Black Sea to Get More NDN Traffic

Georgia is among the locations that the U.S. is looking at to expand its facilities in the Black Sea region for transit of military cargo to Afghanistan.

Last month, the commander of U.S. European Command, said that the U.S. was looking at locations in the Black Sea/Caucasus region to "further U.S. expeditionary capability." Today I talked with Colonel William Summers, European Deployment and Distribution Operations Center Chief at EUCOM, who gave me a few more details. “The countries that we are looking at engaging with, while providing ourselves flexibility, are Romania and Bulgaria, as well as Georgia,” he said.

The main location will be Constanta, Romania, which will be used starting next month to transport cargo to Afghanistan on the Northern Distribution Network. But the U.S. is looking at further locations where it could transport materiel via ship to the Black Sea, then onward to Afghanistan by air. Georgia is difficult, he said, because the only airport in the country that has adequate facilities is Tbilisi, which would require a somewhat lengthy road or rail transit from the sea port at Poti. But it's still under consideration, he said.

The reason for the expansion is to allow the U.S. greater flexibility in case one part of the NDN becomes unusable, as well as to build relationships with the countries in the region, Col Summers said. But the amount of additional construction or U.S. forces required would be small, he added.

As Deirdre Tynan has reported, the NDN now accounts for 50 percent of non-lethal cargo shipped to Afghanistan, but the U.S. is hoping to increase that to 75 percent of that by the end of 2011. Col Summers said that NDN traffic is currently split about 50-50 between the northern leg, via Russia, and the southern leg, via the Black Sea/Caucasus. So they're going to need some extra capacity.