Relief Effort a Huge Task for Military

The massive humanitarian relief operation that President Clinton has ordered for the Central African country of Rwanda is presenting the military with one of its most daunting logistic challenges in recent memory, Pentagon officials said Friday.

The sheer physical task of moving thousands of tons of desperately needed food, medicine and other supplies goes beyond anything American forces faced in Somalia or Saudi Arabia. To get aid to landlocked Rwanda, U.S. troops must deal with clogged port facilities and inadequate storage areas on the African coast, then manage a 1,200-mile trip inland across three or four countries--often over narrow, unpaved roads.

What’s more, security is uncertain. Besides the danger of snipers, U.S. troops might confront demands by local soldiers for payoffs in return for permission to pass unchallenged. And the rapidly spreading cholera outbreak threatens the rescuers as well as Rwandans.

To top it all off, the relief operation must be carried out at breakneck speed, both to quell the cholera epidemic and get the refugees home before late August to save Rwanda’s crops, which are now ready for harvest. If this year’s crops are lost, officials warn, the ill-starred country’s hunger problem will grow drastically.

“This relief effort is the most difficult and complex the world has faced in decades,” Clinton told reporters in a White House briefing Friday. “This is our mission. We must continue it until it is accomplished.”

Indeed, some strategists fear the venture could temporarily sap so much of the military’s logistic capability that the Pentagon might have to abandon the Rwandan effort if the United States were drawn into a military action elsewhere in the next few weeks.

“There’s a real question about how you get out (of the Rwandan operation) if there should be another in Haiti or Korea,” a senior Army official acknowledged Friday. “The ships would just have to change course.”

And if Congress does not provide the extra $320 million that Clinton requested Friday, the Army, at least, will have to cut back on some of its training activities, Army officials said. Without a new appropriation, the Army would have to use its operating funds to pay for the relief program.

Pentagon logistics officers have come up with a series of improvised solutions to help them overcome some of the problems they face:

* Dozens of truck convoys will make the 40-hour trip from the Kenyan seaport of Mombasa to the Rwandan capital of Kigali in 10- or 12-hour stages, changing drivers every few hundred miles--”almost like the Pony Express,” one Army logistics officer said. Hundreds of trucks will be involved.

* Port masters will conserve precious dock facilities by unloading only that part of each ship’s cargo that is needed immediately, leaving the transports to anchor in the harbor until there is room for more.

* The military is contracting out some jobs--such as burying the thousands of dead and setting up water purification facilities to help break the cholera epidemic--to private civilian firms, such as Brown & Root Inc., the giant Houston-based construction company. Military bulldozers also will help.

* Building up the region’s airfields has been the military’s first priority. The airfields at Goma, Zaire, and Kigali are relatively primitive and lack air-traffic-control equipment needed for massive airlift operations. Cargo-handling and storage facilities are almost nonexistent. On Friday, Clinton ordered U.S. troops to improve the airport facilities at Kigali.

The U.S. relief operation actually began about a week ago. The United States is flying C-5A and C-141 cargo planes loaded with humanitarian supplies into airports at Entebbe, Uganda, and Goma, in what has turned into a 24-hour-a-day operation.

Five large military ships laden with food, medicine and equipment are on their way to Mombasa and could begin arriving as early as this weekend, Army logistics planners said.

Because of the potential hazards, the truck convoys going into Rwanda will travel at only 35 m.p.h. and no night driving will be permitted. Besides the normal pitfalls--narrow dirt roads, mud and steep hills--the area is largely thick jungle, with no support services.

Army officials said that the convoy operation is likely to be the biggest--and most challenging--since the 1950-53 Korean War. Truck transportation in the Persian Gulf War was relatively simple. Seaports were close to staging areas and airlift capacity was huge.

Officials said Friday that their first few days’ work has brought some progress. Until U.S. troops moved in, Goma’s tiny landing strip could accommodate no more than 10 flights a day, many of them smaller planes. Today, it is handling more than 20 such flights--including several giant C-5s.

The Pentagon said that expanding the airport facilities at Kigali will double the number of flights that can land in the region, establishing an airlift network stretching from Entebbe to Goma and Kigali. The Goma airstrip already is “saturated.”

Even so, Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that the airlift facilities still will be too small to meet the mammoth demands of the refugee problem.

U.S. military planners said the relief effort may be impeded somewhat by the fact that the United States does not have full operational control of the seaport and airport facilities and may have to bow to U.N. schedulers in deciding when and how to land supplies.

That is partly because the Administration is refusing to take formal charge of the operation, as the United Nations initially had hoped.

But U.N. officials had little choice but to turn to Washington. The logistic problems in the Rwandan relief venture were so huge that only the U.S. military had the wherewithal to meet them. “There’s no one else around anymore,” one official said.