Quote:
Originally Posted by pmulcahy11b
The Soviets must be getting pretty lean on subs by this point, and NATO and the other Western Nations getting pretty lean on cargo ships. How's the airlift situation doing by this time?
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NATO still has a healthy supply of lift available... it had planned its sealift fleet on having to move 6 divisions in two weeks. Due to the way things worked out, REFORGER was able to proceed unhindered, and the Guard divisions are coming on line so slowly as to not overwhelm the available fleet. The conversion to wartime economies mean that the overall demand for shipping for the adjusted NATO is almost exactly half of the peacetime level, 4281 ships vs 8543 in peacetime (extrapolated from
this document). The US has about 310 ready ships at the outbreak of war, plus all the new ships being delivered, and there are about 650 NATO ships available plus miscellaneous other allies (Saudi, Korean). The Soviets sink a lot, but they have a hard time identifying useful ships - convoys are harder targets and carry exclusively military cargo, but a lot of military cargo moves unescorted as well, and they physically cannot deliver enough torpedoes to sink the roughly 4000 extra ships NATO has available.
The Soviet sub fleet is pretty massive as well, although the losses accrue and are not really made up by anything useful... they keep dragging old Whiskey and Foxtrot boats out of reserve, but those boats are so loud that they are almost deathtraps. (Suicidal voyages certainly didn't stop WW II German sailors from venturing out in U-boats, and I don't expect the Soviets to do any less). There are a handful of new boats getting built - watch here! - but not anywhere near enough to make up for losses. As you can see, having to transit to rearm takes a lot of time and is a dangerous undertaking to get to a friendly port.
On the airlift side, the fleet is stretched. There are a lot of civil airliners available, as NATO air defenses are strong enough and the front line far enough east that they can fly into Dutch and western German airfields unhindered. In the Pacific the flights are longer, going via Hawaii to avoid the long transit along the Kamchatka Peninsula. The airliner fleet of NATO is large enough to transfer huge numbers of troops on a daily basis; again having an unopposed REFORGER was a godsend. On the military airlift side, like I said things are stretched. There is so much demand for oversize cargo that the fleet is going full speed, although as the sealift stream gets going steadily the airlift fleet is mostly employed for moving high priority cargo rather than deploying units. The airborne assaults are huge diversions, as there aren't enough C-130s in any theater for the massive lift needed, so C-17s and C-141s get diverted. MAC is reluctant to/refuses to release any C-5s into a hot DZ, or even a warm one!