‘US Air Force running out of bombs’

The US Air Force is fast running out of bombs to drop on ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq after its pilots fired off over 20,000 missiles and bombs since the US bombing campaign against the terror group began 15 months ago, its chief has said.

As America ramps up its military campaign again-st the Islamist terror group, the Air Force is now “expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said.

“B-1s have dropped bombs in record numbers. F-15Es are in the fight because they are able to employ a wide range of weapons and do so with great flexibility. We need the funding in place to ensure we’re prepared for the long fight,” Gen. Welsh said in the statement. “This is a critical need,” he said. The bombing campaign has left the US Air Force with what an Air Force official described as munitions depot stocks “below our desired objective.”

The Air Force has requested additional funding for Hellfire missiles and is developing plans to ramp up weapons production to replenish its stocks more quickly. But replenishing that stock can take “up to four years from time of expenditure to asset resupply,” the official told CNN.

“The precision today’s wars requires demands the right equipment and capability to achieve desired effects. We need to ensure the necessary funding is in place to not only execute today’s wars, but also tomorrow’s challenges,” the official said.

US secretary of state John Kerry, meanwhile, said that the US and its coalition partners are “increasing the pace” of actions against ISIS as the terror outfit has become an overt threat to American interests and law-abiding people.

“Daesh (another name for ISIS) has become an overt, declared threat to the interests of the United States and to law-abiding men and women across the globe,” Mr Kerry said in his keynote address at the Brooking Institute’s Saban Forum here.

“That is why President Obama at the very outset...declared that we must defeat Daesh. And that is why we are now increasing the pace of doing so,” he said.

“And their aggression has fuelled a refugee crisis that is placing an extraordinary burden on our friends in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, and now all of Europe with a profound impact on Europe itself,” he said.