Helicopter Shortages: A Senior British Officer Complains From Beyond the Grave

The British media and political establishment are in an uproar over allegations that U.K. troops fighting in Afghanistan are being forced to make unnecessarily risky road journeys due to a serious shortage of helicopters. The helicopter crisis was highlighted over the weekend when one of Britain's tabloids published the text of a cable complaining about the helicopter shortage written by a top British Army commander who was killed in a roadside bomb attack less than a month after he sent the message.

The Daily Mail, a conservative newspaper which has a strong animus against the Labour government, says that Lt. Col Rupert Thorneloe, commander of a battalion of Welsh Guards who died in an IED attack on July 1, in effect "foreshadowed his own death." The paper said that in a June 5 weekly message to British Defense Ministry HQ, Lt. Col. Thorneloe reported that, because of the helicopter shortage, British troops in Afghanistan were having to make too many routine trips by road, thus exposing themselves to greater risks from roadside attacks. "I have tried to avoid griping about helicopters—we all know we don't have enough," wrote Thorneloe, who the Daily Mail says was the most senior British soldier to be killed in the current Afghan conflict. "We cannot not move people, so this month we have conducted a great deal of administrative movement by road. This increases the IED threat and our exposure to it," Thorneloe continued, adding that he had "vitually no" helicopters suitable for moving troops by air rather than road. "The current level of SH (support helicopter) support is therefore unsustainable."

Only three weeks after Thorneloe's death, U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown claimed to Parliament, "In the operations we are having at the moment it is completely wrong to say that the loss of lives has been caused by the absence of helicopters." However, the Mail quotes Adam Holloway, a former Army officer and Conservative member of Parliament who was first to receive Thorneloe's leaked message, saying that it was a "heart-wrenching irony...that Colonel Thorneloe wrote those words. It must have been terrible for him as the commander of 800 men to know that their lives were being put in danger because the Government, in whose name he had taken them to war, would not spend the money to make it safer for them to move across country." (A U.K. official indicated to NEWSWEEK that while Brown's government at the moment was not questioning the authenticity of the leaked cable, the government did not believe it was fair to tie any specific roadside combat death to the alleged helicopter shortage.)

The open and emotionally charged debate in the U.K. (which quickly spread beyond conservative newspapers to other, less anti-government, media like the BBC and Guardian) parallels a quieter debate inside U.S. defense circles about similar helicopter shortages facing American forces fighting in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. As NEWSWEEK reported in September, 800 Green Beret Special Forces troops assigned to "white" counterinsurgency missions in Afghanistan—missions involving organizing and training local police and militia forces—have only three Chinook heavy-lift helicopters at their disposal to move them around combat zones infested with snipers and roadside bombs. As a consequence of the copter shortage, current and former U.S. military officials said, requests by commanders for routine airlifts are being turned down so frequently—as much as 80 percent of the time—that some commanders had given up asking for airlift. Current and former U.S. officials tell Declassified that since last summer the number of "white" special forces—some of the U.S. military's most skilled, and expensively trained soldiers—killed and injured while making routine movements via Afghan roads has risen sharply. The officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, say they believe that at least some of these casualties could have been avoided if the Green Berets had more heavy-lift helicopters, though they could not enumerate specific cases where soldiers had been killed in roadside attacks after requests for airlift had been rejected. U.S. Special Operations Command has acknowledged that helicopter resources in Afghanistan are "finite" and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that acquiring more aircraft—including helicopters—for Special Forces is one of his top priorities.

Some members of Congress, including Sen. Kit Bond (Republican of Missouri), a member of the Senate's Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, have said they are concerned about helicopter shortages, although so far the issue seems to have acquired only limited urgency within the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill. In Britain, by contrast, the posthumously published complaints of Colonel Thorneloe are only the latest chapter in a public controversy over helicopter shortages, which already has been the subject of high-profile Parliamentary debate and investigation. Declassified plans to examine the American side of the helicopter shortage more closely in the coming days.