CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait — Soldiers heading home from war – if they have to go through Kuwait — won’t have to worry about crowded tents, hour-long chow lines or no mail.

Tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines last winter and spring experienced “the Surge” — the name Army logisticians gave to the unprecedented handoff between the first and second waves of troops to serve in Iraq.

Now, as the first soldiers in the third wave of Operation Iraqi Freedom convoy north from Kuwait, the military officials expect this massive troop rotation to go much more smoothly.

“I have a lot more confidence in the plan this year than I did last year,” said Lt. Col. Jeff Carra, chief of plans for deployment for the Combined Forces Land Component Command, which supervised that rotation.

“The camps will be full, but not for as long.”

Carra, 44, is an Army reservist and logistician with the 377th Theater Support Command. Carra, sometimes called the “bed-down czar” of Kuwait, said CFLCC has adjusted this year based upon hard lessons from the troubles of last winter and spring.

Among the changes:

Unit rotations have been stretched over seven months instead of four.Key movement-support units, such as mayor cells and transportation companies, will rotate before fighting forces instead of at the same time so they are available when needed most.More vehicles and equipment will be left in the theater and handed off from unit to unit, saving time on washing, packing and unpacking.Troops not needed for washing and packing gear will go straight home instead of waiting in Kuwait.Seat-of-the-pants planning combined with unexpected catastrophes bedeviled CFLCC during the Surge, a time when 250,000 troops passed through Kuwait on their way to or from the Iraqi theater. It was the biggest troop movement since the end of World War II and the biggest troop swap in history.

In retrospect, Carra grades his unit’s handling of the Surge as a C- or D+. He expects CFLCC to earn a solid B during the coming rotation because the command is smarter and better organized.

“We had problems [last winter]; we staggered through them,” he said in a candid interview last week. “Despite [our] best efforts, it didn’t go well.”

The sheer immensity of the Surge is hard to comprehend. Troops from seven divisions had to be flown in and out of the theater at the same time as their personal gear, vehicles and more than 750,000 tons of cargo. They needed buses to carry the troops and trucks to carry their stuff.

The movements of 123 ships had to be coordinated with those of 3,076 aircraft and 2,295 trucks. Between Jan. 5 and April 14, CFLCC ran 23,488 convoys, washed 40,000 vehicles, pumped 68 million gallons of fuel, issued 428 million spare parts, and served more than 25 million hot meals.

All of this while fighting an enemy in the field.

“We knew it was going to be ugly, but we didn’t know what to expect,” Carra said.

“There’s no school you can go to, no book you can read on how you plan and execute an exercise this big.”

Carra said planning didn’t start early enough. He arrived just before Thanksgiving to find that Camp New York, with a capacity of 9,500 troops, had just been shut down. He quickly reopened it knowing the other two main camps, Udairi (now called Buehring) and Virginia couldn’t handle a flow expected to peak at 70,000 troops.

The result? Soldiers at the camps in Kuwait sat in long lines at the barber shops. Troops waited four to six hours to shop depleted shelves at the post exchanges. Chow hall lines stretched to one hour and phone lines to three.

One 1st Infantry Division soldier jokingly called New York “Camp Wait-in-Line-a-Lot.”

Carra and Capt. Joe James, a Florida National Guard force flow analyst who worked side-by-side with Carra throughout the Surge, believe there will be no repeat this year. Most of the support units already have rotated and will be running at full speed by the time the 2005 surge hits.

The coming winter’s surge, too, will be much smaller.

During last February’s peak, about 54,000 soldiers and Marines bedded down in Kuwait camps en route to or from Iraq — enough to fill 63 percent of the beds in all of the Motel 6s in North America, Carra noted. In 2005, he said, troop numbers will top out at 46,000.

The peaks will be short spikes instead of long crunches. Every incoming unit already has been slotted into a camp.

“You can’t compare where we were last December with where we are now,” Carra said. “Because we’ve got a plan, we can worry less about crisis management.”

For troops returning home, most will see far less of Kuwait than the last group. Carra said CFLCC is discouraging unit commanders from shuttling soldiers through Kuwait if they don’t need to be there.

He said many will fly straight home from Iraq on empty Air Force cargo jets. Others will spend only a day or two on the ground in Kuwait before hopping flights to the States or Germany.

“If you’re not working, you go home,” Carra said. “You don’t need to sit around in Kuwait for three weeks, twiddling your thumbs.”

James said CFLCC’s goal by next year’s rotation is to calm the annual winter tidal wave of troops to a series of gentle troughs throughout the year. He said besides cutting stress on soldiers, planners and facilities, and it saves money.

If there’s no surge, CFLCC doesn’t have to pay for extra tents, trucks, cots and chow halls that are only needed part of the year. The last rotation, Carra said, was budgeted at $184 million but actually cost about $270 million. This year’s is expected to cost $200 million.

While James and Carra expect this winter’s surge to run more smoothly, there’s a wild card that can’t be forgotten: the Iraqi insurgents waging war against U.S. and coalition forces.

Last winter, for reasons still not understood, rebels rarely harassed the convoys ferrying troops in and out of Iraq. Their bloody offensive didn’t start until after the Surge. The insurgency is much hotter now. Planners can only hope they’ll be lucky again.

“The enemy has a vote,” Carra said. “[Last winter], they chose to stay home.”

Migrated