The United States faces challenges in replenishing the munitions of its Middle Eastern allies whose stocks are being rapidly being depleted by concurrent operations in the region, senior government and military officials said on 10 November.
Speaking at the Dubai Airshow, Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James and the commander of the Air Force Central Command, Lieutenant General Charles Brown Jr, noted that with regional allies heavily engaged in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, it is proving problematic to keep them stocked with the precision-guided munitions needed to sustain operations.
"The importance of replenishing munition stocks of our regional allies is the key message that I will be taking back with me to Washington," James said. "We are looking at various strategies [for achieving this], including the transfer of [United States] stocks, but the important thing is that we keep the fight going."
US Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) allies Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are involved to varying degrees in concurrent operations in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, with some involved in more than one theatre (only Oman is not currently conducting military operations).
As noted by Gen Brown, this level of concurrent military activity has not been seen before and could not have been foreseen on this occasion. "None of us predicted that we would be involved in operations in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen at the same time. This is totally unique and unprecedented," he said.
With each of these campaigns now already months old and with no near-term end in sight for any of them, the belligerents are fast running through their stocks of munitions. This was demonstrated by the UAE's recent request for the United States to supply it with 3,250 GBU-31V1s (KMU-556 Joint Direct Attack Munition [JDAM] kit) with 3,250 MK-84/BLU-117 bombs; 750 GBU-31V3s (KMU-557 JDAM kit) with 750 BLU-109 bombs; 1,000 GBU-12s with 1002 MK-82/BLU-111 bombs; 4,250 FMU-152 fuzes; and 216 GBU-24 tail kits (BSU-84) for an estimated cost of USD380 million.
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