Seventy-two hours in the operations centre at Scott Air Force Base rebuild the North Atlantic logistics spine without a single European runway. Every sortie now flies 3,200 nautical miles round trip.
Small practical thing nobody is covering: the German kids in my daughter's class made her a card.
She is seven. She does not know what an asset freeze is. She knows the card said "wir vermissen dich schon" — we miss you already — and she has not put it down since.
That is what the drawdown actually is, at ground level. Seven year olds saying goodbye in two languages.
Air Mobility Command has established a direct strategic air bridge sustaining U.S. forces in the Arctic from continental hubs. Operations continue on schedule and without interruption.
The bridge was established because host nations revoked clearances for US aerial refuelling from European bases on 21 January.
Operation Boreal Bridge. Fleet mechanics in Greenland were already reporting critical shortages of de-icing fluid, cold-weather lubricants and heavy engineering spares, and fuel burn at Pituffik was outrunning the prepositioned reserve.
Watching the charter market instead of the runways. MSC and MARAD have been booking ice-class heavy lift out of Halifax all week. Generators, prefab, construction material.
You cannot fly a generator to Greenland economically. The air bridge is theatre. The sealift is the position.
State of play, day fourteen.
Greenland: occupied.
Allied fifth-gen: half grounded.
US assets in Europe: frozen.
European airspace to US offensive traffic: closed.
Deaths: zero.
That last line is doing a lot of work and nobody should assume it holds.
I have ordered the Department of Defense to begin bringing our people home from Europe.
— Written statement, the White House
By nightfall on 26 January roughly 2,300 of a planned first wave of 6,000 had left. Fourteen of twenty-six scheduled sorties flew. The rest were held by German clearances and by a payment chain his own opponent's sanctions had broken.
Two C-17s that should have left at 0900 are still sitting there. Cleared three times by our side. Zero times by the Germans. Reason on the hold sheet: "security inspection."
Nobody is shouting. That is what is frightening about it. It is completely quiet out there.
The retrograde has started. ~38,000 personnel and families out of Germany, Italy, the UK, Spain. Largest movement out of Europe since 1990.
And it is already stuck, for a reason nobody planned: the asset freeze broke the payment chain. German suppliers cannot lawfully take US government money. Some aircraft are held because nobody can sell the Air Force jet fuel.
Europe froze the assets of a departing army and thereby prevented it from departing.
Nobody drafted that. It is the single most consequential unintended effect of the entire crisis and it came out of a payments annex.
The retrograde has started. ~38,000 personnel and families out of Germany, Italy, the UK, Spain. Largest movement out of Europe since 1990. And it is already stuck, for a reason nobody planned: the asset freeze broke the…