President Trump has said that America needs to rebuild its military, which is laughable in many ways. But he’s right in one respect. We need more bombs. Why? Because the US has dropped so many bombs in the fight against ISIS over the past two years that we’re running out.
As military news site Defense One reports, America is running short on the GPS-guided Small Diameter Bombs made by Boeing, newer models made by Raytheon, and even air-to-air missiles. Many of the existing stockpiles of bombs held by the US military are being diverted from the Pacific region to the Middle East and Africa, where the need is reportedly most urgent.
But this isn’t a new problem. There have been warnings from the Pentagon for almost a year that our intensive bombing of ISIS targets around the world could lead to a shortage. We ran into a similar problem near the end of 2015.
Since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve in August of 2014, the US has spent over $11.9 billion on military operations against ISIS. That includes over 19,607 strikes in Iraq and Syria alone, at a cost of roughly $12.8 million per day. And that doesn’t even count airstrikes in places like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen.
That’s a fuck-ton of bombing. And someone has to supply those bombs so we can keep constantly bombing the shit out of those countries. But the US military is dropping them quicker than they can be restocked.
“These are not exciting kinds of weapons; these are mundane sort of weapons,” PACOM commander Admiral Harry Harris told the House Armed Services Committee on Wednesday.
“But they’re absolutely critical to what we’re trying to do, not only… against North Korea, but also in the fights in the Middle East,” Admiral Harris continued.
Yes, I guess you could call a GPS-guided bomb mundane. But you could also call it incredibly destructive and expensive. I don’t think there’s any question that ISIS are the bad guys here. But if the world’s largest military is using so many bombs that it’s literally running out, it might be a good time to consider if there is another strategy that could be employed.
After all, Trump did promise to deliver a super-duper secret plan to defeat ISIS in 30 days once in office. That plan? He told the Pentagon they have 30 days to come up with a plan. Tomorrow marks Trump’s 100th day in office, and we’re still waiting on that, I guess.
Great plan, dude. In the meantime, maybe order some more bombs.