10-year Chinook saga grounds Britain in Afghanistan

By Luke Baker

LONDON (Reuters) - Part of the difficulty British forces face in Afghanistan, where 15 soldiers have been killed in the past two weeks, can be traced back to mistakes made in procuring helicopters more than a decade ago, experts say.

In 1995, Britain ordered 14 U.S.-built Chinooks, hoping the twin-rotor, heavy-lift helicopters would enable troops and equipment to be shuttled around a battlefield like Afghanistan.

The helicopters were delivered by Boeing in 2001, but eight of them could not be used because software source code needed to certify their airworthiness was not supplied. Access to the code had not been specified as part of the contract.

As a result, the helicopters have spent most of the past eight years sitting under wraps in hangars, while the Ministry of Defence and Boeing have engaged in protracted negotiations.

In the meantime, the cost of the helicopters has risen by more than 70 percent to 422 million pounds ($690 million), and is expected to top 500 million by the time they are finally fit to enter service, probably some time next year.

Parliament's public accounts committee, in a report published in March, called it one of of the worst procurement mistakes it had seen, "bordering on irresponsibility", and said it could put the lives of soldiers in Afghanistan at risk.

In the past two weeks, public anger over the rapidly rising death toll has prompted opposition politicians to criticise the government for failing to get enough helicopters to the warzone.

"If you want to move more troops around the battlefield, you need more helicopters," David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservatives, told Prime Minister Gordon Brown during a parliamentary question-and-answer session on Wednesday.