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Old 11-21-2008, 08:01 PM
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CENTCOM Transformed and Iran Rebuilt


As the Soviet withdrawal was occurring and in light of America's ejection from Saudi Arabia, CENTCOM was undergoing a massive reorganization to absorb the reinforcements and to adapt to the new strategic situation and mission. Each branch handled the reorganization differently.

Navy and Marine Corps units of III MEF were disbanded and used to bring the equivalent units of I MEF up to strength. In that transition, small units were, to the maximum extent possible, kept intact to preserve the trust, teamwork and esprit de corps that had been developed over the years of operations in Korea. Those small units (fire teams, squads and platoons) were then fed into existing units in I MEF.

Likewise, Army units from I and IX Corps were disbanded and used to bring XVIII Airborne Corps up to strength. By the time the reorganization was finished, divisions in XVIII Airborne Corps ranged in strength from 4,600 to 7,250 soldiers, and they received massively more support as 1st Corps Support Command and 3rd Army's 22nd Theater Army Area Command (TAACOM) had absorbed over 6,000 reinforcing soldiers and hundreds of civilian augmentees.

The Navy assigned ships to early-war style task groups and organized excess personnel into shoreside support units, providing everything from technical expertise (ranging from welding, shoreside construction and machine shop operations to aircraft ordnance and electronics maintenance and repair) to reconstruction support (labor, truck transport and coastal transportation). In this role, the SeeBee's First Naval Construction Regiment was augmented by the remnants of the 31st Naval Construction Regiment, arriving from Korea and brought up to strength with personnel assigned from damaged or sunken ships or disbanded organizations. In addition, CINCNAVCENT organized the civilian merchant ships into a pool from which sailing orders were drawn to support CENTCOM and the United States worldwide. Quickly the mission of transporting personnel and supplies fell to civilian merchant ships, which required much smaller crews and less fuel than Navy transport or support ships. Naval signal and guard parties were formed to serve aboard all CENTCOM controlled merchantmen, and convoys were formed for vessels sailing outside the Persian Gulf and Northern Arabian Sea.

The 9th Air Force absorbed the personnel and equipment that had arrived from Europe, Turkey, the Philippines and Korea into its existing structure. Simultaneously, CVW-10 was released from 9th Air Force control and returned to Navy control as it integrated into CVW-20 aboard Stennis. During the years of war the wing and squadron structures of 9th Air Force had been depleted of excess personnel as aircraft counts decreased; now those structures were built back up using many of the reinforcing airmen. The support units in Iran, however, were not forgotten, as the 915th Construction Engineer Squadron was reinforced in order to prepare airfields in Iran to host units displaced from Saudi Arabia, and as the 619th Security Group's area of responsibility expanded to include areas recently vacated by the advancing IPA. The 53rd Mobile Aerial Port Squadron was tripled in size as it adapted for its new task - to open an air bridge back to the United States through Diego Garcia, Darwin, Guam, Wake Island and Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest. With all this activity, however, the air operations tempo decreased dramatically for many reasons. First, except for engagements against marauders, pirates and deserters, there was little demand for sorties. Second, commands were busy integrating new arrivals into their structure (it was decided not to reverse the wartime personnel transfers to support units due to the importance of the duties they were performing in Iran). Third, maintenance personnel were overwhelmed by relative masses of aircraft and spare parts from around the world - it would take months just to organize the parts, assess the condition of the aircraft that were received from other theaters (the computerized records lost since lost or destroyed) and bring them back to operational condition (or consign them to the cannibalization heap). 9th Air Force headquarters determined that launching more than a minimal number of sorties during this time would place an excessive burden on its structure (and, soldiers in Iran joked, endanger the weekly Friday night barbeques enjoyed by the Air Force throughout the war).

Operationally, the Army and Marine Corps units ashore started carrying out a vastly different mission than their previous one of closing with and destroying the enemy. One third of troops, on a rotating basis, were assigned to conduct security operations, hunting down brigands, deserters and marauders and patrolling the countryside. One major civil support task was identifying unexploded ordnance and minefields, so that civilians could travel through the countryside safely. (As part of the withdrawal, Soviet commanders were required to turn over any information they had regarding minefields emplaced by either side). The remaining two thirds of troops were assigned more direct reconstruction missions, repairing roads and bridges, building schools, clinics and industrial facilities. The power plants dismantled in Kunsan and Subic Bay were brought on line in Bushehr and Bandar-e-Khomeini to provide reconstruction power. Sewage and water treatment plants were rehabilitated and brought into operation. In many of these operations, advisers from the SeeBee battalions of the 1st and 31st Regiments, who were engaged in similar reconstruction tasks, provided vital guidance.

During these reconstruction tasks maintenance units of all branches of service played a very special role. As any sort of machinery was being serviced, the maintenance units would use their machine shops (augmented by tools removed during Operation Omega) to make three copies of each part. One copy would be assembled somewhere in Iran, to assist in the recovery, and the other two copies would be placed in storage for shipment to the United States. (When CENTCOM's Judge Advocate General became aware of the scheme in a staff briefing he objected vigorously to the willful violation of intellectual property, whereupon his Chief of Staff escorted him out before other members of the CENTCOM staff attacked him.) Using this technique recovery in both Iran and the U.S. was sped up considerably. (The technique had its limits, of course. It did not help to replicate inoperable equipment, and materials supply and quality control was spotty. And upon to the U.S., it was discovered that some of the equipment was incompatible with North American standards and required adjustment if it was to be brought into operation at all.)

Throughout the war, CENTCOM's logistic support organization, the 22nd TAACOM, had gradually built up an independent support and supply organization from rear areas of the CENTCOM area of operations. This was a natural result of the always tenuous support from the continental United States, as CENTCOM was forced to procure the food, fuel and other vital supplies from wherever possible. In general, fuel was the least problematic to provide, given the massive amount of refining and production capacity in the Persian Gulf region. Nonetheless, CENTCOM also controlled refineries in Aden, South Yemen and Mombassa, Kenya, which provided refined products and were safe from Soviet air raids and were never targeted by Soviet ballistic missiles. CENTCOM's food was mostly provided locally from farms in Iran south of the Zagros Mountains, but additional food came from farms under contract to CENTCOM in Tanzania and Kenya. As the war ran down, 22nd TAACOM had the luxury of procuring food more familiar to American soldiers, so that Operation Omega evacuees were uniformly welcomed to CENTCOM with a hot dog, hamburger and cold beer cookout upon debarkation in Iran. The entrepreneurial metalworkers of East Africa were engaged to provide spare parts for vehicles and weapons systems, while uniforms were sown from African cotton in sweatshops in Dar-es-Salaam and Mombassa. These products were transported to the fighting troops by the dhows that had sailed for centuries between East Africa, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. 5th Fleet maintained anti-piracy patrols in the western Indian Ocean, and the refineries in Aden and Mombassa (and surround areas) were protected by the 29th Infantry Division (Light) and 173rd Airborne Brigade, respectively. Ammunition and electronic spares were more difficult to obtain, however. Small arms ammunition was provided by local workshops that reloaded spent cartridges. For large caliber and artillery ammunition, CENTCOM had to trade with Israel and South Africa and, as the war went on, it received unmarked ammunition from France. CENTCOM paid for these services in the currency of the early 21st Century - oil, both crude and refined.

As time went on, a key aspect of the reconstruction of Iran (and the U.S.) was CENTCOM's alliance with Israel. Israel and France were exceptional in that they both avoided direct involvement in the war and, while receiving what would in pre-war times be considered catastrophic damage, emerged from the war with their governments, militaries and economies intact. Israel, due to its small size and limited natural resources, was much less able to survive on its own than France, and hence struck an alliance with the U.S. in the Middle East. In early 1999, Israel provided troops to CENTCOM in exchange for a trickle of oil from the Persian Gulf region. With the end of the war, this partnership broadened in scope, so that CENTCOM provided much of the raw materials Israel needed in exchange for Israeli manufactured goods. 22nd TAACOM and 5th Fleet worked to obtain raw materials from East Africa and South Africa, which traded not only ammunition but also strategic minerals for oil, and transport them to Israel. Oil from CENTCOM kept the lights on in Israeli high-tech labs, factories and the steel mill at Ashdod, while Israeli Military Industries and the Israeli high-tech industry were able to craft a trickle of spare parts for fire control systems, radars and communications equipment as those systems went offline in the rest of the world. The output of the Israeli electronics industry leapt in the late summer of 2000, when the DIA recovered the plans and prototype for a Polish-developed system to bring EMP-damaged computers and electronics back online. U.S. military personnel assigned to the DIA's Krakow station finished the mission started by the 20th Special Forces Group, and shortly thereafter Shabak, an Israeli intelligence agency, obtained copies of the plans and rushed them home. CENTCOM was aware of the development and insisted that American forces in the Persian Gulf, as brothers-in-arms of the soldiers who recovered the plans, benefit from Israel's use of the plans. Israeli computer engineers quickly reengineered the Reset Device, as it was called, into a unit that was about the size of a hardcover book. The device was configured using a functioning computer (which itself could have a Reset Device) to replace a damaged or destroyed computer chip, in a process which required about four hours of work by a skilled electronics technician, programmer or engineer. Once configured, the Reset Device replaced the damaged chip's function in whatever device it was attached to. The use of the Reset Device in this manner was key to the reconstruction effort, since it avoided the need to make a custom replacement of every one of thousands of different chips used in infrastructure, industry, communications network and military equipment.

Fuelling the reconstruction was the Iranian oilfields. While heavily damaged by the war, production in early 2001 was approximately 10 percent of the 1996 level - 370,000 barrels a day, two thirds of which was concentrated in the southwestern Khuzestan province north of Bandar-e-Khomeini or offshore in the Persian Gulf. The large refinery in Adaban, destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 and only partially operational in 1996, was once again destroyed. The refinery in Shiraz, damaged in the 1997 fighting, had been repaired by the end of the war and refined 30,000 barrels a day. (The facility did not operate at full capacity due to the disappearance of many of the sophisticated catalytic chemicals required to operate fully, the loss of many of the highly skilled refinery staff due to war, hunger and disease and the limited electrical power available to operate the plant). I MEF was furiously working on reopening part of the Bandar Abbas refinery, open for just a few weeks before it was captured by the Soviet 103rd Guards Airborne Division and flattened in the weeks of fighting that followed. The major source in Iran of refined petroleum for CENTCOM was the Lavan Island refinery, which produced 20,000 barrels a day and survived the war unharmed. The refinery was defended by the guided missile frigate USS Samuel Eliot Morison, damaged by a Soviet ASM in 1997 and ran aground on the west coast of the island. It has remained there, its missile battery having protected the island from numerous air raids and its gun deterring the waterborne marauders that prey upon the waters of the Persian Gulf, while its engineering department has become adept at operation of the refinery along with the pipeline and offshore production equipment that provide it with crude oil. The remainder of Iran's refineries (which even before the war were incapable of producing enough gasoline to meet Iran's domestic needs) were captured by Soviet forces and in most cases damaged or destroyed in the fighting. CENTCOM set a recovery goal of 20,000 barrels a day of refining capacity each year, split between bringing the Adaban and Bandar Abbas refineries back online, increasing the output of the Lavan and Shiraz refineries, and establishing small "teapot" refineries (ones that basically just distill crude oil and turn out rough diesel fuel, benzene and kerosene) which could support divisions in the field and be disassembled and brought back to the U.S. Likewise, increasing crude oil production was given a high priority.

Additional refinery capacity came from American allies in the GCC, from the remnants of Saudi Arabia's massive Jubail, Yanbu and Dharan refinery complexes, which were damaged or destroyed by Soviet missile strikes and bomb raids, and from CENTCOM-controlled refineries in Mombassa, Kenya and Aden, Yemen, which were each capable of refining 75,000 barrels per day. Following the ejection of CENTCOM from Saudi Arabia, Ambassador Thayer encouraged all American citizens working for Saudi Aramco to leave the company (ELF of France was more than happy to provide replacement technicians to the Saudis) and work for CENTCOM. Almost all of the American experts did so, further boosting both production and refining capacity in the American zone of Iran. However, increasing production was difficult, as essential oilfield equipment had been damaged or destroyed during the conflict and could not be replaced.

With that, fuel consumption for U.S. forces in the Gulf averaged less than 18,000 barrels per day (plus another 2,750 per day if 9th Air Force was operational with two sorties a day and whatever fuel was used by the Navy, typically another 1,500 barrels a day). The excess refinery production was used for essential civilian recovery or stockpiled for CENTCOM essential missions. Storage facilities, established ashore in Iran during the war, were located at Bandar Abbas, Bandar-e-Khomeini, Lavan Island and Bushehr, while an emergency reserve of diesel and JP-4 (one million barrels in total) was maintained aboard a tanker anchored at Diego Garcia.

In the reconstruction effort a limiting factor was the availability of materials and electronics. CENTCOM machinists (and East African metalworkers) could replicate almost any metal part if they had appropriate base stock. There were no functioning metal forging facilities in Iran, and the output of Israel's steel mill in Ashdod was limited by the supply of fuel. (A Soviet IRBM destroyed the steel mill in Haifa in late 1997 in the sole nuclear attack on Israel - the rapid destruction of the Soviet metalworking complex in Rustavi, and the port and refinery of Batumi, both in Georgia, by nuclear-tipped Jericho II missiles ended the Soviet-Israeli nuclear exchange.) If production was to be sped up, or steel of the requisite strength or size was unavailable from Israel, CENTCOM was forced to bargain with the French, who overall preferred a weak United States, especially after the defeat and withdrawal of Transcaucasian Front. The overall effect, however, was to severely limit the rate of recovery as CENTCOM faced a spiral of needs - increasing oil production required steel from Israel, which needed to be transported aboard the ships (which required steel parts and oil) that also brought the iron ore from South Africa (which was paid for in oil), all of which were worked by scarce skilled people who needed food, clean water, health care and protection, also all paid for (indirectly) in oil. The continuing wear and tear on machinery, vehicles and equipment as time went on added to this burden. However, with the end of the fighting in Iran, CENTCOM was gradually able to pull out of the downward spiral and produce a small surplus.
CENTCOM Transformed and Iran Rebuilt


As the Soviet withdrawal was occurring and in light of America's ejection from Saudi Arabia, CENTCOM was undergoing a massive reorganization to absorb the reinforcements and to adapt to the new strategic situation and mission. Each branch handled the reorganization differently.

Navy and Marine Corps units of III MEF were disbanded and used to bring the equivalent units of I MEF up to strength. In that transition, small units were, to the maximum extent possible, kept intact to preserve the trust, teamwork and esprit de corps that had been developed over the years of operations in Korea. Those small units (fire teams, squads and platoons) were then fed into existing units in I MEF.

Likewise, Army units from I and IX Corps were disbanded and used to bring XVIII Airborne Corps up to strength. By the time the reorganization was finished, divisions in XVIII Airborne Corps ranged in strength from 4,600 to 7,250 soldiers, and they received massively more support as 1st Corps Support Command and 3rd Army's 22nd Theater Army Area Command (TAACOM) had absorbed over 6,000 reinforcing soldiers and hundreds of civilian augmentees.

The Navy assigned ships to early-war style task groups and organized excess personnel into shoreside support units, providing everything from technical expertise (ranging from welding, shoreside construction and machine shop operations to aircraft ordnance and electronics maintenance and repair) to reconstruction support (labor, truck transport and coastal transportation). In this role, the SeeBee's First Naval Construction Regiment was augmented by the remnants of the 31st Naval Construction Regiment, arriving from Korea and brought up to strength with personnel assigned from damaged or sunken ships or disbanded organizations. In addition, CINCNAVCENT organized the civilian merchant ships into a pool from which sailing orders were drawn to support CENTCOM and the United States worldwide. Quickly the mission of transporting personnel and supplies fell to civilian merchant ships, which required much smaller crews and less fuel than Navy transport or support ships. Naval signal and guard parties were formed to serve aboard all CENTCOM controlled merchantmen, and convoys were formed for vessels sailing outside the Persian Gulf and Northern Arabian Sea.

The 9th Air Force absorbed the personnel and equipment that had arrived from Europe, Turkey, the Philippines and Korea into its existing structure. Simultaneously, CVW-10 was released from 9th Air Force control and returned to Navy control as it integrated into CVW-20 aboard Stennis. During the years of war the wing and squadron structures of 9th Air Force had been depleted of excess personnel as aircraft counts decreased; now those structures were built back up using many of the reinforcing airmen. The support units in Iran, however, were not forgotten, as the 915th Construction Engineer Squadron was reinforced in order to prepare airfields in Iran to host units displaced from Saudi Arabia, and as the 619th Security Group's area of responsibility expanded to include areas recently vacated by the advancing IPA. The 53rd Mobile Aerial Port Squadron was tripled in size as it adapted for its new task - to open an air bridge back to the United States through Diego Garcia, Darwin, Guam, Wake Island and Hawaii to the Pacific Northwest. With all this activity, however, the air operations tempo decreased dramatically for many reasons. First, except for engagements against marauders, pirates and deserters, there was little demand for sorties. Second, commands were busy integrating new arrivals into their structure (it was decided not to reverse the wartime personnel transfers to support units due to the importance of the duties they were performing in Iran). Third, maintenance personnel were overwhelmed by relative masses of aircraft and spare parts from around the world - it would take months just to organize the parts, assess the condition of the aircraft that were received from other theaters (the computerized records lost since lost or destroyed) and bring them back to operational condition (or consign them to the cannibalization heap). 9th Air Force headquarters determined that launching more than a minimal number of sorties during this time would place an excessive burden on its structure (and, soldiers in Iran joked, endanger the weekly Friday night barbeques enjoyed by the Air Force throughout the war).

Operationally, the Army and Marine Corps units ashore started carrying out a vastly different mission than their previous one of closing with and destroying the enemy. One third of troops, on a rotating basis, were assigned to conduct security operations, hunting down brigands, deserters and marauders and patrolling the countryside. One major civil support task was identifying unexploded ordnance and minefields, so that civilians could travel through the countryside safely. (As part of the withdrawal, Soviet commanders were required to turn over any information they had regarding minefields emplaced by either side). The remaining two thirds of troops were assigned more direct reconstruction missions, repairing roads and bridges, building schools, clinics and industrial facilities. The power plants dismantled in Kunsan and Subic Bay were brought on line in Bushehr and Bandar-e-Khomeini to provide reconstruction power. Sewage and water treatment plants were rehabilitated and brought into operation. In many of these operations, advisers from the SeeBee battalions of the 1st and 31st Regiments, who were engaged in similar reconstruction tasks, provided vital guidance.

During these reconstruction tasks maintenance units of all branches of service played a very special role. As any sort of machinery was being serviced, the maintenance units would use their machine shops (augmented by tools removed during Operation Omega) to make three copies of each part. One copy would be assembled somewhere in Iran, to assist in the recovery, and the other two copies would be placed in storage for shipment to the United States. (When CENTCOM's Judge Advocate General became aware of the scheme in a staff briefing he objected vigorously to the willful violation of intellectual property, whereupon his Chief of Staff escorted him out before other members of the CENTCOM staff attacked him.) Using this technique recovery in both Iran and the U.S. was sped up considerably. (The technique had its limits, of course. It did not help to replicate inoperable equipment, and materials supply and quality control was spotty. And upon to the U.S., it was discovered that some of the equipment was incompatible with North American standards and required adjustment if it was to be brought into operation at all.)

Throughout the war, CENTCOM's logistic support organization, the 22nd TAACOM, had gradually built up an independent support and supply organization from rear areas of the CENTCOM area of operations. This was a natural result of the always tenuous support from the continental United States, as CENTCOM was forced to procure the food, fuel and other vital supplies from wherever possible. In general, fuel was the least problematic to provide, given the massive amount of refining and production capacity in the Persian Gulf region. Nonetheless, CENTCOM also controlled refineries in Aden, South Yemen and Mombassa, Kenya, which provided refined products and were safe from Soviet air raids and were never targeted by Soviet ballistic missiles. CENTCOM's food was mostly provided locally from farms in Iran south of the Zagros Mountains, but additional food came from farms under contract to CENTCOM in Tanzania and Kenya. As the war ran down, 22nd TAACOM had the luxury of procuring food more familiar to American soldiers, so that Operation Omega evacuees were uniformly welcomed to CENTCOM with a hot dog, hamburger and cold beer cookout upon debarkation in Iran. The entrepreneurial metalworkers of East Africa were engaged to provide spare parts for vehicles and weapons systems, while uniforms were sown from African cotton in sweatshops in Dar-es-Salaam and Mombassa. These products were transported to the fighting troops by the dhows that had sailed for centuries between East Africa, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. 5th Fleet maintained anti-piracy patrols in the western Indian Ocean, and the refineries in Aden and Mombassa (and surround areas) were protected by the 29th Infantry Division (Light) and 173rd Airborne Brigade, respectively. Ammunition and electronic spares were more difficult to obtain, however. Small arms ammunition was provided by local workshops that reloaded spent cartridges. For large caliber and artillery ammunition, CENTCOM had to trade with Israel and South Africa and, as the war went on, it received unmarked ammunition from France. CENTCOM paid for these services in the currency of the early 21st Century - oil, both crude and refined.

As time went on, a key aspect of the reconstruction of Iran (and the U.S.) was CENTCOM's alliance with Israel. Israel and France were exceptional in that they both avoided direct involvement in the war and, while receiving what would in pre-war times be considered catastrophic damage, emerged from the war with their governments, militaries and economies intact. Israel, due to its small size and limited natural resources, was much less able to survive on its own than France, and hence struck an alliance with the U.S. in the Middle East. In early 1999, Israel provided troops to CENTCOM in exchange for a trickle of oil from the Persian Gulf region. With the end of the war, this partnership broadened in scope, so that CENTCOM provided much of the raw materials Israel needed in exchange for Israeli manufactured goods. 22nd TAACOM and 5th Fleet worked to obtain raw materials from East Africa and South Africa, which traded not only ammunition but also strategic minerals for oil, and transport them to Israel. Oil from CENTCOM kept the lights on in Israeli high-tech labs, factories and the steel mill at Ashdod, while Israeli Military Industries and the Israeli high-tech industry were able to craft a trickle of spare parts for fire control systems, radars and communications equipment as those systems went offline in the rest of the world. The output of the Israeli electronics industry leapt in the late summer of 2000, when the DIA recovered the plans and prototype for a Polish-developed system to bring EMP-damaged computers and electronics back online. U.S. military personnel assigned to the DIA's Krakow station finished the mission started by the 20th Special Forces Group, and shortly thereafter Shabak, an Israeli intelligence agency, obtained copies of the plans and rushed them home. CENTCOM was aware of the development and insisted that American forces in the Persian Gulf, as brothers-in-arms of the soldiers who recovered the plans, benefit from Israel's use of the plans. Israeli computer engineers quickly reengineered the Reset Device, as it was called, into a unit that was about the size of a hardcover book. The device was configured using a functioning computer (which itself could have a Reset Device) to replace a damaged or destroyed computer chip, in a process which required about four hours of work by a skilled electronics technician, programmer or engineer. Once configured, the Reset Device replaced the damaged chip's function in whatever device it was attached to. The use of the Reset Device in this manner was key to the reconstruction effort, since it avoided the need to make a custom replacement of every one of thousands of different chips used in infrastructure, industry, communications network and military equipment.

Fuelling the reconstruction was the Iranian oilfields. While heavily damaged by the war, production in early 2001 was approximately 10 percent of the 1996 level - 370,000 barrels a day, two thirds of which was concentrated in the southwestern Khuzestan province north of Bandar-e-Khomeini or offshore in the Persian Gulf. The large refinery in Adaban, destroyed in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988 and only partially operational in 1996, was once again destroyed. The refinery in Shiraz, damaged in the 1997 fighting, had been repaired by the end of the war and refined 30,000 barrels a day. (The facility did not operate at full capacity due to the disappearance of many of the sophisticated catalytic chemicals required to operate fully, the loss of many of the highly skilled refinery staff due to war, hunger and disease and the limited electrical power available to operate the plant). I MEF was furiously working on reopening part of the Bandar Abbas refinery, open for just a few weeks before it was captured by the Soviet 103rd Guards Airborne Division and flattened in the weeks of fighting that followed. The major source in Iran of refined petroleum for CENTCOM was the Lavan Island refinery, which produced 20,000 barrels a day and survived the war unharmed. The refinery was defended by the guided missile frigate USS Samuel Eliot Morison, damaged by a Soviet ASM in 1997 and ran aground on the west coast of the island. It has remained there, its missile battery having protected the island from numerous air raids and its gun deterring the waterborne marauders that prey upon the waters of the Persian Gulf, while its engineering department has become adept at operation of the refinery along with the pipeline and offshore production equipment that provide it with crude oil. The remainder of Iran's refineries (which even before the war were incapable of producing enough gasoline to meet Iran's domestic needs) were captured by Soviet forces and in most cases damaged or destroyed in the fighting. CENTCOM set a recovery goal of 20,000 barrels a day of refining capacity each year, split between bringing the Adaban and Bandar Abbas refineries back online, increasing the output of the Lavan and Shiraz refineries, and establishing small "teapot" refineries (ones that basically just distill crude oil and turn out rough diesel fuel, benzene and kerosene) which could support divisions in the field and be disassembled and brought back to the U.S. Likewise, increasing crude oil production was given a high priority.

Additional refinery capacity came from American allies in the GCC, from the remnants of Saudi Arabia's massive Jubail, Yanbu and Dharan refinery complexes, which were damaged or destroyed by Soviet missile strikes and bomb raids, and from CENTCOM-controlled refineries in Mombassa, Kenya and Aden, Yemen, which were each capable of refining 75,000 barrels per day. Following the ejection of CENTCOM from Saudi Arabia, Ambassador Thayer encouraged all American citizens working for Saudi Aramco to leave the company (ELF of France was more than happy to provide replacement technicians to the Saudis) and work for CENTCOM. Almost all of the American experts did so, further boosting both production and refining capacity in the American zone of Iran. However, increasing production was difficult, as essential oilfield equipment had been damaged or destroyed during the conflict and could not be replaced.

With that, fuel consumption for U.S. forces in the Gulf averaged less than 18,000 barrels per day (plus another 2,750 per day if 9th Air Force was operational with two sorties a day and whatever fuel was used by the Navy, typically another 1,500 barrels a day). The excess refinery production was used for essential civilian recovery or stockpiled for CENTCOM essential missions. Storage facilities, established ashore in Iran during the war, were located at Bandar Abbas, Bandar-e-Khomeini, Lavan Island and Bushehr, while an emergency reserve of diesel and JP-4 (one million barrels in total) was maintained aboard a tanker anchored at Diego Garcia.

In the reconstruction effort a limiting factor was the availability of materials and electronics. CENTCOM machinists (and East African metalworkers) could replicate almost any metal part if they had appropriate base stock. There were no functioning metal forging facilities in Iran, and the output of Israel's steel mill in Ashdod was limited by the supply of fuel. (A Soviet IRBM destroyed the steel mill in Haifa in late 1997 in the sole nuclear attack on Israel - the rapid destruction of the Soviet metalworking complex in Rustavi, and the port and refinery of Batumi, both in Georgia, by nuclear-tipped Jericho II missiles ended the Soviet-Israeli nuclear exchange.) If production was to be sped up, or steel of the requisite strength or size was unavailable from Israel, CENTCOM was forced to bargain with the French, who overall preferred a weak United States, especially after the defeat and withdrawal of Transcaucasian Front. The overall effect, however, was to severely limit the rate of recovery as CENTCOM faced a spiral of needs - increasing oil production required steel from Israel, which needed to be transported aboard the ships (which required steel parts and oil) that also brought the iron ore from South Africa (which was paid for in oil), all of which were worked by scarce skilled people who needed food, clean water, health care and protection, also all paid for (indirectly) in oil. The continuing wear and tear on machinery, vehicles and equipment as time went on added to this burden. However, with the end of the fighting in Iran, CENTCOM was gradually able to pull out of the downward spiral and produce a small surplus.
__________________
I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...

Last edited by kato13; 03-13-2010 at 09:06 AM.
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