army lacks sufficient railroad crews to transport units to ports for deployment overseas during a crisis.
“Army inspectors characterized about half of the Army’s rail track as closed due to defects, and four of 60 installations had not met or were not scheduled to meet the 5-year ultrasonic inspection timeline standard set by the Army inspection program,” according to the report by the Government Accountability Office. “Although the Army has some quality assurance efforts, it has not established an overall quality assurance program to ensure that its track is inspected and that deficiencies are corrected according to existing protocols.”
Nor are there sufficient railroad crews. In 2015, the Army slashed its railroad personnel by 70 percent, in favor of relying on commercial rail carriers in the U.S., and railroads operated by foreign governments when American troops operate overseas. The Army’s rail units shrunk from four battalions to just one battalion – the 757th Expeditionary Rail Center (ERC).
The 757th ERC told GAO that the unit would “likely be unable to meet the simultaneous overseas and CONUS missions during a large-scale combat operation, but that they saw no other solution to the lack of sufficient, trained rail operating crews,” according to the report. The Army doesn’t even know how many rail crews it needs to transport its units in the event of a mobilization.
But recent history suggests that if the Army needs to move large numbers of troops, it will need a lot of trains. “Army officials have stated that during contingencies, approximately 67 percent of Army unit equipment moves by rail from its fort or base of origin to a shipping port,” GAO noted. “In 2003, for example, nearly 1 million tons of unit equipment moved by rail in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This is the rough equivalent of moving more than twice the total number of M1-series tanks currently in the Army inventory.”
In addition, “a 2020 simulation of deployment from a single fort in support of a large-scale combat operation demonstrated the need for more than 2,200 rail cars over a three-day period. More than 600 of those cars were required to move a single Armored Brigade Combat Team. This Army study also noted that such a movement would require a sufficient number of qualified rail operating crews to operate the trains in addition to well-maintained rail track over which the trains would travel.”
Military railroads seem an almost quaint concept today, like a scene in an old movie. But historically, railroads revolutionized warfare beginning in the mid-19th Century. For millennia, armies could march no faster than a human could walk. More importantly, the pre-locomotive era tied armies to short supply lines. Troops could either forage (a polite word for looting) for food in an area, as did Napoleon’s armies, and Union troops during Sherman’s March to the Sea in the American Civil War. The problem is that once the local food supply has been depleted, armies have to move to a new area or starve.
The safer alternative was to draw supplies from fixed depots, which sent supplies to the troops via oxen- or horse-drawn wagon. But that meant that armies couldn’t operate more than 40 or 50 miles from their depots, or the draft animals would eat all the food they were hauling. This led to a slow, ponderous kind of warfare where armies would move short distances and then pause to set up new depots.
However, the advent of railroads changed the pace and the span of warfare. Beginning with the American Civil War of 1861-1865, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, armies could move long distances without exhausting the troops, and remain in the same area without worrying about starvation. Military railways reached their epitome in 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War saw millions of men smoothly mobilized and then concentrated by rail. The internal combustion engine and truck transport seemed to eclipse railroads, but that was something of an illusion: lack of rail capacity was perhaps the biggest reason for the failure of Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
In a 21st century America crisscrossed by highways and whose population worships the automobile, the appeal of railroads has faded. But when it comes to moving tanks across a continent-sized nation like the United States, railroads are still the best option.
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