(FORTUNE Magazine) – NEVER HAS SO MUCH moved so far so fast. The heroic feats of military transportation -- humping Hannibal's elephants over the Alps or Allied tanks to the beaches of Normandy -- pale beside the air- and sealift of Operation Desert Shield. At the peak in early January, as many as 110 cargo and passenger planes arrived at Saudi airfields daily. Meanwhile 130 transport ships were steaming toward the Gulf. From August through December, Desert Shield delivered 325,000 troops, enough to populate Buffalo, and 1.6 million tons of supplies, the equivalent in weight of more than four Empire State Buildings. The gear included 1,000 tanks, 1,500 helicopters, 2,000 armored personnel carriers, thousands of bombs, tents, and latrines, and millions of ready-to- eat meals (the 12 entrees include chicken loaf and meatballs with barbecue sauce). Altogether, the military moved people and materiel four times as many ton-miles in one-third as much time as during the Berlin Airlift of 1948. No less impressive was the managerial challenge: how to coordinate the biggest freight-forwarding task ever. The first assignment of the Air Force's huge C-5 transport planes was not to carry M1 tanks to face down Saddam Hussein but to deliver forklifts, loading platforms, fuel pumps, and other mundane items on which even the mightiest war machines rely. Though they have excellent runways, Saudi airports are short on cargo-handling facilities. Says Air Force Major General Walter Kross: ''It's like landing on Venus over there.'' The intricacies of the sealift were more formidable still. The Navy's sealift command scrambled to match up ships, dock facilities, and cargoes. Even to load a single vessel like the USNS Denobola at left demands great finesse. One of the Navy's eight Fast Sealift ships, the $103 million Denobola is almost as long as an aircraft carrier and can reach the Saudi port of Ad Dammam from Houston in 15 days, as fast as any vessel afloat. A so-called RoRo ship (for roll on, roll off), it is built so that tanks and other equipment can drive right onto its six decks rather than having to be painstakingly lifted aboard by cranes. Even so, packing the ship with 1,000 vehicles tighter than a Manhattan garage is like playing multidimensional chess. To keep the ship stable, the weight has to be distributed just so. If a stevedore accidentally parks a vehicle next to a fire station, the entire deck must be reshuffled to move it. Considering the enormity of the undertaking, and that 95% of the people arrived by plane and 95% of their gear came by ship, it is astounding that practically everyone and everything wound up in the right place. Among the occasional gaffes: In September a cargo ship sailed into New Orleans harbor carrying enough munitions to flatten the Latin Quarter; someone had neglected to unload them in Ad Dammam. Luck has played a part in the operation's overall success. Weather in the Atlantic has been fair, and the planes and ships were not being shot at. While it delivered the goods, Desert Shield also revealed limitations in the $ ability of the U.S. to project military might. The operation stretched American resources so thin that the U.S. has had to rely heavily on foreign help. Some Pentagon insiders foresee a dangerous decline. Says Vice Admiral Paul D. Butcher, deputy chief of the U.S. Transportation Command: ''I'm not sure we could do this again five years from now. Anyone who thinks this shows how smoothly the system operates doesn't know what he's talking about.'' Like every U.S. mobilization, this one has involved the meshing of the military and commerce, particularly the airline and maritime industries. Despite the airlines' current slump, that business is by far the healthier of the two. Most troops fly to the Gulf in jets chartered from American, United, and 14 other carriers. Military needs and civilian capability fit nicely. Commercial jets accommodate soldiers about as easily as other passengers (personal belongings and rifles in the overhead racks; field packs must be checked). Since U.S. companies have about 4,000 planes and 37,000 pilots and flight engineers, accommodating Desert Shield has been a cinch, requiring at most a few dozen passenger and cargo aircraft at a time. In exchange for promising to pull planes off customary routes in a crisis, airlines get a share of the military's $600 million a year in routine business like rotating service personnel to Germany. Operation Desert Shield itself has been no windfall for the airlines. For each soldier flown one way to Saudi Arabia, the U.S. pays only $770, half the fare for a typical business passenger. Also, the planes return empty, although Federal Express, which delivers some cargo to the Gulf, has worked the run into one of its Pacific routes.

The commercial maritime industry is far weaker, although no less crucial. Even in the most uneventful times, the Pentagon uses ships manned by civilians for transport missions. Reason: Navy operating procedures are so conservative and complex, requiring documentation of everything that happens on board as well as such auxiliary personnel as paymasters and morale officers, that crewing a ship like the Denobola by the book would require more than 200 sailors. Bay Tankers, an Englewood, New Jersey, contractor that runs the vessel, does the job with 42 seamen. In times of crisis, the Navy relies first on several dozen transport ships it keeps under charter from U.S. owners, mostly privately held firms. The fleet includes 25 freighters, each fully loaded with everything 4,000 Marines, say, need to fight for a month. These go out on routine patrols, ready to converge on trouble spots, at a cost to taxpayers of up to $50,000 per ship per day. To supplement this fleet, the Navy maintains the Denobola and the seven other fast transports ready to sail from stateside ports. Operation Desert Shield quickly overwhelmed the capacity of all these. To handle the enormous surge, the Pentagon had to buy capacity on the spot market. When it did not find enough U.S. shipowners to fill the bill, it turned to Norwegians, British, Greeks, and others. Today, of the more than 200 ships ferrying equipment to Saudi Arabia, almost half are foreign owned. American taxpayers, however, are picking up most of the tab, recently estimated at $1.8 billion through the end of 1990. The Japanese have loaned three freighters, the Kuwaitis and the Koreans two each. MESHING THE U.S. maritime and military is difficult for several reasons. A 747 that usually flies the Miami-Paris run can be readily diverted to pick up a detachment of the 82nd Airborne at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. But a ship on the high seas may need a month to complete its voyage and report to Bayonne, New Jersey, for a load of tanks. Even commandeering vessels wouldn't cut the delay much. The Bush Administration has been appropriately reluctant to disrupt commerce for anything short of war. Nor will just any merchantman do. The military mainly needs RoRos like the Denobola. Fully half the U.S. merchant fleet consists of oil tankers, and most of the remaining vessels are container ships and bulk carriers. To hoist a 72- ton M1 tank into a ship's hold is no minor improvisation. It requires a giant crane, which few harbors have, and an operator skilled enough to work blind, guided only by signals from co-workers. (The process is not unlike groping behind a sofa to plug in a lamp.) The fundamental problem the Pentagon faces is that the U.S. merchant fleet has shrunk. It is far cheaper to construct vessels in Korea or Japan, man them with Chinese or Filipino crews, and sail them under Liberian or Panamanian flags. From 1950 to the present, the number of active U.S. merchantmen has dwindled from 2,263 to 379; meanwhile their share of the world's fleet virtually evaporated, from 26% to 3%. Ships today are much larger, on average; even so the total capacity of the U.S. fleet has dropped by 33%. FLEET SIZE tends to determine the size of the seagoing labor force. Officers come from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at King's Point, New York, and a half-dozen state schools, which graduate some 500 prospective captains, mates, and chief engineers a year. But because opportunities are limited and the pay only moderate (as little as $70,000 annually for a captain), most graduates end up in desk jobs on shore. The ranks of able-bodied seamen are likewise depleted. ''The stereotypical seamen, with nothing in life but their duffel bags, are no more,'' says U.S. Navy Captain Ed Gibson, who supervises the Fast Sealift ships. ''Now they are all guys with car payments. And with sea wages as low as $6.50 an hour, they can do about as well at McDonald's.'' Because few modern salts want to spend more than a couple of months on the water at a time, experts reckon the industry needs a minimum of two mariners for every berth. That is the situation that exists today: For 12,600 berths, the pool of officers and seamen is no more than 25,000. To compensate for the shortage of active merchant vessels, the U.S. in 1976 established a fleet of 96 lightly mothballed ships called the ready reserve. Bought from the industry, the ships are scattered in ports around the country; in theory they need only five to ten days of work to be ready to sail. Since the start of the Gulf crisis, the Pentagon has called 65 to duty, but eight had to go back into mothballs because they proved unseaworthy. What went wrong? For a start, the budget for upkeep of the fleet was trimmed to $89 million in fiscal 1990, about one-third what the Maritime Administration requested, so the ships rarely went out on tune-up cruises. Many are 25 years old or more and powered by steam engines that puzzle contemporary seamen accustomed to diesel. Some manufacturers of the equipment have gone out of business, so engineers had to improvise spare parts. Result: To get each ship ready for the voyage to Saudi Arabia cost on average $1.5 million, 50% more than anticipated. Observes William Charrier, president of American Automar, which charters ships to the military: ''When you combine a cold ship with a crew that has never seen its type, you have trouble.'' Manning this not-so-ready reserve meant finding 2,500 hands -- a surge in demand equal to 10% of the labor pool. That forced both Uncle Sam and private shipowners to tap retirement ranks. ''Our radio operator didn't know how to call up the communications satellite because he hadn't been to sea in 20 years,'' says Patrick Dowd, owner of the LASH Atlantico, which the U.S. chartered in December to schlep tanks. Or climb aboard the Denobola one more time. As it pulled out of Houston last month, its navigation officer, second mate Robert W. Wilson, had not been to sea in years. Most recently a real estate salesman in New Jersey, he is 82 years old; the work is physically demanding, and some shipping lines don't allow people over 75 aboard as passengers. How worried should the U.S. be about its declining maritime industry? The House Merchant Marine subcommittee conducted hearings in September on the response to the Gulf crisis. Spokesmen for the industry and the military proposed rejuvenating the merchant marine through subsidies for shipbuilding and new regulations to guarantee jobs for Americans. In the words of a union official: ''All cargoes vital to the national defense and 15% of all other cargoes entering or leaving the U.S. should be required to be carried on U.S.-flag ships.'' That would be the worst remedy. It would encourage retaliatory protectionism when free trade is already endangered, and would cost American consumers billions. The Jones Act of 1920 is bad enough: It stipulates that all cargo carried between U.S. ports travel in American vessels, adding perhaps $500 million annually to the cost of goods from Georgian timber to Alaskan oil. Some policy adjustments make more sense. The ready reserve could be cut in half, culling the oldest and slowest ships and concentrating maintenance on the best. That would produce a reserve that's readier and save money too. Even so, it's hard to imagine the U.S. taking on another campaign the size of Desert Shield without the cooperation of friendly foreign fleets. That notion troubles the Pentagon. Says General Hansford T. Johnson, chief of the Transportation Command: ''It worked okay this time, but what if foreign governments don't go along with the operation? After all, only the United Kingdom supported our raid on Qaddafi in 1986. France would not let us fly overhead.'' But if Washington cannot persuade the British or Japanese or anyone else to help transport a massive force to a faraway place in defense of world order in the future, perhaps the excursion is a bad idea.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: A TALE OF TWO AIRLIFTS Only 5% of the gear went by air, but the delivery broke records.