The Pentagon is sending commercial airliners to Afghanistan

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF) on Sunday, drawing commercial airline companies into the evacuation from Afghanistan. The CRAF allows the Pentagon to quickly call up passenger jets in emergencies without the expense of buying planes of its own. The jets, drawn from six airlines, will not enter Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport, but will instead act as a bridge between bases in the Middle East and beyond.

So far, the Department of Defense (DOD) has activated Stage 1 of the CRAF program. It involves 18 airliners so far, including “three each from American Airlines, Atlas Air, Delta Air Lines and Omni Air; two from Hawaiian Airlines; and four from United Airlines,” according to a DOD press release.

The move comes amid increased tensions at Kabul’s airport. On Tuesday, the Taliban announced that it will no longer allow Afghan civilians to evacuate the country. “We are not in favor of allowing Afghans to leave,” Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told reporters during a news conference Tuesday.

Depending on how the Taliban plans to enforce this position, the group could place airplanes in danger, and the civilian aircraft enacted under CRAF lack defensive countermeasures, such as anti-missile flares, to ward off surface-to-air missiles. Instead, Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transports will continue to fly evacuees out of Kabul to a regional air base. From there, evacuees will board CRAF airliners to their ultimate destinations, either in Europe or the United States, but typically somewhere outside the Middle East.

Military plane enthusiasts have identified many of the 18 aircraft activated under Stage 1 of CRAF, including Boeing 767s and 777s, as well as Airbus A330s. It’s likely that those folks will identify all 18 planes over the next few days.

The Civil Reserve Air Fleet Program was born as a result of World War II, when civil aircraft worked for the U.S. Army Air Forces. The Army Air Forces downsized after the war, but in 1948, the Soviet Union closed off ground access to the West German city of Berlin. Rather than abandon the city to the Soviets, NATO air forces mobilized their air transport fleets to keep the city supplied by air.

The unexpected surge of the Berlin Airlift was a challenge for the newly formed U.S. Air Force. In response, the Pentagon established CRAF in 1952 as an inexpensive way to quickly surge airlift capability.

The fleet was primarily designed to support a war against the Soviet Union, when up to 100,000 U.S. Army troops would have flown into Western Europe in a single week. CRAF airliners would have carried up to 95 percent of personnel and 25 percent of all cargo, underlying how important the program was even to the world’s largest military air transport force.

The program works like this: U.S. airlines sign up for the CRAF program with the Pentagon, identifying specific aircraft in their fleets that would get called up in emergencies. It’s not clear how many airplanes are currently enrolled in the program, but in 2014, the Air Force stated that 553 airplanes across 24 air carriers were earmarked for CRAF. Meanwhile, those earmarked planes (and crews) go about their daily business like usual, plying their daily air routes and making money for the airline. The Pentagon has only activated the program three times in its history, so most of the planes involved over the past 69 years were never called up for service.

In the meantime, if the military needs only a handful of passenger jets at a time—perhaps to fly U.S. Army troops to the peacekeeping mission in the Sinai—it may charter jets from U.S. commercial carriers.

CRAF is broken down into three stages. Stage 1, which Secretary of Defense Austin enacted over the weekend, involves activating planes for “DOD operations in support of, but not confirmed to, counterinsurgency activities and localized emergencies.” Stage 2 is a broader effort that activates more planes “in support of, but not confined to, limited wars.” The President of the United States must authorize Stage 2.

Stage 3 is the most serious of all and involves “major military engagements involving U.S. forces (limited or general war).” The Secretary of Defense can activate Stage 3, presumably since the President might be incapacitated during a general war (read: nuclear war).

The Pentagon activated CRAF for the first time in 1990, when U.S. troops were flown into the Middle East to respond to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. In 2003, it enacted CRAF a second time for the invasion of Iraq, ferrying troops to staging areas in Iraq and Kuwait, while military airlifts from the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command flew in their heavy equipment. The 2021 Afghanistan evacuation is only the third time the Pentagon has activated CRAF.

The program is a success story for both the Pentagon and commercial air carriers. CRAF allows airlines to double-dip, using designated jets for normal business operations, while collecting retainer fees from the Department of Defense. In return, the Pentagon pays out modest fees every year and avoids the hassle of buying, crewing, and maintaining a large fleet of airliners it doesn’t actually need most of the time. yahoo.com