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"What you see going on here is vehicles being washed to a standard in order to get them
back to the UK at the closure of operations. "
NATO will see most of its forces and personnel redeploy over the next 18 months.
This is part of a planned reduction of forces as Afghans increasingly take the lead for
security -- a process which is due to be completed by the end of 2014.
"The best way to think about redeployment is just to think of it as complex house move.
Like you break things down for a house move, so too are we for redeployment.
For example what we are doing is separating stuff into piles and those sorts of piles
are the stuff you actually need to move from one house to another, the stuff that you throw
away when you go through a house move and the stuff that you need in order to get you
from your first house to your next house. And that's the way that redeployment works."
Almost all the UK forces' vehicles are earmarked for return. By end 2014, over 2,700 vehicles
will have been sent back to the United Kingdom. "The vehicles are here as the last point of
departure from Bastion because they're going to be flown out of the country...
My guys will then, once they are delivered here, weigh them, check that they're safe
for air transportation, and check in terms of dangerous goods, that sort of thing....
We routinely move most probably about 5 flights a week out of here in fact I think the number
is about 120 vehicles a month". Like other expensive or sensitive equipment,
most vehicles are sent by aircraft to the United Arab Emirates and from there transferred
by ship to the military port of Marchwood in Southampton.
"A lot of the vehicles have a security classification and therefore can't go outside of the military
to a contractor. We would in the normal run of things fly those back to the UK and that
is quite a high cost. So, the benefit of having a short flight to a port within the Middle
East and then a long RO-RO journey clearly cuts down on the cost and gives value for
money to the tax payer." Like the British, many other troop-contributing
nations have gradually started to redeploy from Afghanistan. While each nation is responsible
for the redeployment of its own troops and equipment, overall coordination lies with
the command of the NATO-led force in Afghanistan. Over 90,000 vehicles and containers and about
100,000 troops need to be moved by the end of 2014. With 49 nations involved, this takes
careful planning. This is a NATOChannel report.