General John Jumper said he "had a little fit" last month during a visit to Iraq when he discovered that commanders had not been discussing how to use airlift to avoid improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, which have made Iraq's roads a deadly gantlet for supply convoys.

"We were taking about a hundred casualties a month in the IED business. And when I went over there on my visit, I asked the simple question: what are we doing to get the vehicles off the roads to take the targets away?" Jumper told defense reporters.

"Quite frankly I wasn't satisfied with the answer," he said.

Changes since then have given the army the means to fly the equivalent of 350 truckloads of supplies a day to troops, according to Jumper.

An aide said the goal was to increase the volume transported by air to the equivalent of 1,500 to 2,000 truckloads a day, which he acknowledged would only account for a small percentage of the army's logistics requirements in Iraq.

However, the shift shows not only that the US military is being forced to change the way it is organized in Iraq, but also how slow it has been in responding to an insurgency that has been relentlessly attacking patrols and convoys with bombs for more than a year.

As air force chief of staff, Jumper is responsible for training and equipping the air forces but has no control over operations in Iraq.

Although greater use of airlift would seem an obvious way to avoid bombs, Jumper said the air and ground commanders in Iraq had not discussed such an approach and it took a "fresh eye" to see it.

"You get into this rhythm of convoy operations," he said, suggesting that army commanders had grown accustomed to using convoys of trucks to move "giant piles of stuff" into and around Iraq.

"We have 64 airplanes and they are staying busy. But the question is couldn't they be busier, and is 64 enough, and where are they taking the stuff to, and is that the right place?" he said.

"These are just questions. I didn't have answers to these questions. Are we looking at where the most dangerous routes are? What if we tried specifically to offset those routes with airlift, could we reduce the traffic on those routes?" he said.

Jumper said changes were made to improve communication between the air and ground commanders after he raised the issue with the top commanders in the region -- Army Generals John Abizaid and George Casey -- and Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker.

He said air force commanders have been told to find ways to supply troops by air, regardless of the cost and despite higher risks.

"There will be increased SAM (surface-to-air missile) threats to C-130s but we're also having a hundred casualties a month in convoys," he said.

"We're not going to send C-130s in there undefended. They have right kind of equipment to go in there and defend themselves," he said.

Jumper recalled that he began his career flying C-7 cargo planes for US special forces in Vietnam.

"My first year as a second lieutenant I landed on a wide spot in the road all over Vietnam. So we know how to do this if that's what's required," he said.

The air force chief acknowledged that airlift alone would not solve the convoy problem, and other solutions were needed to reduce the threat to trucks.

He noted that bottled water accounts for 30 percent of the cargo shipped by convoys. One solution that could have a bigger impact than airlift might be to get water locally and purify it, he said.

"It's just ... how do you change the big system you have right now of transporting bottled water, that has a rhythm to it, and change of all of that with the objective of getting trucks off the road?" he said.

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