Kalos, you may not be getting a lot of bites on this one because a) the Omega angle indeed has been considered in great detail by others and b) it's a sore spot on this forum still, I think. The DC Group did some extensive work on Operation Omega, and the reception of this work led to the largest blow-out in quite some time.
There are a few factors to consider before you completely dismiss Operation Omega, some of which you have mentioned.
1) Not everyone was supposed to go straight home. The RDF Sourcebook allows for Europe-based characters to get to the Gulf as a result of Operation Omega. How many were expected to go to the Gulf is a legitimate question.
2) Many troops were expected to leave the service. Personally, I think any who would trade a meal ticket for the uncertainties of post-Exchange America is out of his mind, but I'm not in the shoes of any of the troops returning from Europe.
3) Maintaining logistical support is a different matter than moving people once. The Marines and the Airborne forces face this problem without a nuclear exchange to gum up the works. Getting bodies to a locale requires far less effort than keeping those bodies supplied with all the necessities, even when those necessities are neatly stacked at the applicable rail head, runway, or pier. The inverse of this truism is that whereas MilGov in late 2000 may be unable to maintain a reliable distribution of supplies to its East Coast and Gulf Coast cantonments, moving people once requires far less than reliably delivering food, fuel, ammunition, etc.
4) Mindset matters. If MilGov is determined to go ahead with Omega, torpedoes be damned, then the orders are going to be issued. More than one campaign in the modern world has been conducted with terse instructions to the logisticians to "make it work." It's possible that SACLANT told Colorado Springs that they didn't have enough food in Norfolk for fifty thousand Omega troops, only to be told that the operation was going ahead anyway. The Joint Chiefs may have decided, with cold logic, that if moving fifty thousand Americans from Europe resulted in a few thousand casualties en route to the ports, a few thousand reinforcements for CENTCOM, ten thousand replacements for CONUS, and losses to mustering out, desertion, and starvation for the rest, then CONUS would be ten thousand troops stronger than before Omega started. It's not pretty, but then we do devote ourselves to a game in which half the global population is dead and most of the rest scratching for a living.
Webstral
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