Helicopters for Afghanistan.

Do not get excited just yet. Three months after the first reports emerged of the chronic shortage of helicopters in Afghanistan, the Ministry of Defence has finally got as far as considering hiring or buying helicopters for use in Helmand. I wonder how many Whitehall man-hours it took to get this far.

The Daily Telegraph reports two offers are under review. One, from a British company, Security Support Solutions, appears to be a second hand job lot of ex-Soviet machines. They sound to me like the lumbering beasts that the Taliban found so easy to shoot down the last time they met them. The other is from the Danish military, which wants to unload half a dozen choppers because of high maintenance costs. So that is why the Danes will not deploy them to Afghanistan despite NATO's repeated requests.

Lord Drayson, defence procurement minister, is quoted as trying to dismiss the past problems by saying,

The question is not how we got here but what we are doing now.

No, minister. Those are both highly pertinent questions and both require an answer.

Tags: Afghanistan