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Now what did Lawrence of Arabia attack in the middle east that beat the Ottoman Empire

I supposes you would be happy to see George Brown as President of the UK instead of having the Queen.

Railways cost a lot of money to build and are a easy target from a whole range of weapons

You can set up a heavy mortar some distance away and let of a few rounds and then move before an air strike was called in. Also man all these check points and strong points and rotate troops through them would probabnly take even more troops out there is already.

You would tie up so much man power on all of this just who would Police the rest of Afghanistan, at this rate you would employ the whole male populatation in the Armed Foirces

The whole thing is so complicated......Pill Boxes now will they have running water laid on and what about sewage for half dozen blokes can produce quite a pile every day. Now all this will have to be on the inside of the pill box in case they come under attack. Then each pill box will need a I'M A SCAMMER SPAMMER!!! and sleeping quarters and a communications section.This will mean power both electric and may be gas, also it will need an area for storing the munitions It is also the sort of place you would need a medic on hand. Now as we can no longer lay land mines there will need to be a large perimeter of barb wire to stop any one creeping up during the night. So now you are going to have quite a large block house. Forget the old Pill Boxes from WW2 this sort of thing will have to be purpose built and just keeps pushing up the costs.

I for one know FA about the details involved in all this, but am really enjoying reading the discussion and ideas!
Keep it coming

Now lets look at some of the points that you suggest...The route of this railway is 2.400 kilometres long and you say that you will have two pill boxes every kilometre, well thats gives us 4.800 pill boxes. You then say you will have a three man team in each doing an eight hour shift, which means you will need 43.000 men just cover the basic shifts. Now you are going to need base camps to feed and rest these men which would mean that some of these men would be traveling over an hour each way to reach the pill boxes so they could be out of the camp fofr 12 hours at a time which would mean that they would get very little rest before they were on there next journey. Next you would need a lot more armoured vehicles to carry these men back wards and forwards to these pill boxes. Also you would need another set of men to relief them to give them break during the the week, so all told what with the extra bases all the extra transport and all the supporting staff you would be looking at a force oif around 100.000 men to do this job which is far more than you have there at the moment, and you would not being doing any anti Taliban sweeps in country to make them keep there heads down.

Now you say that you will have three men teams in each pill box okay fine what weapons would you equip these pill boxes with and why.

With just three men most of these would be taken up on manning the machine gun. One would be aiming and firing the second would be feeding the ammunition and changing the belts and third would changing the barrel every few hundred rounds. Now while they are doing this it leaves a large section of the pill box with any one watching it or defending it. Pill boxes are sitting ducks these days, a missile like the Javelin that is a fire and forget weapon would take it out in know time flat. This missile when fired runs on compressed air for the first 30 odd yards so that it does not give away the firing position. Once you have locked on the sights of the launcher this missile will find its target. It fly in at low level then climb before coming down on the roof of the pill box and it is designed to penetrate. The only way you can deal with the Taliban is the way they are doing it at the moment and that is to hit them hard in places that they think they are safe and keep them on the move. Once you go into a static mode then you hand over the battlefield to them and they chose when and where they will hit out.

There never has been any thing that you can say is 100% secure. If some one really wants to get to it then they will as there will always be a chink in the amour that will let the enemy through

This is an interesting thread indeed! ( I'm a newcomer here, from NZ - a civvy despite the nick. ).

Looking at Peter Dow's excellent map, there are already three good-sized airports at Bastion, Kandahar and Bagram. If there were one more put about halfway along Highway 1, somewhere in Ghazni, then that would give a good nice chain of airports stretching from Bastion to Bagram, from each of which supplies could then be delivered locally by road.

Nice though rail might be, it does seem to be more vulnerable than air transport or road.
I agree with you, Peter. Supply to Afghanistan by air is the way to go.

Just a thought - what about cargo hovercraft too? They wouldn't need roads, and they'd be pretty darned fast. No worrying about flat tires. They could be another option to put in the "mix". Say, two or three big ones at each of the airports.
- go_the_paras

Hi

you mentioned a hovercraft as transport, they dont need roads but the still trigger IEDs and Mines with the Down Draft.