Word: troops
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...That forces the U.S. military to rely on helicopters, not only to reach remote outposts, but also to carry out dangerous combat missions that thinly spread troops couldn't do without the helicopter's ability to hopscotch hundreds of miles. It was precisely such an antidrug mission that a twin-rotor Army MH-47 Chinook was flying when it went down in western Afghanistan, killing 10 Americans including three civilians with the Drug Enforcement Administration. Earlier in the day, a Marine UH-1 Huey troop helicopter collided in midair with an A-1 Cobra helicopter gunship over southern Helmand province...
...over the past year doubled its number of helicopters based in Afghanistan to about 225, but troop numbers have risen even faster, making for a more acute chopper shortage. Helicopters are swift but delicate machines. The physics of flight make them inherently unstable, and therefore less reliable, than fixed-wing aircraft which generate their lift from stationary wings instead of egg-beater-like rotor blades. More critically, chopper pilots are commonly expected to fly in hot weather at high altitudes, where less-dense air offers them less control over their aircraft...
...Laikipia now finds itself caught up in the politics of faraway warmaking. As Britain increases its troop levels in Afghanistan (numbers there have doubled to about 10,000 in the past three years), it has ramped up its training exercises in Kenya, with more than 3,000 soldiers passing through the region each year. The army says Laikipia is perhaps its best training ground because the conditions there - high altitude, extreme heat, hilly terrain - are remarkably similar to those found in Afghanistan...
...Obama administration will have to make up its mind in the next several weeks on the recommendations of the McChrystal Report, which argues for sending in 40,000 or more additional soldiers. The choice comes down to whether America wants to focus on counter-terror operations—keeping troop levels constant and instead using target bombs and drones to prevent al-Qaeda from fully reconstituting—or counter insurgency, which is what we did in Iraq and involves a far greater investment in troops, time, and money but might one day result in a stable Afghan state...
...things stand, the United States spends $60 billion a year waging war in Afghanistan, and, depending on whose estimates you trust, a surge would cost between $10 and $40 billion all by itself. In 2008, there were 32,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan; now there are around 68,000. A troop surge on the scale that General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, is asking for would push us past the 100,000 mark in a war that has been going on for longer than America fought in the Civil War and World War II combined...