Management and Rebuilding At the Center of the Action
Published in the May/Jun 2003 issue of The Portal – a trade magazine of the international forwarding industry
The project forwarding company AES Cargo and its sister company, Move One International Movers, are applying their experience of crisis-hit areas to the present situation in Iraq, where they recently established an office.
“You can’t replace having your own people on the ground,” said AES Cargo General Manager Curt Clements, outlining one of the lessons the Budapest-headquartered group – which has offices across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia – has learned from assisting in the rebuilding of war-torn places such as Kosovo, Bosnia and Afghanistan.
Having employees on the spot all across Iraq and the region helps AES Cargo ensure that goods are loaded, transported and tracked correctly, he explained.
“Planning is essential. It’s more difficult to solve a problem after it happens than to prevent it beforehand,” Clements said.
At the end of March this year, AES Cargo and Move One organized one of the first shipments of humanitarian aid to southern Iraq following on from the US-led attacks. A convoy of 19 trucks was delivered to the people carrying urgent food rations, cooking oil and medical supplies. In addition, AES recently opened full-service forwarding and transit offices in Kuwait, Jordan and Iran. The company expects to become a major provider of humanitarian aid, reconstruction and military equipment throughout the Middle East.
“True to our name, Advance Expeditionary Services, we get there first and build local relationships,” Clements said, describing a linchpin of AES Cargo’s international strategy. “In Iraq, as soon as we are given the green light we will have staff on the ground in a number of areas to manage what will be a massive inflow of goods and supplies.”
In due course, AES Cargo expects to supply companies that will provide security for the new president – once a person is chosen for the job. The company earlier performed such services in the case of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai.
Three big problems
“The major problem areas for transporting to Iraq are access, capacity and security,” Clements said. “It is difficult to get access into Iraq. The military controls the ports and the borders.”
Some access problems can be solved through the technique of staging. Goods are initially flown to a country close to the affected one, and simply taken over the border when they are needed.
AES Cargo used Macedonia and Greece for this purpose when it was delivering shipments related to the rebuilding of Kosovo after the crisis there. A few years earlier, when Bosnia was the troubled area, AES Cargo staged goods in Hungary and Croatia. The goods shipped have included electrical cables, power generators, medical supplies and hospital equipment.
To illustrate the second problem, capacity, Clements drew an analogy with cyberspace. “There’s going to be a big increase in urgent shipments, with capacity reduced,” he said. “It’s like the Internet – too much traffic in a small tube.”
Clements explained that there are a limited number of vehicles able to transport the kind of equipment that needs to be taken to Iraq. “A great deal of heavy lifting will be necessary,” he said, “but there are only a certain number of Antonov 124s, which are among the very few aircraft really able to handle big military, reconstruction, sanitation and hospital equipment.”
As for security, Clements says AES Cargo’s network of people on the ground ensures that the highest possible standards are applied. “Customers are concerned about safe transportation and storage. But most of them have been working with us a long time,” he said. “They know how we work and we know their expectations.”
He added that AES Cargo often uses military bases or asks the military to provide safe areas to maximize the security of shipments.
At least it isn’t Afghanistan
Clements mentioned some respects in which Iraq – though suffering the debilitating effects of multiple wars and 25 years of dictatorship – is a much easier country to supply than Afghanistan.
When delivering equipment to destinations in that rugged country, AES Cargo’s managers often have had to drive along the routes themselves to ensure the roads were passable before sending shipments.
With atrocious infrastructure and unfriendly neighbors, Afghanistan is notoriously difficult to travel to and across, taking at least 20 days to reach from Europe.
“In Afghanistan there are slipping roads, mountains and questionable bridges,” Clements said. “In Iraq it’s flat and straight.”
Then there is the question of who is next door.
“Companies in places like Turkey, Kuwait and Dubai are geared up for big logistics operations,” Clements said. Isolated in the middle of Central Asia, Afghanistan’s neighbors are far behind in this regard.
He also pinpointed a crucial area in which great technological improvements have been made in the course of the decade AES Cargo has been undertaking these types of projects.
“The biggest advance has been in communications,” he noted. “There are now portable reliable satellite phones, instead of a four-foot dish hooked up to a little phone.”
Equipment like satellite phones and base stations, not to mention four-wheel drives outfitted for the local terrain, are a boon for a company trying to keep track of its shipments in troubled areas.
Clements dismissed some more mundane concerns that TV-glued westerners have about the current situation in Iraq.
“The looting is overrated — it will stop once policing kicks in. And there is very little targeting of westerners. When people have been living under a totalitarian system, they tend to be law-abiding,” he said. “In any case, we try to make sure we give them plenty of incentive to be friendly to us. We buy locally and provide jobs locally.”
