Logistics will be the key to introducing 30,000 soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan in the next six to seven months, and to confronting the Taliban over the next 18 months. This reflects an old saying in the military: Amateurs study strategy, and professionals study logistics. Nevertheless, no one on the Senate and House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees last week asked either Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates or Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen about the significant logistics problems they will face in Afghanistan.

The logistics nightmare will be one of the reasons Afghanistan will turn out to be President Barack Obama's brier patch.

In most wartime situations, the equipment and supplies, which the military refers to as "beans, bullets and black oil" (in layman's terms, food, ammo and fuel), arrive by sea to the war zone. Because Afghanistan is landlocked, U.S. aid will have to be sent to Karachi, Pakistan, then trucked through Pakistan across the Khyber Pass into the war zone.

This is a serious and dangerous trek, exacerbated by insurgent attacks along the way. The Central Intelligence Agency has been bribing insurgent groups, including the Taliban, to desist from attacking these convoys. Nevertheless, U.S. military supplies have been lost to both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. The Soviet military had similar problems in the 1980s, when mujahedeen forces frequently closed the Salang Tunnel, which bypassed the Hindu Kush and linked north and south Afghanistan.

Supplying forces in Afghanistan will be far more difficult than supplying forces in Iraq, where large volumes of military assistance arrived in Kuwait and, within a week, were positioned as rolling stock for travel to Baghdad and beyond. In addition to military equipment for U.S. soldiers and Marines, the United States will have to supply the Afghan military forces and the police. The newly reconstituted Afghan forces, for example, will go through hundreds of thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition even in the training phase. Training Afghan forces will take far longer than the projections offered by Messrs. Gates and Mullen, even exceeding the time period for the putative beginning of our drawdown in the summer of 2011.