Posts Tagged ‘warplanes’

Iraq War’s Winners and Losers

August 18, 2009

By Sherwood Ross | Consortiumnews.com, Aug 17, 2009

Editor’s Note: Except for some die-hard neocons, it’s widely recognized that the Iraq War has been a debacle for the United States – paid for in unnecessary loss of Iraqi and American lives, international opprobrium, and the diversion of an astronomical sum of money from domestic priorities to warfare.

However, some military contractors have done quite nicely, thanks; so too have many oil companies, even as the ancillary costs of the $1 trillion-plus war continue to ripple through a devastated U.S. economy, as writer Sherwood Ross describes in this guest essay:

“On my last day in Iraq,” veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9, “as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn’t see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. … I couldn’t understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed.”

Quite a few oil company CEO’s and “defense” industry executives, however, do have a pretty good idea why that war is being fought.  As Michael Cherkasky, president of Kroll Inc., said a year after the Iraq invasion boosted his security firm’s profits 231 percent: “It’s the Gold Rush.”

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Record bombs dropped in Afghanistan in April

May 7, 2009
By Bruce Rolfsen – Staff writer | Navy Times, May 4, 2009

Air Force, Navy and other coalition warplanes dropped a record number of bombs in Afghanistan during April, Air Forces Central figures show.

In the past month, warplanes released 438 bombs, the most ever.

April also marked the fourth consecutive month that the number of bombs dropped rose, after a decline starting last July.

The munitions were released during 2,110 close-air support sorties.

The actual number of airstrikes was higher because the AFCent numbers don’t include attacks by helicopters and special operations gunships. The numbers also don’t include strafing runs or launches of small missiles.

Over Iraq, 26 bombs were released during 767 strike sorties.

Transport crews airdropped 1.8 million pounds of supplies, mostly in Afghanistan, and tankers off loaded 85 million pounds of fuel.

Reconnaissance aircraft flew 1,402 missions over Iraq and Afghanistan.