By Marina Malenic
The U.S. military’s participation in the international relief effort in Haiti has not stretched thin the military supply chain or otherwise undermined ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s top logistician said on Tuesday.
“I am not concerned that what we’re doing today we cannot handle,” Vice Adm. Alan Thompson, director of the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), told reporters at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington.
“We have a lot of capabilities and capacities in the agency that are very scalable and can be leveraged to do even more,” Thompson added.
DLA is expected to deliver some 14 million meals to survivors of the Jan. 12 earthquake that struck the Caribbean nation, according to Thompson. He estimated the cost of that food aid at $100 million.
“The most urgent issue is related to the emergency feeding of the population of Haiti,” he said.
Headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Va., DLA is the Pentagon’s main logistics combat support agency. It provides the military services and several civilian U.S. agencies with items such as construction materials and equipment, food, fuel, medical supplies and spare parts all over the world.
Thompson said that a recent upgrade of his agency’s information technology infrastructure and related software has helped the agency to increase its capacity for planning deliveries without a commensurate increase in its work force.
“That backbone has allowed us to scale remarkably quickly without increasing staffing,” Thompson said.
Asked how soon the U.S. military will begin scaling back its involvement with the Haiti effort, the admiral said many senior military leaders have estimated that their assistance would be needed for another three to six months until other organizations can completely take over the mission.
“My sense would be that probably in the three-to-six-month time period would be when there would be efforts to try to transition some of the support,” he said.
According to the Defense Department, some 15,000 U.S. military personnel have been involved in the effort, with just under 5,000 of those troops currently on the ground in Haiti.
“There’s certainly some inherent capabilities that the U.S. armed forces have that others don’t,” Thompson added. “So I think those are being leveraged. But generally, that’s not the best answer for the longest term.”