The ISIL War: The Real Cost of 20,000 Wasted Missiles

Daniel L. Davis

Security, Middle East

Thanks to ISIL, the U.S. military is now running short of missiles and bombs.  

Last Thursday USA Today published a stunning article revealing that since August 2014 the U.S. Air Force has fired more than 20,000 bombs and missiles against Islamic State (ISIS) targets in Iraq and Syria.  The expenditure has, according to the article, depleted the Air Forces’ “stocks of munitions and prompting the service to scour depots around the world for more weapons and to find money to buy them.” 

The article included a comment by a defense industry consultant lamenting the fact Congress has “capped defense spending” leaving too few missiles in the inventory.  Curiously, no one seems to be asking the much more fundamental question: why should Congress appropriate money to further increase missile stockpiles when the staggering expenditure hasn’t strategically dented the non-state enemy?

In fact, it may not simply be that we have failed to defeat ISIS.  The strategic situation may be worse after the expenditure of 20,000 bombs than before the first struck its target.  According to a report cited by the Associated Press this past summer, a multi-agency intelligence estimate suggested that the first year of bombing not only failed to accomplish strategic objectives, but saw the ISIS threat expand. 

According to the article “intelligence analysts see the overall situation as a strategic stalemate: The Islamic State remains a well-funded extremist army able to replenish its ranks with foreign jihadis as quickly as the US can eliminate them. Meanwhile, the group has expanded to other countries, including Libya, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Afghanistan.”  If the situation were only that we were wasting billions of dollars on a failing strategy, it would be appalling.  But there are second and third order effects at play few seem to consider which together place American national security at increasing risk.