Cost-Benefit Analysis of Air Force Weapons Systems Being used in Afghanistan

Quickly overshadowed by the TSA controversy of full body scanners and infotainment stories about consumer spending on Black Friday, and then the coverage of US State Department communications released by Wikileaks, the perpetual war in Afghanistan has again drifted into the subconscious of the American public. Unfortunately, innocent Afghan civilians killed by indiscriminate aerial bombing and for the members of NATO’s International Security Afghanistan Force (ISAF) serving as cannon fodder; do not have the same luxury as the self-obsessed, tweeting, and texting American population.

Barely a week after a NATO summit, where political leaders publicly revealed an exit strategy centered on progressively handing security over to the local Afghan forces, an Afghan border policeman killed six American service members during a training mission. While this latest incident raises the question about the loyalty and reliability of Afghan forces and the continuing problem of being infiltrated by the Taliban, the latest attack by an Afghan security force member on NATO troops reveal the almost certain failure of the U.S. led and NATO supported mission in Afghanistan.

According to BBC Kabul correspondent Paul Wood:

The Afghan interior ministry says new recruits are checked to make sure they do not have a criminal record - and their village elders have to vouch for their good character. So there is a vetting procedure for recruits to the Afghan forces - but it is not extensive.

In addition, so many new recruits are being taken on, it is doubtful how thorough the checks can be. There are now some 260,000 members of the Afghan security forces - 160,000 were trained in the last year. The US alone is spending some $11bn (£7bn) a year on training the Afghan security forces.

Five British soldiers were shot dead in November last year in Helmand province, by an Afghan policeman, possibly a militant infiltrator, who then escaped.

Isaf is training and mentoring Afghanistan's security forces, but there have also been several incidents of Afghan soldiers firing on foreign troops.

Nato said earlier this month it was investigating Taliban claims that an Afghan soldier had shot dead foreign troops in the south of the country.

In July a renegade Afghan soldier shot and killed three British army Gurkhas at a base in Helmand province.

A week earlier an Afghan soldier killed two American contractors inside a military base in northern Afghanistan.

The futile and almost guaranteed failure of the NATO and U.S. led mission in Afghanistan lies at the fundamental problems facing the country. These include the high amounts of illiteracy and drug addition among recruits joining the Afghan security forces, and high levels of corruption inside the Afghanistan government.

Undermining the already formidable challenges to recruit, train, and equip a reliable and competent Afghan security force, is the recent decision by the United States to step up its use of air power to fight a ground war. Compounding the already flawed strategic decision to use air power to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, is the use of high performance Cold War era fighter jets designed to fight the Soviet Union.

As Chalmers Johnson masterfully observed in his book, Dismantling the Empire:

The F-22 has several strikingly expensive characteristics, which actually limit its usefulness. It is allegedly a stealth fighter-that is, an airplane with a shape that reduces its visibility on radar-but there is no such thing as an airplane completely invisible to all radar. In any case, once it turns on its fire-control radar, which it must do in combat, it becomes fully visible to an enemy.

The F-22 is able to maneuver at very high altitudes, but this is of limited value since there are no other airplanes in service anywhere that can engage in combat at such heights. It can cruise at twice the speed of sound in level flight without the use of its afterburners (which consume fuel at an accelerated rate), but there are no potential adversaries for which these capabilities are relevant. The plane is obviously blindingly irrelevant to “fourth-generation wars” such as that with the Taliban in Afghanistan-the sorts of conflicts for which American strategists inside the Pentagon and out believe the United States should be preparing.

As the aforementioned paragraph put the issue of using high performance aircraft designed to fight a war of attrition with the former Soviet Union or perhaps with China into context with the current needs of the U.S. military in Afghanistan, the following paragraph from Johnson expands on this further.

Northrop Grumman’s much-touted B-2 stealth bomber has proven to be almost totally worthless. It is too delicate to deploy to harsh climates without special hanger first being built to protect it at ridiculous expense; it cannot fulfill any combat missions that older designs were not fully adequate to perform, at a cost of $ 44.75 billion for only twenty-one bombers-it wastes resources needed for real combat situations.

Instead, in military terms, the most unexpectedly successful post-Vietnam aircraft has been the Fairchild A-10, unflatteringly nicknamed the “Warthog”. It is the only close-support aircraft ever developed by the U.S. Air Force. Its task is to loiter over battlefields and assist ground forces in disposing of obstinate or formidable targets, which is not something that fits comfortably with the Air Force’s hotshot self-image.

Some 715 A-10s were produced, and they served with great effectiveness in the first Persian Gulf War. All 715 cumulatively cost less than three B-2 bombers. The A-10 is now out of production because Air Force establishment favors extremely fast aircraft that can fly in straight lines at high altitudes, rather than aircraft that are useful in battle. In the Afghan war, the Air Force has regularly inflicted heavy casualties on innocent civilians at least in part because it tries to attack ground targets from the air with inappropriately high-performance equipment.

The failure of the press to continue to report on the Afghanistan war on a daily basis facilitates the continuing plundering of the American treasury by politically connected defense firms and private contractors.